On Monday morning between two and three, Laura Clayborne put on her heavy overcoat, got into her car in the Days Inn parking lot, started the engine, and drove west, heading for Didi Morse's cottage in the woods.
Sleep was impossible, the night full of phantoms. a crescent moon hung in the sky, the road empty before the BMW's headlights. Laura shivered, waiting for the heater to warm up. She and Mark had driven out to the cottage at ten o'clock, to see if Didi Morse had gotten home and was simply not answering her telephone, but the house had been dark. Laura wanted to drive, to have the sensation of at least going from one point to another. Her calls to agent Kastle in atlanta had told her how his investigation was going: Kastle, his secretary said, was out of the city and would get in touch with Laura whenever he returned. In other words: don't call us, we'll call you.
That wasn't good enough. Not good enough by a damned long shot.
Laura drove past the cottage. Still dark, no car in front. Wherever Didi was, her weekend trip had stretched out another day. Laura thought she might start chewing the walls of her motel room if she'd come all this way and couldn't find the woman. She'd stopped taking her sleeping pills because she didn't want her brain fogged with drugs. The downside of kicking the sleeping pills, though, was that she had maybe three or four hours of sleep a night and the other hours were haunted by visions of the madwoman on the balcony and the sniper with his rifle. Laura couldn't take looking at her face in a mirror; her eyes had seemingly sunken deeper, and there was a steely shine in them as if something hard and unknown were beginning to peer out.
about a mile west of the cottage, Laura turned around on a dirt road and headed back. Get something to eat, she thought. Find an all-night pancake house, maybe. Someplace with a lot of hot black coffee.
She slowed, nearing the cottage again. She glanced toward it as the BMW crept by. Dark, of course. Didi had gone birding, the old man had said. Borrowed his binoculars, and went bye-bye. Her hands tightened around the wheel. Didi Morse might be her only hope of finding David alive. David might be dead right now, torn apart like the dolls in the box they'd found in Mary Terrell's apartment. Dear God, Laura prayed, help me hold on to my sanity.
a light flashed.
a light.
In a window of Didi Morse's cottage.
Laura was past the house by a hundred yards before she could make her foot hit the brake. She slowed down gradually, not wanting the tires to shriek. Her heart was about to blow out of her chest. a light. Just a brief glimmer, maybe a second and then gone. It hadn't been a reflection of the moon, or of her headlights.
Someone was inside the house, prowling around in the dark.
Laura's first thought was to stop and call the police. No, no; she didn't want the police in this, not yet. She turned around again and drove past the house once more. This time no light shone. But she'd seen it; she knew she had. The real question was: what was she going to do about iti
She pulled the car off the road, stopped it on the brown-grassed shoulder, cut the headlights and the engine.
Her purse was on the seat beside her, but her pistol remained in her suitcase at the motel. She sat there, shivering as the warm air slipped away and the night came in. Who was inside Bedelia Morse's housei a burglari Stealing whati Her potteryi Laura realized she could either sit there and thrash it around in her mind or walk back to the house. Courage was not a question here: it was a matter of desperation.
Laura got out, opened the trunk, and put her hand around the tire iron. Then she buttoned up her coat to the neck and began walking the couple of hundred yards back to the dirt driveway that curved up through the woods. No light shone in any of the cottage's windows. There was no other car anywhere in sight. Imagination or noti She tightened her grip around the tire iron and started up the driveway, the air's eighteen-degree temperature burning her nostrils and lungs.
The baby was crying again. The sound roused Mary from a dream of a castle on a cloud, and set her teeth on edge. It had been a good dream, and in it she'd been young and slim and her hair had been the color of the summer sun. It had been a dream that she hated leaving, but the baby was crying again. Babies were killers of dreams, she thought as she sat up in bed. Her dream had been to place the baby in Lord Jack's hands, and see him smile like a blaze of beauty. Lord Jack would love her again, and everything would be right with the world.
But Lord Jack wasn't here. He hadn't been at the weeping lady. Lord Jack wasn't coming for her. Not now. Not ever.
The baby was crying, a sound that razored her brain. She stood up, a well of despair, and she felt the old familiar rage begin to steam from the pores of her flesh.
"Hush," she said. "Drummer, hush." He wouldn't obey. His crying was going to wake the neighbors, and then the pigs might come calling. Why did the babies always try to betray her like thisi Why did they take her love and twist it into hateful knotsi What good was Drummer now if Lord Jack didn't want himi Drummer was a piece of crying flesh that had no purpose, no reason for being. She hated him at that moment because she realized what she'd done to bring him to Lord Jack. Now it was all over, and Lord Jack would never set eyes on the wailing rag.
"Won't you stop cryingi" she asked Drummer as she sat on the narrow bed in the dark. She spoke in a quiet voice. Drummer gurgled and cried louder. "all right," Mary said, and she stood up. "all right, then. I'll make you stop."
She switched on the lights in the kitchenette. Then she turned on one of the stove's burners and swiveled its dial to high.
Laura walked slowly up the front steps of Bedelia Morse's house. a clay cat was crouched near the door, and dead leaves scuttled across the porch. Laura reached out and tried the doorknob, gently working it from side to side. Locked. She retreated from the door, went back down the stairs again and around to the rear of the house. Her fingers, clenched so hard on the tire iron, were stiffening up with the cold. There was a one-car garage and a larger stone outbuilding, its door sealed with a padlock and chain, where Laura assumed the pottery work was done. Strange clay sculptures stood amid the barren trees like alien plant life; Laura couldn't see them now, in the dark, but they'd been apparent when she and Mark had gone back there on their initial visit Saturday. all kinds of clay geegaws - bird feeders, mobiles, and other things not so readily identifiable - dangled on wires from the tree limbs. It was obvious that Bedeua Morse - or Diane Daniells, as she called herself now - had thrown herself heart and soul into the work she'd begun as a member of Mark's commune. Laura went to the back door, her shoes crunching on dead branches and leaves, and she tried this doorknob as well.
It turned easily. Laura's heart kicked again. She ran her hand over the door and found that one of its small rectangular panes of glass had been removed. Not broken, because there were no shards. Removed, as with a glass cutter.
She opened the door and stood on the threshold. Off in the woods somewhere, an owl spoke to the moon. The cold wind hissed through the trees and made the clay ornaments clink and clatter on their wires. She shivered involuntarily, and she stood in the doorway trying to see through the dark. Nothing in there but shapes upon shapes. She and Mark had looked through the door's panes on Saturday and seen a kitchen with a table and a single chair in the middle of the room. On Saturday, the door had had all its panes of glass, and it had been securely locked.
Her heart pounding, Laura lifted the tire iron and walked into the house.
Mary picked up the baby. Her touch was rough. The infant's crying broke, faltered, and began to climb in volume again, a thin, high whine that Mary could not abide. "STOP IT!" she shouted into his reddened, squawling face. "STOP IT, YOU LITTLE SHIT!"
The baby cried on. Mary almost choked on a scream of rage. How could she have been so stupid to believe that Lord Jack had written the messagei To believe that he wanted her and the baby after all these yearsi To believe that he caredi No one cared. No one. She had stolen this child and blown her disguise, had put herself in mortal danger from the pigs of the Mindfuck State... and all for Edward Fordyce's traitorous book about the Storm Front.
She would deal with Edward before she left. She would make herself put a bullet between his eyes and dump his body in a garbage can. But right now there was the baby, crying his head off. Drummer, she thought, and she sneered. "You want to cryi" She shook him. "You want to cryi" Shook him harder. His crying became a shriek. "Okay, I'll make you cry!"
She took him into the kitchenette, where the burner glowed fiercely red and its heat rose up in a shimmer. The baby was trembling, still wailing, legs trying to thrash. She didn't need the little bastard. Didn't need Lord Jack. Didn't need anyone. She would make Drummer stop crying, make him obey her, and then she'd leave what remained of him for the pigs and the woman named Laura Clayborne. Then she would go underground again, deep underground, where nothing and no one could touch her, and she would turn her back for the last time on the idiot's dream of love and hope.
"Cry!" she shouted. "Cry! Cry!"
and she grasped the back of the baby's head and pressed his face toward the red burner.
In the dark, Laura listened. The boom of her heart and the roar of her breathing got in the way. Get out, she told herself. You don't belong here. You're a long way from home, and you've gone too far. If a burglar was ransacking Bedelia Morse's house, that was his business. But she didn't leave, and her fingers groped for a light switch. Her hand hit something that jingled merrily and made her jump a foot in the air. another damned pottery mobile. She was making more noise than a marching band.
In another moment she found a light switch, and she turned it on.
a warm breath washed against her neck.
She spun around, to the right, and looked into the face of the man who was standing there. She opened her mouth to scream. a black-gloved hand rose up, fast as a cobra's head, and clamped her mouth shut before the scream could get out.
The baby's face was almost on the burner. He was still wailing, stubbornly, and Mary braced for the scream of agony.
a scream came.
"NO!"
Someone grabbed her from behind, shoving her and the baby away from the hot burner. "No! Jesus, no!" a pair of hands winnowed in, trying to grasp Drummer. Mary slammed an elbow backward and heard a grunt of pain as it connected. a woman with red hair was fighting to take Drummer, and Mary didn't know her face. The woman was saying, "Mary, don't! Don't, please don't!" Her hands grasped at the baby again, and Mary shoved the red-haired stranger back hard against the wall. This was her baby, to do with as she pleased. She had risked her life to have this child, and no one would take him away from her. The woman was fighting her for Drummer once more, the red-glowing burner behind them and the baby wailing. "Listen to me! Listen!" the woman was pleading as she grabbed hold of Mary's shoulders and hung on. Mary looked at the woman's white throat, and she saw where she should punch into it to crush her windpipe. "Don't hurt the baby! Please don't!" the woman said, still hanging on. "Mary, look at me! It's Didi! It's Didi Morse!"
Didi Morsei Mary lifted her gaze from the vulnerable throat and stared into the woman's heavy-jowled, deeply lined face.
"No," Mary said over Drummer's crying. "No. Didi Morse was beautiful."
"I had surgery. Remember what I told youi I had the plastic surgeon do it. Don't hurt the baby, Mary. Don't hurt Drummer."
Plastic surgeon. Didi Morse, her face made ugly by a scalpel, silicone implants, and a hammer that had broken her nose. I had it done when I went underground, she'd told Mary and Edward. a surgeon who did work on a lot of people who wanted to disappear. Didi had actually paid to have herself made ugly, and the surgeon - who was part of the militant underground - had done the work in St. Louis. Didi Morse, still with green eyes and red hair but now drastically different. Pleading with her not to hurt Drummer.
"Hurt... Drummeri" Mary whispered. "Hurt my babyi" Tears came to her eyes. She heard Drummer crying, but the sound didn't razor her brain anymore; it was a cry of innocent need, and Mary pressed Drummer against her and sobbed as she realized what her rage had been guiding her toward. "Oh God, oh God, oh God," she moaned as the baby trembled in her arms. "I'm sick, Didi. I'm so sick."
Didi switched off the stove's burner. Her collarbone was still throbbing from the collision with Mary's elbow, and Mary had almost broken her back against the wall. She said, "Come on, let's sit down." She wanted to get Mary away from the stove. Her sight of the woman about to mash the infant's face down on that burner had been a horror beyond belief. She grasped Mary's arm with a careful touch. "Come on, sister."
Mary allowed herself to be steered out of the kitchenette. Tears were streaming down her face, her lungs ratcheted by sobbing. "I'm sick," she repeated. "Something's wrong with me, I get crazy. Oh God, I wouldn't hurt my sweet Drummer!" She hugged him close. His crying was starting to weaken. They were in Mary's room at the Cameo Motor Lodge. Didi and Mary had gone there after leaving Edward's at eight o'clock, and they'd shared a couple of bottles of wine and talked about the old days. Mary had folded down the sofa bed for Didi, and it was there that Didi had been sleeping when she'd heard Mary stalk out of the bedroom and go into the kitchenette. Then Mary had gone back for the crying baby, and the rest of what might have happened had been only narrowly averted.
Mary sat down in a chair and began to rock Drummer, the tears glistening on her face and her eyes red and swollen. Drummer was growing quiet, getting sleepy again. Didi sat on the rumpled sofa bed, her nerves still jangling.
"I love my baby," Mary said. "Can't you see I doi"
"Yes," Didi answered. But what she saw was an insane woman with a stolen infant in her arms.
"Mine," Mary whispered. She kissed his forehead and nuzzled his soft whorls of dark hair. "He's mine. all mine."
Sardonicus.
One side of the man's mouth was frozen open in a hideous rictus that showed teeth ground down to stubs. Like Sardonicus, Laura thought as the gloved hand clamped to her face. His cheek on the grinning side was caved in, his lower jaw crooked and jutting forward like a barracuda's underbite. He had black eyes, the one on the damaged hemisphere of his face sunken and glassy. a battlefield of scars streaked back from the corner of his grin across his collapsed cheek. In his throat there was a flesh-colored plug with a three-holed socket.
The sight was terrifying, but Laura had no time to be terrified. She struck out with the tire iron, the strength of desperation behind it, and hit him a glancing blow across the left shoulder. It was hard enough: the man staggered back, and he opened his ruined mouth and made a hissing sound of pain like a ruptured steam pipe.
at once he was on her again, reaching for her throat. Laura stepped back, giving herself room, and swung the tire iron once more. The man lifted his arm to ward off the blow; their forearms collided with a jolt that knocked numbness into Laura's hand, but it was the man who lost what he was holding. a small flashlight fell to the floor and rolled under the kitchen table.
He caught Laura's wrist, and they fought for the tire iron. The man was tall and sinewy, wearing a black outfit and a black woolen cap. His face was pallid, the color of the moon. He slammed Laura back against a counter, and pottery knickknacks clattered and fell. a knee came up, hitting Laura between the legs; the pain made her cry out, but she clenched her teeth and hung on to the tire iron. They careened across the kitchen, crashing into the table and throwing it over. The man grasped her chin with one hand and shoved her head back, trying to snap her neck. Laura clawed at his throat, digging furrows in his flesh. Her fingers found the plug, and she tore at it.
He retreated, clutching at his throat, the breath shrieking from his predator's grin. Laura advanced on him, her eyes wild. She lifted the tire iron for another blow, her intent to knock his brains out before he could kill her. He made a guttural growling sound that might have been rage, and he darted in before she could swing the tool. He trapped her arm, twisted his body, and lifted her off her feet, flinging her like a flour sack to the other side of the kitchen. She went down on her right shoulder, the air whooshing from her lungs as she slammed to the floor.
Time hitched and spun, knocked out of rhythm. Laura tasted blood. Pain throbbed through her shoulder, and her hand had lost the tire iron. When she could gather the strength to sit up, she found herself alone in Bedelia Morse's kitchen. The back door was wide open, dead leaves blowing in. Laura spat a red scrawl on the floor, and her tongue found the wound inside her cheek where her teeth had met. I'm all right, she thought. I'm all right. But she was starting to shake uncontrollably now that the man with the death's-head grin had gone, and fear and nausea hit her in tandem. She barely made it outside to throw up, next to one of the abstract sculptures. She heaved until nothing would come up, and then she sat on the ground away from her mess and breathed in lungfuls of frigid air. Between her thighs there was a pulse of pain. She felt warm wetness spreading there, and she realized with a flash of anger that the son of a bitch had torn her stitches open again.
She stood up and walked back into the kitchen. The flashlight was gone. Her tire iron remained. The urge to cry fell upon her, and she almost gave in to this brutal friend. But she couldn't trust herself to stop crying if she began, and so she stood with her hands pressed to her eyes until the urge passed. Shock lurked in the back of her mind, waiting its turn to creep over her. There was nothing to be done now but to go to her car and drive back to the Days Inn. Her right shoulder was going to be one black bruise tomorrow, and her back was aching where the man had driven her against the counter.
But she had not been killed. She had stood up against him, whoever he'd been, and she'd survived. Before all this had started, she would have crumpled into a heap and cried her heart out, but things were different now. Her heart was harder, her vision colder. Violence had suddenly and irrevocably become a part of her life.
She would have to tell Mark about this. The man with the plug in his throat, who'd been asking questions about Diane Daniells from the neighbor across the road. Who was he, and how did he fit into the puzzlei
Laura helped herself to a glass of water from the faucet, spitting blood into the sink. It was time to go. Time to leave the light and strike out into the darkness again. She retrieved the tire iron, and she waited for her trembling to subside. It wouldn't. She put out of her mind the image of the grinning man waiting for her out there somewhere. Let it be, she told herself. and then she switched off the light, closed the back door, and began walking the distance to her car. Nothing came after her, though she jumped at every sound, imagined or otherwise, and her fingers cramped around the tire iron.
Laura got into the BMW, turned on the ignition and the headlights.
That was when she saw it. Backwards letters, carved into her windshield by a glass cutter. Two words:
EMOH OG
She sat there for a moment, stunned, looking at what she took to be a warning. Go home. Where was thati a house in atlanta, shared by a stranger named Dougi a place where her parents lived, ready and eager to command her lifei
Go home.
"Not without my son," Laura vowed, and she pulled the car off the shoulder and drove toward ann arbor.