Mortal Faults

20

Before they’d left, the FBI people had repaired the damage to Andrea’s phone line. She almost wished they hadn’t. For hours the phone had never stopped ringing. Finally she had jerked the cord out of the wall.

There was nothing she could do about the doorbell. Its incessant chiming had become the background music of her life.

She put tissue in her ears to block the sound. She retreated to the rear of her house, but some of her persecutors had made their way into the backyard and were banging on the rear door. Fortunately the broken glass panel had been boarded up, or they might have forced their way inside.

She withdrew into her bedroom. No escape. They were outside the windows, calling her name.

God, she hated them. TV people, radio people, newspaper people. Vultures, parasites, piranha. And they were after her again. After her-even though they didn’t know who she was. She imagined how it would be if they ever learned her real identity. She would be on constant display, a freak in a side show, twenty-hour hours a day.

She paced the house, afraid even to peep through the curtains for fear that her face would be glimpsed. If they got a picture of her and put it on TV, someone might recognize her as the Medea killer. Unlikely, after all these years, but she couldn’t take the chance.

They would leave eventually. She would wait them out. She was patient. She had endured twelve years in a mental institution. She could endure this.

Her mind kept running back over the events in the house, trying to find some logic in what had happened. Not the attack itself-there was a certain rough but inescapable logic to that-but its aftermath.

She remembered huddling behind the bed. Something exploded in the hall with a terrifying burst of light and noise. Moments later, when she heard an exchange of gunshots outside, she assumed Abby had retrieved her gun from her purse and was shooting it out with the intruders. Then there was silence, a long stretch of silence that scared her worse than the explosion and the gunfire. From the living room she heard low voices but could make out no words. Then the closing of a door-the door to the carport, she thought-and footsteps in the hall. A woman’s voice, but not Abby’s.

“Federal agent. Don’t be alarmed. The assailants have gone.”

It could be a trick. Andrea remained hidden.

“Ms. Lowry?” the voice asked. “I’m Special Agent McCallum, FBI.”

Andrea dared to raise her head. In the dimness she saw a woman in a business suit, gun in one hand, credentials in the other.

“FBI?” Andrea asked. It didn’t make sense.

Agent McCallum nodded. “I’m here to help. Other federal agents are on the way. So are the police and paramedics. Are you injured?”

“No, I don’t think so. I’m all right.” Andrea got up slowly, her legs unsteady. “How did you get here so fast?”

“I’ll explain that later. Right now there’s something we need to discuss before anyone else arrives. It involves Abby.”

Andrea was baffled. “You know her?”

“We’ve worked together in the past. As you probably know, she needs to keep a low profile. Which is why it’s important that you not say anything about her when you’re interviewed by my colleagues. No mention of her name. Okay?”

“Not say anything?”

“I can’t allow her to be dragged into this. It would be bad for me and bad for her. We need you to keep the secret. Can you do that?”

“How do I explain what happened here?”

“The gun is yours, right? Say you fired it. Here, take it.” Andrea accepted the revolver, vaguely aware that she had now put her fingerprints on the handle. “You grabbed the gun and took cover in here. You held off the intruders by yourself.”

“And the bomb?”

“I’m not sure what that was about. I heard the noise. Do you know what Abby did?”

“She went into the bathroom. She said something about hairspray.”

“Okay. She improvised a grenade out of a can of hairspray. The stuff is flammable. That’s all you have to know. Just say you did it. If they press you for details, tell them you’re too shaken up to talk about it.”

“That wouldn’t be a lie. I am pretty shaken up.”

“We can have you taken to the hospital.”

Hospital. Andrea shook her head firmly. “No. No hospital.”

“Just for observation. As a precaution.”

“No. I’m not going there. You can’t make me go there.”

“Okay, okay. No one’s going to make you do anything, Ms. Lowry.”

More people arrived after that. The paramedics wanted to check her over, but she refused to let them touch her. She wouldn’t let any medical people come near her ever again.

They left, but the house was still crowded. There were crime lab people marking the spots where bullets had struck the walls and taking photographs and videotapes. Police and federal agents were arguing about jurisdiction, ignoring her until somehow the FBI established that they were in control of the case. Then she was taken aside by a pair of men in suits who interviewed her gently but thoroughly about what transpired. She said what Agent McCallum had told her to say. She wasn’t even thinking about it. It was as if a hypnotic suggestion had been planted in her mind and she was powerless to resist.

At some point the FBI people suggested that she leave her house for the night and stay with a friend. She told them there was no one she could stay with. They suggested a hotel. She said no. She would not leave the house, not even after what had happened. The house was her refuge, the only place she felt safe. And even now, after everything that had happened, she still felt safe here-safer than anywhere else. It was irrational, but she couldn’t fight it.

One of the FBI men told her there was a chance the criminals would come back.

She knew that. Still, she insisted, “I can’t leave. I just can’t.”

She gathered that the attack was being treated as a home invasion, a failed robbery. She knew this was wrong, but said nothing.

By nine o’clock most of the law enforcement personnel had left. Agent McCallum was among the last to depart. She thanked Andrea for her cooperation, keeping her language carefully ambiguous.

“You never answered my question,” Andrea said.

“Which question?”

“How did you get here so quickly?”

“I was working an unrelated case very close by. I can’t give you the details. It’s an ongoing investigation. I heard the gunshots and came running.”

Andrea lowered her voice so only Tess could hear. “So it’s just a coincidence, you knowing Abby?”

“Just a coincidence. L.A. is a smaller town than it seems.”

This had to be a lie. Andrea didn’t believe in coincidence. It was possible that McCallum was working with Abby, backing her up or something. Unlikely, but the alternative was that the FBI had been interested in Andrea herself-watching her home, even. But this was a prospect too disturbing to consider.

Alone, she wandered through the house, surveying the damage. The corridor leading to her bedroom was pocked with bullet holes, the carpet charred by Abby’s improvised bomb. One bedroom window had been shattered. The bedroom walls were speckled with more bullet holes. By now the bullets themselves were gone. The crime lab experts had dug them out of the walls and taken them away. The recovery of the bullets had made the holes bigger and deeper. They gaped like a lunar craters.

The thought of bullets reminded her of her own gun, confiscated by the authorities for ballistics tests. She wished they hadn’t taken it. She felt defenseless without it.

But there was another gun.

She had almost forgotten it. She had purchased the gun soon after buying this house, a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. The pistol had seemed like a good choice because it held more than twice as many rounds as a revolver. But when she took it into the desert to practice shooting, the gun jammed. Pistols could do that, she learned. The feeding mechanism that inserted the cartridge into the chamber could malfunction. She hadn’t trusted the gun after that. She’d bought the revolver to replace it. The revolver held only six rounds, but it was dependable. When she practiced with it in the wilderness, it never failed her.

The pistol had gone into a shoe box, which was hidden in a tiny overhead crawlspace that served as an attic. She pulled down the collapsible ladder and climbed into the crawlspace, hunting among miscellaneous junk-a lamp that no longer worked but that she hadn’t wanted to throw out, some empty vases she’d been meaning to use for flowers, old clothes she should’ve donated to Goodwill. After twenty minutes of searching, she found the box with the pistol in it. The gun had not been oiled in months, and she could not be sure it would work, but she had a full magazine stashed alongside it in the box, and when she attached the magazine, it clicked smoothly into place. The pistol felt small and light, almost like a toy when compared with the bulkier revolver, but holding it gave her some comfort.

She stashed it in the kitchen drawer where the revolver had been. She hoped she wouldn’t need it.

But somehow she was sure she would.