Arthur rose, furious but unable to speak. After a long moment, he spoke, fighting to keep his voice calm. “Dad. What would I have to do to prove I’m telling the truth?”
His father hesitated, not looking at his son. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I can ever trust you again.”
“Then it’s pointless for me to even try, isn’t it?” Arthur said bitterly. “I might as well go out and start doing drugs right now, for all the difference it would make to you.”
His father gritted his teeth and turned back to face him. “If you were to bring me back a legal document stating that the charges you were imprisoned for were found to be false, I would give you back your mother’s money and your share of my assets when I’m gone. Isn’t that fair?”
“It would be, if this were only about money, Dad,” he retorted. “But it’s not.” And he stormed out of the room to his bedroom and slammed the door.
…Only to find the blond woman there, smiling triumphantly.
“Get out of my room,” he had said evenly, not sure why he suddenly felt afraid.
She took a step forward, hands on her hips. “It’s not your room any more, is it?”
* * *
Standing again beside the piano, Bear realized, by comparison, that prison hadn’t been as repugnant to him, nor those dangerous years on the streets, as living in this house had been.
Now the interior was so structurally changed that it more resembled a nightmare about the house than the actual house he had once lived in. He took a step further into the darkness, and caught a glimpse of an orange glow. He turned, and saw the entranceway where he had come in, with the lotus chandelier.
Disoriented, he paused. How had he come back to this place? Mentally he traced his steps backward to the sitting room and down the corridors—but suddenly his attention was distracted. The front door was opening as a slender figure stepped inside.
His heart rushed upwards as though through dark waters towards the light. It was Blanche.
Chapter Twenty-One
Pursued by darkness, she had plunged into the subway tunnel once again with a sense of being caught in a repetitive cycle of time. Always running, always her heart beating with this painful intensity, always pursued, always surrounded by nothing but the mechanical roar of the dragon’s belly—deeper and deeper into the shadow…
Poisoned. He’s being poisoned. Is he even still alive? And if he is, will he believe me?
When the serpentine train had halted, she had hurried upward, above ground, back into the tangle of streets and buildings. In that vast concrete forest, she was nothing but a single soul moving frantically among so many other souls, effectively invisible until she came at last to the house again, pulled out the key, and let herself in.
Journey’s end. She faced the mirror again, and took a deep breath, gazing at the silver surface and the smoke behind the glass.
You couldn’t stop me. I’m here.
II
“Leon, are you all right?”
It seemed only a few minutes later that someone was calling him. Leon groaned and struggled against the pile of metal desks that covered him as Matt and Charley quickly pulled them off.
“What happened to you?” The Midwestern friar’s voice was anxious.
Leon wrestled himself from the ground, shoving desks aside as he tried to stand up. “Bonnie was here—after Nora.”
“Where is she now?”
“Bonnie? She took off. Where’s Nora?”
“She just came and got us,” Matt said, looking back over his shoulder as he moved a last chair. “I thought she was right behind me.”
“Where’d Bonnie go?” Charley asked, pushing desks back against the wall.
“Uh, I was a bit preoccupied and missed that part.” Leon rose and stumbled towards Charley. “We’ve got to get after them. Bonnie—whoever she is—wants Nora for some reason of her own. I had a chance to talk with her about it—on the wrong end of a gun, unfortunately.”
Charley caught him by the shoulders. “Whoa! Steady there, little brother. Looks like she roughed you up a bit.”
“Yeah. With some help from the desks, as I’m sure you can tell.” He rubbed his sore forehead. “Come on, let’s go.”
As Leon had suspected, there was no sign of Nora in the courtyard. Down on the streets, the novices looked around. “I asked our neighbors if they saw anything. Mrs. Himina saw an old lady going down the alleyway, but didn’t see much else,” Matt said. “She said the old lady got into a white car and drove off, real fast.”
The white car. The ugly witch. It made sense now. Leon’s foreboding was growing stronger. “I’m going to ask the Fathers for permission to go to look for Nora.”
“Not without us, you’re not,” Charley said, and the other two novices fell into step beside Leon.
III
Blanche was here.
He both recognized her and didn’t recognize her. She was swathed in some sort of flowing gown that shone in the cloudy lamplight, yet her petite figure was unmistakable. But her hair, her long curtain of dark hair was gone. Cut short.
He had barely time to think of this, because he started towards her as soon as he saw her, reaching out his hands in the darkness. She stood in the muted yellow haze in the distance, looking around, apparently unaware of his presence. Just as he seemed about to reach her, an invisible wall sprang up against his hands and face with a thunderclap. Glass.
He was trapped behind the mirror. She startled, and glanced quickly at the mirror, right at him, seeing no one but herself. Stupefied, he stood, disoriented, his hands on the glass wall, as she flew quickly past the mirror and onto the stairs. “Blanche!” he called.
At the sound, she barely halted for a moment, a question on her face, then hurried up around the curve in the staircase, away from him. He rapped the glass now and called her again, but he seemed to be invisible, or far away. She had vanished into the darkness.
Blindly he turned and fought his way through to the living room, then rushed through the sitting room back down the corridor. What had once been the doorway into the music room, was now blocked with a sheet of one-way glass, framed to look like a huge mirror. Why? And why was Blanche here at this hour? It didn’t matter—she was here. He had to find her.
At last he found himself back in the entranceway, rushed up the steps into the darkness, then halted, and looked up and down the passageways to the left and to the right. No one.
She had vanished once again. If he hadn’t been so sure that he had seen her, he might have thought she was a phantom, a trick of the light in a house of mirrors. Gritting his teeth, he strained his ears for any sound, looking for any motion.
At last he thought he heard a murmur of voices to his left. Tense, he stepped softly down the passage, his footsteps muffled to nothing by the thick dark carpet. The voices were near impossible to locate, but after going up and down the passage twice, he finally placed the sound and halted in front of a closed door. He noticed a thin bar of light coming from the crack at the bottom of the door, and put his ear to the door. The voices were coming from within, and one of them was Blanche’s. The other was fainter, a weak male voice. Blanche and his father, talking.
He put a hand on the doorknob, and turned it slowly. It opened without a sound. The voices grew louder.
Inside he saw a luxurious white desk, and above it, a flat-paneled computer monitor flickering on an empty room. The voices were coming over the computer’s speakers, and on the screen, he saw the video images of two people talking. The colors were off, and the outlines were tinged with green. A menu tag at the bottom of the screen read “cam 6.”
Incredulous, he stepped into the private office suite, then fixed his eyes on the monitor again. It showed an image of a bedroom with pale lime-green walls and a white bed and black furniture. There was a sick man lying in the bed, and a girl sitting on a stool beside the bed. The colors in the picture were bad, but he could see the girl, her face washed out to white, her h
air black and choppy, her eyes dark smudges.
He studied the two figures. The girl was Blanche, and she was sitting on the stool, leaning towards the man, nodding her head. The man was speaking haltingly, with difficulty in a shallow, rasping voice that Bear slowly recognized despite the speech impediments. His father. But the figure in the bed bore little resemblance to the tall, urbane figure he remembered. His ruddy face was now pale and shrunken, his cheeks hollowed out, his hair limp and lifeless. One side of his face was clearly not operating the way it should be. And his eyes looked larger than Bear remembered, and drained of energy.
He made out his father’s words: “...of course I’m always glad to see you, but why are you here so late?”
The microphone thinned the girl’s voice out. She was tense, her hands on her knees as she sat. “I had to,” she said. “I talked with a pharmacist, and found out about one of the medications you’ve been getting. It’s not what you should be taking. You have to stop taking it until you check with another doctor.”
“Well, actually I already know it’s not what’s normally prescribed,” the man said, one half of his face looking clearly uncomfortable, the other half slack and motionless. “It’s something Elaine was able to get for me.” He fumbled with the bedspread with his left hand, picked up a remote control, and clumsily punched a button. A large television in the corner blinked off, and a buzz in the video monitor fell into silence while the picture on the computer screen became a bit sharper. “There are places you can get these kinds of things, if you know the right people, like Elaine does. It does seem to help the pain.”
Bear smiled grimly at the irony. So Dad has been using drugs—illegal prescription drugs.
There was a pause. The girl said timidly, “But my friend told me that this drug could put you into a coma.”
“But I’m probably going into a coma anyway,” the man said. “Don’t worry. I know about the side effects, Blanche. I’m very careful about how much I take. I limit myself to one dosage a day. So there’s nothing to worry about.” He smiled with half his face. “You’re very sweet to be so concerned for me. But I very much doubt that Elaine would be doing anything that would harm me.”
That last line was typical of his father, Bear knew. No matter how outrageously Elaine might behave, he was blind to it.
“But you said you were…afraid,” the girl seemed to have difficulty finding words.
The man tilted his face, in an attempt to shake his head. “You have to understand, Blanche, that my disease affects my moods, and my judgment. I know I might have said something to you that might have made you feel that I was more worried than I actually should have been. Elaine is a temperamental person. She’s difficult to live with at times. People have found it hard to understand why I would stay with her, but Blanche, at my age, you crave stability. All my life, people have come and gone, and I need someone who’s going to stay with me. People say she stays with me because of the money. Well, Elaine has plenty of assets of her own—the Mirror Corporation. I know she doesn’t need me, but she chooses to stay with me. So I can put up with some of the things she does because—well, because I’m grateful that she’s stuck with me. Which is more than I’ve done for other people.” He looked at her. There was silence. Blanche seemed to be embarrassed.
“You look like you’re starving.” With one hand, he pushed a tea tray towards her that was hovering over his chest, suspended on a black metal swinging arm. “Elaine made me dessert, but I couldn’t touch it. Are you hungry?”
“I am, thank you.” The girl took the plate from the tray and began to eat something off the plate that looked to Bear like strudel. “It’s delicious.”
“Yes, some family recipe. I forget where she said she got the fruit from, but I know she orders a crate of apples around this time of year from our friends in New England. There’s tea in the pot.”
The girl murmured something in appreciation. She turned over a teacup from the tray, picked up a small lime green teapot, and poured herself a cup of tea. Bear noticed a red rose lying on the tray beside the teapot, a spot of dark blood on the wavering screen, like a stage prop.
“By the way,” the man said, and paused, lifting up his chin so that Bear could see his familiar profile. “Elaine said that you’re dating my son.”
IV
“Your son?” she asked, a bit stupidly, jerked from her own parallel reverie and eating the dessert. She had fallen silent, feeling sillier and sillier for coming all the way out here, daring the darkness, only to find out that there had been nothing to worry about all along. So his question threw her for a loop.
“My son, Arthur Denniston.”
She blinked, trying to match the mental image she had created of Mr. Fairston’s selfish, distant children with Bear and Fish. “He’s your son?”
“Yes. By my first wife, Catherine. Who died of cancer.”
She stared at the sick man. Of course that’s why Mr. Fairston seemed so familiar. Now she saw the family resemblance beneath the marks of age and illness.
He squeezed a corner of the blanket with his good hand. “Elaine told me Arthur and Ben were just arrested again for drug possession. She showed me the notice about it in the paper. So I know it’s true.”
She hadn’t moved, even though her heart was racing, probably faster than was good for her heart. It was silly, completely irrational, but when she heard the bad news about Bear’s arrest, the only thing she could think was, He’s back. He’s come back.
V
“Did you see a white girl with short black hair come through here recently?” Brother Leon asked the man at the token counter on the subway. It was a chance in a million. He didn’t know if Blanche had taken the subway. And even if she had, she might have either had a token or gotten one from the machines.
“I have no idea if I did or I didn’t!” the man said, looking up at him with a perplexed smile.
“Thanks anyway,” Leon reddened, and retreated.
“So what do we do now?” Charley asked. He and Matt looked at him soberly.
“Um—I’m not sure,” he said.
He looked around as they walked back down the stairs, and spotted a homeless man stretched out in the shade of the staircase. He was surrounded by three mangy dogs on leashes that wagged their tails when they saw the friars.
“Brother Leon!” the man said, sitting up, and Leon recognized him from his neighborhood rounds.
“Hey Robbie, how are you?” he asked, reaching out to touch the man’s hand.
“Doin’ fine,” the man rasped, shaking his hand.
“How’s the pooches?” Brother Leon tousled the head of the nearest dog, which licked his hand appreciatively. The other dogs were already checking out Matt and Charley.
“That one got himself kicked by a jerk who came through here last night at midnight. Poor Molly was just being friendly, and he kicked her. Lookit!” The man indicated the smaller dog, which was holding its leg up as it stood, in a half-hearted attempt not to put any weight on it.
“That’s too bad,” Leon said, examining the dog. “Look, you come by the friary and I’ll have Brother George take a look at it, okay? He knows a lot about animals.”
“He does? Thanks. Maybe I will.”
“Robbie, have you seen a young white girl with short kinda ragged black hair down this way anytime this evening?”
Robbie looked around meditatively. “Well, there was a girl—a pretty one—who came through looking like that. Bout half hour to an hour ago?”
“Yeah, I’d say so.”
“Indian girl? With one of those scarf and nightgown things?”
Brother Leon squatted down. “What? You mean in a sari or something?”
“Yeah, all pink and blue with stars. Kind of wild.”
Of course—she had been wearing her Guadalupe costume! Leon reddened to think he had forgotten that. “Yes, that sounds like her.”
“Yeah, I saw her when I was up there, afore the man kicked me and my dogs
out. She got on the train.”
“Did you see which way she went?”
“Towards Manhattan, I’m pretty sure.”
Brother Leon’s heart skipped a beat. “Thanks, Robbie, thanks a lot.” He hurried up the steps to the train, with the other novices following close behind.
VI
Bear had moved further into the windowless office, watching the computer monitor with its spy video camera capturing every word that Blanche said, every move she made.
On the screen, Bear’s father looked at the girl warily. “I hope you’re not going to try and tell me that he’s innocent? I can tell you I’ve heard that story, many times before, from Arthur.”
“I know he’s innocent,” the girl said firmly. For some reason she was smiling as she pushed back her chopped hair.
“Blanche, you know, it bothers me that you never told me you two were dating.”
“I didn’t know.” She half-laughed and got to her feet. “I mean, I didn’t know he was your son. All I knew was that he wasn’t on good terms with his father, and…” she turned away, putting a hand to her hair to push it back behind her ear. It was a familiar gesture, but the hair was now so short it didn’t stay. And she cut her hair...? he distractedly thought to himself.
The girl crossed to the bedside table, her face away from the hidden microphone, so Bear missed her words. Then she turned back towards the bed, and he heard her saying, “…but mostly he just never talked much about you. And, the name Fairston, well, he never mentioned that you had changed your name.”
“Maybe he didn’t know about that, though I was sure Elaine had told him and Ben,” the man said slowly.
The girl set down the bottle of medication. “I’m sorry—I don’t mean to change the subject—but there is another reason I came over here. I—I saw Elaine. And she said you were planning on committing suicide.”
The man put his head to one side. “Did she? That’s odd. Well, I told her a few days ago that I’d changed my mind.”
“You did?”
The man seemed embarrassed and raised his good hand to his straggling hair to try to smooth it. “Well, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that I was depressed. You told me that once, remember? It sort of stuck in my mind, and I kept wondering if—well, I thought perhaps I should talk to a counselor first. Consult a professional.”
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