think ... oh, that he's had to go off to some clinic to dry out or-"
Parker had heard enough. He rose to leave, but Essie got between him
and the doorway, trying to delay him by making him feel guilty that he
had not finished his coffee or even tasted a cookie. She suggested tea
instead of coffee, some strudel, or "perhaps an almond croissant." By
dint of the same indomitable will that had made him a great painter, he
managed to get to the front door, through it, and onto the portico.
She followed him all the way to the rental car in her driveway. The
little vomit-green Tempo looked, for that one moment, as beautiful as a
Rolls-Royce, for it offered escape from Essie Craw. As he sped away, he
quoted Coleridge aloud, an apt passage.
Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
He drove around for half an hour, working up the courage to do what must
be done. Finally, upon his return to the Salcoe house, he parked boldly
at the head of the circular driveway, in the shadows of the massive
pines. He went to the front door again, insistently pressed the bell
for three minutes. If anyone was home and merely unwilling to see
visitors, he would have answered that unrelenting ring out of sheer
desperation. But no one responded.
Parker walked along the veranda, studying the front windows, being
nonchalant, acting as if he belonged there, though the property was so
shrouded by trees and lush landscaping that he could not be spotted
easily from the street-or from Essie Craw's windows. The drapes were
shut, preventing a glimpse of the interior. He expected to see the
telltale electricity-conducting tape of an alarm system on the glass.
But there was no tape and no other indication of electronic security.
He stepped off the end of the veranda and went around the western side
of the house, where the morning sun had not shrunk the long, deep
shadows of the pines. He tried two windows there. They were locked.
In back of the house were more shrubs, flowers, and a large brick patio
with a lattice cover, outdoor wet-bar, expensive lawn furniture.
He used his coat-protected elbow to smash in a small pane on one of the
French doors. He unlocked the door and went inside, pushing through the
drapes into a tile-floored family room.
He stood very still, listening. The house was silent.
It would have been uncomfortably dark if the family room had not opened
onto a breakfast area and the breakfast area onto the kitchen, where
light entered through the glass in that uncurtained door to the patio.
Parker moved past a fireplace, billiards table-and froze when he spotted
the motion-detection alarm unit on the wall. He recognized it from when
he had investigated security systems for his Laguna house. He was about
to flee when he recalled that a small red light should have been visible
on the unit if it was in operation. The bulb was there-but dark.
Apparently the system had not been activated when the Salcoes had left.
The kitchen was roomy, with the best appliances. Beyond that was a
serving pantry, then the dining room. The light from the kitchen did
not reach that far, so he decided to risk turning on lights as he went.
In the living room, he stood very still again, listening.
Nothing. The silence was deep and heavy, as in a tomb.
When Brendan Cronin entered the Blocks'kitchen after rising late and
taking a long hot shower, he found little Marcie coloring moons and
murmuring eerily to herself. He thought of how he had mended Emmeline
Halbourg with his hands, and he wondered if he could cure Marcie's
psychological obsession by the application of that same psychic power.
But he dared not try. Not until he learned to control his wild talent,
for he might do irreparable harm to the girl's mind.
Jack and Jorja were finishing omelets and toast, and they greeted him
warmly. Jorja wanted to make breakfast for Brendan, too, but he
declined. He only wanted a cup of coffee, black and strong.
As Jack ate, he examined four handguns that were lying on the table
beside his plate. Two of them were Ernie's. Jack had brought the other
two with him from the East. Neither Brendan nor anyone else referred to
the firearms, for they knew their enemy might be listening right now. No
point revealing the size of their arsenal.
The guns made Brendan nervous. Maybe because he had a prescient feeling
that the weapons would be used repeatedly before day's end.
His characteristic optimism had left him, largely because he had not
dreamed last night. He'd had his first uninterrupted sleep in weeks,
but for him that was no improvement. Unlike the others, Brendan had been
having a good dream every night, and it had given him hope. Now the
dream was gone, and the loss made him edgy.
"I thought it would be snowing by now," he said as he sat down at the
table with a cup of coffee.
"Soon," Jack said.
The sky looked like a great slab of dark-gray granite.
Ned and Sandy Sarver, serving as the second team of outriders, had
driven into Elko to rendezvous with Jack, Jorja, and Brendan at the Arco
Mini-Mart at four in the morning, then had cruised around town until
seven-thirty, by which time some of those back at the Tranquility would
have set out on their tasks for the day. They returned to the motel at
eight o'clock, ate a quick breakfast, and went back to bed to get a few
more hours of rest in order to cope with the busy day ahead.
Ned woke after little more than two hours, but he did not get out of
bed. He lay in the dimness of the motel room for a while, watching
Sandy sleep. The love he felt for her was deep and smooth and flowing
like a great river that could bear them both away to better places and
times beyond all the worries of the world.
Ned wished he was as good a talker as he was a fixer. Sometimes he
worried that he had never been able to tell her exactly how he felt
about her. But when he tried to put his sentiments into words, he
either became tongue-tied or heard himself expressing his emotions in
hopelessly inarticulate sentences and leaden images. It was good to be
a fixer, with the talent to repair everything from broken toasters to
broken cars to broken people. Yet sometimes, Ned would have traded all
his mending skills for the ability to compose and speak one perfect
sentence which would convey his deepest feelings for her.
Now, watching her, he realized that she was no longer sleeping. "Playing
possum?" he asked.
She opened her eyes and smiled. "I was scared, the way you were
watching me, that I was going to get eaten alive, so I played possum."
"You look good enough to eat; that's for sure."
She threw aside the covers and, naked, opened her arms to him. They
fell at once into the familiar silken rhythms of love-making at which
they had become so sensuously adept during the past year of her sexual
awakening.
In the afterglow, as they lay side by side, holding hands, Sandy said,
"Oh, Ned, I'must be the happiest woman on earth. Since I met you down
in Arizona all those years ago, since you took me under your wing,
you've made me very happy, Ned. In fact, I'm so crazy-happy now that if
God struck me dead this minute, I wouldn't complain."
"Don't say that," he told her sharply. Rising up on one elbow, leaning
over her, looking down at her, he said, "I don't like you saying-that.
It makes me ... superstitious. All this trouble we're in-it's possible
some of us will die. So I don't want you tempting fate. I don't want
you saying things like that."
"Ned, you're about the least superstitious man I know."
"Yeah, well, I feel different about this. I don't want you saying
you're so happy you wouldn't mind dying, nothing like that. Understand?
I don't want you even thinking it."
He slipped his arms around her again, pulling her very tightly against
him, needing to feel the throb of life within her. He held her so close
that after a while he could no longer detect the strong and regular
stroking of her heart, which was only because it had become synchronized
with-and lost inhis own beat.
In the Salcoe family's Monterey house, Parker Faine was looking
primarily for two things, either of which would fulfill his obligation
to Dom. First, he hoped to find something to prove they had actually
gone to Napa-Sonoma: If he found a brochure for a hotel, he could call
and confirm that the Salcoes had checked in safely; or if they went to
the wine country regularly, perhaps an address book would contain the
telephone number of the place where they stayed. But he half-expected
to find the other thing instead: overturned
furniture, bloodstains, or other evidence that the Salcoes had been
taken against their will.
Of course, Dom had only asked him to come talk with these people. He
would be appalled to know that Parker had gone to these illegal lengths
when the Salcoes had been unlocatable. But Parker never did anything by
halves, and he was enjoying himself even though his heart had begun to
pound and his throat had clutched up a bit.
Beyond the living room was a library. Beyond that, a small music room
contained a piano, music stands, chairs, two clarinet cases, and a
ballet exercise bar. Evidently, the twins liked music and dance.
Parker found nothing amiss on the first floor, so he slowly climbed the
stairs, staying in the runner of plush carpet between oak inlays. The
light from the first floor reached just to the top step. Above, the
second-floor hallway was dark.
He stopped on the landing.
Stillness.
His hands were clammy.
He did not understand why he was clutching up. Maybe instinct. It
might be wise to pay attention to his more primitive senses. But if
anyone had wanted to ambush him, there had been plenty of places on the
first floor ideal for the purpose, yet the rooms had been deserted.
He continued upward, and when he reached the secondfloor hallway, he
finally heard something. It was a cross between a beep-sound and a
blip-sound, and it came from rooms on both ends of the hall. For a
moment he thought the alarm system was about to go off, after all, but
an alarm would have been a thousand times louder than these beep-blips.
The sounds came in counterpointed, rhythmic patterns.
He found a switch at the head of the stairs and snapped on the overhead
lights in the hall. Standing motionless once more, he listened for
noises other than the curious beep-blips. He heard none. There was
something familiar about the sound, but it eluded him.
His curiosity was greater than his fear. He had always been compelled
by a chronic curiosity, with frequent acute attacks of same, and if he
had not allowed it to drive him in the past, he'd never have become a
successful painter. Curiosity was the heart of creativity. Therefore,
he looked both ways along the hall, then turned right and walked
cautiously toward one source of the beep-blips.
At the end of the hallway, there were two distinct sets of beeping
sounds, each with a slightly different rhythm, both coming from a dark
room where the door was three-quarters shut. Poised to flee, he pushed
the door all the way open. Nothing leaped at him out of the darkness.
The beeping became louder, but only because the door was out of the way
now. He saw that the room was not entirely dark. On the far wall, thin
ribbons of pale gray light outlined drapes that were drawn across a very
large window or perhaps a pair of balcony doors; the Salcoes' Southern
Colonial had lots of balconies. In addition, around the corner from the
doorway, out of sight, were two sources of eerie soft green light that
did little to dispel the gloom.
Parker eased forward, clicked the light switch, entered the room, saw
the Salcoe twins, and thought for an instant that they were dead. They
were lying on their backs in a queensized bed, covers drawn up to their
shoulders, unmoving, eyes open. Then Parker realized that the beeping
and the green light came from EEG and EKG monitors to which both girls
were connected, and he saw the IV racks trailing lines to spikes
inserted in their arms, so he knew they were not dead but merely in the
process of being brainwashed. The chamber had none of the quality of a
teenaged girl's room; from the lack of personal mementos or any stamp of
individuality, he assumed it was a guest room and that the girls had
been put here in a single bed simply to make it easier to monitor them.
But where were their captors and tormentors? Were the mind-control
experts so certain of the effectiveness of their drugs and other devices
that they could leave the family alone and dash out for a Big Mac and
fries at McDonald's? Was there no risk at all that one of the Salcoes,
in a moment of lucidity, might tear out his IV line, rise up, and flee?
Parker went to the nearest girl, looked into her blank eyes. For a few
seconds she peered up unblinking, then suddenly blinked furiously-ten,
twenty, thirty times-then stared unblinking again. She did not see
Parker. He waved a hand across her eyes and got no reaction.
He saw that she was wearing a pair of earphones connected to a tape
recorder that lay on the pillow beside her head. He leaned close to
her, lifted one earphone an inch, and listened to a soft, melodic, and
very soothing voice, a woman's voice: "On Monday morning, I slept in
late. It's a wonderful hotel "We're sleeping late because the staff is
so quiet, so respectful. It's actually a country club as well as a
hotel, so it's not like other places, where maids make a racket in the
halls as soon as the sun rises. Oh, don't you just love the wine
country! I'd like to live there someday. Anyway, after we finally got
up, Chrissie and I took a long walk around the grounds, sort of hoping
we'd run into some neat boys, but we couldn'tfind any. . .."
The hypnotic rhythms of the woman's voice spooked Parker. He put the
<
br /> earphones back in place.
Evidently, one or more of the Salcoes had remembered what they had
experienced at the Tranquility Motel the summer before last. So those
memories had again been repressed. Now to cover the time span of this
current brainwashing session, new false memories were being implanted, a
process that included the repeated playing of a tape recording that
undoubtedly had subliminal as well as audible messages to impart.
Dom had explained some of it to Parker on the telephone, Saturday and
Sunday nights. But Parker had not fully appreciated the hideousness of
the conspiracy until he heard that insidious whisper in the Salcoe
girl's ear.
He moved to the foot of the bed and studied the other twin, whose eyes
also alternated between blihkless stares and abrupt, machine-gun bursts
of blinks. He wondered if he would do any physical or mental harm to
them if he pulled out their IV lines, disconnected them from the
machines, and moved them out of the house before their captors returned.
Better to find a phone, call the police How long they were watching him
he did not know, but suddenly he was aware that he and the twins were
not alone. He jumped and whirled toward the door, where two men had
entered the room. They were wearing dark slacks, white shirts with the
sleeves rolled up and the collars unbuttoned, neckties loosened and
askew. At the doorway behind them was another man, bespectacled and in
a suit with his tie in place. They had to be government agents, for no
one else would bother to wear business clothes while engaged upon
Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers Page 78