They both knew who was calling. They let it ring.
The phone stopped ringing. After a pause of less than a minute, it began again.
The ringing filled the mansion and echoed through its twenty-three rooms like a voice crying in the dark.
Natalie Terrell said, “Oh dear God,” and she got up and crossed the black and crimson Oriental rug to the telephone table. Edgar’s gaze tried to follow her, but his neck wouldn’t swivel past a certain point. She picked up the receiver with wrinkled, diamond-ring-adorned fingers. “Yes?”
No answer. Breathing.
“Yes?”
Then it came. Her voice: “Hi, Mother.”
Natalie stiffened. “I don’t care to talk to—”
“Don’t hang up. Please don’t. All right?”
“I’m not going to talk to you.”
“Are they watching the house?”
“I said I’m not going to talk—”
“Are they watching? Just tell me that.”
The elderly woman closed her eyes. She listened to the sound of her daughter breathing. Mary was their only child, since Grant had committed suicide when he was seventeen and Mary was fourteen. Natalie struggled for a moment, right against wrong. But which was which? She didn’t know anymore. “There’s a van parked down the street,” she said.
“How long has it been there?”
“Two hours. Maybe longer.”
“Do they have the line tapped?”
“I don’t know. Not from inside the house. I don’t know.”
“Anybody hassle you?”
“A reporter from the local paper came this afternoon. We talked awhile and he left. I haven’t seen any policemen or FBI, if that’s what you mean.”
“FBI’s in that van. You can believe it. I’m in Richmond.”
“What?”
“I said I’m in Richmond. At a pay phone. Have I been on TV yet?”
Natalie put a hand to her forehead. She felt faint, and she had to lean against the wall for support. “Yes. All the networks.”
“They found out faster than I thought they would. It’s not like it used to be. They’ve got those laptop computers and shit. It’s really Big Brother now, isn’t it?”
“Mary?” Her voice quavered and threatened to break. “Why?”
“Karma,” Mary said, and that was all.
Silence. Natalie Terrell heard the thin crying of a baby through the receiver, and her stomach clenched. “You’re crazy,” she said. “Absolutely crazy! Why did you steal a baby? For God’s sake, don’t you have any decency?”
Silence, but for the crying baby.
“The parents were on television today. They showed the mother leaving the hospital, and she was in such shock she couldn’t even speak. Are you smiling? Does that make you happy, Mary? Answer me!”
“It makes me happy,” Mary said calmly, “that I have my baby.”
“He’s not yours! His name is David Clayborne! He’s not your baby!”
“His name is Drummer,” Mary said. “Know why? Because his heart beats like a drum, and because a drummer sounds the call to freedom. So he’s Drummer now.”
Behind Natalie, her husband gave an incomprehensible shout, full of rage and pain.
“Is that Father? He doesn’t sound good.”
“He’s not. You’ve done it to him. That should make you happy, too.” About eight months after the stroke, Mary had called out of the blue. Natalie had told her what had happened, and Mary had listened and hung up without another word. A week later, a get well card had arrived in the mail with no return address and no signature, postmarked Houston.
“You’re wrong.” Mary’s voice was flat, without emotion. “Father did it to himself. He mindfucked too many people and all those bad vibes blew his head out like an old lamp. Does all his money make him feel better now?”
“I’m not going to talk to you anymore.”
Mary waited in silence. Natalie did not put down the phone. In a few seconds she could hear her daughter cooing to the baby.
“Let that baby go,” Natalie said. “Please. For me. This is going to be very bad.”
“You know, I’d forgotten how cold it can be up here.”
“Mary, let that child go. I’m begging you. Your father and I can’t stand any more.” Her voice snagged, and the hot tears came. “What did we ever do to make you hate us so much?”
“I don’t know. Ask Grant.”
Natalie Terrell slammed the telephone down, the tears blinding her. She heard the labored squeaking of the wheelchair as Edgar pushed himself across the Oriental carpet with all the strength in his spindly body. She looked at him, saw his face contorted and his mouth drooling, and she looked away quickly.
The telephone rang.
Natalie stood there, her head and body slumped like a broken puppet dangling from a nail. Tears raced down her cheeks, and she put her hands to her ears, but the telephone kept ringing…ringing…ringing.
“I’d like to see you,” Mary said when Natalie picked up the receiver again.
“No. Absolutely not. No.”
“You know where I’m going, don’t you?”
The mention of Grant had told her. “Yes.”
“I want to smell the water. I remember it was always a clean smell. Why won’t you meet me there?”
“I can’t. No. You’re a…you’re a criminal.”
“I’m a freedom fighter,” Mary corrected her mother. “If that’s criminal, to fight for freedom, then yeah, okay, I plead guilty. But I’d still like to see you. It’s been…Jesus… it’s been over ten years, hasn’t it?”
“Twelve years.”
“Blows my mind.” Then to the child: “Hush! Mama’s on the phone!”
“I can’t come there,” Natalie said. “I just can’t.”
“I’ll be here for a few days. Maybe. I’ve got some things to do. If you’d come see me, I’d be…you’d make me feel real good, Mother. We’re not enemies, are we? We’ve always understood each other, and we could talk like real people.”
“I talked. You never listened.”
“Like real people,” Mary plowed on. “See, I’ve got my baby now and there are things I have to do, and I know the pigs are hunting me but I’ve got to go on because that’s the way it is, that’s how things stand. I’ve got my baby now, and that makes me feel…like I belong in the world again. Hope, Mother. You know what hope is, don’t you? Remember, we talked about hope, and good and evil, and all that stuff?”
“I remember.”
“I’d like to see you. But you can’t let the pigs follow you, Mother. No. See, because I’ve got my baby. I’m not going to let the pigs take me and my Drummer. We’ll go to the angels together, but the pigs won’t take us. Can you dig it?”
“I understand,” the older woman said, her hand tight around the receiver.
“Gotta change Drummer’s diaper,” Mary said. “Bye, Mother.”
“Good-bye.”
Click.
Natalie backed away from the phone as one might retreat from a particularly deadly snake. She bumped into Edgar’s wheelchair, and he said something to her that sprayed spittle.
Perhaps thirty seconds passed. The phone began to ring once more.
Natalie didn’t move.
It rang and rang, and finally Natalie stepped forward, reached out, and picked up the receiver. Her face had gone deathly pale.
“We’ve got it on tape, Mrs. Terrell,” one of the FBI agents in the white van said. She thought it was the younger of the two, the one who’d shown her the phone-tracing device that automatically printed out a caller’s number. “It was from a pay phone inside the city limits, all right. We’re getting a precise location on it now, but your daughter’ll be long gone by the time we get a car there. Do you know where she’s going, Mrs. Terrell?”
Natalie had an obstruction in her throat. She swallowed and swallowed, but she couldn’t make it go away.
“Mrs. Terrell?” the young man urg
ed.
“Yes,” she answered with an effort. “Yes, I do know. She’s…going to our beach house. In Virginia Beach. The address is…” She couldn’t get her breath, and she had to stop for a moment. “The address is 2717 Hargo Point Road. It’s a white house with a brown roof. Is that all you need?”
“Do you have a phone number, please?”
She gave it to him. “Mary won’t answer the phone, though.”
“You’re sure about this, then?”
“Yes.” Again, the breathless sensation. “I’m sure.”
“How?”
“She mentioned Grant, her brother. He committed suicide at the beach house. And she said she wanted to smell the water.” Natalie felt a sharp stab in her heart. “That’s where we used to take her when she was a little girl.”
“Yes, ma’am. Excuse me, please.” There was a long pause. Talking it over, Natalie surmised. Then the younger man came back on the line. “Okay, that does it. Thank you for your cooperation, Mrs. Terrell.”
“I—” Her throat closed up.
“Ma’am?”
“I…oh God, I don’t…want anything to happen to that baby. You heard her. She said she’d kill the baby and herself, too. That’s what she meant. You heard her, didn’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What are you going to do, then? Go in after her?”
“No, ma’am, we’ll put the house under surveillance first. We’ll wait until daylight and try to pinpoint her position and the infant’s position in the house. If we have to, we’ll evacuate the other houses around it. We won’t go storming in like you see in the movies; all that does is get people killed.”
“I don’t want that baby’s blood on my hands. Do you hear me? I couldn’t stand to live if I thought I’d helped kill that child.”
“I hear you.” The young man’s voice was calm and sympathetic. “We’ll stake the house out for a while, and then we’ll see what has to be done. Just pray to God your daughter decides to listen to reason and give herself up.”
“She’ll never give up,” Natalie said. “Never.”
“I hope that’s where you’re wrong. We’re going to sit here awhile longer and make some calls, so if you think of anything, you know our number. One more thing: do you mind if we leave the tap on your line?”
“No, I don’t mind.”
“Thank you again. I know this hasn’t been easy.”
“No. Far from easy.” She hung up, and her husband made a gibbering sound.
At ten-thirty, Natalie put Edgar to bed. She kissed his cheek and wiped his mouth, and he gave her a weak, helpless smile. She pulled the covers up to his throat, and she wondered where her life had gone.
The white van left a little after eleven. From an upstairs window Natalie watched it go, the room dark behind her. She presumed another team of agents now had the beach house under watch. She let one more hour slip past, to make sure.
Then, bundled in an overcoat against the raw cold, Natalie left the house and went to the garage. She got into the gray Coupe de Ville, started the engine, and drove away into the night. For fifteen minutes or so she drove through the streets of Richmond, her speed slow, and she obeyed all traffic signs though there were hardly any cars out. She stopped at a Shell station on Monument Avenue to fill up with gas, and she bought a diet drink and a candy bar to calm her nervous stomach. She left the station and drove in aimless circles again, and all the time she watched her rearview mirror.
She pulled into an area of warehouses and railroad tracks, and she stopped the Cadillac next to a chain-link fence and watched a freight train speed past. Her gaze swept the dark streets around her. As far as she could tell, she was not being followed.
They believed her. Why wouldn’t they? She was the woman who’d vehemently said, in a 1975 interview on the Dick Cavett Show along with the families of other wanted criminals, that she hoped the police locked her daughter in a cage where she belonged and tossed the key into the Atlantic Ocean.
The quote had gotten a lot of newsprint. The FBI knew she was willing to help them in any way possible. She still felt that way. But now there was a vital difference: Mary had a baby.
Around one o’clock, Natalie Terrell turned the Cadillac up onto a ramp of I-95, and she headed north toward the wooded hills.
5
Into the Vortex
IT WAS BAD, THE nightmare.
In it, Laura gave David into the hands of the murderess, and she saw drops of blood falling from the woman’s fingers, falling like scarlet leaves through October air, falling to spatter on white sheets as ridged and rumpled as snowswept badlands. She gave David up, and the murderess and David became shadows that slipped away along a pale green wall. But something had been given in exchange; something was in Laura’s right hand. She opened her fingers, and saw the yellow Smiley Face pinned to the flesh of her palm.
Then the scene changed. She was in a parking lot on a hot and humid night, the blue lights of police cars spinning around her. Voices bellowed through bullhorns, and she heard the sharp clickings of bullet magazines being snapped into automatic rifles. She could see a woman standing on a balcony, caught in a white light, and one hand held a pistol while the other gripped David by the back of the neck. The woman wore a green paisley blouse and bell-bottom trousers with an American-flag belt, and she was raving as she held David in the air and shook him. Laura could feel his crying more than hear it, like a razor blade drawn along the folds of her labia. “I want my baby!” she told a shadowy policeman who passed on without speaking. “My baby! I want my baby!” She grasped at someone else; he looked blankly at her. She recognized Kastle. “Please!” she begged. “Don’t let my baby be hurt!”
“We’ll get your baby back for you,” he answered. “You can count on it.”
Kastle pulled away and disappeared into the vortex of shadows, and as Laura saw the snipers taking their positions she realized with a jolt of horror that Kastle had not promised to get David back alive.
“Hold your fire until I give the signal!” someone commanded through a bullhorn. She saw Doug sitting on the hood of a police car, his head slumped forward and his eyes half closed, as if all this had no meaning to him whatsoever. A spark of light caught her attention. She looked up at the corner of a rooftop, and there she could make out a shadowy shape aiming a rifle at Mary Terror. She thought the man was bald-headed—slick bald—and that something might be wrong with his face, but she couldn’t tell for sure; she thought she might know him, but that, too, was uncertain. The man was lifting his rifle to take aim. He wasn’t waiting for the signal; he was going to shoot Mary Terror, and his would be the bullet that made the madwoman fire her gun and blow David’s head apart.
“NO!” Laura screamed. “STOP IT!” She began running toward the building the sniper perched on, but the concrete mired her feet like fresh tar. She heard the click of his rifle, a bullet slipping into the chamber. She heard the insane raving of Mary Terror’s voice, and the shrill, frantic crying of her son. A doorway was ahead of her. She started through it, fighting the earth, and that was when two muscular dogs with flaming eyes leapt from the darkness at her.
She heard two shots, a split second apart.
The scream started to come out. It swelled in her throat and burst from her mouth, and someone was over her saying, “Laura? Laura, wake up! Wake up!”
She came up out of the hot darkness, sweat on her face. The lamp beside the bed was on. Doug was sitting on the bed beside her, his face furrowed with worry, and behind him stood Doug’s mother, who’d arrived from her home in Orlando earlier in the evening.
“It’s all right,” Doug said. “You were having a nightmare. It’s all right.”
Laura looked around the room, her eyes wide with fear. There were too many shadows. Too many.
“Doug, can I do anything?” Angela Clayborne asked. She was a tall, elegant woman with white hair, and she wore a dark blue Cardin suit with a diamond brooch on the lapel. Doug’s father,
divorced from Angela when Doug was in his early teens, was an investment banker in London.
“No. We’re okay.”
Laura shook her head. “We’re not okay. We’re not okay.” She kept repeating it as she pulled away from Doug and huddled up under the blanket again. She could feel sticky wetness between her thighs: the oozing stitches.
“Do you want to talk?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Mom, would you leave us alone for a minute?” When Angela had gone, Doug stood up and walked to the window. He peered through the blinds, out into the rainy dark. “I don’t see any reporters,” he told her. “Maybe they called it a night.”
“What time is it?”
He didn’t have to look at his watch. “Almost two.” He came back to her side. She smelled a stale aroma wafting from him; he hadn’t taken a shower since David had been stolen, but then, neither had she. “You can talk to me, you know. We still live in the same house.”
“No.”
“No what? No we don’t live in the same house? Or no you can’t talk to me?”
“Just…no,” she said, using the word like a wall.
He was silent for a moment. Then, in a somber voice: “I screwed it up, didn’t I?”
Laura didn’t bother to answer. Her nerves were still jangled by the nightmare, and she clung to the blanket like a cat.
“You don’t have to say anything. I know I screwed up. I just…I…well, I guess I’ve said everything I can say. Except…I’m sorry. I don’t know how to make you believe that.”
She closed her eyes, blocking out his presence.
“I don’t want…things to be like this. Between you and me, I mean.” He touched her arm under the blanket. She didn’t pull away, nor did she respond; she just lay there without moving. “We can work it out. I swear to God we can. I know I screwed up, and I’m sorry. What more can I say?”
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