Death Mask

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Bad Day Dawning

Sissy opened her eyes. She was lying on top of her pink and green comforter, fully dressed except for her shoes. Frank was lying next to her with the covers over him, still sleeping.

She reached over and touched his hair, just to make sure that he was real. It was such a miracle to see him again that her eyes filled up with tears again, and she lay there for almost five minutes, stroking his shoulder, touching his ear.

She lifted her head a little and looked across at her bedside clock. It was nearly half past eleven. After Frank’s collapse, Sissy had insisted that he go to bed for a rest. He may not be the real Frank, only a likeness of Frank, but she still loved him, and she still wanted to take care of him.

There was a soft knock and then the bedroom door opened. It was Trevor, with Molly close behind him.

“How is he?” Trevor asked.

“He seems to be fine. He’s been sleeping.”

“We told Victoria.”

“How did she take it?”

“Pretty good, so far as we can tell. But you know what kids are like. As far as they’re concerned, anything’s possible until you can prove beyond doubt that it can’t be. I think she still believes in fairies. And remember what she said about giants.”

“Well, she may be right,” said Sissy, easing herself off the bed. “I’m seriously beginning to believe in giants myself. I can’t stop dreaming about them. Or at least this one particular giant.”

“Do you think that means anything, that dream?” Molly asked her.

Sissy looked down at Frank and couldn’t help smiling at him. “I don’t know. Probably not. Maybe I just need to believe in magic, too.”

Frank stirred and opened his eyes, and frowned at her.

“Frank? Good morning! How are you feeling?”

He blinked, and sat up. “Okay, I think. How long have I been asleep?”

“Are you hungry?” asked Molly.

“Sure. Yes. You don’t have any pancakes, do you?”

At that moment, Victoria came shyly into the bedroom and took hold of her mother’s hand, wearing jeans and a white embroidered blouse. She stood staring at Frank with a solemn expression on her face.

“Victoria,” said Trevor. “This is your grandpa. Are you going to say hi?”

Frank smiled at her. “Hi, Victoria. It’s a pleasure to meet you. You’re a very pretty girl, just like your momma.”

“Mommy says she painted you.”

“Yes, she did. And that’s why I’m here. I guess you could call it a kind of a miracle.”

“You’re not as old as Grandma.”

“No, I’m not, because this is what I looked like the last time that anybody saw me.”

Victoria approached a little closer. “You look real.”

“I feel real. I even feel hungry.”

He held out his hand. Victoria hesitated, and then she held it. She stared directly into his eyes, as if she were searching for some kind of sign that he was a trick or an optical illusion.

“Do you think God made you real?” she asked him.

“God? I don’t know, honey. All I can say is, that I’m deeply grateful. Even if I can’t stay for very long, at least I’ve had the chance to see my granddaughter, and my son, and your momma, too. And most of all I’ve had the chance to see my wife again.”

Sissy sat next to him at the kitchen table as he ate pancakes and syrup and two fried eggs, and drank three mugs of black coffee. Victoria sat opposite, staring at him in obvious fascination.

“Don’t stare, Victoria!” Molly scolded her.

“She can stare all she wants,” said Frank. “It’s not every day your momma brings your late grandpa back to life, now is it? I’ll bet all of those people in Bethany had a darn good stare when Jesus resurrected Lazarus.”

He put down his knife and fork. “If you ask me, what we really are and the way we picture ourselves, they must be pretty much the same thing. I’ve heard of statues that cry and turn their heads around, and what’s a statue made of? Stone, or bronze, or plaster, sure, but that isn’t all, is it? It’s made out of human imagination, too. What it looks like, that’s what it is — just like me.”

“Well, I’m glad you’ve come back to life,” said Victoria. Frank reached across the table and ruffled her hair.

After he had finished eating, they went out into the yard. It was humid outside. The sky was hazy and the cicadas creaked even louder than ever, as if Frank’s presence had somehow unsettled them.

“Homely little critters, ain’t they?” said Frank, picking one off his sleeve.

Mr. Boots seemed to be perplexed by Frank, too. When Frank tried to pat him, he shied away, but he couldn’t take his eyes off him. He stood at the far end of the yard with his head cocked on one side, making a mewling noise in the back of his throat.

Molly used a rolled-up copy of the Enquirer to sweep cicadas off the seat under the vine trellis. Sissy took out her cigarettes. “We need to decide how we’re going to go after Red Mask.”

“You’re not still smoking, are you?” Frank asked her.

“I’m sorry. I was going to give it up after — ” She nearly said “your funeral,” but she stopped herself. “Well, I’ve tried a few times, but it isn’t easy, especially since I live on my own. It gives me comfort.”

“Well, I don’t think I’m any position to tell you what to do,” said Frank. “But try to think of your health, okay? The longer you live, the more time Victoria can spend with her grandma.”

Sissy said, “We should go downtown to the Giley Building this afternoon and search it all over again. Maybe I can’t find Red Mask, Frank, but I’ll bet anything you like that you can.”

“Do you think the police will let us do that?” said Trevor. “The building was evacuated after the last attack, and so far as I know they haven’t allowed anybody back in.”

“I’ll call Mike Kunzel. I’m pretty sure that I’m beginning to win him over to the dark side. I’ll tell him that I need to check for any new psychic resonance.”

“Psychic resonance?”

“That’s when somebody leaves a building, but they leave a kind of an echo behind them. It can be their actual voice. Most times, though, it’s their emotions — especially if they’ve been angry, or frightened, or very upset. Occasionally, the resonance can last for days, or even weeks, or even longer. Does the word ghost mean anything to you?”

Trevor pressed his hand against his forehead as if he were developing a migraine, but said nothing.

“There’s one more thing that’s been nagging at the back of my mind,” Frank put in. “You said that George Woods appeared to be lying about something, although you don’t know what. George Woods was killed first, right? The girl was stabbed, too, wasn’t she? What was her name?”

“Jane Becker.”

“That’s it, Jane Becker. But it doesn’t seem to me that Red Mask intended to hurt her at all, and that her injuries were simply the result of her trying to stop him from killing George Woods. They weren’t too severe, anyhow. No — I think it was George Woods that Red Mask was after to begin with, and George Woods alone. I also think that Red Mask had a very strong motive for killing him, although we don’t know what it was. Revenge, sure. But revenge for what?”

Trevor said, “Maybe it was revenge for whatever it was that he kept trying to tell his wife that he was sorry for.”

Sissy took out one of her hairpins and prodded it more securely into her bun. “I really don’t know what his motive could have been. The trouble is, George Woods wouldn’t say, and I’m not so sure that I could raise his spirit a second time — not willingly, anyhow. I guess I could read his cards. That might tell us something. I was going to read them anyhow, to see if they would give me clues about how we find Red Mask.”

“You and those darned cards, Sissy.”

“I know you never believed in them, Frank. But even if they speak in riddles, they always turn out to be telling the truth, one way or another. And they’ve been a comfort to me, too, just like smoking. At least I always have some idea of what’s coming down the line.”

Frank said, “I’ve come across perpetrators like Red Mask a few times before. The first time they kill, they’re doing it for a very specific reason — mostly because they’re angry, or because they feel that they’ve been wronged or insulted or not given the respect they think they deserve. They’re seriously looking for justice. But when they find out how exciting it is to kill another human being, and what a feeling of power it gives them — ”

Sissy quickly dealt out the cards, with her cigarette dangling from one side of her mouth and one eye closed against the rising smoke.

“Hmm,” she said, when she was finished. “Not a whole lot of change. A few cards haven’t reappeared, though. L’Avertissement has gone, the Warning — that’s because that attack on the skywalk is yesterday’s news now, not tomorrow’s. The Cache-cache card has gone, too — the Game of Hide-and-Go-Seek.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“I’m hoping it’s good. It predicted that any police who went looking for Red Mask would be massacred, and that doesn’t seem to have happened, thank God.”

She turned over the second-to-last card. It was the blood card again, totally scarlet.

“What does that mean?”

“There’s still some more killing to come, I’m afraid. But it isn’t the ultimate card, which means that there might be a way of stopping it.”

She turned over the very last card. She had turned it up only once before in the whole of her fortune-telling career, when a four-year-old girl had gone missing in the Litchfield Hills close to the Massachusetts border. At Sissy’s suggestion, troopers with tracker dogs went searching for her deep in the furthest recesses of the legendary Colebrook cavern. After three days she was found hungry and shivering, but alive.

The card was called le Flambeau de la vertu, the Torch of Righteousness. It showed a man in a dark blue cloak walking through a shadowy place that could have been a cavern or a forest or a tunnel. He was holding up a fiery torch so that he could see where he was going, but he was also being led by a large black bloodhound, or St. Hubert hound, as the French called them.

Around its neck, the bloodhound wore a collar of wilted roses.

“This is it,” said Sissy. “This is what we have to do to find those Red Masks.”

“We have to take a dog for a walk?”

“This is a tracker dog. We need a tracker dog to find them, and a torch to set fire to them.”

“Set fire to them?”

“Of course. They’re paintings. They’re inflammable. They can burn.”

“Just like me,” said Frank.

“I guess so, my darling. Just like you. But I’m still so happy that you’re here.”

“So where are we going to find ourselves a bloodhound?” demanded Trevor. “Mr. Boots isn’t much of a tracker. I threw a stick for him the other day, and he came back with somebody’s bicycle pump.”

“I wasn’t thinking of Mr. Boots. We need a scenting dog. Molly can paint us one.”

Trevor said, “Whoa! Hold on here, Sissy! You’ve gone against nature by bringing my dad back to life. Now you want to create a dog?”

“We have to! Red Mask doesn’t have a scent that a real dog can follow. But a painted dog could. Think of what happened this morning, when your daddy looked at that painting of the New Milford Green. He could hear it and feel it and smell it, and a painted dog should be able to do the same.”

“My God,” said Trevor.

Sissy crushed out her cigarette. “Molly?” she said. “Do you think you can do it?”

Molly looked up at Trevor and took hold of his hand. “Come on, sweetheart. We’ve come this far. And it’s only a dog.”

“For Christ’s sake. Why don’t you paint some horses, too, while you’re at it? Then you’ll be able to ride downtown.”

“Trevor,” said Sissy, and her voice was stern. “Over forty people have already been killed, and if we don’t do something about it, a whole lot more are going to die, too.”

Trevor was about to answer when his cell warbled. He fished it out of his shirt pocket and said, “Trevor Sawyer.”

He listened, and nodded, and then he passed it over to Sissy. “It’s for you, Momma. Detective Bellman. Something really bad has happened.”