“So he wasn’t going to stop her from working. Or blowing the cross-eyed son of a bitch in the back room. Or whatever else she was getting paid to do. Because with her out of the house he could spend the long afternoons sucking on his pipe with the little asshole mouth the doctors had left him. Holding that sweet smoke in his mouth while he imagined his wife bent over a display of garbage disposals, giving it up for the cross-eyed bastard she’d marry as soon as she buried his cancer-ridden corpse in a boneyard with a fountain that attracted flocks of birds which would no doubt shit all over his tombstone at every opportunity.”
Janice drew a deep breath and held it. If she wanted to confess, I’d let her. Maybe the time had come.
“That was why you didn’t shake my hand when we first met,” I said. “And why you didn’t want to touch the backpack.”
“I can’t stand to touch anything anymore. That’s what ruined me as a medium. After a while I couldn’t hold the pain, and smile, and tell those pretty lies. It started to burn me down. I knew I had to make a change.”
“What about your third book? It was a big hit, wasn’t it? You must have seen some money from that.”
“And I earned every penny. To make the kind of sales my publisher expected, I had to do a book tour. That meant dozens of interviews, and lots of people wanting to test me.”
“Lots of little old ladies wanting to hand you their dead husbands’ pipes.”
“Exactly. I came home from the tour with a deal for another book, but I was burned out. I locked myself in the house for a couple months. I tried to write, but I was completely blocked. I couldn’t stand to go out. Complete strangers seemed to know everything about me.” She laughed. “It was my own fault. Like every neophyte celebrity, I’d given it up to People. They printed all my pretty lies, but that wasn’t enough. People wanted more. They always want more, until they’re done with you. All I wanted was to be left alone.
“That was when Circe Whistler entered my life. I knew she lived in Cliffside, but we’d never met. She called me out of the blue and suggested we get together for lunch at her place. Somehow, I felt that I could talk to her. Or maybe it was just that I’d been cooped up alone for so long, I would have talked to the first person who showed me some sympathy. Anyway, I trusted Circe instantly. By the time lunch was over, I’d spilled my guts. I told her everything.”
“Why?”
“I think…” Janice hesitated. “I don’t know why…but I think that somehow Circe saw right through me, and she made me talk. I started to think that maybe…well, just maybe there really was some truth to the things that Diabolos Whistler preached, and maybe Circe, being his daughter-”
I laughed. “Now, that sounds like the prettiest lie of all.”
“I know! It sounds crazy. I don’t believe it-not in my head, anyway. But my gut tells me something else.”
“Okay. Say you’re not lying. Say Circe seduced you with dark promises of juicy book deals and large royalty checks. But something else must have happened, something that brought you to the point where you found yourself picking up the guy who cut off her father’s head.”
“When you put it that way, I wonder what happened myself.”
Janice was quiet for a while. I left her to her silence, and I kept my eyes on the road. I didn’t want to miss the turnoff. The rain was hammering now. Loud, hollow, ringing on the truck cab like it was empty, like we weren’t inside it at all.
I flicked the wipers on high. They whipped back and forth, fast and sure, beating like purposeful metronomes.
The sound made me uneasy. I felt like I was marching in step, like something beyond my control was directing my actions.
Those thoughts were for someone like Janice Ravenwood. I tried to banish them from my mind, but they stayed with me as I raced forward through the storm, as the wipers lashed back and forth, keeping time, setting the pace. The tempo didn’t slow, and neither did I. Not long enough to gather my thoughts or consider my actions. The wipers beat time, and my foot pressed hard on the gas pedal, and the truck roared forward, carrying us to a place we had to go, the only place I could go.
Then, just as quickly as it had come, the moment ended. Janice started talking again, her voice more confident now, as if she had come to terms with the things she had to say.
“I don’t know how Circe manipulated me,” Janice said. “If she has some kind of special power, I could never sense it. When I touched her, I didn’t get anything that wasn’t already apparent. It wasn’t so much what I felt as what I didn’t. With Circe, it always seemed that a piece was missing somehow. Touching her was like seeing everything, but not seeing anything at all. I couldn’t decide if there was something she was hiding, or something she didn’t have.
“Our first lunch was like that. She invited me to her home. At the time, everything seemed so casual. Looking back, it seems the whole afternoon was calculated to put me at ease. Even though I made a lot of money on my third book, the first two had put me into debt. In the end, I barely broke even. Circe knew that. She had what I wanted-a big house, material things-and she knew it. Visiting Circe’s home, enjoying good food served on fine china…it seemed that the world she inhabited was my deepest dream realized.
“I told her that. As I said, I told her everything-all about the stress caused by my gift, and the way the book tour had drained me…all of it.
“And then it was Circe’s turn. She’d just been on the cover Newsweek, and the media attention was pretty intense at the time. She talked about that. And then she told me about her family. Her father and her sister, and the things they believed and the things she didn’t. She said that they were destroying her plans for the church, draining the fortune her father had built in the sixties, and she wanted to be free of them.”
“I guess she got her wish,” I said. “And you helped her do it.”
“Yes, I did. And I would have gone on helping her. After the Newsweek story, the autobiography was the next big step on Circe’s promotional plan. Working on it, I spent more time at Circe’s house than my own. She set up an office for me at her place. Every day I’d talk to Circe, write about her. At night, I dreamed about her. I began to feel that, in a way, I was her.”
“Or the woman she pretended to be.”
“Yes. Her wants became my wants. Her needs were my needs. When I did something for her, I felt that I was doing it for me, too.”
“Right down to chauffeuring a hit man.”
She nodded. “It seems so obvious now. Circe knew what I wanted out of life. The funny thing is, I never knew what she wanted. Not really. She pretended to tell me everything, but even though I felt as if I were living in her skin at times, I never understood the needs behind her actions. I never had a clue. Even after ghosting her autobiography, I really didn’t know Circe Whistler at all.”
I swallowed hard. Janice’s words were hitting too close to home. Once upon a time I’d shared a meal with Circe Whistler, too. I couldn’t help remembering it, and the things we’d done in her father’s bed in the shadow of that meal.
That night Circe Whistler gave me what I wanted.
The next morning she tried to kill me.
The turn came up quick. I nearly missed it. Mud splattered against the wheel wells as I downshifted. The rear end started to drift, but the tires dug in and kept us on the road.
“I feel better,” Janice said. “Thanks for listening.”
I choked back laughter. The grove was coming up soon. I parked the Explorer at the trail head, turned off the lights, and killed the engine.
Bleak shadows waited under the redwood boughs. Fat raindrops dripped from the branches and splattered against the truck cab like hammer strikes.
Janice’s voice was a whisper. “Can I ask you a question?” Sure.