She didn’t bother to answer and he sank down at the table and put the gun down with a clunk, but kept his hand on it. “So that’s the big secret,” he said quietly. “The deep, dark secret of my life.” He looked up at her. “Lots of people cut up their kids, you know. It’s become the national sport. Cut ’em up, smash their heads in, set ’em on fire... ‘All he got for all his trouble was a hatful of rain.’”
“What?”
“Nothing.” He looked away. “I feel like a kid on his birthday. Remember how you used to jump out of bed and run to look at the full-length mirror behind the bathroom door to see how you’d changed... and you hadn’t?”
“I remember.” Full-length mirrors on bathroom doors must transcend class and bank balances because every other bathroom door at home had one.
“I thought I’d change and I haven’t.”
But he had. He looked older and tired for the first time. His face was no longer blandly handsome like one of those TV-commercial models you got sick of watching in half a second. And there was something in his eyes that reminded her of the light on a fishing boat that had foundered on the rocks off Winter Harbor one night. It had left all its lights on for the Coast Guard and they had shifted and rocked, winked on and off in the dark as the little boat heaved in the swell.
“I guess I thought I’d be cured, like Ken Nevins,” he said.
“Is he cured?”
“He’s alive. Saw him at Rose’s Coffee Shop on Main the other day and he smiled a lot and said hello to people. He ate an enormous breakfast, talked sports with the counterman, and after he left everyone said he’d never acted like that before.”
So the thing had saved Meg’s marriage and maybe cured Ken Nevins. It had also gotten Bunner killed, would probably kill Eve and die with her—only it wasn’t like that, she thought suddenly. It wasn’t a parasite or opportunistic infection that swarmed over her when her mother died. It was part of her, like the timbre of her voice, the Tilden-Dodd green undercast in her eyes, and it always had been, whether she’d known it or not. Power, Meg called it. “You were a woman with a power,” she’d said when Eve thought it was gone. “Now you’re just a helpless asshole, like the rest of us.” But it wasn’t gone and she wasn’t helpless. He’d snatched her to use her; she’d told him what he wanted to know but that led to more: Who was his real mother? Where was she? Who was the bitch in the flowered dress? Was his father his father? Hours of tales to spin to buy time for Dave to find her.
“The old man could be a while yet. Why don’t you sit down?” he said kindly.
She pulled out a chair and sat across from him at the table on which the woman in the flowered dress had cut him up and almost sliced his “dingus” off.
“I should warn you, he’ll probably be drunk.”
“I can handle it,” she said drily. He laughed, and she let herself believe she saw the laughter in his eyes.
Then footsteps shuffled up the back stairs and he picked up the gun. The door opened and a man about seventy stood on the threshold holding a bulging paper bag.
“Adam,” he cried, “Adam boy.”
His name was Adam. Adam and Eve—primary characters, like primary colors. She wanted to laugh but was afraid she’d end up crying.
“Well, ain’t you a sight for sore—” The old man stopped when he saw her. “What the hell... who’s this, Adam?”
Adam stood up, holding the gun on the old man, but he didn’t seem to notice. He gave a deep beery belch and said gaily, “No, don’t tell me, son. Let me guess.”
“Okay, we get there,” Lucci yelled over the beat of the rotors. “Then what?”
Latovsky shrugged and Lucci yelled, “Great!” He was getting airsick. “At least get backup, Dave.”
“No. Meers said Soames is a hotdog who’ll hear kidnap, heiress, feds, and go ape. He’ll get her killed if she’s still alive.”
Not a hope in hell she is, Lucci started to say, then thought better of it.
A gust hit the chopper and flung him against Latovsky. It was like lurching into the trunk of one of those thousand-year-old trees they were trying to save in Oregon, along with the cute little owl that’d die with the trees.
Not a hope in hell of saving them either, he thought.
“Big wind,” he yelled, trying to get his mind off the hot uneasiness in his gut.
“Wing wind,” Latovsky yelled back.
“What?”
“My mother would say it’s the beat of the wings of chickens coming home to roost.”
“Cute. You think that’s what’s going to happen in Sawyerville?”
“Could be.”
Then Latovsky grabbed Lucci’s arm and yelled in his ear, “Mike, Adam Fuller’s the Wolfman.”
“What?” Lucci forgot about being sick.
“You heard me. He did the women... we know he did Bunner. I got shit to prove it, but I know he did the Rileys too. That’s eight. Nine if he’s killed her.”
Nine...
Then Latovsky screeched, “We don’t have to be too picky about bringing him in.”
Trying to cover his shock, Lucci yelled, “You mean what I think you mean?”
Latovsky nodded and let Lucci go. Lucci sank back in the seat, suddenly bereft and alone with his airsickness, the beat of the rotors, and the miles of plowed-mud fields sliding by under them. It must be warmer here than in Glenvale because some of the tields were misted with green.
Dave meant to kill Adam Fuller.
No arrest, arraignment, testimony, or trial. Just You have the right to remain silent... blam blam.
Lucci didn’t know if he could do it or keep his mouth shut if Dave did. If he couldn’t, he had to at least warn Dave. Then he could leave Lucci behind with the chopper on the clear assumption you can’t bear witness to what you weren’t there to see.
He had to decide and it had to be now, because the beat of the rotors changed as they sank toward the chopped-up, squared-off fields of mud stretching to nothing as the horizon darkened.
Nine people.
It was a wrap on Bunner; Fuller had taken the tape from his office and hidden it in a Bach slipcase. End of discussion about Bunner. But how did Dave know about the women?
From her.
Dill said Dave went to Connecticut on Monday; the cars in the drive of that house the night Reese got herself sliced had Connecticut plates. He could see the white on blue with Connecticut, The Constitution State.
That night, she’d put her hand against Latovsky’s chest, told him about his oil bill, his ex, his kid, the kind of bread his mother baked, for fuck’s sake... and Latovsky fell for it as Lucci had because you’d have to have rice pudding between your ears not to fall for it. Lucci was part Abnaki Indian on his mother’s side. She’d told him a hundred tales of men and women witches of bygone days who’d had the gift.
So Dave went to Connecticut to see the seer and he’d taken Bunner’s recorder or portable phone... or his jock strap for all Lucci knew. And she’d laid her thin, childlike, sallow hand with too-short nails on it and told him about Bunner and, as an extra added bonus (two for the price of one), about the women in the woods. And Latovsky went for it, as Lucci would have.
Soooo... Adam Fuller had killed six people (if you left out the Rileys), seven counting the seer, who was certainly dead by now.
For one murder they’d jug him; for two they’d jug him for good and he’d never eat another Big Mac. For seven they’d decide he was nuts and send him to the funny farm—Duyvilskill. At Duyvilskill they’d drug and shock him, sit him down with a shrink, then drug and shock him some more. In between, he’d eat chopped meat with a plastic spoon, watch TV, and get it in the ass from the guards and/or other inmates. In a few years—seven, maybe eight—they’d pronounce him “safe on medication” and let him go. It had happened before, more often than not. That meant one year per stiff and it wasn’t enough for Bunner or the others. It wasn’t enough for that poor babe Lucci had found in the woods with her guts steaming in the night air, and Lucci made his decision.