Fear itself

2

“Watch out!” called Missy. She knew the man with the hook was hiding behind the door, and that as soon as Audrey Hepburn opened it, he would…

Ring ring ring ring, Simon, it’s me, call me.

Missy rarely answered the telephone, partly because Simon didn’t like her to, and partly because it was generally a frustrating experience. But all morning it had been ring ring ring ring Simon it’s Dorie, ring ring ring ring, call me I have news, and finally she couldn’t stand it anymore. She paused Charade and picked up the extension.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Missy. It’s Dorie. Remember me?”

Of course she did-Dorie gave absolutely the best hugs. “Oh, hi.”

“Hi. Is Simon there?”

“In the basement.”

“What? I’m sorry, honey, he’s what?”

“Basement. He is in the basement.” But she could have repeated herself all day and not been understood. Stupid tongue. Stupid mouth. “Wait.”

Even though the basement door was securely locked and bolted, you couldn’t have dragged Missy near it with a team of horses. She beeped Simon with their two-way, then went back to her movie, leaving the receiver off the hook. A few minutes later, a frowning Simon showed up in the doorway wearing his kneepads and his rubber boots, smelling of wet cement. Missy waved the pager in the direction of the phone.

“Hello?…Oh, hi, Dorie, what’s-…Oh, no. Oh, no…Listen, Dor’, I want to take this in the other room…. Yeah, no sense getting the kid all upset.” He handed the phone to Missy. “I’m gonna take it in my room-would you hang this up for me?”

And she did. Simon raised his hand as if he were going to strike her; then his mustache twitched; then he laughed. “I meant after I picked up the other phone.”

“Then why didn’t you say so?” Missy said coolly, without taking her eyes off the television screen, where Cary Grant (who with his silver hair and dimpled chin looked a lot like Simon, at least to Missy’s eyes) was sliding, clackety-clackety-clackety-clack, down Audrey Hepburn’s slippery, steeply sloped tile roof.

Simon, who’d been up since well before dawn-he’d driven to San Francisco and back to drop off the note and cello case at Ocean Beach, then worked like a galley slave all morning-still hadn’t decided what to do with the birds when Missy summoned him up from the basement to take Dorie’s call.

And while this afternoon’s news update from the troublesome Ms. Bell wasn’t entirely bad-according to the FBI agent she’d been in touch with, apparently SFPD had bought the suicide note, hook, line, and sinker-it was alarming to learn that she’d gotten the FBI involved in the first place. Simon would have to accelerate his timetable-a road trip was definitely in order.

But he couldn’t leave Missy alone, and he’d given her attendant the week off in order to have more privacy with Wayne. Now he’d have to get Tasha back, but before he could do that, he’d have to do something about the birds in the basement. All on three hours of sleep. Busy, busy, busy, but at least he wasn’t bored. That was the important thing-Simon had never encountered anyone who suffered from boredom to the extent he did, with the possible exception of Grandfather Childs, who’d known it well enough to have given it its name: the blind rat.

Only, the way Simon pictured it as a boy, it was more like a grub, a fat, blind, hairless grub gnawing away at him from the inside, robbing him of his peace, of his rest, and if he went too long without sufficient stimulation, of his sanity.

But with another session of the fear game to look forward to in the near future, the blind rat was not likely to be an immediate problem. And this game would be an easy one to prepare for: all he needed, really, was some Rohypnol, with which he was already well supplied, and a few masks, which shouldn’t be all that difficult to procure, Simon reminded himself, not with Halloween less than two weeks away.