Firestarter

1

The story appeared in fragments on the late television news that Wednesday night, but Americans were not greeted with the entire story until they rose the next morning. By then all the available data had been coordinated into what Americans really seem to mean when they say they want “the news”-and what they really mean is “Tell me a story” and make sure it has a beginning, a middle, and some kind of ending.

The story America got over its collective coffee cup, via Today, Good Morning, America, and The CBS Morning News, was this: There had been a terrorist firebomb attack at a top-secret scientific think tank in Longmont, Virginia. The terrorist group was not positively known yet, although three of them had already stepped forward to claim the credit-a group of Japanese Reds, the Khafadi splinter of Black September, and a domestic group who went by the rich and wonderful name of the Militant Midwest Weather-people.

Though no one was sure exactly who was behind the attack, the reports seemed quite clear on how it had been carried out. An agent named John Rainbird, an Indian and a Vietnam vet, had been a double agent who had planted the firebombs on behalf of the terrorist organization. He had either killed himself by accident or had committed suicide at the site of one of the firebombings, a stable. One source claimed that Rainbird had actually been overcome by heat and smoke while trying to drive the horses out of the burning stable; this occasioned the usual newscom irony about coldblooded terrorists who cared more for animals than they did for people. Twenty lives had been lost in the tragedy; forty-five people had been injured, ten of them seriously. The survivors had all been “sequestered” by the government.

That was the story. The name of the Shop hardly surfaced at all. It was quite satisfactory.

Except for one dangling loose end.

2

“I don’t care where she is,” the new head of the Shop said four weeks after the conflagration and Charlie’s escape. Things had been in total confusion for the first ten days, when the girl might easily have been swept back into the Shop’s net; they were still not back to normal. The new head sat behind a make-do desk; her own would not be delivered for another three days. “And I don’t care what she can do, either. She’s an eight-year-old kid, not Superwoman. She can’t stay out of sight long. I want her found and then I want her killed.”

She was speaking to a middle-aged man who looked like a small-town librarian. Needless to say, he was not.

He tapped a series of neat computer printouts on the head’s desk. Cap’s files had not survived the burning, but most of his information had been stored in the computer memory banks. “What’s the status of this?”

“The Lot Six proposals have been tabled indefinitely,” the head told him. “It’s all political, of course. Eleven old men, one young woman, and three blue-haired old ladies who probably own stock in some Swiss goat-gland clinic… all of them with sweat under their balls about what would happen if the girl showed up. They-”

“I doubt very much if the senators from Idaho, Maine, and Minnesota have any sweat under their balls,” the man who was not a librarian murmured.

The head shrugged it off: “They’re interested in Lot Six. Of course they are. I would describe the light as amber.” She began to play with her hair, which was long-a shaggy, handsome dark auburn.

“‘Tabled indefinitely” means until we bring them the girl with a tag on her toe.”

“We must be Salome,” the man across the desk murmured. “But the platter is yet empty.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Never mind,” he said. “We seem to be back to square one.”

“Not exactly,” the head replied grimly. “She doesn’t have her father to watch out for her anymore. She’s on her own. And I want her found. Quickly.” “And if she spills her guts before we can find her?”

The head leaned back in Cap’s chair and laced her hands behind her neck. The man who was not a librarian eyed appreciatively the way her sweater pulled taut across the rounds of her breasts. Cap had never been like this.

“If she were going to spill her guts, I think she would have by now.” She leaned forward again, and tapped the desk calendar. “November fifth,” she said, “and nothing. Meantime, I think we’ve taken all the reasonable precautions. The Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune… we’re watching all the majors, but so far, nothing.”

“Suppose she decides to go to one of the minors? The Podunk Times instead of the New York Times? We can’t watch every news organ in the country.” “That is regrettably true,” the head agreed. “But there has been nothing. Which means she has said nothing.” “Would anyone really believe such a wild tale from an eight-year-old girl anyway?”

“If she lit a fire at the end of the story, I think that they might be disposed to,” the head answered. “But shall I tell you what the computer says?” She smiled and tapped the sheets. “The computer says there’s an eighty-percent probability that we can bring the committee her dead body without lifting a finger… except to ID her.”

“Suicide?”

The head nodded. The prospect seemed to please her a great deal.

“That’s nice,” the man who was not a librarian said, standing up. “For my own part, I’ll remember that the computer also said that Andrew McGee was almost certainly tipped over.”

The head’s smile faltered a bit.

“Have a nice day, Chief,” the man who was not a librarian said, and strolled out.

3

On the same November day, a man in a flannel shirt, flannel pants, and high green boots stood chopping wood under a mellow white sky. On this mild day, the prospect of another winter still seemed distant; the temperature was an agreeable fifty degrees. The man’s coat, which his wife had scolded him into wearing, hung over a fencepost. Behind him, stacked against the side of the old barn, was a spectacular drift of orange pumpkins-some of them starting to go punky now, sad to say.

The man put another log on the chopping block, slung the ax up, and brought it down. There was a satisfying thud, and two stove lengths fell to either side of the block. He was bending down to pick them up and toss them over with the others when a voice said from behind him: “You got a new block, but the mark’s still there, isn’t it? It’s still there.”

Startled, he turned around. What he saw caused him to step back involuntarily, knocking the ax to the ground, where it lay across the deep, indelible mark in the earth. At first he thought it was a ghost he was looking at, some gruesome specter of a child risen from the Dartmouth Crossing graveyard three miles up the road. She stood, pallid and dirty and thin in the driveway, her eyes hollow and glistening in their sockets, her jumper ragged and torn. A scrape mark skidded up her right arm almost to the elbow. It looked infected. There were loafers on her feet, or what had once been loafers; now it was hard to tell.

And then, suddenly, he recognized her. It was the little girl from a year ago; she had called herself Roberta, and she had a flamethrower in her head.

“Bobbi?” he said. “My sainted hat, is that Bobbi?”

“Yes, it’s still right there,” she repeated as if she had not heard him, and he suddenly realized what the glisten in her eyes was: she was weeping.

“Bobbi,” he said, “honey, what’s the matter? Where’s your dad?”

“Still there,” she said a third time, and then collapsed forward in a faint. Irv Manders was barely able to catch her. Cradling her, kneeling in the dirt of his dooryard, Irv Manders began to scream for his wife.

4

Dr. Hofferitz arrived at dusk and was in the back bedroom with the girl for about twenty minutes. Irv and Norma Manders sat in the kitchen, doing more looking at their supper than eating. Every now and then, Norma would look at her husband, not accusingly but merely questioningly, and there was the drag of fear, not in her eyes but around them-the eyes of a woman fighting a tension headache or perhaps low-back pain.

The man named Tarkington had arrived the day after the great burning; he had come to the hospital where Irv was being kept, and he had presented them with his card, which said only WHITNEY TARKINGTON GOVERNMENT ADJUSTMENTS.

“You just want to get out of here,” Norma had said. Her lips were tight and white, and her eyes had that same look of pain they had now. She had pointed at her husband’s arm, wrapped in bulky bandages; drains had been inserted, and they had been paining him considerably. Irv had told her he had gone through most of World War II with nothing much to show for it except a case of roaring hemorrhoids; it took being at home at his place in Hastings Glen to get shot up. “You just want to get out,” Norma repeated.

But Irv, who had perhaps had more time to think, only said, “Say what you have to, Tarkington.”

Tarkington had produced a check for thirty-five thousand dollars-not a government check but one drawn on the account of a large insurance company. Not one, however, that the Manderses did business with. “We don’t want your hush money,” Norma had said harshly, and reached for the call button over Irv’s bed. “I think you had better listen to me before you take any action you might regret later,” Whitney Tarkington had replied quietly and politely. Norma looked at Irv, and Irv had nodded. Her hand fell away from the call button. Reluctantly.

Tarkington had a briefcase with him. Now he put it on his knees, opened it, and removed a file with the names MANDERS and BREEDLOVE written on the tab. Norma’s eyes had widened, and her stomach began to twist and untwist. Breedlove was her maiden name. No one likes to see a government folder with his name on it; there is something terrible about the idea that tabs have been kept, perhaps secrets known.

Tarkington had talked for perhaps forty-five minutes in a low, reasonable tone. He occasionally illustrated what he had to say with Xerox copies from the Manders/Breedlove file. Norma would scan these sheets with tight lips and then pass them on to Irv in his hospital bed.

We are in a national-security situation, Tarkington had said on that horrible evening. You must realize that. We don’t enjoy doing this, but the simple fact is, you must be made to see reason. These are things you know very little about.

I know you tried to kill an unarmed man and his little girl, Irv had replied.

Tarkington had smiled coldly-a smile reserved for people who foolishly pretend to a knowledge of how the government works to protect its charges and replied, You don’t know what you saw or what it means. My job is not to convince you of that fact but only to try and convince you not to talk about it. Now, look here: this needn’t be so painful. The check is tax-free. It will pay for repairs to your house and your hospital bills with a nice little sum left over. And a good deal of unpleasantness will be avoided.

Unpleasantness, Norma thought now, listening to Dr. Hofferitz move around in the back bedroom and looking at her almost untouched supper. After Tarkington had gone, Irv had looked at her, and his mouth had been smiling, but his eyes had been sick and wounded. He told her: My daddy always said that when you was in a shit-throwing contest, it didn’t matter how much you threw but how much stuck to you.

Both of them had come from large families. Irv had three brothers and three sisters; Norma had four sisters and one brother. There were uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins galore. There were parents and grandparents, in-laws… and, as in every family, a few outlaws.

One of Irv’s nephews, a boy named Fred Drew whom he had met only three or four times, had a little pot garden growing in his backyard in Kansas, according to Tarkington’s papers. One of Norma’s uncles, a contractor, was up to his eyebrows in debt and shaky business ventures on the Gulf Coast of Texas; this fellow, whose name was Milo Breedlove, had a family of seven to support, and one whisper from the government would send Milo’s whole desperate house of cards tumbling and put them all on the state, common bankrupts. A cousin of Irv’s (twice removed; he thought he had met her once but couldn’t recall what she had looked like) had apparently embezzled a small sum of money from the bank where she worked about six years ago. The bank had found out and had let her go, electing not to prosecute so as to avoid adverse publicity. She had made restitution over a period of two years and was now making a moderate success of her own beauty parlor in North Fork, Minnesota. But the statute of limitations had not run out and she could be federally prosecuted under some law or other having to do with banking practices. The FBI had a file on Norma’s youngest brother, Don. Don had been involved with the SDS in the middle sixties and might have been briefly involved with a plot to firebomb a Dow Chemical Company office in Philadelphia. The evidence was not strong enough to stand up in court (and Don had told Norma himself that when he got wind of what was going on, he had dropped the group, horrified), but a copy of the file forwarded to the division of the corporation he worked for would undoubtedly lose him his job.

It had gone on and on, Tarkington’s droning voice in the closed, tight little room. He had saved the best for last. Irv’s family’s last name had been

Mandroski when his great-grandparents came to America from Poland in 1888. They were Jews, and Irv himself was part Jewish, although there had been no pretension to Judaism in the family since the time of his grandfather, who had married a Gentile; the two of them had lived in happy agnosticism ever after. The blood had been further thinned when Irv’s father had gone and done him likewise (as Irv himself had done, marrying Norma Breedlove, a sometime Methodist). But there were still Mandroskis in Poland, and Poland was behind the Iron Curtain, and if the CIA wanted to, they could set in motion a short chain of events that would end up making life very, very difficult for these relatives whom Irv had never seen. Jews were not loved behind the Iron Curtain.

Tarkington’s voice ceased. He replaced his file, snapped his briefcase shut, put it between his feet again, and looked at them brightly, like a good student who has just given a winning recitation.

Irv lay against his pillow, feeling very weary. He, felt Tarkington’s eyes on him, and that he didn’t particularly mind, but Norma’s eyes were on him as well, anxious and questioning.

You haff relatives in the old country, yesss? Irv thought. It was such a cliche that it was funny, but he didn’t feel like laughing at all, somehow. How many removes before they’re not your relatives anymore? Fourth-cousin remove? Sixth? Eighth? Christ on a sidecar. And if we stand up to this sanctimonious bastard and they ship those people off to Siberia, what do I do? Send them a postcard saying they’re working in the salt mines because I picked up a little button and her daddy hitching on the road in Hastings Glen? Christ on a sidecar.

Dr. Hofferitz, who was nearly eighty, came slowly out of the back bedroom, brushing his white hair back with one gnarled hand. Irv and Norma, both glad to be jerked out of their memories of the past, looked around at him.

“She’s awake,” Dr. Hofferitz said, and shrugged. “She’s not in very good shape, your little ragamuffin, but she is in no danger, either. She has an infected cut on her arm and another on her back, which she says she got crawling under a barbed wire fence to get away from ‘a pig that was mad at her.'”

Hofferitz sat down at the kitchen table with a sigh, produced a pack of Camels, and lit one. He had smoked all his life, and, he had sometimes told colleagues, as far as he was concerned, the surgeon general could go fuck himself.

“Do you want something to eat, Karl?” Norma asked. Hofferitz looked at their plates. “No-but if I was to, it looks like you wouldn’t have to dish up anything new,” he said dryly. “Will she have to stay in bed for long?” Irv asked.

“Ought to have her down to Albany,” Hofferitz said. There was a dish of olives on the table and he took a handful. “Observation. She’s got a fever of a hundred and one. It’s from the infection. I’ll leave you some penicillin and some antibiotic ointment. Mostly what she needs to do is eat and drink and rest. Malnutrition. Dehydration.” He popped an olive into his mouth. “You were right to give her that chicken broth, Norma. Anything else, she would have sicked it up, almost as sure as shooting. Nothing but clear liquids for her tomorrow. Beef broth, chicken broth, lots of water. And plenty of gin, of course; that’s the best of those clear liquids.” He cackled at this old joke, which both Irv and Norma had heard a score of times before, and popped another olive into his mouth. “I ought to notify the police about this, you know.”

“No,” Irv and Norma said together, and then they looked at each other, so obviously surprised that Dr. Hofferitz cackled again.

“She’s in trouble, ain’t she?”

Irv looked uncomfortable. He opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“Got something to do with that trouble you had last year, maybe?”

This time Norma opened her mouth, but before she could speak, Irv said, “I thought it was only gunshot wounds you had to report, Karl.”

“By law, by law,” Hofferitz said impatiently, and stubbed out his cigarette. “But you know there’s a spirit of the law as well as a letter, Irv. Here’s a little girl and you say her name is Roberta McCauley and I don’t believe that anymore than I believe a hog will shit dollar bills. She says she scraped her back open crawling under barbed wire, and I got to think that’s a funny thing to have happen to you on the way to your relatives, even with gas as tight as it is. She says she don’t remember much of the last week or so, and that I do believe. Who is she, Irv?”

Norma looked at her husband, frightened. Irv rocked back in his chair and looked at Dr. Hofferitz.

“Yeah,” he said finally, “she’s part of that trouble from last year. That’s why I called you, Karl. You’ve seen trouble, both here and back in the old country. You know what trouble is. And you know that sometimes the laws are only as good as the people in charge of them. I’m just saying that if you let out that little girl is here, it’s going to mean trouble for a lot of people who haven’t earned it. Norma and me, a lot of our kin… and her in there. And that’s all I think I can tell you. We’ve known each other twenty-five years. You’ll have to decide what you’re going to do.”

“And if I keep my mouth shut,” Hofferitz said, lighting another cigarette, “what are you going to do?” Irv looked at Norma, and she looked back at him. After a moment she gave her head a bewildered little shake and dropped her eyes to her plate. “I dunno,” Irv said quietly.

“You just gonna keep her like a parrot in a cage?” Hofferitz asked. “This is a small town, Irv. I can keep my mouth shut, but I’m in the minority. Your wife and you belong to the church. To the Grange. People come and people go. Dairy inspectors gonna drop by to check your cows. Tax assessor’s gonna drop by some fine day-that bald bastard-to reassess your buildings. What are you gonna do? Build her a room down cellar? Nice life for a kid, all right.”

Norma was looking more and more troubled.

“I dunno,” Irv repeated. “I guess I have got to think on it some. I see what you’re sayin… but if you knew the people that was after her…”

Hofferitz’s eyes sharpened at this, but he said nothing.

“I got to think on it some. But will you keep quiet about her for the time being?”

Hofferitz popped the last of his olives into his mouth, sighed, stood up, holding onto the edge of the table. “Yeah,” he said. “She’s stable. That V-Cillin will knock out the bugs. I’ll keep my mouth shut, Irv. But you better think on it, all right. Long and hard. Because a kid ain’t a parrot.”

“No,” Norma said softly. “No, of course not.” “Something strange about that kid,” Hofferitz said, picking up his black bag. “Something damn funny about her. I couldn’t see it and I couldn’t put my finger on it… but I felt it.” “Yeah,” Irv said. “There’s something strange about her, all right, Karl. That’s why she’s in trouble.” He saw the doctor out into the warm and rainy November night.

5

After the doctor had finished probing and pressing with his old, gnarled, but wonderfully gentle hands, Charlie fell into a feverish but not unpleasant doze. She could hear their voices in the other room and understood that they were talking about her, but she felt sure that they were only talking… not hatching plans.

The sheets were cool and clean; the weight of the crazy quilt was comforting on her chest. She drifted. She remembered the woman calling her a witch. She remembered walking away. She remembered hitching a ride with a vanful of hippies, all of them smoking dope and drinking wine, and she remembered that they had called her little sister and asked her where she was going.

“North,” she had replied, and that had caused a roar of approval.

After that she remembered very little until yesterday, and the hog that had charged her, apparently meaning to eat her. How she had got to the Manders farm, and why she had come here-whether it had been a conscious decision or something else-she could not remember.

She drifted. The doze deepened. She slept. And in her dream they were back in Harrison and she was starting up in her bed, her face wet with tears, screaming with terror, and her mother rushed in, auburn hair blinding and sweet in the morning light, and she had cried, “Mommy, I dreamed you and Daddy were dead!” And her mother stroked her hot forehead with a cool hand and said, “Shhh, Charlie, shhh. It’s morning now, and wasn’t that a silly dream?”

6

There was very little sleep for Irv and Norma Manders that night. They sat watching a succession of inane prime-time sitcoms, then the news, then the Tonight show. And every fifteen minutes or so Norma would get up, leave the living room quietly, and go to check on Charlie.

“How is she?” Irv asked around quarter of one.

“Fine. Sleeping.”

Irv grunted.

“Have you thought of it, Irv?”

“We’ve got to keep her until she’s better,” Irv said. “Then we’ll talk to her. Find out about her dad. I can only see that far ahead.”

“If they come back-”

“Why should they?” Irv asked. “They shut us up. They think they scared us-”

“They did scare me,” Norma said softly.

“But it wasn’t right,” Irv replied, just as softly. “You know that. That money… that ‘insurance money”… I never felt right about that, did you?”

“No,” she said, and shifted restlessly. “But what Doc Hofferitz said is true, Irv. A little girl has got to have people… and she’s got to go to school… and have friends… and… and-”

“You saw what she did that time,” Irv said flatly. “That pyrowhatsis. You called her a monster.”

“I’ve regretted that unkind word ever since,” Norma said. “Her father-he seemed like such a nice man. If only we knew where he was now.”

“He’s dead,” a voice said from behind them, and Norma actually cried out as she turned and saw Charlie standing in the doorway, clean now and looking all the more pallid for that. Her forehead shone like a lamp. She floated in one of Norma’s flannel nightgowns. “My daddy is dead. They killed him and now there’s nowhere I can go. Won’t you please help me? I’m sorry. It’s not my fault. I told them it wasn’t my fault… I told them… but the lady said I was a witch… she said…” The tears were coming now, streaming down her cheeks, and Charlie’s voice dissolved into incoherent sobs.

“Oh, honey, come here,” Norma said, and Charlie ran to her.

7

Dr. Hofferitz came the next day and pronounced Charlie improved. He came two days after that and pronounced her much improved. He came over the weekend and pronounced her well.

“Irv, you decided what you’re going to do?”

Irv shook his head.

8

Norma went to church by herself that Sunday morning, telling people that Irv had “a touch of the bug.” Irv sat home with Charlie, who was still weak but able to get around inside the house now. The day before, Norma had bought her a lot of clothes not in Hastings Glen, where such a purchase would have caused comment, but in Albany.

Irv sat beside the stove whittling, and after a while Charlie came and sat with him. “Don’t you want to know?” she said. “Don’t you want to know what happened after we took your car and left here?”

He looked up from his whittling and smiled at her. “Figure you’ll tell when you’re ready, button.”

Her face, white, tense, and unsmiling, didn’t change. “Aren’t you afraid of me?”

“Should I be?”

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll burn you up?”

“No, button. I don’t think so. Let me tell you something. You’re no little girl anymore. Maybe you ain’t a big girl-you’re someplace in the middle-but you’re big enough. A kid your age any kid-could get hold of matches if she wanted to, burn up the house or whatever. But not many do. Why would they want to? Why should you want to? A kid your age should be able to be trusted with a jackknife or a pack of matches if they’re halfway bright. So, no. I ain’t scared.”

At that Charlie’s face relaxed; an expression of almost indescribable relief flowed across it.

“I’ll tell you,” she said then. “I’ll tell you everything.” She began to speak and was still speaking when Norma returned an hour later. Norma stopped in the doorway, listening, then slowly unbuttoned her coat and took it off: She put her purse down. And still Charlie’s young but somehow old voice droned, on and on, telling it, telling it all.

And by the time she was done, both of them understood just what the stakes were, and how enormous they had become.

9

Winter came with no firm decision made. Irv and Norma began to go to church again, leaving Charlie alone in the house with strict instructions not to answer the telephone if it rang and to go down the cellar if someone drove in while they were gone. Hofferitz’s words, like a parrot in a cage, haunted Irv. He bought a pile of schoolbooks-in Albanyand-took up teaching Charlie himself. Although she was quick, he was not particularly good at it. Norma was a little better. But sometimes the two of them would be sitting at the kitchen table, bent over a history or geography book, and Norma would look up at him with a question in her eyes… a question for which Irv had no answer.

The New Year came; February; March. Charlie’s birthday. Presents bought in Albany. Like a parrot in a cage. Charlie did not seem entirely to mind, and in some ways, Irv reasoned to himself on nights when he couldn’t sleep, perhaps it had been the best thing in the world for her, this period of slow healing, of each day taken in its slow winter course. But what came next? He didn’t know.

There was the day in early April after a drenching two-day rain when the damned kindling was so damp he couldn’t get the kitchen stove lit.

“Stand back a second,” Charlie said, and he did, automatically, thinking she wanted to look at something in there. He felt something pass him in midair, something tight and hot, and a moment later the kindling was blazing nicely.

Irv stared around at her, wide-eyed, and saw Charlie looking back at him with a kind of nervous, guilty hope on her face. “I helped you, didn’t I?” she said in a voice that was not quite steady. “It wasn’t really bad, was it?”

“No,” he said. “Not if you can control it, Charlie.”

“I can control the little ones.”

“Just don’t do it around Norma, girl. She’d drop her teddies.”

Charlie smiled a little.

Irv hesitated and then said, “For myself, anytime you want to give me a hand and save me messing around with that damned kindling, you go right ahead. I’ve never been any good at it.”

“I will,” she said, smiling more now. “And I’ll be careful.” “Sure. Sure you will,” he said, and for just a moment he saw those men on the porch again, beating at their flaming hair, trying to put it out. Charlie’s healing quickened, but still there were bad dreams and her appetite remained poor. She was what Norma Manders called “peckish.”

Sometimes she would wake up from these nightmares with shuddering suddenness, not so much pulled from sleep as ejected from it, like a fighter pilot from his plane. This happened to her one night during the second week of April; at one moment she was asleep, and at the next she was wide awake in her narrow bed in the back room, her body coated with sweat. For a moment the nightmare remained with her, vivid and terrible (the sap was running freely in the maples now, and Irv had taken her with him that afternoon to change the buckets; in her dream they had been sapping again, and she had heard something behind and had looked back to see John Rainbird creeping up on them, flitting from tree to tree, barely visible; his one eye glittered with a baleful lack of mercy, and his gun, the one he had shot her daddy with, was in one hand, and he was gaining). And then it slipped away. Mercifully, she could remember none of the bad dreams for long, and she rarely screamed anymore upon awakening from them, frightening Irv and Norma into her room to see what was wrong.

Charlie heard them talking in the kitchen. She fumbled for the Big Ben on her dresser and brought it close to her face. It was ten o'clock. She had been asleep only an hour and a half.

“-going to do?” Norma asked.

It was wrong to eavesdrop, but how could she help it? And they were talking about her; she knew it.

“I don’t know,” Irv said.

“Have you thought anymore about the paper?”

Papers, Charlie thought. Daddy wanted to talk to the papers. Daddy said it would be all right then. “Which one?” Irv asked. “The Hastings Bugle? They can put it right next to the A amp;P ad and this week’s shows at the Bijou.” “It was what her father was planning to do.” “Norma,” he said. “I could take her to New York City. I could take her to the Times. And what would happen if four guys pulled guns and started shooting in the lobby?” Charlie was all ears now. Norma’s footfalls crossed the kitchen; there was the rattle of the teapot’s lid, and what she said in reply was mostly lost under running water.

Irv said, “Yeah, I think it might happen. And I tell you what might be even worse, as much as I love her. She might get the drop on them. And if it got out of control, like it did at that place where they kept her… well, there’s pretty nearly eight million people in New York City, Norma. I just feel like I’m too old to take a risk like that.”

Norma’s footfalls crossed back to the table again, the old flooring of the farmhouse creaking comfortably beneath them. “But, Irv, listen to me now,” she said. Norma spoke carefully and slowly, as if she had been thinking this out carefully over a long period of time. “Even a little paper, even a little weekly like the Bugle, they’re hooked into those AP tickers. News comes from everyplace these days. Why, just two years ago a little paper in Southern California won the Pulitzer Prize for some news story, and they had a circulation of under fifteen hundred!”

He laughed, and Charlie suddenly knew he had taken her hand across the table. “You’ve been studying on this, haven’t you?”

“Yes I have, and there’s no reason to laugh at me for it, Irv Manders! This is serious, a serious business! We’re in a box! How long can we keep her here before somebody finds out? You took her sapping out in the woods just this afternoon-”

“Norma, I wasn’t laughin at you, and the child has got to get out sometime-”

“Don’t you think I know that? I didn’t say no, did I? That’s just it! A growing child needs fresh air, exercise. Got to have those things if you’re going to have any appetite, and she’s-”

“Peckish, I know.”

“Pale and peckish, that’s right. So I didn’t say no. I was glad to see you take her. But, Irv, what if Johnny Gordon or Ray Parks had been out today and had just happened to drift over to see what you were doing, like they sometimes do?”

“Honey, they didn’t.” But Irv sounded uneasy. “Not this time! Not the time before! But Irv, it can’t go on! We been lucky already, and you know it” Her footsteps crossed the kitchen again, and then there was the sound of tea being poured. “Yeah,” Irv said. “Yeah, I know we have. But… thanks, darlin.”

“Welcome,” she said, sitting down again. “And never mind the buts, either. You know it only takes one person, or maybe two. It’ll spread. It’ll get out, Irv, that we got a little girl up here. Never mind what it’s doing to her; what happens if it gets back to them?”

In the darkness of the back room, Charlie’s arms rashed out in goosebumps.

Slowly, Irv answered her. “I know what you’re saying, Norma. We got to do something, and I keep going over and over it in my head. A little paper… well, it’s not just sure enough. You know we’ve got to get this story out right if we’re going to make that girl safe for the rest of her life. If she’s going to be safe, a lot of people have got to know she exists and what she can do-isn’t that right? A lot of people.”

Norma Manders stirred restlessly but said nothing.

Irv pressed on. “We got to do it right for her, and we got to do it right for us. Because it could be our lives at stake, too. Me, I’ve already been shot once. I believe that. I love her like my own, and I know you do, too, but we got to be realists about it, Norma. She could get us killed.”

Charlie felt her face grow hot with shame… and with terror. Not for herself but for them. What had she brought on their house? “And it’s not just us or her. You remember what that man Tarkington said. The files he showed us. “It’s your brother and my nephew Fred and Shelley, and-““-and all those people back in Poland,” Norma said. “Well, maybe he was only bluffing about that. I pray to God he was. It’s hard for me to believe anyone could get that low.” Norma said grimly, “They’ve been pretty low already.”

“Anyway,” Irv said, “we know they’ll follow through on as much as they can, the dirty bastards. The shit is going to fly. All I’m saying, Norma, is I don’t want the shit to fly to no good purpose. If we’re going to make a move, I want it to be a good one. I don’t want to go to some country weekly and then have them get wind of it and squash it. They could do it. They could do it.”

“But what does that leave?”

“That,” Irv said heavily, “is what I keep tryin to figure out. A paper or a magazine, but one they won’t think of. It’s got to be honest, and it ought to be nationwide. But most of all, it can’t have any ties to the government or to the government’s ideas.”

“You mean to the Shop,” she said flatly. “Yeah. That’s what I mean.” There was the soft sound of Irv sipping his tea. Charlie lay in her bed, listening, waiting.

… it could be our lives at stake, too… I’ve already been shot once… I love her like my own, and I know you do, too, but we got to be realists about it, Norma… she could get us killed.

(no please I)

(she could get us killed like she got her mother killed)

(no please please don’t don’t say that)

(like she got her daddy killed)

(please stop)

Tears rolled across her side-turned face, catching in her ears, wetting the pillowcase. “Well, we’ll think on it some more,” Norma said finally. “There’s an answer to this, Irv. Somewhere.” “Yeah. I hope so.” “And in the meantime,” she said, “we just got to hope no one knows she’s here.” Her voice suddenly kindled with excitement. “Irv, maybe if we got a lawyer-”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’m done in, Norma. And no one knows she’s here yet.”

But someone did. And the news had already begun to spread.

10

Until he was in his late sixties, Dr. Hofferitz, an inveterate bachelor, had slept with his longtime housekeeper, Shirley McKenzie. The sex part of it had slowly dried up: the last time, as well as Hofferitz could recall, had been about fourteen years before, and that had been something of an anomaly. But the two of them had remained close; in fact, with the sex gone, the friendship had deepened and had lost some of that tense prickliness that seems to be at the center of most sexual relationships. Their friendship had become of that platonic variety that seems to genuinely obtain only in the very young and in the very old of the opposite sex.

Still, Hofferitz held onto his knowledge of the Manderses” “boarder” for better than three months. Then, one night in February, after three glasses of wine while he and Shirley (who had just that January turned seventy-five) were watching television, he told her the whole story, after swearing her to complete secrecy.

Secrets, as Cap could have told Dr. Hofferitz, are even more unstable than U-235, and stability lessens proportionately as the secret is told. Shirley McKenzie kept the secret for almost a month before telling her best girlfriend, Hortense Barclay. Hortense kept the secret for about ten days before telling her best girlfriend, Christine Traegger. Christine told her husband and her best friends (all three of them) almost immediately.

This is how the truth spreads in small towns; and by the night in April when Irv and Norma had their overheard conversation, a good deal of Hastings Glen knew that they had taken in a mysterious girl. Curiosity ran high. Tongues wagged.

Eventually the news reached the wrong pair of ears. A telephone call was made from a scrambler phone.

Shop agents closed in on the Manders farm for the second time on the last day of April; this time they came across the dawn fields through a spring mist, like horrific invaders from Planet X in their bright flame-resistant suits. Backing them up was a National Guard unit who didn’t know what the fuck they were doing or why they had been ordered out to the peaceful little town of Hastings Glen, New York.

They found Irv and Norma Manders sitting stunned in their kitchen, a note between them. Irv had found it that morning when he arose at five o'clock to milk the cows. It was one line: I think I know what to do now. Love, Charlie.

She had eluded the Shop again-but wherever she was, she was alone.

The only consolation was that this time she didn’t have so far to hitch.

11

The librarian was a young man, twenty-six years old, bearded, long-haired. Standing in front of his desk was a little girl in a green blouse and bluejeans. In one hand she held a paper shopping bag. She was woefully thin, and the young man wondered what the hell her mother and father had been feeding her… if anything.

He listened to her question carefully and respectfully. Her daddy, she said, had told her that if you had a really hard question, you had to go to the library to find the answer, because at the library they knew the answers to almost all the questions. Behind them, the great lobby of the New York Public Library echoed dimly; outside, the stone lions kept their endless watch.

When she was done, the librarian recapitulated, ticking of the salient points on his fingers.

“Honest.”

She nodded.

“Big… that is, nationwide.”

She nodded again.

“No ties to the government.”

For the third time, the thin girl nodded.

“Do you mind my asking why?”

“I”-she paused-“I have to tell them something.”

The young man considered for several moments. He seemed about to speak, then held up a finger and went and conferred with another librarian. He came back to the little girl and spoke two words.

“Can you give me an address?” she asked.

He found the address and then printed it carefully on a square of yellow paper.

“Thank you,” the girl said, and turned to go. “Listen,” he said, “when was the last time you had something to eat, kid? You want a couple of bucks for lunch?” She smiled-an amazingly sweet and gentle smile. For a moment, the young librarian was almost in love.

“I have money,” she said, and opened the sack so he could see.

The paper bag was filled with quarters.

Before he could say anything else-ask her if she had taken a hammer to her piggybank, or what-she was gone.

12

The little girl rode the elevator up to the sixteenth floor of the skyscraper. Several of the men and women who rode with her looked at her curiously-just a small girl in a green blouse and bluejeans, holding a crumpled paper bag in one hand and a Sunkist orange in the other. But they were New Yorkers, and the essence of the New York character is to mind your own business and let other people mind theirs.

She got off the elevator, read the signs, and turned left. Double glass doors gave on a handsome reception area at the end of the hall. Written below the two words the librarian had spoken to her was this motto: “All the News That Fits.”

Charlie paused outside a moment longer.

“I’m doing it, Daddy,” she whispered. “Oh, I hope I’m doing it right.”

Charlie McGee tugged open one of the glass doors and went into the offices of Rolling Stone, where the librarian had sent her.

The receptionist was a young woman with clear gray eyes. She looked at Charlie for several seconds in silence, taking in the crumpled Shop and Save bag, the orange, the slightness of the girl herself she was slender almost to the point of emaciation, but tall for a child, and her face had a kind of serene, calm glow. She’s going to be so beautiful, the receptionist thought.

“What can I do for you, little sister?” the receptionist asked, and smiled. “I need to see someone who writes for your magazine,” Charlie said. Her voice was low, but it was clear and firm. “I have a story I want to tell. And something to show.” “Just like show-and-tell in school, huh?” the receptionist asked. Charlie smiled. It was the smile that had so dazzled the librarian. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for a long time.”