“My name is Special Agent BC Querrey with the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he called loudly. “I want you to put down the knife and step away from Mr. Forrestal.”
“Get away! Please! I beg you!”
BC didn’t ask a second time. He stepped quickly into the doorway, his weapon leveled at the girl.
“Drop it!”
The girl screamed. The terror in her voice was so palpable that BC felt it wash over him like a wave. At the same time, he caught a glimpse of something flying at him from the right. He ducked, and a vase smashed against the door frame, spraying him with bits of pottery. He whirled but there was nothing there save a bureau pressed firmly against the wall. No one could have been hiding behind it.
“It wasn’t me!” the girl screamed now, and BC whirled back to her. Her screams were unnerving—he felt almost as frightened as she was. He fought to steady the gun in his hands even as she waved the knife in hers. There was blood on the blade and handle, on her hands and clothes, too. Not a lot, though. BC knew how much blood spurted from a chest puncture. There should have been more.
“You have to believe me,” she pleaded. “He killed himself.”
BC glanced at the man on the bed. He was drenched in sweat and writhing around, but appeared uninjured. He lowered his voice but kept his gun pointed at the girl.
“Is Mr. Forrestal injured?”
The girl’s eyes went wide with fear and confusion. “I told him we’d taken too much, but he gave him more anyway.”
“Who—Leary?”
“Logan. He came in last night when we were asleep. Used an eyedropper. He got Chandler first, and the coughing woke me up.”
“Logan? The man downstairs?”
The girl nodded her head convulsively. “I don’t know how much he gave him. Thousands of times the normal dose.”
BC wasn’t sure how one got thousands of doses of a drug into an eyedropper, but talking seemed to be calming the girl down.
“LSD?” he asked, and when the girl nodded again, he said, “Everyone who comes here does so to take the drug. Why would you refuse?”
The girl shook her head. “We’d already taken it, and—” She broke off, shook her head. “We didn’t understand what happened to us. Agent Logan thought Leary might be able to help.”
“You knew Logan before?”
The girl suddenly snapped back into a panic. “He made me! He said he would go to the police otherwise! I had no choice!”
BC took a step closer. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. But what you’re describing sounds a lot like motive.”
“Stay away!” The girl brandished the bloody knife in both shaking hands, but what BC noticed was the ring on her finger. A large ruby, its color deeper and richer than the blood that spotted her hands. He didn’t know why, but it seemed to him that you would take off a ring like that if you were going to commit murder, or at the very least afterward.
“You have to believe me,” the girl implored. “He stabbed himself. He couldn’t take it.”
“Take what?”
“I don’t know. Whatever Chandler—whatever he saw.”
BC glanced at the man on the bed. “What does he have to do with this?”
“I told him not to give Chandler any more acid, but he wouldn’t listen! You have to get away.”
Suddenly BC realized: the girl wasn’t afraid of him. She was afraid for him. “You’re trying to protect me?”
“He—” The girl gulped back the word. “It’s out of control. You have to get away. Out of its reach. Until it wears off.”
“But … but how did he—”
The girl screamed in frustration, so loud the man on the bed moaned. “Don’t you see? Don’t you see?”
And now BC did see: saw that the entire room had begun to shimmer like the trees outside. Only this time it wasn’t just a hallucination. He could feel the floorboards warping beneath his feet.
“You have to run! Please. Before it’s too late.”
BC tried to hold the gun on the girl but the seesawing motion beneath his feet made it impossible. He reached for the wall but the wall was rocking too. Splaying his feet, supporting his right arm with his left, he mustered as much authority as he could.
“I’m sorry, miss. I have to ask you to put the knife down and step away from Mr. Forrestal. Until I figure out what’s going on here, you’re going to have to come with me.”
The girl screamed, even as the bureau lifted up and flew across the room at him. He threw himself to the floor just before it hit the wall so hard that it smashed through, hung half in, half out of the melting bedroom in a cloud of plaster dust. A rain of random objects began pelting BC—books, lamps, pictures, little pieces of bric-a-brac that flew at him too quickly to make out. He squeezed himself into the corner behind a tall armoire and shielded his face as best he could. Glass exploded as objects crashed through the window over his head. This isn’t happening, he tried to tell himself. It’s just an illusion. A hallucination. It has to be. But he could feel glass and plaster and wood chips rain down on his hair and knew he was wrong. Somehow the man on the bed was throwing things at him without touching them. Throwing them with his mind.
Suddenly the girl screamed again. BC couldn’t see her but he heard the difference in her voice: this was a scream of pure terror. A moment later there was a gunshot and she fell silent.
“Miss—” BC’s words were choked out as the armoire he was leaning against suddenly tipped over and pinned him into the corner. His gun was knocked from his hands and his body was trapped in a low, painful crouch. His cheek was mashed against the wall so hard that it felt like his skull was going to crack. The little sliver of the room he could see began to blur as spots danced before his eyes.
“Is someone there?” he called, his voice a choked whisper. “Someone, please! Help me!”
There was a second gunshot then, and all at once the armoire fell off him and BC half stumbled, half rolled away from the wall. He wobbled toward his gun, but even as he reached for it he saw a large object hurtling toward him. He turned his head, had time to see that the object was a portable typewriter. A dark shadow filled the doorway, and the faint smell of cigar smoke, and then the typewriter smashed into his skull and the room went black.
Millbrook, NY
November 4, 1963
The first thing he saw when he came to was a tattered lattice of sunset shining through the needles of the pine forest. There was something wrong with this picture, but he couldn’t tell what it was at first. Then it came to him: the pine trees were solid now, their only movement caused by the breeze.
He sat up, wincing in pain. He felt the crust of dried blood on his face, looked down and saw a few drops on the front of his suit. Then he saw the car.
A Lincoln, flat, black, and rectangular, was slotted into the trees like a gigantic domino. He turned toward the cottage, looked first at the second-floor window to the bedroom where he’d confronted the girl and Forrestal. He stared at it a long time before accepting the truth of what his eyes told him: it was unbroken. Light shown through the drawn curtain, and dark shadows moved back and forth inside the room.
He started to stand and immediately felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned to see a stony-faced man sitting on a section of sawn tree trunk.
“I’m going to have to ask you to wait until the ambulance arrives, sir.”
“I’m fine,” BC said, and moved to get up again.