by John Farris
"That's okay. I'm Eden. It's hot, isn't it?"
"Yeah. Hot. I'm used to it. Grew up out thisaway. But we may have rain once the Pardoner gets here."
Eden looks around at the burial plot.
"Do you want me to help?"
"Thanks. But there's only one shovel. And dying is, in the end, it's just down to your ownself, right? I mean, nobody else can do it for you."
"I guess not. How did it happen?"
"Plane crash. But you know about that."
In a flash, but without distress, Eden relives the events of her graduation day. She nods.
"Yeah. I do. Who else did you say was coming?"
"The Pardoner."
"Oh. Sure. Then you'll be on your way."
"Right. We have a little more time, though. Come on, let's hunker down in the shade a while. There's stuff you probably want to know. Tell me, how's Warhol?"
"Doing great. He misses you."
"Miss my kitty too," Portia Darkfeather says, with the suspicion of a tear in her eye. "Sorry I can't offer you refreshments. But as I was saying, didn't count on company today. Doesn't mean that I'm not happy to see you, Eden." Darkfeather looks around with a slight shrug of uneasiness as a cloud, or a shadow, momentarily dims the sun. She won't look up. "I only have a few minutes. What do you need to know?"
"Portland. Why, and who, and all that. And the next time. That's more important. It's soon, isn't it?"
"'Fraid so."
"Do you know where?"
"Madison, Wisconsin."
"Is there time to stop it?"
"That I don't know. Rona didn't—"
"Rona Harvester?"
"A very bad person. But not a Bad Soul. Neither am I." She blinks a teardrop. "The Pardoner won't see Bad Souls. They're pure evil, no hope for them." More tears fall, and she sobs. "I don't know what he'll say to me.
"It's okay, Portia. But what does Mrs. Harvester want?"
Darkfeather wipes her eyes and after a last tremulous sob recovers her voice.
"One word, five letters. Power. She's taking over from Clint after the next nuking. She'll have him assassinated, not that it wouldn't be a blessing, he's totally brain-locked. I don't know how they did it. There's a place called Plenty Coups, west of here. Put your forehead against mine, I'll show it to you. And everything else that's going on there."
Their foreheads touch. Temple to temple, and Eden slips inside Darkfeather's receptive mind. Eden swallows hard, her senses amuck. Then flashings, mind-numbing images. Flash, flash. She withdraws in dismay.
"Oh, no. Oh . . . no!"
And she closes her eyes momentarily. The wind is stronger beneath the trees, buffeting her. Eden feels the heat of the day like a weight on her lungs. But the sky has darkened. There is a fist of thunder in her brain. The stallion and packhorse mutter and shy nervously. When Eden looks up Portia Darkfeather is gone.
"Portia!"
Oh . . . she's just over there. At the burial ground. Kneeling penitently at the feet of the Pardoner, hair down over her naked breasts. He places his hand briefly on the crown of her head. She lifts her eyes, speaks to him. Eden can't hear what she is saying. The Pardoner smiles, but his smile is fierce. His blond hair is a little straggly on his shoulders. But his snakeskin suit is immaculate, so too the gold tooth in his smile. The spurs of his boots are made of silver, and sharp as talons.
Darkfeather trembles.
Eden gets to her feet to go to Darkfeathar's defense, even though they have just met. A hand gently pulls her back.
Eden looks around, at the face of the Good Lady.
"I thought I'd lost you!"
"Of course you haven't," Gillian Bellaver says to her daughter.
"Don't hold me like that. Why can't I help Darkfeather? I saw her life. I know everything that was done to her. Somebody has to speak up for her!"
"No, Eden. It's too late. There's nothing to be said for her now."
The cloud is furious, dark and low over the burial ground, like multiplying wasps brutal with buzz-tone.
"I don't want to see this," Eden moans, but she watches anyway with Gillian's arm comfortingly around her. The Pardoner's horses are black and neatly trimmed and have small silver hooves; the silver hooves and the patient cunning heads of the black horses make Eden feel giddy. The chariot behind the horses glows as if it is made of moonlight.
"You'll never get me up in that thing," she says as the Pardoner takes Darkfeather by the hand, raises her from her knees, and leads her away.
"Now you're being foolish. And forgetful. There's no eternal reward and there's no eternal punishment. There are just lessons to be learned. Or relearned."
"What about the Bad Souls?"
"Slow learners," Gillian says with a wry smile. "Very slow."
"There's a couple I have to deal with. Quickly. Help me."
"Can't do it, Eden. That's just not the way things happen. Here, there. Wherever."
"I hate the way things happen! I've missed you. Always. They deliberately kept me from you. How fair is that?"
"Life doesn't have to be fair. Or understandable. Only useful. Lessons, Eden. And now you've overstayed. Kick some butt, darling."
Eden blinks away tears, feeling Gillian's grip loosen. There is a trail of fire out there beyond the burial ground, rim-wrinkles on the dry land, a meadowlark-yellow wake in the darkened air, ascending, somewhere. Or perhaps descending—the dark is closing in and Eden has vertigo, can't tell which end is up, her right hand from her left. Strong winds try to lift her off her feet. Eden feels fragile, incomplete. Abandoned.
"Mother!"
Silence.
CHAPTER 7
WASHINGTON, D.C. • JUNE 2 • 8:20 A.M. EDT
"Good morning, Mr. President."
"Good morning, Mr. President." Clint Harvester appeared fit and chipper as he walked, discreetly guided by his wife, through the outer office to the Oval Office in the White House. Tan two-button suit, size forty-six, a subtle window pane check that the President had the height and heft to wear without seeming clownish, a light blue shirt with French cuffs, dark brown Peal shoes. Clint had had a workout and a rubdown and a good breakfast with his plastic tablespoon and a bib to absorb spillage. He was all smiles, although if anyone had been afforded the opportunity to observe him closely, the smile was just a touch gaga.
There were new faces at the secretaries' desks, two of them from the R Team, but he wouldn't have recognized the old faces. Mary Ellen Connaught, who had been Clint's personal secretary since his statehouse days in Montana, had been removed to the President's private study. Rona still needed Mary Ellen, and she was less of a potential problem in isolation. Rona had paid a high price for Mary Ellen's cooperation; even so she didn't trust the fiftyish spinster, who was a secret drinker.
Washington's insiders and, particularly, the media establishment, led by a diligent hack with investigative best-sellers to his credit and the sanctimonious nature of a castrated monk, had been trying to fan embers of rumor into publishable flame since the President's return. All of them clamoring for a few minutes with the President to check out his alleged fitness for themselves. The White House correspondents were likewise grumbling and prying away at their sources, although Rona had banned them from all but their little corner of the White House. The press corps could be persuasive with long-time White House functionaries, but Rona had terror on her side and everyone working there knew how effectively she could use it.
The senior staff meeting in the Oval Office featured Clint's six and two of Rona's, plus National Security Advisor Beau Chanson at Rona's request. The President's staff murmured "good morning" as if they had loose bridgework to protect as well as their reputations. Clint beamed at them. He was humming a simple tune that had stuck to a batch of memory cells in his disordered brain, a commercial jingle he'd heard on TV.
Rona smilingly sat Clint down in a leather armchair placed to one side of his desk. From her purse she took out a Rubik's Cube and handed it to her hus
band to play with. For some reason he was fascinated by Rubik's Cube, the bright colors probably. Rona took Clint's chair behind his desk. The blue suit she had chosen to wear today exactly matched the indigo field for the fifty stars on the flag behind her.
Beau Chanson was staring at a spot of egg yolk on Clint Harvester's tie. No one else in the Oval Office wanted to look at him. Rona put on her reading glasses and glanced at the two-page summary of current and upcoming White House events for which Clint would be, at the last minute, indisposed. She cleared her throat. Beau Chanson looked over at her, rising to some sort of challenge. Obviously Clint's loyalists had elected Beau their spokesman.
Rona offered him a relaxed smile and said, "Out with it, Beau."
"The question is, Madam—Mrs. Harvester, how long can murderers get away with the crime if there is blood on their hands that won't wash off."
Rona cocked her head with a certain combative fervor. "That's a movie, isn't it? No, wait. A play. What was her name? Help me out here, Beau."
"Lady Macbeth," Chanson said dourly, inspecting his own hands. "But of course I wasn't drawing a parallel strictly between you and—"
"Now I remember! Read it in high school. Loved him, hated her. She had big ideas but lost her nerve at crunch time."
Beau nodded tensely.
"Not a good analogy," Rona said. "We haven't murdered anyone. Clint's speech the other night was a barn-burner. It raised patriotic temperatures across this land. My land. Your land. The most prosperous nation on earth. Clint socked it to us. Get your chin up, America! What does it matter where the speech actually came from? They were his words. All speeches are a form of manipulation. Does that equate to guilt-ridden stares and bloody hands? I've lost my husband. Yes, it's true. God bless him, I may never get him back. Whole and hearty and loving. My strength and my inspiration." Rona paused briefly, trying to remember if she was taping this. Yes, the recorder was voice-activated. "The man I love so deeply is all but gone. That is the tragedy we must all bear. Yet we cannot lose sight of what we've gained since he was elected president. Clint Harvester is nothing less than the Abraham Lincoln of his era! A symbol of what is right about America and will always be right. Clint When It Counts has become more than just a slogan. It echoes in the mind of the American people like the words of 'America the Beautiful.' Our man from Montana, those spacious skies. Riding out of the frontier with our nation's standard held high. Thank God we're a country that respects image even more than idealism. How can we afford to lose Clint Harvester now? So there's an element of deception involved in continuing the new spirit of optimism which the polls are going to show this week. What of it? Clint looks buff, doesn't he?" She gave her husband a fond glance, and noticed with a tingle of surprise that he had solved Rubik's Cube and was just sitting there playing with an earlobe and studying her amiably. "A hell of a lot more presentable than Boris Yeltsin, trying to keep his mouth out of his eye while he stumbled through official duties." Rona paused to catch her breath. "Now let's get over our little guilt spasms, shall we, our metaphorically bloody hands. As the Aussies say, it's crap bananas. We have got ourselves a fucking country to run."
CHAPTER 8
HOLBROOK, CALIFORNIA • JUNE 2 • 10:30 A.M. PDT
The Shipp and Proffit Funeral Home and Crematory ("Family owned and operated since 1926") was located on West Sutter, an area of turn-of-thecentury homes, most of them large frame Victorians restored and occupied by lawyers and antique dealers.. The home was conveniently located a block from the small city's hospital. There were two acres of grounds with radiant willow trees, a meandering creek, and a prayer garden, nondenominational.
Both of Riley Waring's parents were deceased, but his brother Carl was mayor of Holbrook, so the turnout for Riley's funeral was a civic event. Carl and his wife also had nine children, three of whom had children of their own. Betts couldn't attend and Eden's whereabouts was unknown. Even so the funeral was covered by both local TV stations and three syndicated junk-journalism gossip shows, each with its own satellite uplink truck parked on Sutter. The weather was fair and all of the media attention, including a circling helicopter with a cameraman standing boldly outside on one of the skids, attracted a crowd of local people hoping for a glimpse of Eden. And Eden was just about the only topic of conversation among the arriving mourners. Carl had anticipated something of a melee. Reserve police officers were on hand. Four California Highway Patrol motorcycle cops had showed up for escort duty. Big guys on their police-model Harleys. Carl hadn't requested them, but he was touched by someone else's thoughtfulness. A note to the Commissioner would be his first order of business when Carl returned to the office.
Shipp and Proffit could accommodate very large funerals if necessary, by turning the three viewing parlors on the first floor into one big chapellike room. Riley Waring's mourners numbered close to two hundred by the time brother Carl rose to deliver his eulogy.
There were two late arrivals, escorted upstairs from the basement by Sandy Proffit III and in through a side door. Most of the mourners were looking at Carl, a big man with the sort of homely face women often found endearing, hair dyed too dark for his age, and a weight problem that was always threatening to get out of control. Carl gave the latecomers only a flicker of a glance, enough to register that he didn't know them.
The man was tall and had a weathered face, an outdoorsman's tracklike wrinkles at the corners of sharp, somewhat hooded gray eyes. He walked with a limp and carried an interesting-looking cane, dark and knuckly, capped by a gold lion's head. The young woman with him wore a simple black sleeveless dress, a strand of pearls, dark glasses that hid much of her face like the Lone Ranger's mask. Her blond hair was cut short and slicked back in a tight arrowhead. They took seats to one side of the expanded viewing room. The young woman placed both hands on the Bible she had brought with her, and sat quietly with her face turned toward Carl and the rosewood coffin behind him, banked with floral tributes. Carl shouldered his burden of sadness and began to talk about his brother.
In the Multiphasic Operations and Research Group's surveillance van, which carried the logo of a florist in a city thirty miles north of Holbrook, technicians from Watchbird Section were running tapes acquired from several cameras that had been trained on the parking lot, all exterior walkways, and every outside door of the Shipp and Proffit Funeral Home. A dozen tapes flashed by on as many screens of a computerized scanner called Face-Up, but faster than a human eye could follow. The technology was the design of a MORG proprietary. A database contained Eden Waring's facial contours, and the computer was searching for a match among the twenty or so young women approximately Eden's age who were attending Riley's funeral.
"We expect her to be disguised," a Watchbird techie explained to one of the MORG agents assigned to the funeral. "But she would have had to put on at least thirty pounds in less than a week to change her facial features enough to fool Face-Up. That's a lot of Haagen-Dazs."
"Face-Up don't fuckup?" the agent murmured.
"Cool. Where did they get you, Comedy Central?" The technician, who had a foot and a half of arrogant bushy mustache and a hairless pate, fingered his keyboard lovingly. The center screen of the display, somewhat larger than the others, was projecting a winner. He froze and enhanced, added Eden's yearbook photo to a box on the screen. Enhanced that. Superimposed. In the other photo her face was lifted toward the surveillance camera over the door of a basement entrance.
"There's your girl. I think I dig her more as a blondie. You guys need printouts? How about something in the style of a wanted poster? If there's a reward, I was there first. Like I always am."
"Uncle Carl?"
The other mourners had dispersed. Carl Waring had paused at the head of his brother's casket for a few moments of contemplation and prayer. He turned to see the blond girl who had come in late. The man who had accompanied her was standing some distance away, arms folded, watching them. She took off her sunglasses as she approached him. Now he recognized her. T
ears flowed. They embraced.
"You came."
"Of course."
"Have you seen Betts, Eden?"
"Yes. She was hurt, but she'll be okay."
"How—? I don't understand what's happened."
"I hope I can explain it to you."
Two of the funeral home associates had appeared and waited with clasped hands to close Riley Waring's coffin.
Carl glanced at the tall man who had come with his niece, wondering who he might be. He said to Eden, "Would you ride with me to the memorial gardens? We can talk on the way. It'll just be family there, Marge and the kids and the minister, of course."
Eden glanced back at Tom Sherard, who nodded.
"Certainly, Carl. Oh, that's Tom. He's a friend. Tom, do you mind following us in your SUV?"
Sherard nodded, smiled at her, and, leaning on his cane, limped out the door.
With their arms around each other, Carl and Eden turned for a last look at Riley. His face like a cleverly painted wood carving in the immaculate deeply gleaming coffin. He was wearing a double-breasted suit Eden hadn't seen before. Eden clutched her throat as if it were full of nettles and uttered a sound between a sigh and a sob. She appeared to collapse. Carl looked at her in anguish and bewilderment. Sandy Proffit III stepped forward smoothly to take the convulsed girl off Carl's hands. He'd seen it happen many times.
"She just needs a few moments," Proffit said. "I'll take her into my study. Mayor, if you're ready to join your family now—"
Carl nodded dumbly. Eden, grieving, was led away, supported by Proffit and a matronly woman who seemed to be there solely for such crises. They spoke soothingly to Eden. Carl wiped his eyes. The other Shipp and Proffit employees who had been waiting to take Riley's coffin down to the hearse in the rear courtyard drew a curtain between Carl and his brother's earthly remains. Carl stumbled out to the vestibule where his wife and children were somberly gathered.
The family was ushered into waiting limousines on the street. Carl stayed on the sidewalk, looking back at the front entrance, wishing Eden would come out, wishing it was over with. Media people, cameras; a small crowd remained behind police barricades, all of them hanging on like vultures waiting for a prospector's pack mule to die.