Paul watched him until he turned the comer at the square.
“Now what?” Jenny said.
“Rya probably ran to Sam for sympathy and protection.” He sighed. “She’s had time to calm down. Maybe she realizes that she panicked. We’ll see what her story is now.”
“If she didn’t run to Sam?”
“Then there’s no use looking for her all over town. If she wants to hide from us, she can with little trouble. Sooner or later she’ll come to the store.”
Sitting at the kitchen table, across from his mother, Jeremy recounted the conversation he’d had with Paul Annendale a few minutes ago.
When the boy finished, Salsbury said, “And he believed it?”
Jeremy frowned. “Believed what?”
“He believed that Mark was at the treehouse?”
“Well, sure. Isn’t he?”
Okay. Okay, okay, Salsbury thought. This isn’t the end of the crisis. You’ve bought some time to think. An hour or two. Maybe three hours. Eventually Annendale will go looking for his son. Two or three hours. You’ve no time to waste. Be decisive. You’ve been wonderfully decisive so far. What you’ve got to do is be decisive and get this straightened out before you have to tell Dawson about it.
Earlier, within twenty minutes of the boy’s death, he had edited the Thorp family’s memories, had erased all remembrance of the killing from their minds. That editing took no longer than two or three minutes — but it was only the first stage of a plan to conceal his involvement in the murder. If the situation were any less desperate, if a capital offense hadn’t been committed, if the entire key-lock program didn’t hang in the balance, he could have left the Thorps with blank spots in their memories, and he would have felt perfectly safe in spite of that. But the circumstances were such that he knew he should not merely wipe out the truth but that he should also replace it with a detailed set of false memories, recollections of routine events which might have happened that morning but which in reality did not.
He decided to begin with the woman. To the boy he said, “Go into the living room and sit on the couch. Don’t move from there until I call for you. Understood?”
“Yeah.” Jeremy left the room.
Salsbury thought for a minute about how to proceed.
Emma watched him, waited.
Finally he said, “Emma, what time is it?”
She looked at the clock-radio. “Twenty minutes of eleven. ”
“No,” he said softly. “That’s wrong. It’s twenty minutes of nine. Twenty minutes of nine this morning.”
“It is?”
“Look at the clock, Emma.”
“Twenty of nine,” she said.
“Where are you, Emma?”
“In my kitchen.”
“Who else is here?”
“Just you.”
“No.” He sat in Jeremy’s chair. “You can’t see me. You can’t see me at all. Can you, Emma?”
“No. 1 can’t see you.”
“You can hear me. But you know what? Whenever our little conversation is over, you won’t remember we’ve had it. Every event that I describe to you in the next couple of minutes will become a part of your memories. You won’t remember that you were told these things. You will think that you actually experienced them. Is that clear, Emma?”
“Yes.” Her eyes glazed. Her facial muscles went slack.
“All right. What time is it?”
“Twenty minutes of nine.”
“Where are you?”
“In my kitchen.”
“Who else is here?”
“No one.”
“Bob and Jeremy are here.”
“Bob and Jeremy are here,” she said.
“Bob’s in that chair.”
She smiled at Bob.
“Jeremy’s sitting there. The three of you are eating breakfast. ”
“Yes. Breakfast.”
“Fried eggs. Toast. Orange juice.”
“Fried eggs. Toast. Orange juice. ”
“Pick up that glass, Emma.”
She stared doubtfully at the tumbler.
“It’s filled to the top with cold, sweet orange juice. Do you see it?”
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t it look good?”
“Yes.”
“Drink some of it, Emma.”
She drank from the empty glass.
He laughed aloud. The power… It was going to work. He could make her remember whatever he wished. “How does it taste?”
She licked her lips. “Delicious.”
Lovely animal, he thought, suddenly giddy. Lovely, lovely little animal.
3
NOON
In Buddy’s nightmare two men were filling the town’s reservoir with cats. In the deepest shadows of the night, just before sunrise, they were standing at the edge of the pool, opening cages and pitching the animals into the water. The felines squalled about this assault on their dignity and comfort. Soon the reservoir was teeming with cats: alley cats, Siamese cats, Angora cats, Persian cats, black cats and gray cats and white cats and yellow cats, striped cats, spotted cats, old cats and kittens. Below the reservoir in Black River, Buddy innocently turned on the cold water tap in his kitchen — and cats, dozens upon dozens of fiercely angry cats, began to spill into the sink, full-sized cats that had somehow, miraculously, passed through the plumbing, through narrow-gauge pipe and rat traps and elbow joints and filter screens. Screeching, wailing, hissing, biting, scratching cats fell over one another and clawed the porcelain and scrambled inexorably out of the sink as new streams of cats poured in behind them. Cats on the counter. Cats on the breadbox. Cats in the dish rack. They leapt to the floor and clambered atop the cupboards. One of them jumped on Buddy’s back as he turned to run. He tore it loose and threw it against the wall. The other cats were outraged by this cruelty. They swarmed after Buddy, all of them spitting and snarling. He reached the bedroom/living room inches ahead of them, slammed and locked the door. They threw themselves against the far side of the barrier and yammered incessantly, but they weren’t strong enough to force their way through it. Relieved that he had escaped them, Buddy turned — and saw ten-yard-square cages full of cats, scores of green eyes studying him intensely, and behind the cages two men wearing shoulder holsters, holding pistols, and dressed in black rubber scuba suits.
He woke up, sat up, and screamed. He flailed at the mattress, wrestled with the sheets, and pounded his fists into the pillows for a few seconds until, gradually, he realized that none of these things was a cat.
“Dream,” he mumbled.
Because Buddy slept in the mornings and early afternoons, the drapes were heavy, and there was virtually no light in the room. He quickly switched on the bedside lamp.
No cats.
No men in scuba suits.
Although he knew that he had been dreaming, although he’d had this same dream on each of the last three days, Buddy got out of bed, stepped into a pair of slippers that were as large as most men’s boots, and lumbered into the kitchen to check the water faucets. There were no cats streaming out of them, and that was a good thing to know.
However, he was badly shaken. He was no less affected by the dream for having endured it on two other occasions. All week his sleep had been disturbed by dreams of one sort or another; and he never was able to fall back to sleep once brought awake by a vivid nightmare.
The wall clock showed 12:13. He came home from the mill at half past eight and went to bed at half past nine, five days a week, as if he were a clockwork mechanism. Which meant that he had gotten barely three hours of sleep.
He went to the kitchen table, sat down, and opened the travel magazine that he had bought at the general store last Monday. He studied the photographs of divers in scuba suits.