"Nah. We nightclub types work late. But I sleep till noon. What about you? You usually up at this hour?"
"I don't sleep well any more. Four or five hours a night is good for me. Instead of lying in bed, fidgeting, I get up and write."
Thelma pulled up a chair, sat, and propped her feet on Laura's desk. Her taste in sleepwear was even more flamboyant than it had been in her youth: baggy silk pajamas in a red, green, blue, and yellow abstract pattern of squares and circles.
"I'm glad to see you're still wearing bunny slippers," Laura said. "It shows a certain constancy of personality."
"That's me. Rock-solid. Can't buy bunny slippers in my size any more, so I have to buy a pair of furry adult slippers and a pair of kids' slippers, snip the eyes and ears off the little ones and sew them on the big ones. What're you writing?"
"A bile-black book."
"Sounds like just the thing for a fun weekend at the beach."
Laura sighed and relaxed in her spring-backed armchair. "It's a novel about death, about the injustice of death. It's a fool's project because I'm trying to explain the unexplainable. I'm trying to explain death to my ideal reader because then maybe I can finally understand it myself. It's a book about why we have to struggle and go on in spite of that knowledge of our mortality, why we have to fight and endure. It's a black, bleak, grim, moody, depressing, bitter, deeply disturbing book."
"Is there a big market for that?"
Laura laughed. "Probably no market at all. But once an idea for a novel seizes a writer… well, it's like an inner fire that at first warms you and makes you feel good but then begins to eat you alive, burn you up from within. You can't just walk away from the fire; it keeps burning. The only way to put it out is to write the damned book. Anyway, when I get stuck on this one, I turn to a nice little children's book I'm writing all about Sir Tommy Toad."
"You're nuts, Shane."
"Who's wearing the bunny slippers?"
They talked about this and that, with the easy camaraderie they had shared for twenty years. Perhaps it was Laura's loneliness, more acute than in the days immediately following Danny's murder, or maybe it was fear of the unknown, but for whatever reason she began to speak of her special guardian. In all the world only Thelma might believe the tale. In fact Thelma was spellbound, soon lowering her feet from the desk and sitting forward on her chair, never expressing disbelief, as the story unrolled from the day the junkie was shot until the guardian vanished on the mountain highway.
When Laura had quenched that inner fire, Thelma said, "Why didn't you tell me about this… this guardian years ago? Back in Mcllroy?"
"I don't know. It seemed like something… magical. Something I should keep to myself because if I shared it I'd break the spell and never see him again. Then after he left me to deal with the Eel on my own, after he had done nothing to save Ruthie, I guess I just stopped believing in him. I never told Danny about him because by the time I met Danny my guardian was no more real to me than Santa Claus. Then suddenly… there he was again on the highway."
"That night on the mountain, he said he'd be back to explain everything in a few days…?"
"But I haven't seen him since. I've been waiting seven months, and I figure that when someone suddenly materializes it might be my guardian or, just as likely, another Kokoschka with a submachine gun."
The story had electrified Thelma, and she fidgeted on her chair as if a current were crackling through her. Finally she got up and paced. "What about Kokoschka? The cops find out anything about him?"
"Nothing. He was carrying no identification whatsoever. The Pontiac he was driving was stolen, just like the red Jeep. They ran his fingerprints through every file they've got, came up empty-handed. And they can't interrogate a corpse. They don't know who he was or where he came from or why he wanted to kill us."
"You've had a long time to think about all this. So any ideas? Who is this guardian? Where did he come from?"
"I don't know." She had one idea in particular that she focused on, but it sounded mad, and she had no evidence to support the theory. She withheld it from Thelma not because it was crazy, however, but because it would sound so egomaniacal. "I just don't know."
"Where's this belt he left with you?"
"In the safe," Laura said, nodding toward the corner where a floor-set box was hidden under the carpet.
Together they pulled the wall-to-wall carpet off its tack strip in that corner, revealing the face of the safe, which was a cylinder twelve inches in diameter and sixteen inches deep. Only one item reposed within, and Laura withdrew it.
They moved back to the desk to look at the mysterious article in better light. Laura adjusted the flexible neck of the lamp.
The belt was four inches wide and was made of a stretchy, black fabric, perhaps nylon, through which were woven copper wires that formed intricate and peculiar patterns. Because of its width, the belt required two small buckles rather than one; those were also made of copper. In addition, sewn on the belt just to the left of the buckles, was a thin box the size of an old-fashioned cigarette case — about four inches by three inches, only three-quarters of an inch thick — and this, too, was made of copper. Even on close examination no way to open the rectangular copper box could be discerned; its only feature was a yellow button toward the lower left corner, less than an inch in diameter.
Thelma fingered the odd material. "Tell me again what he said would happen if you pushed the yellow button."
"He just told me for God's sake not to push it, and when I asked why not, he said, 'You won't want to go where it'll take you.'"
They stood side by side in the glow of the desk lamp, staring at the belt that Thelma held. It was after four in the morning, and the house was as silent as any dead, airless crater on the moon.
Finally Thelma said, "You ever been tempted to push the button?"
"No, never," Laura said without hesitation. "When he mentioned the place to which it would take me… there was a terrible look in his eyes. And I know he returned there himself only with reluctance. I don't know where he comes from, Thelma, but if I didn't misunderstand what I saw in his eyes, the place is just one step this side of hell."
Sunday afternoon they dressed in shorts and T-shirts, spread a couple of blankets on the rear lawn, and made a long, lazy picnic of potato salad, cold cuts, cheese, fresh fruit, potato chips, and plump cinnamon rolls with lots of crunchy pecan topping. They played games with Chris, and he enjoyed the day enormously, partly because Thelma was able to shift her comic engine into a lower gear, producing one-liners designed for eight-year-olds.
When Chris saw squirrels frolicking farther back in the yard, near the woods, he wanted to feed them. Laura gave him a pecan roll and said, "Tear it into little pieces and toss the pieces to them. They won't let you get too near. And you stay close to me, you hear?"
"Sure, Mom."
"Don't you go all the way to the woods. Only about halfway."
He ran thirty feet from the blanket, only a little more than halfway to the trees, then dropped to his knees. He tore pieces from the cinnamon roll and threw them to the squirrels, making those quick and cautious creatures edge a bit closer for each successive scrap.
"He's a good kid," Thelma said.
"The best." Laura moved the Uzi to her side.
"He's only ten or twelve yards away," Thelma said.
"But he's closer to the woods than to me." Laura studied the shadows under the serried pines.
Plucking a few potato chips from the bag, Thelma said, "Never been on a picnic with someone who brought a submachine gun. I sort of like it. Don't have to worry about bears."