by Dean Koontz
“I feel dizzy,” Jolie said. She had been standing stiffly, her shoulders tensed as her mother pressed them against the door. She sagged, suddenly weak. “I need to sit down.”
“We all need to sit down, honey. Sit down together and figure this out.”
Twyla was getting another Coca-Cola from the honor bar.
“Okay,” Jolie said shakily. “Let’s sit down and you tell me what this is all about.”
Mother let go of Jolie but still held her against the door with her body. She smiled. “That’s more like my Jolie.” As she searched her daughter’s eyes, she put one hand to Jolie’s face and stroked her cheek with apparent affection, whether genuine or not.
Jolie hated what she did, but she did it anyway: bit the hand. She bit it hard and tasted blood, and her mother cried out in shock and pain. Mother stepped back, and Jolie punched her in the stomach, and Mother dropped to her knees beside the bed.
Mother’s purse stood on the nearby nightstand. Jolie grabbed it, pivoted to the door, disengaged the security chain, threw open the door, slammed it behind her, and ran.
Their room was on the third floor. Stairs at both ends of the corridor. No time for the elevator.
As Jolie opened the stairwell door, she heard running footsteps behind her. She glanced back. Twyla.
She raced down the stairs, which seemed to telescope out before her, adding a tread for every tread she descended, so that she might never get to the bottom. Jolie was in a state. She had never been in such a state before. Torn by so many emotions. Terrified but at the same time crying in grief for having somehow lost her mother and sister—how, why, to what?—burning with shame for hurting her mother, yet fiercely pleased with herself for having gotten away. The world had been wobbly to one degree or another ever since Cora Gundersun killed herself and those people at the hotel, but during the past three days it had grown more wobbly ever faster, and now it had abruptly undergone a total pole shift, north becoming south, the new angle of rotation apocalyptic. Jolie could feel the outer crust of the earth sliding catastrophically to a new position under her feet, entire continents heaving and colliding and buckling over one another, all the works of humanity crashing down in ruins, and mile-high tsunamis coming fast out of the deep sea, metaphorically if not literally.
Feet pounding, heart pounding, she ran to the ground floor and opened the fire door and hurried along a corridor. As she sprinted toward the lobby, she zippered open her mother’s purse and took from it the disposable phone.
Close behind her, she heard her sister call her name, and as they dashed into the lobby, Twyla shouted, “Help me, somebody, help me stop my sister! She’s hallucinating, she’s taken drugs!”
Jolie stopped and turned and threw Mother’s purse, and it hit Twyla square in the face. Twyla stumbled and maybe she fell, but Jolie didn’t wait to see. She ran toward the front entrance, and when people moved as if to intercept her, she screamed at them to fuck off, screamed so hard that spittle flew. She had never used that word before, but she used it now, snarled it, as if she really might be a crazy person on drugs, because nothing mattered except escaping. Realizing there was blood on her chin, her mother’s blood, she shouted, “I’ll bite you,” when the F-word didn’t work. Through the front entrance, into the cool day, she ran flat out, her heart knocking so hard that with every beat she felt shaken, as if quakes were rocking her flesh and bones along fault lines in her body, breath burning her throat. When she finally dared to look back, no one pursued her, but still she ran.
13
* * *
Jane couldn’t do anything more just yet. She would go after D. J. Michael where he really was, which would no doubt be on the ninth floor of his building in San Francisco, but not today, not tomorrow. Too little sleep, too much stress, and too much emotion expended had left her shaky: strained muscles, grainy eyes, fuzzy thinking.
She got a motel room in Tucson and took the longest shower of her life, letting the hot water beat some of the aches out of her.
After she dressed in a fresh change of clothes, she took from her wallet the Melinda June Garlock driver’s license and replaced it with the one in the name of Elizabeth Bennet.
She packed away the auburn wig and fake eyeglasses. She put on the chopped-everywhichway jet-black Vogue-version punky number. The fake nose ring: silver serpent with one ruby eye. Blue eye shadow and matching lipstick. Hello, Liz Bennet.
After tossing the room key onto the bed, she left the motel without sleeping there.
An hour later, in Casa Grande, at a Best Western Suites, Liz Bennet submitted her driver’s license to the desk clerk as ID and paid cash for a little suite with a king-size bed.
14
* * *
The Courtyard by Marriott was near Indianapolis International Airport, and there were several other hotels in the general area. Jolie didn’t want to go into any of them, because maybe her mother and sister—and who knew what others like them they were able to summon—might soon be searching for her in those establishments. However, there wasn’t anywhere else she could just walk into as though she belonged there, so she chose the largest hotel, a six-story place maybe a mile from the Marriott.
She sat in a comfortable chair in the lobby, not in a direct line from the front entrance but with a good view of it, prepared to flee if she saw a beloved face with a terrifying new aspect. She had the disposable phone. With an indelible-ink felt-tip pen, Mother had written the number of Daddy’s disposable on this one, in case she forgot it.
As Jolie tried to think what to say to her father, strove to find words that might convince him the crazy-sounding accusation she made was the truth, she held the phone tightly in both hands. This wasn’t just a burner cell. This was her one precious link to a sane past, to what was left of her family, to whatever hope she dared to entertain. In this city where she’d never been before, she was alone without a dime, without ID. She’d left her purse in the room at the Marriott. They had parked Aunt Tandy’s Dodge at the Marriott, but she didn’t have a key for it. Anyway, she didn’t dare go back there in case her mother or the hotel had called the police. She had run through the lobby like a crazy person, threatening to bite people, so the police would probably want to put her in the hospital for observation. In the hospital they would most likely sedate her. If she was sedated, she would be helpless. When she woke, Mother and Twyla would be there, and she wouldn’t know whether or not they had injected her while she’d been sleeping. No. Wrong. She would know on some level, but it would be too late. She would not be able to save herself. She would thereafter be calling somebody the way Twyla had called somebody, and she would be doing every hateful thing that he told her to do. The object clutched in her hands wasn’t merely a phone but also a talisman with the magical power to deliver her out of this present darkness and into the light once more—if she could just get her act together and think what to say to Daddy!
Sandwiched between her hands, the phone rang. She gasped and twitched in her chair and nearly cried out in surprise. She fumbled with the phone and took the call on the third ring. “Daddy?”
As she spoke, she realized that her mother might remember this number, that this could be Mother or Twyla. Maybe somehow the moment she accepted the call, they knew where she was. A magical talisman might work both ways.
But it was Daddy. “Jolie? Is that you, girl?”
The phone would expire, the line would go dead, something rotten would surely happen before she put the right words together and managed to speak them. But nothing rotten happened, and after only a brief hesitation, Jolie said, “Daddy, why did Cora Gundersun do such a horrible thing? Did someone inject her with a drug or something, did someone tell her to do it?”
Daddy hesitated, too, and Jolie thought the line had gone dead after all, but then he said, “What’s wrong, candygirl? Where did you get that idea?”
People were coming and going from the lobby—bellmen with luggage carts, guests—but no one took special notice of
Jolie Tillman. No one sat in other nearby lobby chairs.
The words spilled out in an undisciplined torrent: “Somebody injected Twyla, I don’t know who or why, but she had these syringes and ampules, Twyla did, had them in her suitcase, and she injected Mother while I was sleeping, sedated her and injected her, and just now they both tried to inject me, so I had to bite Mommy and hit her really hard.” Jolie began to cry. “Daddy, it was so awful, I had to bite her, she was Mommy and she wasn’t, and I bit her, it was the worst thing ever.”
She had lost it, blown the chance to convince him, ranted like a child. Daddy said, “Oh, God,” and she knew he thought she’d lost her mind. He said, “Oh, God,” again in the most awful way, and she said, “It’s true, Daddy, it sounds crazy, but it’s really true, please believe me.” His voice broke. He was choking with emotion. “Jolie, oh, God, I believe you,” and though he kept speaking, he began to cry, he who never cried easily if at all, and it was then that Jolie knew beyond all last doubts that her life had changed profoundly and forever.
15
* * *
Daddy had said that someone was already here in Indianapolis to meet them, had just started out for the Marriott, and he had to call at once and send that person to Jolie instead. Then he realized that when Mother woke this morning and was changed, she might have given his phone number to the Arcadians, whoever they were. He didn’t know if they had the capability to find him by his burner phone once they knew the number; but he could not take a chance, would destroy it as soon as he had hung up and had used another phone to call the person en route. He also didn’t know if, with the burner number, the wrong people might be listening this very minute; he didn’t think they could be, but he didn’t want to name the person who was coming for Jolie or give her a description. He said only that the right person, the person he was sending, would know Jolie because Jolie was seventeen, beautiful, about five-six, and black; and Jolie would know the person who came to her could be trusted if that person told her something that only she and Daddy knew.
Their rapid-fire conversation ended and Daddy was gone before Jolie quite realized that the phone in her hand could no longer reach him, for he was switching off and would soon smash his own disposable cell.
She was even more isolated than she had been just two minutes earlier. Now there was no one she could call. Not her grandmother, not Aunt Tandy in Madison, because maybe they had become like Mother and Twyla. Jolie couldn’t be sure that she could trust them.
The next five minutes were five eternities, and she tensed as each new arrival came through the front entrance of the hotel. She liked to read all kinds of books, and she read her share of spy novels, but she was no good at this cloak-and-dagger stuff, too edgy for it.
The right person, the contact, turned out to be the last one Jolie would have expected. A blonde in a white blouse and a black-denim jacket and black jeans. Hard to tell her age—maybe forty, maybe fifty. Her black boots featured elaborately carved leather with bright-blue inlays, and she wore dangly diamond earrings even in the middle of the day. She walked directly to Jolie, who stood up as she approached, and in what might have been a Texas accent, she said, “Darlin’, when you were the littlest girl, your daddy made up funny stories just for your ownself and no one else, stories about a mouse sheriff name of Whiskers.”
Jolie liked the woman on sight and might have trusted her a little even if she hadn’t known about Whiskers the mouse sheriff.
“How’re you doin’, child?”
“I’m a mess. Scared, sad, sick in my heart, but hanging on.”
“Me and you, we’ll hang on together,” the woman said. “I’m Nadine Sacket. Your daddy’s at our place in Texas. We’re takin’ you to him. But plans changed all sudden like, so now we’re goin’ there roundabout. When we’re in the taxi, we don’t use names, and nothin’ we talk about will be what’s really happenin’ with us. You get me, darlin’?”
“Yes. I understand.”
Nadine had arrived in a taxi, but she didn’t want to depart here in one. They left by a side entrance. Never using the sidewalk along the street, they crossed from the grounds of this hotel to the parking lot of a neighboring hotel. At the new place, Nadine hailed a cab, which they took downtown to the convention center.
From there they walked to the Westin Indianapolis, the largest and fanciest hotel that Jolie had ever seen. Although Nadine wasn’t a guest, she somehow engaged the concierge to help her book a rental car, and it wasn’t half an hour before they were on the road in a Cadillac Escalade.
“We were goin’ to scoot y’all—you, your mom, and your sister—right over to the airport here and then out, but when this ugliness raised itself up, that couldn’t work anymore. Maybe the bad hats aren’t crawlin’ all over the terminals by now, but later they’ll be lookin’ through all the video there, tryin’ to find where you went and who with. So you and me, we’ll drive to St. Louis, about four and a half hours without a tailwind. By then, Leland and Kelsey will be waitin’ there with the jet, and we’ll slip right down the sky to home.”
On top of everything else that had happened this day, the speed and confidence with which Nadine took the current situation in hand both reassured Jolie and left her a little disoriented. “Who’re Leland and Kelsey?”
“Leland’s the rascal wedded me when I was but nineteen. Kelsey Bodine was sent to us down to the ranch when he was fourteen, as dour as a mortician with constipation when we first met him. That boy didn’t know a mule from a horse from a pony back in those days. Thought himself slow-witted, which was the worst of the lies the world had told him. He’s twenty-three now, works with us and copilots with Leland every time Leland goes up. You’ll probably like old Kelsey. I know he’ll like you, considerin’ there’s not a boy with eyes and heart who wouldn’t.”
“You have your own jet?”
“Now, darlin’, don’t you go expectin’ a big seven-forty-seven tricked up like some palace in the sky. It’s just a little old Learjet, hauls about a dozen, but it’s a darn cozy way to get around.”
For Jolie, that trip to St. Louis was like a drive from a graveyard after a funeral, marked by sorrow and anguish and worry about the future, but it was also just the littlest bit as engaging as Harry Potter’s first trip from platform nine and three-quarters in King’s Cross station to Hogwarts School. Nadine was a talker: She talked about herself and Leland, about the Sacket Home and School, as well as about a dazzling variety of other things, and she got Jolie to talk about herself, more than she had talked about herself in ages. Yet by the time they arrived at the private-craft terminal at St. Louis International and boarded the Lear and were airborne, Jolie couldn’t remember more than a fraction of what either of them had said. When her life was in the hands of Mr. Sacket and Kelsey Bodine, a crushing weariness overcame Jolie. Not having slept well the past two nights, she thought she would never sleep well again, considering what could happen to you in your sleep. However, she fell sound asleep as they slid down the sky to Texas.
16
* * *
In Casa Grande, a town of fifty thousand souls, Jane found a restaurant with a good wine list. She drank two glasses of cabernet sauvignon and ate filet mignon. She was confident in her Elizabeth Bennet look, and she felt safe.
The three-star motor inn offered cable TV, in which she had no interest, and Sirius Radio. She tuned to a classical-music channel. The pianist Glenn Gould. Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
She mixed a vodka-and-Coke and sat in an armchair with three objects at hand. The cameo Travis had given her for good luck. The wedding band she could no longer wear in public. The wallet-size photograph of Miriam Riggowitz, whom Bernie had lost a year earlier.
Gould’s brilliant music spoke of both joy and suffering, approaching the heart through the mind, braiding a listener’s intellect and emotions, until those aspects of human experience, often at odds, were united and healed.
As the music transported Jane, she was captivated by the ph
oto of Miriam, reading that clear and gentle face as if it were a novel, imagining stories in it that she could never know were true. Her fascination puzzled her until she understood that it was the Miriams of the world for whom she lived now, for whom she might die: people who lived full lives with little interest in fame or the ideologies that enfrenzied the self-described elites. Over the centuries, the Miriams and the Bernies and the millions like them were the fonts of free and civil societies, which was why the likes of D. J. Michael so despised them and yearned to oppress them; freedom and civility were barriers to absolute power and to the adoration that the powerful could command of others.
She did not want another vodka. She undressed, went to bed, turned out the lamp. With her pistol under the pillow on which her husband would never rest his head, she lay in the dark and in the thrall of music. Maybe she was a woman born in the wrong era, for whom some period of the past had been intended, a woman out of time in more than one sense. In sleep, time did not exist to harry her; there was no hour of reckoning to dread, for once no child in peril.
17
* * *
Saturday, Jane went to the library in Casa Grande and used a computer to research recent references to D. J. Michael. Evidently in the interest of his personal security, it had been announced only the previous day that he would attend a charity gala the following Saturday, in San Francisco, to receive a humanitarian award.
She suspected his appearance at the gala was bait meant to draw her to that venue, to scope it out for a possible assault on him. She would be sure not to venture within sight of the place.