She had just put the pot on the burner. She had turned around to pick up a pot holder, and had looked up at a sudden movement, thinking one of the kids had come in.
There was an Indian in her kitchen.
An Indian with a mohawk, some kind of shell necklace around his neck, a blanket tied around his waist, fringed leather pants-carrying a hatchet with a shiny metal blade in one hand, some kind of wooden club in the other. And his face-it had such an expression of hate that she shrank back with a little squeak of panic, so terrified her voice wouldn't work.
Then he was gone. Just gone. He didn't leave, he vanished, completely.
Just as Ryan appeared in the doorway.
It couldn't have been more than thirty seconds from the time she'd lit the flame to when the Indian vanished into" thin air. She wasn't sure what warned her, then; some instinct, God only knew. But the moment Ryan appeared, she knew, something horrible was going to happen, and she just leapt on him, tackled him, and pulled him to the floor right outside the kitchen.
Just as the pressure cooker exploded.
She got both of them just out of the way of the shrapnel- for the pot had literally exploded, rather than having the lid blow off.
She sat there on the floor with Ryan and they both cried for a while. Then she got him calmed down, extracted a promise from him not to tell his daddy, and ventured into the kitchen. There was only one thing to do, if she didn't want another lecture-or worse-from Rod. She had to get the mess cleaned up, hide the damage from a cursory examination, and get some other kind of dinner going before he got home. And how she was going to explain this if he did find out, she had no idea.
Maybe she wouldn't have to. Rod never came into the kitchen if he could help it. A few hours with some plaster would take care of the holes in the walls and ceiling, and he probably wouldn't notice the dents in the fridge even if he did come in.
She set to work, frantically pulling bits of metal out of the walls, scrubbing red sauce-like blood-off the walls, the ceiling, the floor-trying to remember if she had told Rod what supper would be-
She had. Hell. Well, he would just have to put up with a different kind of sauce. She could say it was an experiment. She snatched tomato sauce and spices out of the cabinet, threw them at random into a pot. If it came out tasting funny, she could bury it in cheese.
But the Indian-she had to be going crazy. No amount of scrubbing would wipe him out of her mind. Standing there, between the table and the fridge, long hair trailing down his back, staring at her. Hating her. Telling her so, with his eyes.
And then vanishing, just like a soap bubble.
She was going crazy. She had to be.
She stopped dead at that thought, hands frozen on her scrubbing pads, hair trailing into her face.
If she was crazy, could Rod be right? Could she be doing these things herself! Could she have put the scorpion in the sandbox, stripped the insulation from the wires in the dryer, turned the heat up under the pressure cooker?
Was she trying to kill her own children?
She started crying at that, silently so as not to alert the children. Mechanically, she went back to scrubbing, tears falling to mingle with the soapy water. If she was doing all this…
She didn't remember doing anything!
But-people with multiple personalities didn't remember what then- other "selves" did, either. Sybil, Trudi Chase, Eve . . . they had no idea what their other selves did. And they never noticed missing time, either, the places in their lives where the other personalities took over.
But then a single ray of hope came to her. The woman who had almost hit Ryan-she had seen the Indian too! What was more, even if this "Indian" was a personality of her own, she couldn't possibly have gotten into a costume, down the street, pushed Ryan in front of the car, then sprinted back to her kitchen and shed the costume before Ryan and the stranger arrived there.
She sniffed, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She had to keep cleaning. No matter what, she had to keep cleaning. Cleaning up this mess, that was real reality. She could cope with this, even if the rest of her life was falling apart.
Even if it was the only thing left in her life that she could cope with.
_CHAPTER FOURTEEN
jennie wrapped her long hair into a French braid, and examined herself carefully in the mirror. Hmm. A little too harsh, I think. She added a touch of eye shadow. Better.
Somehow, she felt as if she were donning-well, not warpaint, but possibly bluff-paint, the colors the Osage put on when they were not taking the path of war but wanted their enemies to think that Wah-K'on-Tah had directed them to do just that. On the other hand, that was indirectly what she was doing. She was about to try to pull off a bluff.
She was still not certain of all the points in the connection between Calligan and the looted gravesite, but the little medicine-pouch proved he was involved. The presence of the mi-ah-luschka at the site only confirmed that. She and Mooncrow had done everything they could; she needed some kind of real-world proof that he had at least looted the gravesite. Based on that, and on the bomb she and David had taken, she might be able to convince the police and the insurance company that Calligan was running some kind of looted artifact scam, that he routinely booby-trapped his caches, and that his men had accidentally set off one of his bombs. It was thin, but it was better than watching him get off scot-free.
Something protected Calligan, Mooncrow said, so the Little People were going after everything "near" him. It stood to reason that they just might be attacking his family at this point. If that was the case, Calligan's wife might be willing to talk. She might know something.
So Jennie was going on the offensive. Time to talk to Antonia Calligan. There were any number of explanations for the artifacts and the Little People, including the possibility that it could be the wife who had looted the site and cached the artifacts. This was remote, and certainly did not fit the little Jenny knew about the woman, but still a possibility that should not be dismissed without checking.
Hence the suit and the makeup. She wanted to look like someone that Antonia would find familiar enough to talk to, possibly even confide in.
Meanwhile, Mooncrow and David had jobs of their own. Mooncrow was searching the spirit-worlds for signs of the evil spirit's work. It seemed far too coincidental for that spirit to have suddenly been freed at about the same time that Calligan looted the sacred ground, but whether Calligan was under the direct influence of the evil one was still in question. David was searching the papers for the same thing, going back for six months, which is about when Mooncrow thought the flood had uncovered the spirit-bundle that was missing. If they were very lucky, it was in the hands of someone who was resistant to it. If not, well, they would play that as it came.
She gave her hair another pat, and headed out.
"Would you like another cup of coffee?" Antonia-("Oh, call me Toni, please") Calligan asked. Her dark eyes pleaded with Jennie to accept, so of course, she did.
Toni's kitchen was a warm and homey place, eggshell-white and tan, but was curiously marred. The immaculate white walls showed slightly discolored patches of very fresh plaster and paint; there were odd dents in the metal cabinets and the appliances. Strange. Nothing else in the house showed that kind of abuse.
But it was fairly obvious that the kitchen was the only place where Toni felt comfortable. Jennie wasn't too surprised; you could eat off the floors in the living and dining areas, but the rooms looked like pictures in a magazine, not places where children played and people ate. Clearly the kitchen was Toni's personal domain; the only place in the house that was permitted to be less than perfect.
Rod Calligan's wife wore her dark hair in a pert Hamill-cut; despite three children, she was slender under that perky pink sweatsuit. But "pert" and "perky" were the very last adjectives that Jennie would ever apply to her, despite a petite figure and a sweet, square face.