It is the first day of December. Day one. He is making a fresh start. From now on, everything will go his way because he will no longer underestimate his enemy.
Before he kills the false father, he will put out the bastard’s eyes in retribution for the wound that he himself suffered. He will require his daughters to watch, for this will be an important lesson to them, proof that false fathers cannot triumph in the long run and that their real father is a man to be disobeyed only at the risk of severe punishment.
Five
1
Shortly after dawn, Marty woke Charlotte and Emily. “Got to get showered and hit the road, ladies. Lots to do this morning.”
Emily was fully awake in an instant. She scrambled out from under the covers and stood on the bed in her daffodil-yellow pajamas, which brought her almost to eye-level with him. She demanded a hug and a good-morning kiss. “I had a super dream last night.”
“Let me guess. You dreamed you were old enough to date Tom Cruise, drive a sports car, smoke cigars, get drunk, and puke your guts out.”
“Silly,” she said. “I dreamed, for breakfast, you went out to the vending machines and got us Mountain Dew and candy bars.”
“Sorry, but it wasn’t prophetic.”
“Daddy, don’t be a writer using big words.”
“I meant, your dream isn’t going to come true.”
“Well, I know that,” she said. “You and Mommy would blow a basket if we had candy for breakfast.”
“Gasket. Not basket.”
She wrinkled her face. “Does it really matter?”
“No, I guess not. Basket, gasket, whatever you say.”
Emily squirmed out of his arms and jumped down from the bed. “I’m going to the potty,” she announced.
“That’s a start. Then take a shower, brush your teeth, and get dressed.”
Charlotte was, as usual, slower to come fully awake. By the time Emily was closing the bathroom door, Charlotte had only managed to push back the blankets and sit on the edge of her bed. She was scowling down at her bare feet.
Marty sat beside her. “They’re called ‘toes.’ ”
“Mmmm,” she said.
“You need them to fill out the ends of your socks.”
She yawned.
Marty said, “You’ll need them a lot more if you’re going to be a ballet dancer. But for most other professions, however, they’re not essential. So if you aren’t going to be a ballet dancer, then you could have them surgically removed, just the biggest ones or all ten, that’s entirely up to you.”
She cocked her head and gave him a Daddy’s-being-cute -so-let’s-humor-him look. “I think I’ll keep them.”
“Whatever you want,” he said, and kissed her forehead.
“My teeth feel furry,” she complained. “So does my tongue.”
“Maybe during the night you ate a cat.”
She was awake enough to giggle.
In the bathroom the toilet flushed, and a second later the door opened. Emily said, “Charlotte, you want privacy for the potty, or can I shower now?”
“Go ahead and shower,” Charlotte said. “You smell.”
“Yeah? Well, you stink.”
“You reek.”
“That’s because I want to,” Emily said, probably because she couldn’t think of a comeback word for “reek.”
“My gracious young daughters, such little ladies.”
As Emily disappeared back into the bathroom and began to fiddle with the shower controls, Charlotte said, “Gotta get this fuzz off my teeth.” She got up and went to the open door. At the threshold she turned to Marty. “Daddy, do we have to go to school today?”
“Not today.”
“I didn’t think so.” She hesitated. “Tomorrow?”
“I don’t know, honey. Probably not.”
Another hesitation. “Will we be going to school again ever?”
“Well, sure, of course.”
She stared at him for too long, then nodded and went into the bathroom.
Her question rattled Marty. He wasn’t sure if she was merely fantasizing about a life without school, as most kids did now and then, or whether she was expressing a more genuine concern about the depth of the trouble that had rolled over them.
He had heard the television come on in the other room while he had been sitting on the edge of the bed with Charlotte, so he knew Paige was awake. He got up to go say good morning to her.
As he was approaching the connecting door, Paige called to him. “Marty, quick, look at this.”
When he hurried into the other room, he saw her standing in front of the TV. She was watching an early-morning news program.
“It’s about us,” she said.
He recognized their own home on the screen. A woman reporter was standing in the street, her back to the house, facing the camera.
Marty squatted in front of the television and turned up the sound.
“. . . so the mystery remains, and the police would very much like to talk to Martin Stillwater this morning . . .”
“Oh, this morning they want to talk,” he said disgustedly.
Paige shushed him.
“. . . an irresponsible hoax by a writer too eager to advance his career, or something far more sinister? Now that the police laboratory has confirmed the large amount of blood in the Stillwater house is indeed of human origin, the need for the authorities to answer that question has overnight become more urgent.”
That was the end of the piece. As the reporter gave her name and location, Marty registered the word “LIVE” in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Although the four letters had been there all along, the importance of them hadn’t registered immediately.
“Live?” Marty said. “They don’t send reporters out live unless the story’s ongoing.”
“It is ongoing,” Paige said. She was standing with her arms folded across her chest, frowning down at the television. “The lunatic is still out there somewhere.”
“I mean, like a robbery in progress or a hostage situation with a SWAT team waiting to storm the place. By TV standards, this is boring, no action, no one on scene to shove a microphone at, just an empty house for visuals. It’s not the kind of story they use for a live spot, too expensive and no excitement.”
The broadcast had gone back to the studio. To his surprise, the anchorman wasn’t one of the second-string newsreaders from a Los Angeles station, who would ordinarily have pulled duty on an early-morning program, but a well-known network face.
Astonished, Marty said, “This is national. Since when does a breaking-and-entry report rate national news?”
“You were assaulted too,” Paige said.
“So what? These days, there’s a worse crime than this every ten seconds somewhere in the country.”
“But you’re a celebrity.”
“The hell I am.”
“You may not like it, but you are.”
“I’m not that much of a celebrity, not with only two paperback bestsellers. You know how hard it is to get on this program for one of their chat segments, as an invited guest?” He rapped a knuckle against the face of the anchorman on the screen. “Harder than getting an invitation to a state dinner at the White House! Even if I hired a publicist who’d sold his soul to the devil, he couldn’t get me on this program, Paige. I’m just not big enough. I’m a nobody to them.”
“So . . . what’re you saying?”
He went to the window that provided a view of the parking lot, and parted the draperies. Pale sunlight. Steady traffic out on Pacific Coast Highway. The trees stirred lazily in the mildest of on-shore breezes.