'The same group every time? You're sure?'
'Yes. Always the same vehicles. There's a list here., with registrations – mostly Texas and Delaware tags. You want the list?'
'Eventually. Not now. Go on.'
There wasn't much more. The Gypsies had shown up in Revere, just north of Boston, had stayed ten days, and moved on of their own accord. Four days in Portsmouth, New Hampshire … and then they had simply dropped out of sight.
'We can pick up their scent again, if you want,' Penschley said. 'We're less than a week behind now. There are three first-class investigators from Barton Detective Services on this, and they think the Gypsies are almost certainly somewhere in Maine by now. They've paralleled 1-95 all the way up the coast from Connecticut – hell, all the way up the coast from at least the Carolinas, from what the Greeley men were able to find of their back-trail. It's almost like a circus tour. They'll probably work the southern Maine tourist areas like Ogunquit and Kennebunkport, work their way up to Boothbay Harbor, and finish in Bar Harbor. Then, when the tourist season starts to run out, they'll head back down to Florida or the Texas gulf coast for the winter.'
'Is there an old man with them?' Billy asked. He was gripping the phone very tightly. 'About eighty? With a horrible nose condition – sore, cancer, something like that?'
A sound of riffling papers that seemed to go on forever. Then:
'Taduz Lemke,' Penschley said calmly. 'The father of the woman you struck with your car. Yes, he's with them.'
'Father?' Halleck barked. 'That's impossible, Kirk! The woman was old, around seventy, seventy-five
'Taduz Lemke is a hundred and six.'
For several moments Billy found it impossible to speak at all. His lips moved, but that was all. He looked like a man kissing a ghost. Then he managed to repeat: 'That's impossible.'
'An age we all could certainly envy,' Kirk Penschley said, 'but not at all impossible. There are records on all of these people, you know – they're not wandering around eastern Europe in caravans anymore, although I imagine some of the older ones, like this fellow Lemke, wish they were. I've got pix for you … Social Security numbers . . . fingerprints, if you want them. Lemke has variously claimed his age to be a hundred and six, a hundred and eight, and a hundred and twenty. I choose to believe a hundred and six, because it jibes with the Social Security information that Barton operatives were able to obtain. Susanna Lemke was his daughter, all right, no doubt at all about that. And, for whatever it's worth, he's listed as “president of the Taduz Company” on the various gaming permits they've had to obtain … which means he's the head of the tribe, or the band, or whatever they call themselves.'
His daughter? Lemke's daughter? In Billy's mind it seemed to change everything. Suppose someone had struck Linda? Suppose it had been Linda run down in the street like a mongrel dog?
'. . . it down?'
'Huh?' He tried to bring his mind back to Kirk Penschley.
'I said, are you sure you don't want us to close this down? It's costing you, Bill.'
'Please ask them to push on a little further,' Billy said. 'I'll call you in four days – no, three – and find out if you've located them.'
'You don't need to do that,' Penschley said, 'If – when the Barton people locate them, you'll be the first to know.`
'I won't be here,' Halleck said slowly.
'Oh?' Penschley's voice was carefully noncommittal. 'Where do you expect to be?'
'Traveling,' Halleck said, and hung up shortly afterward. He sat perfectly still, his mind a confused whirl, his fingers – his very thin fingers – drumming uneasily on the edge of his desk.
Chapter Sixteen. Billy's Letter
Heidi went out the next day just after ten to do some shopping. She did not look in on Billy to tell him where she was going or when she would be back – that old and amiable habit was no more. Billy sat in his study watching the Olds back down the driveway to the street. For just a moment Heidi's head turned and their eyes seemed to meet, his confused and scared, hers dumbly accusing: You made me send our daughter away, you won't get the professional help you need, our friends are starting to talk. You seem to want someone to copilot you over into ha-ha-land, and I'm elected … Well, fuck you, Billy Halleck. Leave me alone. Burn if you want to, but you've got no right to ask me to join you in the pot.
Just an illusion, of course. She couldn't see him far back in the shadows.
Just an illusion, but it hurt.
After the Olds had disappeared down the street, Billy ran a piece of paper into his Olivetti and wrote: 'Dear Heidi' at the top. It was the only part of the letter that came easily. He wrote it one painful sentence at a time, always thinking in the back of his mind that she would come back in while he was pecking it out. But she did not. He finally pulled the note from the typewriter and read it over:
Dear Heidi,
By the time you read this, I'll be gone. I don't know exactly where, and I don't know exactly for how long, but I hope that when I come back, all of this will be over. This nightmare we've been living with.
Heidi, Michael Houston is wrong – wrong about everything. Leda Rossington really did tell me that the old Gypsy – his name is Taduz Lemke, by the way touched Cary, and she really did tell me that Cary's skin was plating. And Duncan Hopley really was covered with pimples … It was more horrible than you can imagine.
Houston refuses to allow himself any serious examination of the chain of logic I've presented in defense of my belief, and he's certainly refused to combine that chain of logic with the inexplicability of what's happening to me (155 this morning; almost a hundred pounds now). He cannot do these things -it would knock him out entirely of his orbit if he did. He would rather see me committed for the rest of my life than to even seriously entertain the possibility that all of this is happening as a result of a Gypsy's curse. The idea that such off-the-wall-things as Gypsy curses exist at all anywhere in the world, but especially in Fairview, Connecticut – is anathema to everything Michael Houston has ever believed in. His gods come out of bottles, not out of the air.
But I believe that somewhere deep inside of yourself, you may believe it's possible. I think part of your anger at me this last week has been my insistence on believing what your own heart knows to be true. Accuse me of playing amateur shrink if you want, but I've reasoned it like this: to believe in the curse is to believe that only one of us is being punished for something in which we both played a part. I'm talking about guilt avoidance on your part . . . and God knows, Heidi, in the craven and cowardly part of my soul, I feel that if I'm going through this hellish decline, you should be going through one also … misery loves company, and I guess we've all got a streak of one hundred percent gold-plated bastard in our natures, tangled up so tightly with the good part of us that we can never get free of it.
There's another side of me, though, and that other part loves you, Heidi, and would never wish the slightest harm to come to you. That better part of me also has an intellectual, logical side, and that's why I've left. I need to find that Gypsy, Heidi. I need to find Taduz Lemke and tell him what I've worked out over the last six weeks or so. It's easy to blame, easy to want revenge. But when you look at things closely, you start to see that every event is locked onto every other event; that sometimes things happen just because they happen. None of us like to think that's so, because then we can never strike out at someone to ease the pain; we have to find another way, and none of the other ways are so simple, or so satisfying. I want to tell him that there was no evil intent. I want to ask him if he'll reverse what he's done … always assuming it's in his power to do so. But what I want to do more than anything else, I find, is to simply apologize. For me … for you … for all of Fairview. I know a lot more about Gypsies than I used to, you see. I guess you could say that my eyes have been opened. And I think it's only fair to tell You one more thing, Heidi – if he can reverse it, if I find I have a future to look forward to after all – I will not spend that future in Fairview. I find I've had a bellyful of Andy's Pub, Lantern Drive, the country club, the whole dirty hypocritical town. If I do have that future, I hope you and Linda will come along to some other, cleaner place and share it with me. If you won't, or can't, I'll go anyway. If Lemke won't or can't do anything to help me, I will at least feel that I've done all that I could. Then I can come home, and will happily check into the Glassman Clinic, if that's what you still want.