"I'll be waiting for it, son."
They said their chilly good-byes. Quentin hung up the phone and called the limo company to have them fax Chief Bolt a copy of the bill. All the while, he kept telling himself that this was about the stupidest thing he could do. Since Ray Cryer was lying and he hadn't told the police anything, why should Quentin do anything to arouse more suspicion? Why didn't he just tell Bolt some cockamamy story and hang up and sigh in relief and call off the search for a missing wife that he knew would never turn up? And above all, why would he provoke Bolt into getting proof positive from the limo driver that yes indeed, Mrs. Fears got out of the car and went into the house with Mr. Fears? The fact that there were no woman's footprints coming out of the house could only make the chief suspect foul play.
And yet at the time it seemed like the right thing to do. A gut feeling. A sense that Chief Bolt was a decent guy whose trust was worth having. And there was something important about him.
Oh. Of course. Chief Bolt knew the old lady. And if there was any sense to the universe at all, the old lady in the rest home had to be Grandmother. Didn't she? Only she wasn't old lady Laurent, who was twenty years dead, which would make her Grandmother's late mother, which meant Laurent must have been Grandmother's maiden name and the chief would know her married name and where to find her. So knowing the chief was maybe a route to Grandmother.
It was also quite possibly a route to jail.
Quentin shuddered, and then thought of the thing that had made him shudder: When he felt so certain that he should say what he said to the chief, what made him think it was his own idea? For all he knew, he was acting out somebody's script.
No. The User doesn't do that. She's made me see things, but she hasn't made me do things. She can't make me say or do things because if she could, that box would be open and this whole thing would have ended back there by the Hudson. And if Grandmother could make me do things she wouldn't have made me see a talking rat in order to persuade me.
Quentin thought about it some more and realized why he didn't palm off some easy lie on the chief. It was because Quentin was a pretty good judge of people, Madeleine, of course, being a spectacular exception. After screening hundreds and hundreds of people responding to his ads, after working with many dozens of partners over the years, he could tell pretty quickly which people he'd enjoy working with and which would be nothing but pain.
And Chief Bolt was his kind of guy. It was that simple. If Bolt were asking him for funding to start some business, Quentin would hear him out, make sure the premise was sound, and have the papers drawn up, because he could do business with Bolt.
Except the business Bolt was in was the suspicious cop trade, and the only partnership the chief had in mind was the uneasy partnership of cop and suspect. The only thing the chief lacked was evidence of a crime and Quentin was helping him find some.
Maybe it's an unconscious attempt to thwart the User, thought Quentin. After all, I can't open that treasure box if I'm in jail.
11. Reunion
Something touched him in the night. As he lay on his side in bed, something light glided over his bare skin, above his hip. He woke with a start, slapping at it. Someone gave a cry. He lunged for the light and turned it on.
Madeleine sat in the bed, holding her hand as if it had been burnt, an accusing look on her face.
He couldn't think of anything to say.
"Miss me?" she said.
Suddenly it annoyed him, the way she was holding her hand, as if she were really in pain. "Don't bother holding your hand. I know you aren't hurt."
"You think it doesn't hurt when you slap me?"
"I thought a spider was crawling up my—yeah, well, I wasn't far wrong, was I?"
"Don't be mad," she said. "Please don't be mad."
The expression on her face was so genuinely sad, so full of longing, that he felt himself melting with compassion in spite of himself. But no, no, he refused to be taken in.
"Get out," he said.
She was wearing a nightgown. She plucked at the hem. "Tin, please, I..."
"Don't call me that. You sucked that out of my mind. Or Lizzy's—that name doesn't belong to you!"
"No, it's your name."
"It's my name when it's spoken by somebody who loves me. Not somebody who's trying to use me to open some... box." He got up and walked clumsily around the bed, out of the bedroom, into the kitchen. He got orange juice out of the fridge and poured a glass.
She stood in the kitchen doorway. "Enough for me?"
"No," he said. "You don't need it. And that's something I want to know. Since you're not really here, what did you do with everything you ate and drank? Where does it go?"
Her face went cold and she walked back to the living room. "I see," she said. "Your note meant nothing."
He followed her, the glass of juice in his hand. "So your real name is Duncan?"
She whirled on him. "My real name is Madeleine Cryer Fears. Your wife. There's a license."
"And how did you sign it? How did your name get on it? You can't really hold a pen."
"I can hold a pen. I can hold a glass. I can hold you. Remember how it felt?" She reached for him. Her hand, reaching to brush against his cheek, to cup his jaw and draw him close...
He grabbed her wrist and pulled her even closer, then poured orange juice over her head. It dribbled down her hair, over her forehead. She covered her face with her hands and wept. "All I want is to love you, Quentin!"
He stood there, looking at the juice, how real it looked. How it dripped from her hair onto her shoulders, some of it down onto the carpet.
"No," he said. "You're not there, and when I poured out that juice it went straight down to the carpet. It didn't go into your hair because you... aren't... real."
She took the glass and threw it against the wall. It shattered and fell. "Think the neighbors heard that?" she asked.
The shards of glass sparkled in the light from the kitchen.
She was crying. He was crying. "Madeleine," he said. "I'm so sorry, I'm—you wouldn't believe—these past few days without you—"
She held him. Her body fit perfectly against his, as it always had. "You think it was easy for me? I shouldn't have run out of there, but Grandmother—she hates me so much. I should have remembered, my love for you, it's stronger than anything, stronger than her hate, stronger than... Oh, Quentin, don't ever be angry with me again, please, it scares me, it hurts me..."
And as she spoke, he looked at the glittering bits of broken glass and remembered the shimmer of the perfect goblets on the table in the library. And then how bare and dirty the table looked, under its dustcover. The look of the water flowing out of the tap into the clean sink in the bathroom, and then the dirty dry sink with taps that didn't work.
"Tin, please let me call you that, please, let me come back and be your wife the way I should be. The way we promised before God that we would."
"You didn't want any cameras at our wedding, Mad," he said. "Why was that?"
She was toying with his hair. "I wanted to imagine that I was the perfect bride, beautiful as snow in sunlight." Her words were simple, and her voice was like low music. Her hand touched his skin, the same touch that had wakened him a few minutes ago and it was awakening him again. "I didn't want to see pictures that might contradict my dream. Do you believe all those Kodak ads? That nothing is real unless you have a picture of it to prove it to yourself? Maybe I should be giving you a Hallmark card right now, or calling you on AT&T so we can have a really touching moment."