False Memory

62

The wheel of luck was turning. Two seats on United, out of John Wayne International Airport, to Santa Fe by way of Denver, were available on an early-morning flight. Using a credit card, Dusty secured the tickets from the phone in Fig Newton’s kitchen.

“Gun?” Fig asked, a few minutes later, as Dusty and Martie were at the front door, preparing to leave brother and dog in his care.

“What about it?” Dusty asked.

“Need one?”

“No.”

“Think you will,” Fig disagreed.

“Please tell me you don’t have an arsenal big enough to start a war,” Martie said, clearly wondering if Foster Newton was something more troubling than a mere eccentric.

“Don’t,” Fig assured her.

“Anyway, I’ve got this,” Dusty said, drawing the customized.45 Colt Commander from his jacket.

“Flying, aren’t you?” Fig said.

“I’m not going to try to carry it on the plane. I’ll pack it in one of our suitcases.”

“Might get random scanned,” Fig warned.

“Even if the baggage isn’t carry-on?”

“Lately, yeah.”

“Even on short-haul flights?”

“Even,” Fig insisted.

“It’s all these terrorist events recently. Everyone’s nervous, and the FAA’s issued some new crisis rules,” Skeet explained.

Dusty and Martie regarded him with no less astonishment than they would have shown if he had suddenly opened a third eye in the center of his forehead. Subscribing to the philosophical contention that reality sucks, Skeet never read a newspaper, never tuned in to television or radio news.

Recognizing the source of their amazement, Skeet shrugged and said, “Well, anyway, that’s what I overheard one dealer telling another.”

“Dealer?” Martie asked. “Like in drug dealer?”

“Not blackjack. I don’t gamble.”

“Drug dealers sit around talking current events?”

“I think this impacted their courier business. They were ticked off about it.”

To Fig, Dusty said, “So how random is random scanning? One bag in ten? One in five?”

“Maybe some flights, five percent.”

“Well, then—”

“Maybe others, a hundred percent.”

Looking at the pistol in his hand, Dusty said, “It’s a legal gun — but I don’t have a permit to carry.”

“And crossing state lines,” Fig warned.

“Even worse, huh?”

“Not better.” Winking one owlish eye, he added: “But I have something.”

Fig disappeared into back rooms of the trailer but returned only a minute later, carrying a box. From the box, he extracted a gleaming toy truck. With a swipe of one hand, he spun the wheels. “Vrooooom! Transport.”

From black sky, black wind. Black, the windows of the house. Does wind live within?

On the back porch of the Rhodeses’ miniature Victorian, which Ahriman found too precious for his taste, he hesitated at the door, listening to the maraca rhythms of the shaken trees in the night, and to the black-wind haiku in his mind, pleased with himself.

When he’d first come here to conduct programming sessions with Dusty, a couple months ago, he had acquired one of the Rhodeses’ spare house keys, just as he had kept a key to Susan’s apartment. Now he stepped inside and quietly closed the door behind him.

If the wind lived here, it wasn’t home. This blackness was warm and still. No one else was in residence, either, not even the golden retriever.

Accustomed to a royal right of passage in the homes of those whom he ruled, he boldly switched on the kitchen lights.

He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he was confident that he would recognize it when he saw it.

Almost at once, a discovery. A padded mailing envelope, torn open, discarded on the dinette table. His attention was snared by the return address on the label: Dr. Roy Closterman.

Because of Ahriman’s spectacular success both in his practice and with his books, because he had inherited considerable wealth and was a figure of envy, because he did not suffer fools well, because he was more disposed to feel contempt rather than admiration for others in the healing community, whose self-congratulatory codes of ethics and dogmatic views he found suffocating, and for a number of other reasons, he made few friends but more than a few enemies among fellow physicians in every specialty. Consequently, he would have been surprised if the Rhodeses’ internist had not been one of those harboring a negative opinion of him. That they were patients of the self-beatified Saint Closterman, therefore, was only marginally more troublesome than if they had consulted one of the other doctors to whom Ahriman disdainfully referred as pokers-and-prodders.

What concerned him was a handwritten message that lay with the torn envelope. The note was on Closterman’s stationary, signed by him.

My receptionist passes your place on her way home, so I’ve asked her to drop this off. I thought you might find Dr. Ahriman’s latest book of interest. Perhaps you’ve never read him.

Here was another wild card.

Dr. Ahriman folded the note and pocketed it.

The volume to which Closterman referred was not here. If it was truly the latest, then it must have been a hardcover copy of Learn to Love Yourself.

The doctor was pleased to know that even his enemies contributed to his book royalties.

Nevertheless, when this crisis had been resolved, Ahriman would have to turn his attention to Saint Closterman. Some balance could be restored to the boyfriend’s head by clipping from it the remaining ear. From Closterman himself, perhaps the middle finger of the right hand could be removed, reducing his capacity to make vulgar gestures; a saint should not object to being relieved of a digit that had such obscene potential.

The fire truck — five inches wide, five inches high, and twelve inches long — was constructed of pressed metal. Nicely detailed, hand-painted, made in Holland by craftsmen with pride and flair, it would charm any child.

Sitting at the dining table, as his guests gathered around to watch, Fig used a tiny screwdriver with a quarter-inch head to remove eight brass screws, detaching the body of the truck from the base frame and wheels.

Inside the truck was a small felt bag of the type used to pack a pair of shoes in a suitcase to prevent rubbing.

“Gun,” Fig said.

Dusty gave the.45 Colt to him.

Fig wrapped the compact pistol in the shoe bag so it wouldn’t rattle, and he placed the bag inside the hollow body of the fire truck. If the weapon had been much larger, they would have needed a bigger truck.

“Spare magazine?” Fig asked.

“I don’t have one,” Dusty said.

“Should.”

“Don’t.”

Fig reattached the body of the truck to the base, taped the little screwdriver to the underside, and handed it to Dusty. “Let ’em scan.”

“Lay it on its side in a suitcase, and it makes a recognizable toy-truck silhouette on an X ray,” Martie said admiringly.

“There you go,” Fig said.

“They wouldn’t make anyone open a bag to inspect anything like that.”

“Nope.”

“We could probably even take this in a carry-on,” Dusty said.

“Better.”

“Better?” Martie said. “Well, yeah, because sometimes airlines lose the luggage you don’t carry.”

Fig nodded. “Exactly.”

“You ever use this yourself?” Skeet asked.

“Never,” said Fig.

“Then why do you have it?”

“Just in case.”

Turning the fire truck over in his hands, Dusty said, “You’re a strange man, Foster Newton.”

“Thanks,” said Fig. “Kevlar body armor?”

“Huh?”

“Kevlar. Bulletproof.”

“Bulletproof vests?” Dusty said.

“Got ’em?”

“No.”

“Want ’em?”

“You have body armor?” Martie marveled.

“Sure.”

Skeet said, “You ever needed it, Fig?”

“Not yet,” said Fig.

Martie shook her head. “Next you’ll be offering us an alien death-ray pistol.”

“Don’t have one,” Fig said with evident disappointment.

“We’ll skip the body armor,” Dusty said. “They might notice how bulked up we look going through airport security.”

“Might,” Fig agreed, taking him seriously.

The doctor found nothing more to engage him downstairs. Though he had a lively interest in the arts and interior design, he didn’t pause to admire even one painting, article of furniture, or objet d’art. The decor left him cold.

In the bedroom were signs of a hasty departure. Two dresser drawers weren’t closed. A closet door stood open. A sweater lay discarded on the floor.

On a closer inspection of the closet, he saw two matched pieces of luggage stored overhead on a shelf. Beside those two was an empty space where two smaller bags might have been shelved.

Another bedroom and bath provided no clues, and then he came to Martie’s office.

Busy blue-eyed girl. Busy making Hobbit games. Death waits in Mordor.

Across her large U-shaped work area were stacked books, maps of fantasy lands, sketches of characters, and other materials related to her project based on The Lord of the Rings. Ahriman took more time examining these items than was warranted, indulging his enthusiasm for anything to do with games.

As he pored through the computer-assisted designs for Hobbits and Orcs and other creatures, the doctor realized one reason why he was able to compose routinely better haiku about Martie than he’d been able to write when Susan and other women were his inspiration. He and Martie shared this gaming interest. She liked the power of being the game master, as did he. At least this one aspect of her mind resonated in sympathy with his.

He wondered if, in time, he might discover other attitudes and passions they shared. Once they were past the current regrettable ferment in their relationship, how ironic it would be to learn that they were fated to have a more complex future together than he had ever envisioned, distracted as he had been by Susan’s exceptional beauty and by Martie’s family connections.

The sweet sentimentalist in Ahriman delighted at the thought of falling in love or at least in something like it. Although his life was full and his habits long established, he would not be averse to the complication of romance.

Proceeding from desktop to desk drawers, he felt now less like a detective than like a naughty lover leafing through his darling’s diary in search of the most guarded secrets of her heart.

In a bank of three drawers, he found nothing to interest either a detective or a lover. In the wide but shallow center drawer, however, among rulers and pencils and erasers and the like, he came upon a microcassette on which SUSAN had been printed in red letters.

He felt what a gifted Gypsy might feel when tipping a mess of tea leaves on a plate and glimpsing a particularly ominous fate in the soggy patterns: a chill that turned the pia mater of his spine into a membrane of ice.

He searched the remaining drawers for a tape recorder that would accept the microcassette. Martie didn’t have one.

When he saw the answering machine on one corner of the desk, he realized what he held in his hand.

The aluminum awning, vibrating in the wind, had the guttural growl of a living beast, as though in the night something hungry waited for Dusty to open the trailer door.

“If the weather forecasts can be believed, the rest of the week is going to be a mess,” he told Fig. “Don’t even try to go out to the Sorenson job. Just look after Skeet and Valet for me.”

“Till when?” Fig asked.

“I don’t know. Depends on what we find out there. Probably be back the day after tomorrow, Friday. But maybe Saturday.”

“We’ll keep ourselves entertained,” Fig promised.

“We’ll play some cards,” Skeet said.

“And monitor shortwave frequencies for alien code bursts,” Fig said, in what was for him the equivalent of an oration.

“Listen to talk radio, I bet,” Skeet predicted.

“Hey,” Fig said to Skeet, “you want to blow up a courthouse?”

Martie said, “Whoa.”

“Joke,” said Fig, with an owlish wink.

“Bad one,” she advised.

Outside, as Dusty and Martie descended the steps and crossed the small porch, the wind tore at them, and all the way to the car, large dead-brown magnolia leaves scuttled like rats at their feet.

Behind them, out of the open door of the trailer came a piercing and pathetic whine from Valet, as though canine precognition told him that he would never see them again.

The indicator window on the answering machine showed two waiting messages. Dr. Ahriman decided to listen to these before reviewing the cassette labeled SUSAN.

The first call was from Martie’s mother. She sounded frantic to find out what was wrong, to learn why her previous calls had not been returned.

The second voice on the tape was that of a woman who identified herself as an airline ticket agent. “Mr. Rhodes, I neglected to ask for the expiration date on your credit card. If you get this message, would you please call me back with the information? She provided an 800 number. “But if I don’t hear from you, your two tickets to Santa Fe will still be waiting for you in the morning.”

Dr. Ahriman marveled at their having focused so quickly on the central importance of his New Mexico days. Martie and Dusty seemed to be supernatural adversaries…until he realized that the Santa Fe connection must have been made for them by Saint Closterman.

Nevertheless, the doctor’s slow and steady pulse, which even during the commission of murder was seldom elevated by more than ten beats per minute, accelerated upon the receipt of this news regarding the Rhodeses’ travel plans.

With an athlete’s intimate awareness of his body, ever sensitive to the maintenance of good health, the doctor sat down again, took several deep breaths, and then consulted his wristwatch to time his pulse. Usually, when he was seated, his rate ranged between sixty and sixty-two beats per minute, because he was in exceptional condition. Now, he counted seventy, a full eight-point elevation, and with no dead woman handy to credit for it.

In the car, as Dusty went in search of a hotel near the airport, Martie at last phoned her mother.

Sabrina was distraught and in full fluster. For minutes, she refused to believe that Martie was not injured or maimed, that she was not the victim of a traffic accident, a drive-by shooting, fire, lightning, a disgruntled postal employee, or that horrid flesh-eating bacteria that was in the news again.

As she listened to this rant, Martie was filled with a special tenderness that only her mother could evoke.

Sabrina loved her sole child with a crazy intensity that would have made Martie a hopeless neurotic by the age of eleven, if she had not been so determinedly independent almost from the day that she took her first steps. But this world harbored worse things than crazy love. Crazy hate. Oh, lots of that. And just plain crazy, in abundance.

Sabrina loved Smilin’ Bob no less than she loved her daughter. The loss of him, when he was only fifty-three, had made her more protective of Martie than ever. The probability of her husband and her daughter both dying young, of separate causes, might be as low as the chances of the earth being destroyed by an asteroid impact before morning, but cold statistics and insurance-company actuarial tables offered no consolation to a wounded and wary heart.

Martie, therefore, wasn’t going to say a word to her mother about mind control, haiku, the Leaf Man, the priest with the spike through his head, severed ears, or the trip to Santa Fe. Given this overload of weird news, Sabrina’s anxiety would explode into hysteria.

She wasn’t going to tell her mother about Susan Jagger, either, partly because she didn’t trust herself to talk about the loss of her friend without breaking down, but also because Sabrina had loved Susan almost like a daughter. This was news that she had to deliver in person, holding her mother’s hand, both to give emotional support and to receive it.

To explain her failure to return her mother’s calls on a timely basis, Martie told her all about Skeet’s attempted suicide and his voluntary commitment to New Life Clinic. Of course, these events had all occurred the previous morning, Tuesday, which didn’t explain Martie’s behavior on Wednesday, but she fudged the story to make it sound as if Skeet had taken the plunge from the Sorensons’ roof one day and entered the clinic the next, implying two days of turmoil.

Sabrina’s reaction was only partly what Martie had expected — and surprisingly emotional. She didn’t know Skeet all that well; and she had never expressed a desire to know him better. To Martie’s mother, poor Skeet was no less dangerous than any machine-gun-toting member of Columbia’s Medellin drug cartel, a violent and evil figure who wanted to pin down children on school playgrounds and forcibly inject heroin into their veins. Yet here, now, tears and sobs, worried questions about his injuries, his prospects, and more tears.

“This is what I’ve been afraid of, this is what eats at me all the time,” Sabrina said. “I knew this was coming, it was bound to happen, and now here it is, and the next time it might not turn out so well. The next time Dusty might go off the roof, break his neck and be paralyzed for life, or die. And then what? I begged you not to marry a housepainter, to find a man with more ambition, someone who will have a nice office, who will sit at a desk, who won’t fall off roofs all the time, won’t even have a chance to fall off roofs.”

“Mom—”

“I lived with this worry all my life, with your father. Your father and fire. Always fire and burning buildings and things blowing up and things maybe collapsing on him. All my married life I dreaded him going to work, panicked when I heard a fire siren, couldn’t look at the news on TV because when they showed some breaking news story about a big fire, I’d think maybe he was there. And he was hurt, time and again. And maybe his cancer had something to do with breathing so much smoke at fires. All those toxins in the air at a big fire. And now you’ve got a husband with roofs like I had one with fires. Roofs and ladders, always falling, and you’ll never know any peace.”

This worried, heartfelt speech left Martie stunned and wordless.

On the other end of the line, Sabrina was crying.

Apparently sensing a mother-daughter moment of unusual import and assuming that it must have negative consequences for him, Dusty glanced away from the traffic ahead and whispered, “Now what?”

Finally Martie said, “Mom, you’ve never said a word about this before. You—”

“A fireman’s wife doesn’t talk about it, doesn’t nag him about it or worry aloud,” Sabrina said. “Never, not ever, my God, because if you talk about it, that’s when it happens. A fireman’s wife has to be strong, has to be positive, has to give him support, swallow her fear, and smile. But it’s always in her heart, this dread, and now you go and marry a man who’s on ladders all the time and running around roofs and falling off, when you could have found someone who worked at a desk and couldn’t fall off worse than a chair.”

“The thing is, I love him, Mom.”

“I know you do, dear,” her mother sobbed. “It’s just terrible.”

“This is why you’ve been on my case about Dusty since forever?”

“I haven’t been on your case, dear. I’ve been on your team.”

“It felt like my case. Mom…can I infer from this you might actually sort of, kind of, at least a little bit like Dusty?”

Dusty was so startled to hear this question that his hands slipped on the steering wheel and the Saturn almost swerved out of its lane in traffic.

“He’s a sweet boy,” Sabrina said, as if Martie were still in junior high and dating adolescents. “He’s very sweet and smart and polite, and I know why you love him. But he’s going to fall off a roof and kill himself one day, and that’s going to ruin your whole life. You’ll never get over it. Your heart will die with him.”

“Why didn’t you just say this long ago, instead of all the sniping about everything he did?”

“I wasn’t sniping, dear. I was trying to express my concern. I couldn’t talk about him falling off a roof, not directly. Never, my God, when you talk about it, that’s when it happens. And here we are, talking about it! Now he’s going to fall off a roof, and it’ll be my fault.”

“Mom, that’s irrational. It won’t happen.”

“It’s already happened,” Sabrina said. “And now it’ll happen again. Firemen and fires. Painters and roofs.”

Holding the phone between herself and Dusty, so that her mother could hear both of them, Martie said, “How many housepainters have you known, people who work for you, others in the trade who haven’t?”

“Fifty? Sixty? I don’t know. At least that.”

“And how many have fallen off roofs?”

“Aside from me and Skeet?”

“Aside from you and Skeet.”

“One that I know of. He broke a leg.”

Putting the phone to her ear again, Martie said, “You hear that, Mom? One. Broke his leg.”

“One that he knows of,” Sabrina said. “One, and now he’s next.”

“He already fell off a roof. Chances of any one painter falling off a roof twice in his lifetime must be millions to one.”

“His first fall didn’t count,” Sabrina said. “He was trying to save his brother. It wasn’t an accident. The accident is still waiting to happen.”

“Mom, I love you tons, but you’re a little nuts.”

“I know, dear. All those years of worrying. And you’re going to end up a little nuts, too.”

“We’ll be busy the next couple days, Mom. Don’t pass a kidney stone if I fail to return one of your calls right away, okay? We’re not going to fall off any roofs.”

“Let me talk to Dusty.”

Martie passed the phone to him.

He looked wary, but he accepted it. “Hi, Sabrina. Yeah. Well, you know. Uh-huh. Sure. No, I won’t. No, I won’t. No, I promise I won’t. That’s true, isn’t it? Huh? Oh, no, I never did take it seriously. Don’t beat up on yourself. Well, I love you too, Sabrina. Huh? Sure. Mom. I love you, too, Mom.”

He passed the phone back to Martie, and she pressed end.

They were both silent, and then Martie said, “Who would have thought — a mother-and-child reunion in the midst of all this crap.”

Funny, how hope raises its lovely head when least expected, a flower in a wasteland.

Dusty said, “You lied to her, babe.”

She knew he wasn’t referring to her reconstruction of the time frame of Skeet’s leap and hospitalization, nor to her leaving out the news about Susan and the rest of the mess they were in.

Nodding, she said, “Yeah, I told her we weren’t going to fall off any roofs — and, hell, every one of us falls off a roof sooner or later.”

“Unless we’re going to be the first to live forever.”

“If we are, then we’d better get a whole lot more serious about our retirement fund.”

Martie was terrified of losing him. Like her mother, she could not bring herself to put the fear into words, lest what she dreaded would come to pass.

New Mexico was the state where the high plains met the Rockies, the roof of the American Southwest, and Santa Fe was a city built at a high altitude, nearly one and a half miles above sea level: a long way to fall.

On the answering-machine microcassette labeled SUSAN, only one of the five messages was important, but listening to it, the doctor felt his heartbeat accelerate once more.

Another wild card.

When he had reviewed the two messages from Martie’s mother that followed Susan’s bombshell, he erased the tape.

Once it was erased, he took the cassette out of the machine, dropped it on the floor, and stomped it underfoot until the plastic casing was well crushed.

From the ruins, he extracted the narrow magnetic tape and the two tiny hubs around which it was spooled. They didn’t even fill the palm of his hand: so much danger compressed into such a small object.

Downstairs, in the living room, Ahriman opened the damper in the fireplace flue. He placed the tape and two plastic hubs atop one of the ceramic logs.

From his suit coat, he withdrew a slim Cartier cigarette lighter of elegant design and superb craftsmanship.

He had carried a lighter since he was eleven years old, first one that he had stolen from his father and then, later, this better model. The doctor didn’t smoke, but there was always the possibility that he would want to set something on fire.

When he was thirteen, already in his first year of college, he had torched his mother. If he hadn’t been carrying a lighter in his pocket when the need of one arose, his life might have changed much for the worse on that grim day thirty-five years ago.

Although his mother was supposed to be skiing — this was at their vacation house in Vail, during the Christmas holiday — she walked in on him while he was preparing a cat for live dissection. He had only just anesthetized the cat, using chloroform that he concocted from common household cleaning fluids, had used strapping tape to secure its paws to the plastic tarp that would serve as an autopsy table, had taped its mouth shut to muffle its cries when it woke, and had laid out the set of surgical tools he had acquired from the medical-supply company that offered a discount to premed students at the university. Then…hello, Mom. Often he didn’t see her for months at a time, when she was on location with a film, or when she went on one of the gunless safaris she so enjoyed, but now suddenly she felt guilty about leaving him alone while she went skiing with her girl pals, and she decided they needed to spend an afternoon in some damn bonding activity or another. What lousy timing.

He could see that his mother knew at once what had happened to his cousin Heather’s puppy at Thanksgiving, and perhaps she intuited the truth behind the disappearance of the four-year-old son of their estate manager a year previous. His mother was self-involved, the typical thirty-something actress who framed her magazine covers and decorated her bedroom with them, but she was not stupid.

As quick-thinking as always, young Ahriman plucked the stopper from the chloroform bottle and splashed her photogenic face with the contents. This gave him time to free the cat, put away the tarp and surgical kit, extinguish the pilot lights in the kitchen range, turn the gas on, set his mother ablaze while she still lay unconscious, grab the cat, and run for it.

The explosion rocked Vail and echoed like thunder through the snowy mountains, triggering a few avalanches too minor to have any entertainment value. The ten-room redwood chalet, shattered into kindling, burned furiously.

When firemen found young Ahriman sitting in the snow a hundred feet from the pyre, clutching the cat that he had saved from the blast, the boy was in such a state of shock that at first he could not speak and was even too dazed to cry. “I saved the cat,” he told them eventually, in a stricken voice that haunted them for years after, “but I couldn’t save my mom. I couldn’t save my mom.”

Later, they identified his mother’s body with the help of dental records. The small mound of remains, once cremated, didn’t even half fill the memorial jar. (He knew; he looked.) Her graveside service was attended by the royalty of Hollywood, and that noisy honor guard of celebrity funerals — press helicopters — circled overhead.

He had missed seeing new movies starring his mother, because she’d been smart about scripts and usually made only good pictures, but he had not missed his mother herself, as he knew she would not have much missed him, had their fates been reversed. She loved animals and was a staunch champion of all the causes related to them; children just didn’t resonate with her as deeply as did anything with four feet. On the big screen, she could stir your heart, plunge it into despair or fill it with joy; this talent didn’t extend to real life.

Two terrible fires, fifteen years apart, had made an orphan of the doctor (if you didn’t know about the poisoned petits fours): the first a freak accident, for which the manufacturer of the gas range paid dearly, the second set by the drunken, lust-crazed, homicidal handyman, Earl Ventnor, who had finally died in prison two years ago, stabbed by another inmate during a brawl.

Now, as Ahriman thumbed the striker wheel on the old flint-style lighter and ignited the answering-machine tape in the fireplace, he meditated upon the fact that fire had played such a central role in both his life and Martie’s, her father having been the most-decorated fireman in the history of the state. Here was yet another thing they shared.

Sad. After these latest developments, he would probably not be able to allow their relationship to evolve. He had so looked forward to the possibility that he and this lovely, game-loving woman might one day be something special to each other.

If he could locate her and her husband, he could activate them, take them down to their mind chapels, and find out what else they had learned about him, whom they might have told. More likely than not, the damage could be undone, the game resumed and played to its end.

He had their cell-phone number, but they knew he had it, and they were unlikely to answer it in their current paranoid state of mind. And he could activate only one at a time by phone, thereby immediately alerting the one who was listening. Too risky.

Finding them was the trick. They were running, alert and wary, and they would stay well hidden until they boarded the flight to New Mexico in the morning.

Approaching them in the airport, at the boarding gate, was out of the question. Even if they didn’t flee, he couldn’t activate, quiz, and instruct them in public.

Once in New Mexico, they were as good as dead.

When the audiotape began to burn, issuing a noxious stink, the doctor switched on the fireplace gas. Whoosh, and in two minutes, nothing was left of the tape but a sticky residue on the topmost of the ceramic logs.

He was in a mood, the doctor, and sadness was not the greater component of his mood.

All the fun had gone out of this game. He had put so much effort into it, so much strategy, but now it would most likely not be played out above the beaches of Malibu, as he had planned.

He wanted to burn down this house.

Spite was not his sole motivation, nor was his distaste for the decor. Without spending the better part of a day searching the place inch by inch, he couldn’t be sure that the microcassette with Susan’s accusations was the only evidence against him that Martie and Dusty had accumulated. He didn’t have a day to waste, and burning the house to the ground was the surest way to protect himself.

Granted, Susan’s message on the tape was insufficient to convict him, not even damning enough to get him indicted. He was, however, a man who never made bargains with the god of chance.

Torching the house himself was far too risky. Once the fire was set, someone might see him leaving — and be able to identify him one day in court.

He shut off the fireplace gas.

Room by room, as he left the house, he extinguished the lights.

On the back porch, he slipped his spare key under the doormat, where the next visitor would be instructed to look for it.

Before morning, he would torch the house, but by proxy rather than with his own hands. He had a candidate, programmed and easily reached by phone, who would commit this bit of arson when told to do so, but who would never remember striking the match.

The night remained wind-rattled.

On the walk to his car, which was parked three blocks away, the doctor tried to compose a wind haiku, without success.

Driving past the Rhodeses’ quaint Victorian, he imagined it in flames, and he searched his mind for a seventeen-syllable verse about fire, but the words eluded him.

Instead, he recalled the lines he had composed extemporaneously and so fluently when, on entering Martie’s office, he had seen the work piled on her desk.

Busy blue-eyed girl. Busy making Hobbit games. Death waits in Mordor.

He edited the work, updating it to reflect recent developments: Busy blue-eyed girl. Busy playing detective. Death in Santa Fe.