False Memory

74

Death was as stylish as anyone now: gone, the black carriage drawn by black horses, traded in on a silver Lexus. Gone, the black robe with the melodramatic hood: instead, tasseled loafers, black slacks, a Jhane Barnes sweater.

The Kevlar body armor was in the pickup, and the pickup was in the garage, so Skeet and Fig were as unprotected as everyone else, and this time the gunman would be taking head shots, anyway.

“Gun?” Lampton said when Martie asked. “You mean here?”

“No, of course not, don’t be ridiculous,” Claudette said, as if spoiling for another argument even now, “we don’t have a gun.”

“Then too bad you don’t have a really lethal idea,” Martie said.

Dusty grabbed Lampton by the arm. “The back-porch roof. You can get onto it through Junior’s room or the master bedroom.”

Blinking in confusion, nose twitching as if trying to catch a scent that would explain the precise nature of the danger, the mink man said, “But why—”

“Hurry!” Dusty said. “All of you. Go, go. Onto the porch roof, down to the lawn, down to the beach, and hide out at one of the neighbors’ houses.”

Junior was the first through the study doorway, out and gone in a sprint, apparently not in fact prepared to immerse himself in anything more than the idea of death.

Dusty followed the boy, pulling the wheeled office chair away from Lampton’s desk and then pushing it ahead of him, racing down the hall to the top of the stairs, while the rest of them hurried off in the opposite direction.

No, not all of them. Here was Skeet, sweet but useless. “What can I do?”

“Damn it, kid, just get out!”

“Help me with this,” Martie said.

She hadn’t fled, either. She was at a six-foot-long Sheraton sideboard that stood along the wide hallway, opposite the head of the stairs. With a sweep of her arm, she cleared off a vase and an arrangement of silver candlesticks, which shattered and rattled to the floor. Evidently, she had figured out what Dusty intended to do with the office chair, but she was of the opinion that higher-caliber ammunition was needed.

Together, after moving the chair aside, the three of them dragged the sideboard away from the wall and stood it on one end at the head of the stairs.

“Now make him go,” Dusty urged her. His voice was hoarse with terror, worse now than it had been when they had finished the slo-mo roll in the rental car outside Santa Fe, because at least then he’d had the comfort of knowing, as the gunmen descended the slope after them, that Martie had the Colt Commander, whereas now he had nothing but a damn sideboard.

Martie grabbed Skeet by the arm, and he tried to resist, but she was the stronger of the two.

Downstairs, a tattoo of automatic gunfire shattered the leaded glass in the front door, cracked off pieces of wood, too, and chopped into the walls of the foyer.

Dusty dropped onto the hall floor, behind the upended sideboard, looking past it down the long single flight of stairs.

The investment adviser slammed through the splintered door and stormed into the house as though a master’s in business administration from Harvard now required courses in ass-kicking and heavy weaponry. He put the autopsy saw on the foyer table, gripped the machine pistol in both hands, and turned in a hundred-eighty-degree arc, spraying bullets into the downstairs rooms on three sides of him.

This was an extended magazine, probably thirty-three rounds, but it wasn’t a magic well of cartridges, so at the end of Eric’s arc, the gun ran dry.

Spare magazines were tucked under his belt. He fumbled with the pistol, trying to eject the spent magazine.

He couldn’t be allowed to search the lower floor first, because when he went into the kitchen, he might see people dropping off the back-porch roof or fleeing across the backyard toward the beach.

Gunfire seemed to be still thundering through the house, but Dusty knew the inner workings of his ears were just vibrating in the aftermath, so he shouted, “Ben Marco!”

Eric looked up at the top of the stairs, but he didn’t freeze or get that telltale glazed look. He continued fumbling with the pistol, which was clearly unfamiliar to him.

“Bobby Lembeck!” Dusty shouted.

The spent magazine clattered to the foyer floor.

In this case, maybe the activating name didn’t come from The Manchurian Candidate. Maybe it came from The Godfather or Rosemary’s Baby, or from The House at Pooh Corner, for all he knew, but he didn’t have time to sample the last fifty years of popular fiction in search of the right character. “Johnny Iselin!”

After shoving another magazine into the machine pistol, Eric locked it in place with a hard whack from the palm of his hand.

“Wen Chang!”

Eric squeezed off a burst of eight or ten rounds, which tore through the solid cherry-wood top of the sideboard—pock, pock, pock, too many pocks to count — cracked through the drawers, smashed out of the bottom, and thudded into the hallway wall behind Dusty, passing over his head and leaving a wake of splinters to rain over him. High-velocity rounds, jacketed in something way harder than he wanted to think about, and maybe with Teflon tips.

“Jocelyn Jordan!” Dusty shouted into the jarring silence that throbbed through his head following the skull-ringing peals of the gunshots. He had read a sizable piece of the novel, and he had skimmed the whole thing, looking for names, in particular for the one that would activate him. He remembered them all. His eidetic memory was the one gift with which he’d been born into this world, that and the common sense that had driven him to be a housepainter instead of a mover and shaker in the world of Big Ideas, but Condon’s novel was chocked full of characters, major and minor — as minor as Viola Narvilly, who didn’t even appear until past page 300—and he might not have time to run through the entire cast before Eric blew his head off. “Alan Melvin!”

Holding his fire, Eric climbed the steps.

Dusty could hear him coming.

Climbing fast, unfazed by the Sheraton-sideboard deadfall that loomed over him. Coming like a robot. Which was pretty much what he was, in fact: a living robot, a meat machine.

“Ellie Iselin!” Dusty shouted, and he was simultaneously half mad with fear and yet aware of what a ludicrous exit this would be, blown to kingdom come while shouting out names like a frantic quiz-show contestant trying to beat a countdown clock. “Nora Lemmon!”

Unmoved by Nora Lemmon, Eric kept coming, and Dusty scrambled up from the floor, shoved the sideboard, and dove to his left, away from the top of the stairs, behind a sheltering wall, as another burst of gunfire smacked into the toppling mass of fine eighteenth-century cherry wood.

Eric grunted and cursed, but it was impossible to tell from the thunderous descent of the sideboard whether he had been hurt or carried to the foyer below. The stairs were wider than the upended antique, and he might have been able to dodge it.

Standing with his back to the hallway wall, next to the stairs, Dusty didn’t relish poking his head around the corner to have a look. In addition to never having attended a college class in logic, he’d never taken a class in magic, either, and he didn’t know how to catch bullets in his teeth.

And, dear God, even as the thudding-crashing-cracking-banging still rose from the staircase, here came Martie — who was supposed to be gone with the rest of them — pushing a wheeled, three-drawer filing cabinet along the hallway, having commandeered it from Lampton’s office.

Dusty glowered at her. What the hell was she thinking, anyway? That Eric would run out of bullets before they ran out of furniture?

Seizing the filing cabinet, pushing Martie away, using the four-foot-high stack of metal drawers as cover, Dusty moved to the head of the stairs again.

Eric had tumbled into the foyer with the sideboard. His left leg was pinned under it. He was still holding the machine pistol, and he fired toward the top of the stairs.

Ducking, Dusty heard the shots go wild. They slammed hard into the ceiling, and a few rounds twanged through ducts and pipes behind the plaster. Not even one ricocheted off the filing cabinet.

His heart was rattling in his chest as if several rounds were ricocheting from wall to wall of its chambers.

When he cautiously peered down into the foyer again, he saw that Eric had pulled his leg out from under the sideboard and was getting to his feet. Relentless as a robot, operating on programmed instructions rather than reason or emotion, the guy was nonetheless pissed.

“Eugenie Rose Cheyney!”

Not even limping, cursing fluently, Eric started toward the stairs. The filing cabinet wasn’t half as massive as the sideboard. He would be able to dodge it, pumping out rounds as he came.

“Ed Mavole!”

“I’m listening.”

Eric stopped at the foot of the stairs. The murderous glare melted off his face, and what replaced it was not the flat, grimly determined expression with which he had entered the house, but the glazed and slightly quizzical look that signified activation.

Ed Mavole was the name, all right, but Dusty was still lacking a haiku. According to Ned Motherwell, umpteen feet of shelves in the bookstore were devoted to haiku, so even if all the volumes Ned had bought were now near at hand — which they weren’t — the accessing lines might not be in them.

Down in the foyer, Eric twitched, blinked, and reacquainted himself with his murderous intentions.

“Ed Mavole,” Dusty said again, and once more Eric froze and said, “I’m listening.”

This wouldn’t be fun, but it ought to be doable. Keep using the magic name, snap Eric back into an activated state every time he came out of it, go straight down the stairs at him, snatch the gun from his hand, knock him ass over teakettle, clip him alongside the head with the butt of the gun, just hard enough to knock him unconscious without leaving him comatose for life, and then tie him up with whatever was at hand. Maybe when he regained consciousness, he would no longer be a robotic killer. Otherwise, they could keep him under restraint, buy all umpteen shelf feet of haiku, brew ten gallons of strong coffee, and read every verse to him until they got a response.

As Dusty rolled the filing cabinet aside, Martie said, “Oh, God, please, babe, don’t chance it,” and Eric twitched back to his killing glare.

“Ed Mavole.”

“I’m listening.”

Dusty descended the stairs fast. Eric was looking straight at him but didn’t seem to be able to work out the physics of what was about to happen. Before Dusty was a third of the way down, taking no chances, he shouted, “Ed Mavole,” and Eric Jagger replied, “I’m listening,” and then he was two-thirds of the way down, and he said, “Ed Mavole,” and as he reached Eric, the answer came in that same mellow voice, “I’m listening.” Looking straight into the muzzle, which seemed as big as any tunnel that he might drive through, Dusty closed one hand around the barrel, pushed it aside and out of his face, wrenched the gun from Eric’s slack hands, and at the same time drove his shoulder into the dazed man, knocking him to the floor.

Dusty fell, too, and rolled across broken glass and chunks of wood from the bullet-riddled front door, afraid he might accidentally discharge the pistol. He tumbled into the half-moon table that stood against the foyer wall, rapping his forehead hard against the sturdy stretcher bar that connected its three legs, but he didn’t shoot himself in the thigh, the groin, or anywhere else.

When Dusty staggered to his feet, he saw that Eric had already gotten off the floor. The guy looked confused but nonetheless angry and still in a programmed-killer mode.

From the stairs, which she was rapidly descending, Martie said, “Ed Mavole,” even before Dusty could say it, and suddenly this seemed to be the lamest video game Martie had ever concocted: Housepainter Versus Investment Adviser, one armed with an automatic weapon and the other with furniture and magic names.

It might have been funny, this thought at this moment, if he’d not looked past Martie to the top of the stairs, where Junior stood with a crossbow, cranked to full tension and loaded.

“No!” Dusty shouted.

Shusssh.

A crossbow quarrel, shorter and thicker than an ordinary arrow, is far more difficult to see in flight than is an arrow let off by a standard bow, so much faster does it move. Magic, the way this one appeared to pop from Eric Jagger’s chest, as if out of his heart like a rabbit out of a hat: All but two inches of its notchless butt protruded in a small carnation of blood.

Eric dropped to his knees. The homicidal glare cleared from his eyes, and he looked around in bewilderment at the foyer, which apparently was altogether new to him. Then he blinked up at Dusty and seemed astonished as he fell forward, dead.

When Martie tried to stop Dusty from going upstairs, he shook her off, and he climbed two steps at a time, his forehead throbbing where he’d rapped it against the stretcher bar, his vision swimming, but not from the blow on the head, swimming because his body was flooded with whatever brain chemicals induce and sustain rage, his heart pumping as much pure fury as blood, the angelic-looking boy seen now through a dark lens and a red tint, as though Dusty’s eyes were streaming tears of blood.

Junior tried to use the crossbow like a shield, to block the assault. Dusty grabbed the stock at midpoint, the revolving nut of the lock plate digging into the palm of his hand. He wrenched the bow out of the boy’s grasp, threw it on the floor, and kept moving. He drove the boy across the hall, into the space where the sideboard had stood, shoving him against the wall so hard that his head bounced off the plaster with a thock like a tennis ball off a racket.

“You sick, rotten little shit.”

“He had a gun!”

“I’d already taken it away from him,” Dusty screamed, spraying the boy with spittle, but Junior insisted, “I didn’t see!” And they repeated the same useless things to each other, twice, three times, until Dusty accused him with such violence that his damning words boomed along the hall: “You saw, you knew, you did it anyway!”

Then came Claudette, pushing between them, forcing them apart, her back to Junior, confronting Dusty, eyes harder than before, the unyielding gray of flint and flashing as if with sparks. For the first time in her life, her face didn’t astonish with its beauty: instead, such a hideous ferocity. “You leave him alone, leave him alone, you get away from him!”

“He killed Eric.”

“He saved us! We’d all be dead, but he saved us!” Claudette was shrill, as never before, her lips pale and her skin gray, like some stone goddess come alive and raging, a termagant who, by sheer power of will, would alter this bitter reality to suit her, as only gods and goddesses could do. “He had the guts, and he had the brains to act, to save us!”

Lampton appeared, too, pouring out thick streams of soothing words, gouts of platitudes, slathers of anger-management jargon, no less containable than the oil spill from a floundering supertanker. Talking, talking, talking, even as his wife pressed her ceaseless strident defense of Junior, both of them chattering at once: Their words were like paint rollers, laying down obscuring swaths of new color over stains.

At the same time, Lampton was trying to get the machine pistol out of Dusty’s right hand, which at first Dusty didn’t even realize he was still holding. When he understood what Lampton wanted, he let go of the weapon.

“Better call the police,” Lampton said, though surely neighbors had already done so, and he hurried away.

Skeet warily approached, staying well clear of his mother but nonetheless coming around to Dusty’s side of the standoff, and Fig stood farther back down the hall, watching them as though he had, at last, made contact with the aliens he had so long desired to meet.

None of them had fled the house as Dusty had urged them to do — or if they had gotten as far as the roof of the back porch, they had returned. At least Lampton and Claudette must have known that Junior was loading his crossbow with the intention of joining the battle, and apparently neither of them had tried to stop him. Or perhaps they had been afraid to try. Any parents with common sense or a genuine love of their child would have taken the crossbow away from him and dragged him out of this house if necessary. Or maybe the idea of a boy with a primitive weapon defeating a man with a machine pistol — a twisted incarnation of Rousseau’s concept of the noble savage, which set so many hearts aflutter in the academic literary community — had been too delicious to resist. Dusty could no longer pretend to understand the odd thought processes of these people, and he was weary of trying.

“He killed a man,” Dusty reminded his mother, because for him no amount of shrill argument could change this fundamental truth.

“A lunatic, a maniac, a demented man with a gun,” Claudette insisted.

“I’d taken the gun away from him.”

“That’s what you say.”

“That’s the truth. I could have handled him.”

“You can’t handle anything. You drop out of school, you drop out of life, you paint houses for a living.”

“If customer satisfaction were the issue,” he said, knowing he shouldn’t say it, unable to restrain himself, “I’d be on the cover of Time, and Derek would be in prison, paying for all the patients’ lives he’s fucked up.”

“You ungrateful bastard.”

Distraught, on the verge of tears, Skeet pleaded, “Don’t start this. Don’t start. It’ll never stop if you start now.”

Dusty recognized the truth of what Skeet said. After all these years of keeping his head down, all these years of enduring and being dutiful but distant, so much hurt remained unsalved, so many offenses had never been responded to, that the temptation now would be to redress all wrongs in one terrible venting. He wanted to avoid that dreadful plunge, but he and his mother seemed to be in a barrel on the roaring brink of Niagara, with nowhere to go but down.

“I know what I saw,” Claudette insisted. “And you’re not going to change my mind about that, not you of all people, not you, Dusty.”

He couldn’t let it go and still be sure of who he was: “You weren’t here. You weren’t in a position to see anything.”

Martie had joined them. Taking hold of Dusty’s hand, gripping it tightly, she said, “Claudette, only two people saw what happened. Me and Dusty.”

“I saw,” Claudette declared angrily. “No one can tell me what I saw or didn’t see. Who do you think you are? I’m not a doddering old senile bitch who can be told what to think, what she saw!”

Behind his mother, Junior smiled. He met Dusty’s eyes and was so lacking in shame that he didn’t look away.

“What’s wrong with you?” Claudette demanded of Dusty. “What’s wrong with you that you’d rather see your brother’s life ruined over something as meaningless as this?”

“Murder is meaningless to you?”

Claudette slapped Dusty, slapped him hard, grabbed handfuls of his shirt, tried to push him back, and as she shook him, words shook from her, too, one at a time: “You. Won’t. Do. This. Vicious. Thing. To. Me.”

“I don’t want to ruin his life, Mother. That’s the last thing I want. He needs help. Can’t you see that? He needs help, and somebody better get it for him.”

“Don’t you judge him, Dusty.” Such venom in the emphasis that she gave to his name, such bitterness. “One year of college doesn’t make you a master of psychology, you know. It doesn’t make you any damn thing at all, except a loser.”

Crying now, Skeet said, “Mother, please—”

“Shut up,” Claudette said, rounding on her younger son. “You just shut up, Holden. You didn’t see anything, and you better not pretend you did. No one will believe you, anyway, the mess you are.”

As Martie pulled Skeet aside, out of the fray, Dusty looked past Claudette, to Junior, who was smirking as he watched Skeet.

Dusty almost heard the click as a switch was thrown and insight brightened a previously dark space in his mind. The Japanese called this a satori, a moment of sudden enlightenment: an odd word learned in one year of college.

Satori. Here was Junior, as fair of face as his mother, blessed with her physical grace, as well. And bright. No denying how very bright he was. At her age, he would be her last child, and the only one with the prospect to fulfill her expectations. Here was her last chance to be not merely a woman of ideas, to be not merely the bride to a man of ideas, but to be the mother of a man of ideas. Indeed, in her mind, though not in reality, here was her last chance to be associated with ideas that might move the world, because her first three husbands had proved to be men whose big ideas had no solidity and had popped at the first prick. Even Derek, with all his success, was a chupaflor, not an eagle, and Claudette knew it. Dusty was, in her mind, too pigheaded to fulfill his potential, and Skeet was too fragile. And Dominique, her first child, was long and safely dead. Dusty had never known his half sister, had seen one photo of her, perhaps the only ever taken: her sweet, small, gentle face. Junior was the only hope that remained for Claudette, and she was determined to believe that his mind and his heart were as fair as his face.

While she was still browbeating Skeet, Dusty heard himself say, “Mother, how did Dominique die?”

The question, dangerous in this context, silenced Claudette as nothing else except perhaps another gunshot would have done.

He met her eyes and didn’t turn to stone, as she intended, and shame — rather than a lack of it — kept him from looking away. Shame that he had known the truth, intuitively at first and then through the application of logic and reflection, had known the truth since boyhood and yet had denied it to himself and had never spoken. Shame that he allowed her and Skeet’s pompous father and then Derek Lampton to grind Skeet down, when ferreting out the truth about Dominique might have disarmed them and given Skeet a better life.

“You must have been heartbroken,” Dusty said, “when your first child was born with Down’s syndrome. Such high hopes, and such sad reality.”

“What are you doing?” Her voice was softer now but even more highly charged with anger.

The hallway seemed to grow narrower, and the ceiling seemed to descend slowly, as if this were one of those deadly room-size traps in corny old adventure movies, and as if all of them were in danger of being crushed alive.

“And then another tragedy. Crib death. Sudden infant death syndrome. How difficult to endure it…the whispers, the medical inquiry, waiting for a final determination of the cause of death.”

Martie drew a sharp breath with the realization of where this was going, and she said, “Dusty,” meaning Maybe you shouldn’t do this.

He had never spoken up when it might have helped Skeet, however, and now he was determined to do what he could to force her to get treatment for Junior while there might still be time. “One of my clearest early memories, Mother, is a day when I was five, going on six…a couple weeks after Skeet was brought home from the hospital. You were born prematurely, Skeet. Did you know that?”

“I guess,” Skeet said shakily.

“They didn’t think you’d survive, but you did. And when they brought you home, they thought you were likely to have suffered some brain damage that would show up sooner or later. But that, of course, proved not to be the case.”

“My learning disability,” Skeet reminded him.

“Maybe that,” Dusty agreed. “Assuming you ever really had one.”

Claudette regarded Dusty as though he were a snake: wanting to stomp him before he coiled and struck, but afraid to make any move against him and thereby precipitate what she feared most.

He said, “That day when I was five, going on six, you were in a mood, Mother. Such a strange mood that even a little boy couldn’t help but sense that something terrible was going to happen. You got out the photograph of Dominique.”

She raised one fist as if to hit him again, but it hung in the air, the blow not struck.

In some respects, this was the hardest thing that Dusty had ever done, and yet in other ways it was so easy that it frightened him, easy in the same sense that jumping off a roof is easy if there are no consequences to the fall. But there would be consequences here. “It was the first time I’d ever seen that photograph, ever known I’d had a sister. You carried it with you around the house that day. You couldn’t stop looking at it. And it was late in the afternoon when I found the photo lying in the hallway outside the nursery.”

Claudette lowered her fist and turned away from Dusty.

His hand seemed to belong to another, bolder man as he watched it reach out and take her by the arm, halting her and forcing her to face him.

Junior stepped forward protectively.

“Better pick up your crossbow and load it,” Dusty warned the boy. “Because you can’t handle me without it.”

Although the violence in his eyes was more fierce even than the hard rage in his mother’s, Junior backed off.

“When I came into the nursery,” Dusty said, “you didn’t hear me. Skeet was in the crib. You were standing over him with a pillow in your hands. You stood over him for the longest time. And then you lowered the pillow toward his face. Slowly. And that’s when I said something. I don’t remember what. But you knew I was there, and you…stopped. At the time, I didn’t know what had almost happened. But later…years later, I did understand, but wouldn’t face it.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Skeet said, his voice as weak as that of a child. “Oh, dear sweet Jesus.”

Although Dusty had faith in the power of truth, he didn’t know for sure that this revelation would help Skeet more than harm him. He was so torn by the thought of the wreckage he might be causing that when a quiver of nausea passed briefly through him, he assumed he would throw up blood if he threw up anything at all.

Claudette’s teeth were so tightly clenched that the muscles twitched in her jaws.

“A couple minutes ago, Mother, I asked if murder was meaningless to you, and the question didn’t even give you pause. Which is odd, because that is a big idea. Worth discussion if ever anything was.”

“Are you done?”

“Not quite. After all these years of putting up with this crap, I’ve earned the right to finish what I have to say. I know your worst secrets, Mother, all the worst. I’ve suffered for them, we all have, and we’re going to suffer more—”

Clawing at his hand, drawing two thin tracks of blood with her fingernails, wrenching loose of him, she said, “If Dominique hadn’t been a Down’s baby, and if I hadn’t spared her that half life she would’ve led, and if she were alive here and now, wouldn’t that be worse? Wouldn’t that be infinitely worse?”

The sense she made diminished as the volume of her voice rose, and Dusty had no idea what she meant.

Junior moved closer to his mother’s side. They stood hand in hand, drawing a strange strength from each other.

Pointing toward the dead man sprawled in the foyer below, a gesture that seemed to have no connection to her words, she said, “Down’s was at least an obvious condition. What if she’d seemed normal but then…all grown up, what if she’d been just like her father?”

Dominique’s father, Claudette’s first husband, had been more than twenty years her senior, a psychologist named Lief Reissler, a cold fish with pale eyes and a pencil mustache, who had thankfully played no role in either Dusty’s or Skeet’s life. A cold fish, yes, but not the monster that her question implied he was.

Before Dusty could express his bafflement, Claudette clarified. After three days of shocks that he’d thought had forever inoculated him against surprise, she rocked him with eight words: “What if she’d been just like Mark Ahriman?” The rest was superfluous: “You say he burns down houses, he shoots people, he’s a sociopath, and this crazy man who’s dead downstairs is somehow associated with him. So would you want his child for your half sister?”

She raised Junior’s hand and kissed it, as though to say that she was especially glad that she had spared him the problem of this difficult sister.

When Dusty had claimed to know her worst secrets, all the worst, she assumed he’d been referring to more than the fact that the sudden infant death syndrome that claimed Dominique had truly been ruthless suffocation.

Now, because of his reaction and Martie’s, Claudette realized this revelation need never have been made, but instead of retreating into silence, she tried to explain.

“Lief was infertile. We were never going to be able to have children. I was twenty-one, and Lief was forty-four, and he could have been the perfect father, with his tremendous knowledge, all his insights, his theories of emotional development. Lief had a brilliant child-rearing philosophy.”

Yes, they all had their child-rearing philosophies, their deep insights, and their abiding interest in social engineering. Medicate to educate, and all that.

“Mark Ahriman was just seventeen, but he’d started college soon after his thirteenth birthday, and he’d already earned a doctorate by the time I met him. He was a prodigy’s prodigy, and everyone at the university was in awe of him. A genius almost beyond measure. He was no one’s idea of a perfect father. He was a snooty Hollywood brat. But the genes.”

“Did he know the child was his?”

“Yes. Why not? None of us was that conventional.”

The buzzing in Dusty’s head, which was the accompanying theme music for any visit to this house, had settled into a more ominous tone than usual. “When Dominique was born with Down’s…how did you handle that, Mother?”

She stared at the blood on his hand, which she had drawn with her fingernails, and when she raised her eyes to meet his, she said only, “You know how I handled it.”

Once more, she lifted Junior’s hand to her lips and kissed his knuckles, this time as if to say that all her problems with damaged children had been worth enduring now that she had been given him.

Dusty said, “I meant, not how did you handle Dominique. How did you handle the news of her condition? If I know you, Ahriman got his ear bent almost off. I’ll bet you dished out more humiliation to him than a snotty Hollywood brat is used to.”

“Nothing like that has ever showed up in my family,” she said, confirming that Ahriman must have been the target of her full fury.

Martie could contain herself no longer. “So thirty-two years ago, you humiliate him, you kill his child—”

“He was glad when he heard she was dead.”

“I’m sure he was, knowing him like I do now. But just the same, you humiliate him back then. And all these years later, the man who gave you Junior, this golden boy—”

Junior actually smiled, as if Martie were coming on to him.

“—the man who gives you this boy that Ahriman couldn’t give you, your husband, goes out of his way to mock Ahriman, to belittle him, to tear him apart in every public forum he can find, and even sabotages him with this petty crap on Amazon.com. And you didn’t put a stop to it?”

Claudette’s anger flared anew at Martie’s accusation of bad judgment. “I encouraged it. And why not. Mark Ahriman can’t make a book any better than he can make a baby. Why should he have more success than Derek? Why should he have anything at all?”

“You foolish woman.” Martie evidently chose this insult because she knew that it would sting Claudette worse than any other. “You foolish, ignorant woman.”

Skeet, alarmed by Martie’s directness, afraid for her, tried to draw her back.

Instead, Martie grasped his hand and held it tightly, just as Claudette held Junior’s. But she wasn’t taking strength from Skeet; she was giving it. “Stay cool, honey.” Pressing the attack, she said, “Claudette, you don’t have a clue what Ahriman is capable of doing. You don’t understand jack about him — his viciousness, his relentlessness.”

“I understand—”

“Like hell you do! You opened the door to him and let him into all our lives, not just your own. He wouldn’t have looked twice at me if I hadn’t had a connection to you. If not for you, none of this would have happened to me, and I wouldn’t have had to do”—she looked miserably at Dusty, and he knew she was thinking of two dead men in New Mexico—“the things I’ve had to do.”

Claudette could be cowed neither by the virulence of an argument nor by the facts of it. “You make it sound as if it’s all about you. Like they say, shit happens. I’m sure you’ve heard that kind of talk in your circles before. Shit happens, Martie. It happens to all of us. It’s my house that was shot apart, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Get used to it,” Martie countered. “Because Ahriman won’t stop with this. He’s going to send someone else, and someone else, and then ten more someone elses, people who’re strangers and people we’ve known and trusted all our lives, blindsiding us time after time, and he’s going to keep sending them until we’re all dead.”

“You aren’t even making any damn sense,” Claudette fumed.

“Enough! Shut up, shut up, all of you!” Derek stood downstairs in the foyer, near Eric’s body, shouting up at them. “Neighbors must not be home, ’cause no one called the police till I just did. Before they get here, I’m telling you how it’s going to be. This is my house, and I’m telling you. I wiped the gun off. I put it back in his hand. Dusty, Martie, if you want to go against us, you do what you have to do, but then it’s warfare between us, and I’ll smear the two of you any way I can. You said your house burned down? I’ll tell them you gamble, you have debts, and you burned it down for the insurance.”

Staggered by this grotesque threat and yet not surprised, Dusty said, “Derek, for God’s sake, what good would that do any of us now?”

“It’ll muddy the waters,” Lampton said. “Confuse the cops. This guy was your friend’s husband, Martie? So I’ll tell the cops he came here to kill Dusty because Dusty was screwing with Susan.”

“You stupid bastard,” Martie said, “Susan’s dead. She—”

Claudette embraced the conspiracy: “Then I’ll say Eric confessed to killing Susan before he started shooting up this place, killed her because she was screwing Dusty. I’m warning you two, we’ll muddy these waters until they can’t even see my boy, let alone accuse him of murder, when all he did was save our lives.”

Dusty couldn’t recall having stepped through a looking glass or being sucked into a tornado full of dark magic, but here he was in a world where everything was upside down and backward, where lies were celebrated as truths, where truth was unwelcome and unrecognized.

“Come on, Claudette,” Lampton urged, motioning her downstairs. “Come on, Derek. The kitchen. Quick. We’ve got to talk before the police get here. Our stories have to match.”

The boy smirked at Dusty as he trailed his mother, still holding her hand, to the stairs and then down.

Dusty wheeled away from them and back down the hall to Fig, who had stood motionless through the storm.

“Wow,” Fig said.

“You understand Skeet better now?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Where’s Valet?” Dusty asked, because the dog was a link to reality, his own Toto, reminding him of a world where wicked witches were not real.

“Bed,” Fig advised, pointing toward the open door of the master-bedroom suite.

The Sheraton bed stood high enough off the floor for Valet to have squeezed under it. He was betrayed by his tail, which trailed beyond the bedspread.

Dusty went around to the farther side of the bed, got down on the floor, lifted the spread, and said, “Got room in there for me?”

Valet whined as if inviting him under for a cuddle.

“They’d find us anyway,” Dusty assured him. “Come out of there, fella. Come here and let me rub your tummy.”

With coaxing, Valet crawled into the open, although he was too spooked to expose his belly even to those he trusted most.

Martie joined Dusty, sitting on the floor with the dog between them. “I’m reconsidering the whole idea of ever having a family. I think maybe this here is as good as it gets — you, me, and Valet.”

The dog seemed to agree.

Martie said, “Driving here, I didn’t think this mess could get any worse, and now look where we are. Neck deep and sinking. I’m numb, you know? I know what happened to Eric, but I don’t feel it yet.”

“Yeah. I’m beyond numb.”

“What are you going to do?”

Dusty shook his head. “I don’t know. What’s the use, though? I mean, the kid’s going to be a hero, right? No matter what I say. Or you. I can see it clear as I’ve ever seen anything. The truth won’t play well enough to be believed.”

“And what about Ahriman?”

“I’m scared, Martie.”

“Me too.”

“Who’s going to believe us? It would have been hard enough to get anyone to listen to us before…this. But now, with the Lizard and Claudette willing to make up wild stories about us just to muddy the waters…If we start talking about brainwashing and programmed suicide, programmed killers…that’ll only make their lies about us ring more true.”

“And if someone did burn down our house — Ahriman or someone he sent — it’ll be obvious arson. What’s our alibi?”

Dusty blinked in surprise. “We were in New Mexico.”

“Doing what?”

He opened his mouth to speak — but closed it without a word.

“If we mention New Mexico, we’re going to get into the Ahriman stuff. And yeah, there’s some substantiation of it — all the things that happened to people out there a long time ago. But how do we get into all that and not risk…Zachary and Kevin?”

They stroked the dog in silence for a moment, and finally Dusty said, “I could kill him. I mean, last night, you asked me could I do it, and I said I didn’t know. But now I know.”

“I could do it, too,” she said.

“Kill him, and then it stops.”

“Assuming the institute doesn’t come after us.”

“You heard Ahriman in the office this morning. This wasn’t any part of that. This was personal. And now we know just how personal.”

“You kill him,” she said, “and you’ll spend the rest of your life in prison.”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely. Because no judge will allow a cockamamie defense like, ‘I killed him because he was a brainwashing fiend.’”

“Then they’ll put me away for ten years in an asylum. That’s better, anyway.”

“Not unless they put the two of us in the same asylum.”

Valet raised his head and looked at them as if to say three.

Someone was running in the upstairs hall, and it proved to be Fig Newton when he burst into the room, his glasses askew and his face more red than usual. “Skeet.”

“What about him?” Martie asked, thrusting to her feet.

“Gone.”

“Where?”

“Ahriman.”

“What?”

“Gun.”

Dusty was on his feet, too. “Damn it, Fig, enough telegraphy already. Talk!”

Nodding, Fig stretched himself: “Took the gun off the dead man. And one of the full magazines. Took the Lexus. Said none of you was safe until he did it.”

To Dusty, Martie said, “Tell the cops, let them stop him?”

“Tell them he’s on his way to shoot a prominent citizen, armed with a machine pistol? In a stolen car? Skeet’s as good as dead if we do that.”

“Then we have to get there ahead of him,” she said. “Fig, you watch out for Valet. There’re people around here might kill him just for the fun of it.”

“Don’t feel too safe myself,” Fig said.

“Do the others know where Skeet’s gone?”

“No. Don’t yet know he’s gone at all.”

“You tell them he popped pills earlier today and now suddenly got funny. Took the gun and said he was going up to Santa Barbara, settle with some people for selling him bad dope.”

“Doesn’t sound like Skeet. Too macho.”

“Lampton will love it. Helps muddy the waters.”

“What happens when I lie to cops?”

“You don’t say a word to the cops. You’re good at that. You just tell Lampton, and he’ll do the rest. And tell him we went after Skeet. To Santa Barbara.”

By the time Dusty and Martie reached the foyer, clambered around the body and the overturned sideboard, and reached the front porch, with Lampton and Claudette shouting behind them, Dusty could hear sirens in the distance.

They cleared the driveway, turned south on the highway, and went more than a mile before they saw the first black-and-white racing north toward the Lampton house.

Neck deep and sinking.