He was useless until the state swept them all out of the hospital and gave them, in a ludicrous gesture at their presumed normalcy, both medical and life insurance, along with their places in a halfway house. The life insurance had doomed Martin LaDoux.
Gloria was sitting on Mail's front porch, waiting, not at all impatient. The house was locked, but John was around-through the front window, she could see the pieces of a microwave meal sitting on a TV tray in the living room.
The question was, where was he keeping Manette and the kids? The house felt empty. There was nothing living inside. A feather of unease touched Gloria's heart. Could he have gotten rid of them already?
No. She knew about John and Manette. He'd keep her for a while, she was sure of that.
Gloria was sitting on the front steps, chewing on a grass stem. When Mail pulled the van into the yard, she stood up-dressed all in black, she looked like the wicked witch's apprentice-and sauntered down to meet him.
"John," she said. Her face was pallid, soft, an indoor face, an institutional face. "How are you?"
"Okay," he said, shortly. "What's going on?"
"I came out to see how you're doing? Got a beer?"
He looked at her for a moment, and her face shone with knowledge and expectation. She knew. He nodded to the question. "Yeah, sure. Come on in."
She followed him inside, looked around. "Same old place," she said. She plunked down on his computer chair and looked at the blind eyes of the computer monitors. "Got some new ones," she said. "Any new games?"
"I've been off games," he said.
He got two beers from the refrigerator and handed one to the woman, and she twisted the top off, watching him.
"You've got a Davenport game," she said, picking up a software box. There was a pamphlet inside, and three loose discs.
"Yeah." He took a hit of the beer. "How's your head?" he asked.
"Been okay." She thumbed through the game pamphlet.
"Still on your meds?"
"Ehh, sometimes." She frowned. "But I left them back at my apartment."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I don't think I can go back there." She said it as a teaser. She wanted him to ask why not. She tossed the pamphlet back in the software box and looked up at him.
"Why not?"
"The cops were there," she said. She took a drink from the bottle, eyes fixed on him. "Looking for you."
"For me?"
"Yup. They had a picture. I don't know who told them that I know you, but they knew. I managed to put them off and slid out of there."
"Jesus, are you sure? That they didn't follow…" He looked at the front window, half-expecting squad cars.
"Yeah. They were stupid; it was easy. Hey, you know who one of them was?"
"Davenport."
She nodded. "Yeah."
"Goddamnit, Gloria."
"I jumped a bus, rode it eight blocks, hopped off, walked through Janis's apartment building, and took the walkway to Bob's, borrowed the car key from Bob…"
"Did you tell him you were coming to see me?"
"Nope." She was proud of herself. "I told him I had to bring some school stuff home. Anyway, I got the key, went down into the parking garage, and got his car. There was nobody around when I left."
He watched her as she talked, and when she finished, he nodded. "All right. I've been having some trouble with the cops."
"I know," she said. And she popped it out, a surprise: "They were here, too."
"Here?" Now he was worried.
"A cop pulled in just after I got here-they're checking all the farmhouses. I don't think he was too interested after I told him I was your wife, and we lived here together."
Mail looked at her for a moment, and then said, "You did."
"I did," she said. "And he left."
"All right," he said, his voice flat.
She caught the hems of her dress and did a mock curtsey, oddly crowlike in its bobbing dip. "You took the Manette lady and her kids."
He was dumbstruck by the baldness of it. He tried to recover: "What?"
"Come on, John," she said. "This is Gloria. You can't lie to me. Where've you got them?"
"Gloria…"
But she was shaking her head. "We took down fifteen thousand, remember?"
"Yeah."
"That was sweet," she said. "I'd like to help you collect on Manette… if you'll let me."
"Jesus." He looked at her and scratched his head.
"Can I see them? I mean, you know, put a stocking over my head or something? I assume they haven't seen your face or anything."
"Gloria, this isn't about money," Mail said. "This is about what she did to me in the old days."
That stopped her. She said, "Oh." Then: "What're you doing to her?"
Mail thought about it for ten seconds, then said, "Whatever I want."
"God," Gloria said. "That's so"-she wiggled in the chair-"neat."
Mail smiled now and said, "C'mon. I'll show you."
On the way out the back, Gloria said, "You told me you'd stopped thinking about her."
"I started again," Mail said.
"How come?"
Mail thought about not answering, but Gloria had been inside with him. As dreary and unlikable as she was, she was one of the few people who really might know how his mind worked, how he felt.
"A woman started calling me," he said. "Somebody who doesn't like Andi Manette. I don't know who-just that it's a woman. She said Manette still talks about me, about what I was like. She said Manette said I was interested in her sexually, and that she could feel the sex coming out of me. She must have called fifteen times."
"God, that's a little weird," Gloria said.
"Yeah." Mail scratched his chin, thinking about it. "The really strange thing is, she called me here. She knows who I am, but she won't tell me who she is. I can't figure that out. But she doesn't like Andi, that's for sure. She kept pushing, and I kept thinking, and pretty soon… you know how it gets. It's like you can't get a song out of your head."
"Yeah. Like when I was counting to a thousand." Gloria had once spent a year counting to one thousand, over and over. Then, one day, the counting stopped. She didn't feel like she'd had much to do with it, either starting or stopping it, but she was grateful for the silence in her brain.
Mail grinned: "Drives you nuts…"
On the way down the stairs, into the musty basement, Gloria realized who the woman was-who was calling John Mail. She opened her mouth to tell him, but then decided, Later. That would be something to tease him with, not something simply to blurt out. John had to be controlled, to some extent; you had to fight to maintain your equality.
"I built a room," Mail said, gesturing at a steel door in the basement wall. "Used to be a root cellar. Damn near killed me, working in that hole. I'd have to stop every ten minutes and run outside."
Gloria nodded: she knew about his claustrophobia. "Open it," she said.
Andi and Grace had used the snap tab from Grace's bra to work on the nail in the overhead joist but could work only a half-hour or so before the skin on their fingers grew too painful to continue. They were making progress-a half-inch of the nail was in the clear-but Andi thought it might take another week to extract it.
She didn't think they had a week: Mail was becoming more animated, and darker, at the same time. She could feel the devils driving him, she could see them in his eyes. He was losing control.
"Never get it out," Grace said. She was standing on the Porta-Potti. "Mom, we're never gonna get it." She dropped the snap tab and sat down on the Potti cover and put her face in her hands. She didn't cry: both of them had gone dry-eyed, as though they'd run out of tears.