“You’re getting a little personal there, Jared.”
“Hurry up, then.”
Somehow she struggled to the top without dropping her burden on his head. Jared followed, panting, pushing Mrs. Ransom through the opening. Mary had set Molly’s small body on the bare boards of the attic. The space ran the length of the house. It was low and very hot.
“I’ll be back,” Jared said.
“Okay, but I’m finding it very hard to care. The heat is making my head ache.”
Jared hurried back to the master bedroom. He got his arms around Lila’s wrapped body and felt his sore knee give a warning twang. He had forgotten about her uniform, her heavy workshoes, and her utility belt. How much did all that add to the weight of a healthy, well-nourished female? Ten pounds? Twenty?
He got her as far as the ladder, contemplated its steep incline, and thought, I’ll never be able to get her up there. No way.
Then the doorbell rang, four cheery ascending chimes, and he started to climb, not panting now but gasping. He made it three-quarters of the way up the ladder, then ran out of gas. Just as he was trying to decide if he could get down without dropping his mother, two slim arms appeared, hands open. Mary, thank God. Jared managed another two steps, and Mary was able to grab Lila.
From below, one of the deputies said, “Not even locked. Door’s wide open. Come on.”
Jared shoved. Mary pulled. Together they managed to get Lila above the level of the trapdoor. Mary collapsed on her back, yanking Lila over and in. Jared grabbed the top of the ladder and pulled. It came up, folding in on itself as it did, and he pressed against it, easing it the last couple of feet so it wouldn’t bang shut.
Down below, the other deputy called, “Yoo-hoo, anybody home?”
“Like some woman in a bitch-bag is going to answer,” the other said, and the two of them laughed.
Bitch-bags? Jared thought. Is that what you’re calling them? If my mother heard something like that come out of your mouths, she’d kick your country asses right up between your shoulder blades.
They were still talking, but moving toward the kitchen side of the house, and Jared could no longer tell what they were saying. His fear had communicated itself to Mary, even in her dopey state, and she put her arms around him. He could smell her sweat, and when her cheek pressed against his, he could feel it.
The voices came back, and Jared sent the cops below a thought command: Leave! The place is obviously empty, so just leave!
Mary whispered in his ear. “There’s food in the fridge, Jere. In the pantry, too. A wrapper I tossed in the wastebasket. What if they—”
Big cop shoes going clump-clump-clump, the deputies came up the stairs to the second floor. That was bad, but they weren’t talking about food in the fridge, or fresh trash in the can beside it, and that was good. (Ack-sen-tuate the positive.) They were discussing what to do about their lunch.
From beneath them and to the left, one of the cops—Rangle, maybe—said, “This bedspread looks kinda rumpled to me. Does it to you?”
“Yeah,” said the other. “Wouldn’t shock me if someone’s been squatting here, but more likely, people that come in to look at the place, prospective buyers, they probably sit down, too, sometimes, right? Or even try the bed. Natural thing to do.”
More footsteps, back out into the hall. Clump-clump-clump. Then they stopped, and this time when the voices came, they were directly below. Mary tightened her arms around Jared’s neck and whispered. “If they catch us hiding up here, they’ll arrest us, won’t they!”
“Shhh,” Jared whispered back, thinking, They would have arrested us even if they found us down there. Only they’d probably call it protective custody.
“Trapdoor in the ceiling,” the one who was probably Barrows said. “You want to go up and check the attic, or should I?”
The question was followed by a moment of silence that seemed to stretch out forever. Then the one who was probably Rangle said, “You can go up if you want to, but if Lila and her kid were in the house they’d be down here. And I got allergies. I’m not going up and breathing a lot of dust.”
“Still…”
“Have at it, buddy,” Rangle said, and all at once the ladder went flopping back down, spilling muted light into the attic. If Lila’s cocooned body had been even six inches closer to the open trapdoor, it would have been in view. “Enjoy the heat up there, too. I bet it’s a hundred and ten.”
“Fuck it,” Barrows said. “And while I’m at it, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Allergies. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
The ladder came back up, this time closing with a loud bang that made Jared twitch even though he’d known it was coming. The big cop shoes went clump-clump-clumping back down the stairs. Jared listened, holding his breath, as the deputies stood in the foyer, talking some more. Low tones. Impossible to catch more than a word or a phrase. Something about Terry Coombs; something about a new deputy named Geary; and something else again about lunch.
Leave! Jared wanted to scream at them. Leave before Mary and me have fucking heatstrokes!
At last the front door shut. Jared strained his ears to catch the sound of their cruiser starting up, but couldn’t. Either he’d spent too much time listening to loud music with his headphones on, or the attic insulation was too thick. He counted to a hundred, then back down to zero. He couldn’t stand to wait any longer. The heat was killing him.
“I think they’re gone,” he said.
Mary didn’t answer, and he realized her formerly tight grip on his neck had slackened. He had been concentrating too hard to notice until now. When he turned to look at her, her arms fell limply to her sides and she collapsed to the board floor.
“Mary! Mary! Don’t go to sleep!”
There was no response. Jared shoved the trapdoor open, not caring about the bang the ladder made when its feet landed on the hardwood floor below. He had forgotten about the cops. Mary was what he cared about now, and all he cared about. Maybe it wasn’t too late.
Only it was. Shaking did no good. Mary had fallen asleep while he was listening to make sure the cops weren’t coming back. Now she was lying beside Lila, her fine features already blurring beneath the white threads that were busily knitting themselves out of nothing.
“No,” Jared whispered. “She tried so hard.”
He sat there for almost five minutes, watching the cocoon thicken, weaving relentlessly, then called his father.
It was all he could think to do.
CHAPTER 4
In the world the women had somehow exited, Candy Meshaum had resided in a house on West Lavin, in the direction of the prison. Which was fitting, because her house had also been a prison. In this new world, she had chosen to live with some other women, all regular attendees of the Meeting, in an enclave they’d made out of a storage facility. The storage facility, like the Shopwell (and unlike the great majority of the other buildings in the area), had stayed almost entirely water-tight over the indeterminate number of years of abandonment. It was an L-shaped structure of two levels, box-upon-box-upon-box, hacked out of the surrounding woods and planted on a cement tarmac. Built of hard plastics and fiberglass, the storage pods had admirably fulfilled the leakproof promise of the faded advertisement on the sign outside. Grasses and trees had encroached on the tarmac, and leaves clogged the gutter system, but it had been an easy project to cut back the overgrowth and clear the drainage, and the opened pods, once emptied of useless boxes of possessions, had proven to be excellent if not exactly beautiful housing.