"That'll help." Nancy stood up. "I'll get you some foodand a litter box for the cat-and then I've got to get back to the city. Will you be okay here?"
Veronica nodded. Her growing despair seemed to make the wood-paneled walls grow even darker. "I'll be fine," she said.
The priest droned to a close, and the coffin was lowered into the ground. Ichiko would rather have been cremated, Veronica suspected. Miranda had refused to hear of it. And she had come up with this bastard amalgamation of Shinto and Catholic for a funeral service. Miranda was Ichiko's oldest friend, and she was Veronica's mother, so she got her way.
They filed past the hole, and each threw in a ceremonial shovelful of dirt. Veronica's dirt hit the coffin with a hollow whack. She passed the shovel on and went to stand by her mother. Miranda had walked well away from the others and stood with her arms folded, watching the driveway.
"He's not coming, Mother," Veronica said.
"He's Ichiko's only son. How could he not be here?"
"What do you want me to say? I could tell you maybe his flight was delayed. Maybe he got held up in customs. But you know as well as me he just decided not to come. She's dead, there's nothing he can do."
Except, she thought, use his tantric powers to bring her back to life. A particularly nasty thought that she left unsaid. Miranda started to cry. "It's the end of everything. The business is closed down, Ichiko's gone, Fortunato might as well be dead. And you, you've changed so much…"
I must be getting stronger, Veronica thought. I can almost handle this. She put her arms around her mother and held her until the crying passed.
It had taken Veronica a week to settle in at Nancy's house. Nancy had gotten her a fake birth certificate, which they'd then parlayed into a driver's license and a bank account. Ichiko had rewritten the check with Veronica's new name on it. With the money Veronica had Nancy buy her a portable stereo and a TV set for her attic cell.
She also got on a methadone program at Mercy Hospital. This was the biggest risk of all, but there was no way around it. It meant riding the bus up Peninsula Avenue once a day.
The hospital, with all its Catholic paraphernalia, seemed comforting to Veronica, an island of her childhood.
More and more she would find herself remembering her comfortable middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. Miranda had been making a lot of money working for Fortunato, most of it going into savings. There was enough left over for a good-size apartment in Midwood, new clothes every fall, food, and a color TV Linda, Veronica's younger sister, lived in the apartment now, with her good-for-nothing husband, Orlando. Between Orlando and the smack, Veronica hadn't seen her sister in two years.
Nancy tried to talk her out of the trips to the hospital. It would be safer, she said, for Veronica to go back to shooting up. The words alone brought back the memory of the rush.
The floor seemed to drop out from under her like she was in a high-speed elevator. "No," she said. "Don't even kid around about it." What would Hannah have thought?
On her first Saturday night in the attic, there was a meeting downstairs. People showed up all through the afternoon, and the sound of movement and laughter filtering up through the stairwell only made Veronica's loneliness worse. For a week she had been cooped up there, seeing Nancy for no more than ten minutes a day. She lived for her short bus rides to the hospital, where she might sometimes exchange a few words with a stranger. Her life was turning into a prison sentence.
On Sunday, when Nancy came up to check on her, Veronica said, " I want to join the organization."
Nancy sat down. "It's not that easy. This isn't NOW or Women's Action Alliance or something. Hiding fugitives isn't the only illegal thing we do."
" I know that."
"We only invite people to join us after months, sometimes years of observation."
" I can help you. I worked for Ichiko for over two years." She took a notebook out of the nightstand by her bed. "This is my client list. We're talking some major people here: restaurant and factory owners, publishers, brokers, politicians. I've got names, phone numbers, preferences, personal statistics you're not going to find in Who's Who."
There was more, but Veronica wasn't willing to tell her the rest, not yet, about her ace power. She still didn't know how it worked or how to control it. And she didn't know what Nancy's reaction would be. Veronica had been watching CNN there in the room and was just starting to realize how strongly the tide had turned against wild cards. Aces and jokers were even turning on each other, thanks to Hiram Whatsisname, the fat guy's, murder of Chrysalis.
Nancy stood up. "I'm sorry. I didn't want to have to say this, but you pushed me to it. Try and look at it from our point of view. You're a prostitute, a fugitive, and a heroin addict. You're not exactly a good risk."
Veronica's face felt hot, as if she'd been slapped. She sat motionless, stunned.
"I'll talk to the others," Nancy said. "But I can't make any promises."
Ichiko's funeral was on a Sunday. On Monday, Veronica was back at work. At the moment, she was the receptionist at a company that published trade journals: Pipeline Digest,
Catering!, Trout World. The owner, one of Veronica's former clients, was the only male involved in the business, and he was never there.
When she'd decided to go back on the job market, she'd gone straight to her client files. At her first two interviews, the men who'd once salivated at the sight of her naked body simply stared at her. She'd put on twenty-five pounds in the last four months, and her metabolism, still trying to adjust to life without heroin, had taken it out on her complexion. She wore no makeup, her hair was cut short, and she'd given up dresses for loose drawstring pants and bulky sweaters. The men smiled with faint distaste and told her they'd let her know if something came up. The third interview landed her a cooking job at one of the better New York hotels. After a couple of months, she moved up to a senator's office.
She'd been with Custom Publishing for six weeks. For the first time in her life, she felt comfortable, surrounded by competent women. She had even relaxed enough to stop for a drink with them now and again at Close Encounters, a fern bar across the street.
Which she did on the Thursday after the funeral. It was still only slowly dawning on her that Ichiko was dead, that the most significant part of her life thus far was finally and absolutely over. She needed a little companionship to ease the sudden fits of panic and loss that would sneak up on her. A drink would have helped, but she'd quit that when she quit the heroin.
She looked up from their corner table at the restaurant to see a man standing beside her.
"Veronica?" he said.
She'd gone back to using her own name, but none of her new friends knew about her past. She wanted to keep it that way. "I don't think I know you," she said coolly. Betty, a woman in her fifties with steel-gray hair, stared at the man hungrily. He was young, good-looking in a soap-opera sort of way, wearing an Armani suit.
"We… went out together a couple of years ago. Donald? You don't remember?"
There had probably been more than one man she'd forgotten, what with the heroin. "No," she said. "I wish you'd quit bothering me."
"I wanted to talk to you, just for a second. Please."
"Go away," Veronica said. She didn't like the touch of hysteria she heard in her own voice. "Leave me alone!" People all around them were looking now. The manDonald?-held up both hands and backed away. "Okay," he said. "I'm sorry"
Veronica saw, to her horror, that her wild-card power was affecting the man, without her conscious control. He had turned pale and seemed barely able to stay on his feet. He caught his balance on the back of an empty chair and walked unsteadily out the door.