Stunts, page 24
The rain increased.
He wiped his face.
The wind began to moan above the rooftops, and many of those watching began to scurry away.
Then he whirled and sprinted back for his car. If the police wouldn’t listen to him, most likely wouldn’t listen to Addie, perhaps someone they respected would change their minds for him. And the only one he could think of at the moment was Rupert Flaunter. A long shot, probably worse, but it was better than racing from one shadow to another, waiting for Addie to take a turn thinking of herself for a change.
By the time he reached the church, fighting the wind that tried to slam him off the road, he was convinced that this would work; by the time he had parked in the driveway and had jumped into the rain, he was equally convinced that Ludden was right and he really was nuts after all.
No one answered the doorbell or responded to his heavy knocking on the rectory door. He stepped back, cupped his hands around his mouth and called out against the wind, squinting at the windows, called out again, then hurried across the grass toward the church.
He stopped when he reached the graveyard gate.
He could see the top of Flaunter’s head above an ancient tombstone, the trees twisting, their branches snapping like angered geese. Several dead limbs had already fallen, a sodden leaf slapped him stingingly on the cheek. As he clawed it away, he pushed through the gate and held up an arm to shield him as he moved.
“Reverend Flaunter!”
The head stirred.
Unless it was the wind.
Darker now, the headstones growing, a dead-flower wreath spinning away across the grass.
Halfway there he saw the branch, a huge one, split open and lying across the grave where the minister sat. He tried to run, but the wet grass took his traction; he sprawled on his chest, took a taste of mud, and crawl-ran to the marker and hauled himself up, and looked over.
“Oh Jesus,” he said. “Oh Jesus.”
The wind sighed.
As he batted and tore his way through the tangle of twigs and smaller branches, most of them too wet now to snap away easily, he noted the raw pale wound where the limb had been torn from its trunk and had landed square across the minister’s chest. A gouge in his cheek that ran blood and rain; one eye swollen, purple, bleeding lightly from under the lid; a gash across the top of his head; one hand pinned to the ground, the other to his stomach.
Evan tried to lift the branch, and failed, tried to break or bend away the rest that held the man down.
The wind soughed through the belfry.
“Doesn’t matter.”
He jumped at the voice, looked down and saw the minister looking back with one eye. “Have you out in a minute,” he told him.
Flaunter winced and shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, lad. Me and Lem are friends.”
A cough; a bubble of foam the rain missed for a while.
Evan dropped to his knees in the mud and grass. “Your door’s locked. Where do you keep your tools? I need a shovel, an ax.”
Flaunter’s one-eyed gaze traced the twigs, the little branches, made Evan look at the man’s chest and face. “I’m not that dim, Mr. Kendal. Not that dim.”
Aw shit, he thought, and could think of nothing else to do but try to wipe the rain from the minister’s face.
“I saw Professor Burwin.”
Evan froze. “Where?” His voice was strained.
“Across the way, in the field. I tried to call him, but he couldn’t hear me.”
A cough; a whimper; the rain finally took the bubble.
The eye closed.
In his helplessness, Evan felt like weeping.
“Lem and I.”
The wind.
Evan leaned closer.
“God’s will, Mr. Kendal.”
He couldn’t help it: “Your time, Reverend?”
A nod, a gasp of pain.
“There …”
“Don’t,” Evan cautioned, an automatic response.
Flaunter managed a one-sided smile. “You never argued with me, Mr. Kendal. Never argued, like the doctor.”
An ambulance sirened by, and Evan tensed to leap to his feet, thinking that somehow he might be able to flag it down. The tension died; he sagged.
“Always a plan, you know. Always a plan.”
The eye opened.
Evan smiled. “God’s?”
“Who else, Mr. Kendal?” A smile there again, faint but true. “A hell of a time you picked to take me on.”
The wind gusted, but the rain eased somewhat.
Harsh whisper: “You don’t trust my word, Mr. Kendal?”
“It’s not a matter of trust, Reverend. The proof, I guess.”
“Ah. Well, I can’t help you there.” Flaunter swallowed, and choked, something faintly yellow slipped between his lips. “It’s not proof you’d need, it’s belief. All of it, Mr. Kendal, is a matter of belief.”
Evan didn’t know what to say.
Flaunter said it for him: “Oh Jesus, I’m frightened!”
Another branch crashed somewhere deep in the graveyard.
Evan wanted to tell him not this time, Rupert, it’s not God this time, your faith is intact, but the eye closed again, and rain sluiced across their faces, and he touched the man’s shoulder and said instead, “God speed.”
Something touched his shoulder.
He whirled, still crouched, and angrily slapped away a portion of the branch shoved against him by the wind.
When he turned back he knew, and in knowing rose and left the graveyard.
The drive back was slow.
Rage at Paul made it nearly impossible to breathe; sadness, not quite grief, made his breathing hitch. He rolled down the window, not caring about the rain, he was already so drenched he might as well be naked, and took a series of deep breaths as he followed the road and the village grew and the High Street widened and there, standing on the sidewalk, Addie with her black bag, brown hair blackened, face smudged.
He pulled over.
She climbed in.
“Bad?”
“Not as bad as could be.”
He sat there, not knowing where to go next. When a panda car pulled up alongside him, a policeman asking him to move off the main road, Evan told him about Rupert Flaunter. Addie gasped. The policeman nodded solemnly and asked him again to move on.
He did, and turned right at the first intersection, hissing through streets of brown brick rowhouses, their already dying gardens half-beaten to the ground. Cars at the curbing. No one on the sidewalks. A waste bin rolling around near a storm drain, rattling on the tarmac, drummed on by the rain.
They reached a small playing field, goalposts grey, no netting, and he followed the streets around it until they faced the center of town.
He parked.
“This is dumb,” he said. “There’s no way anyone will believe that it’s all Paul’s fault.”
“Is it?”
“You know it is.”
“How?”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Ludden already asked me that, and if I had a concrete answer, I’d tell you. But I don’t know. I just know.”
“So many people,” she whispered.
He looked at the field, at the goalposts, and saw Paul.
“Jesus.”
He was out of the car before Addie could say a word. Running across the grass. Arms tucked to his sides.
Paul stood at the far side, head up, water dripping from his hat. He didn’t move. He waited.
Evan felt the rage fold his hands into fists, narrow his eyes, draw his lips tight across his teeth. He didn’t care if anyone could see them; he was going to strangle the man, kick him to death, tear out his goddamn heart if he had to.
Paul’s head jerked slightly.
Evan slowed, looked back, saw Addie following. “No,” he called, and waved her back. “Addie, no!”
Paul laughed, the high-pitched shrill of a madman, and slapped his knees in delight.
Evan stopped just six yards away. “I’m going to kill you.”
“Oh, I wish you would,” Paul said unconcernedly. “Truly, I wish you would. But as I believe I already told you, I’m not quite ready for that just yet. How are you, Addie? Practice doing well?”
Addie stopped level with Evan, though some distance away; three points of a triangle, Paul at its head.
Paul’s face was jaundiced, even in the hat’s shadow, and when the wind caught the brim and threatened to take it, the hand that clamped the crown was vein and bone. The other hand was still gloved.
“My god,” Addie said, but she didn’t move forward.
“How?” Evan demanded, a gesture toward the fire on the far side of all the housing.
Paul smiled. “Well, I suppose you could say I’ve cursed this place, Ev. Yes, I suppose you could say that.”
Addie held her bag to her chest; the bag was open.
“I don’t believe it.” He took a step closer. “It’s nonsense, Paul. All you have to do is think about it. Whatever you’ve got has made you crazy.”
Paul shook his head. “Oh, you do believe it, Evan. I know you do. Perhaps I was exaggerating when I said ‘cursed,’ but the end’s the same, wouldn’t you say?” He winked. Slowly. “You believe it, my friend. You just don’t want to.”
Another step. “It’s crazy.”
“Paul?” Addie said. The bag was closed, at her side.
“You know, my dear, I had once hoped, long ago, that perhaps you’d give up that ridiculously sainted profession of yours and join me—join Evan and me, actually—in our ghoulish pursuit of history. It’s much more rewarding, and exciting, than watching your patients die, wouldn’t you think? Ours, as it were, are already dead.”
Evan and Addie as one—another step.
Paul smiled.
“Look,” Evan said evenly, “you told me you were going to kill us.”
“But I am, aren’t I?”
“What? How the hell do you figure that? You’ve just about killed everyone else but.” He glanced at Addie, saw her left hand behind her back. Something there. A syringe. “So we’re here now. So why don’t you try it?”
“Evan,” Paul chided, “it doesn’t work that way. You know that. You’ve seen. You have.”
Addie sprang for him, Evan a second later, a second too late as Paul clubbed her aside with his gloved hand, then used it to grab Evan’s collar, the bare hand between them.
Evan smelled death.
But when he struggled, grabbing Paul’s wrist in both hands, the gloved grip tightened, and the sight of that scabrous hand suddenly between their faces froze him. He couldn’t not look at it, though he saw between the spread fingers the dead look in Paul’s eyes.
Addie moaned.
“Ah no, Evan, not this way. Not this way at all.” A smile, water spilling from the hat, the wind rising again. “Think about it, Ev. Think hard. I’m killing you, you fool, and you don’t even know it.”
He threw Evan aside as if he weighed nothing, dropped quickly beside Addie and said, “Listen to me, bitch, you’ll be dead by week’s end. Ask your lover. He knows.” And he slapped her again, rolling her over, making her cry out.
Evan to his feet.
Paul holding out the bare hand and casually slipping on its glove.
“The taxi,” Paul said. “I give you that free because you’re too dim to remember.”
As Evan vacillated between helping Addie and charging Burwin again, Paul backed away, nodding, waving his hand as if he were royalty dismissing a peasant. When he suddenly turned and ran, Evan ran a step toward him, cursed, and hurried to help Addie back to her feet.
“Take me home,” she said shakily.
He looked at the rain falling where Paul had stood, had run. “I’ll do better than that. Where’s your passport?”
Thirty-One
Addie stared at him as he sped through the back streets, fishtailing around corners, leaning on his horn whenever someone got in his way. He knew she was watching, could feel her struggling for the right question. He didn’t help. Couldn’t. She had to know for herself why, because no amount of explanation would truly convince her.
Like Flaunter had said, it was a matter of belief.
A matter of faith.
Paul was right.
Evan believed now that if he stayed in Bettin Wells, sooner or later he would die. Murder it would be, though murder couldn’t be proven. He would die as much of terror as of anything physical. Terror because he wouldn’t be able to leave the house, ever, for fear of happening upon an accident in which he was the luckless victim. Like Purdy. Minding his own business and some drunk loses control of his car, or something falls from a ledge, or he slips, or …
The next thing would be locking himself in one room, then staying in bed or on a chair.
Slow death.
Scared to death.
Unless he got away from Paul.
“Evan?” A plea for understanding.
“Simple,” he said, mauling the car around a turn that shot him onto the High Street just below the Cross and Sword. “You’re staying at my place tonight, no arguments. First thing in the morning I’m pulling all my money from the bank and I’m taking the first flight out of Heathrow for the States.”
“You can’t.”
“Of course I can. And you’re going with me.”
She shook her head. “That’s impossible.”
“So’s dying,” he told her, swerving into the fork. “At least for now.” A thumb jerked over his shoulder. “It’s easy, Addie—as long as we stay here, there are going to be accidents. Some of them as bad as the fish ’n’ chips place. People are going to be hurt, they’re going to die, because Paul wants us caught up in one of them. And it’ll happen, sooner or later.”
“I don’t …” She shook her head again and stared out the window, didn’t move when he braked into a turn and nearly slammed into the closed garage door.
He touched her arm. “C’mon.”
And once inside he double-checked the windows, double-locked the doors, and brought her a large glass of whiskey.
They sat facing the window.
The wind had stopped; the rain fell harder.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, and said, “Don’t,” when he shifted to speak. “I’ve been trying to understand why.”
“Why us, or why Paul?”
“Yes to both.”
His expression told her he had no answer to the latter, and she ought to know, now, the answer to the first.
“You make plans,” she said, talking to the window and the rain that snaked down it. “A nice little practice in a nice little town. No riches, surely, but a comfortable life nonetheless. And then things happen and you wonder why you bother to make plans at all.” She looked at him, looked back. “You’ve no control, you see. You’ve no control at all.” Tears in her voice. “And when you try to get it back, that control you thought you had, it only gets worse, don’t you see? It only gets worse, and you’re deeper in than when you started.”
He sipped his own drink, afraid to say anything because he sensed she had come to the same threshold as he—the threshold of belief in what Paul was doing out there, in the storm. If he nudged her, she’d shy away, and in shying away might try to contact Paul again.
They drank, and watched the rain.
She made one call—to a colleague, to cover her practice while she was gone.
“Why,” she asked when she hung up, “doesn’t he just kill us outright?”
“You heard him.”
“Yes, but why?”
Evan massaged his brow with his fingertips. “Torment, Addie. Nothing more than torment. He’s mad. Crazy mad, I mean.”
Dark afternoon gave way to darker night.
He dozed after his second glass, maybe his third, he couldn’t remember, and when he woke up she was standing at the window, a palm against the glass. Looking out. Head tilted. Free hand on a hip, massaging it lightly. When he stirred, she turned and he could see the faint glow of her teeth.
“He has some sort of power, doesn’t he?” she said.
He rubbed his eyes, licked his lips. “I don’t know. I mean, I’m not sure that it’s really a power the way you mean it—to cause things to happen.”
“A psi power,” she said, not moving, the dark behind her. “He can make things happen.”
A moment’s thought: “Maybe. All things considered right now, it’s as good an explanation as any, I suppose.”
“No!” she snapped, nearly yelling. “It’s not very good at all, damnit, Evan! It’s insane. It’s not possible.”
His temper lurched. “Then you tell me, okay? Tell me why we’re hiding here from your husband, Addie. Tell me why he’s falling apart, literally falling apart.” A disgusted wave shut her up. “No disease, Addie, you know that now. He’s not sick the way your doctoring understands it.” He reached for his glass, found it empty, held it anyway, turning it slowly in his hands. “And I don’t particularly care if it’s possible or not. I’ve seen it in action. And you have, too. Whatever it is, he’s got it, and if we don’t leave, we’ll be trapped here, waiting, until he decides to use it against us.”
She moved away from the window toward the door, turned from the door toward the stairs. “We’re still soaked, you know. We’d better change clothes.”
He watched her climb until the wall hid her, then clamped his teeth against a violent chill. Immediately, he set the glass down and stood, stripped, and went upstairs to his room. Addie was in the shower, steam curling around the edge of the not-quite-closed door. He stood in the bedroom, naked, and raked through his drawers until he found his passport and passbook. A check of the balance after turning on the dresser lamp told him there’d be plenty for their tickets, with not much more left over; he prayed that Addie had some money stashed away.
The shower stopped.
He grabbed up a pair of dry jeans and held it in front of him as he walked into the hall. When she came out, towel clasped to her chest, most of her legs exposed, they stared at each other, examined each other in the steam-fog that cloaked them before drifting to the ceiling.
“If I may say so,” she said, moving aside to let him pass, “we look rather stupid.”
“Silly,” he told her. “There’s a difference.”
He wiped his face.
The wind began to moan above the rooftops, and many of those watching began to scurry away.
Then he whirled and sprinted back for his car. If the police wouldn’t listen to him, most likely wouldn’t listen to Addie, perhaps someone they respected would change their minds for him. And the only one he could think of at the moment was Rupert Flaunter. A long shot, probably worse, but it was better than racing from one shadow to another, waiting for Addie to take a turn thinking of herself for a change.
By the time he reached the church, fighting the wind that tried to slam him off the road, he was convinced that this would work; by the time he had parked in the driveway and had jumped into the rain, he was equally convinced that Ludden was right and he really was nuts after all.
No one answered the doorbell or responded to his heavy knocking on the rectory door. He stepped back, cupped his hands around his mouth and called out against the wind, squinting at the windows, called out again, then hurried across the grass toward the church.
He stopped when he reached the graveyard gate.
He could see the top of Flaunter’s head above an ancient tombstone, the trees twisting, their branches snapping like angered geese. Several dead limbs had already fallen, a sodden leaf slapped him stingingly on the cheek. As he clawed it away, he pushed through the gate and held up an arm to shield him as he moved.
“Reverend Flaunter!”
The head stirred.
Unless it was the wind.
Darker now, the headstones growing, a dead-flower wreath spinning away across the grass.
Halfway there he saw the branch, a huge one, split open and lying across the grave where the minister sat. He tried to run, but the wet grass took his traction; he sprawled on his chest, took a taste of mud, and crawl-ran to the marker and hauled himself up, and looked over.
“Oh Jesus,” he said. “Oh Jesus.”
The wind sighed.
As he batted and tore his way through the tangle of twigs and smaller branches, most of them too wet now to snap away easily, he noted the raw pale wound where the limb had been torn from its trunk and had landed square across the minister’s chest. A gouge in his cheek that ran blood and rain; one eye swollen, purple, bleeding lightly from under the lid; a gash across the top of his head; one hand pinned to the ground, the other to his stomach.
Evan tried to lift the branch, and failed, tried to break or bend away the rest that held the man down.
The wind soughed through the belfry.
“Doesn’t matter.”
He jumped at the voice, looked down and saw the minister looking back with one eye. “Have you out in a minute,” he told him.
Flaunter winced and shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, lad. Me and Lem are friends.”
A cough; a bubble of foam the rain missed for a while.
Evan dropped to his knees in the mud and grass. “Your door’s locked. Where do you keep your tools? I need a shovel, an ax.”
Flaunter’s one-eyed gaze traced the twigs, the little branches, made Evan look at the man’s chest and face. “I’m not that dim, Mr. Kendal. Not that dim.”
Aw shit, he thought, and could think of nothing else to do but try to wipe the rain from the minister’s face.
“I saw Professor Burwin.”
Evan froze. “Where?” His voice was strained.
“Across the way, in the field. I tried to call him, but he couldn’t hear me.”
A cough; a whimper; the rain finally took the bubble.
The eye closed.
In his helplessness, Evan felt like weeping.
“Lem and I.”
The wind.
Evan leaned closer.
“God’s will, Mr. Kendal.”
He couldn’t help it: “Your time, Reverend?”
A nod, a gasp of pain.
“There …”
“Don’t,” Evan cautioned, an automatic response.
Flaunter managed a one-sided smile. “You never argued with me, Mr. Kendal. Never argued, like the doctor.”
An ambulance sirened by, and Evan tensed to leap to his feet, thinking that somehow he might be able to flag it down. The tension died; he sagged.
“Always a plan, you know. Always a plan.”
The eye opened.
Evan smiled. “God’s?”
“Who else, Mr. Kendal?” A smile there again, faint but true. “A hell of a time you picked to take me on.”
The wind gusted, but the rain eased somewhat.
Harsh whisper: “You don’t trust my word, Mr. Kendal?”
“It’s not a matter of trust, Reverend. The proof, I guess.”
“Ah. Well, I can’t help you there.” Flaunter swallowed, and choked, something faintly yellow slipped between his lips. “It’s not proof you’d need, it’s belief. All of it, Mr. Kendal, is a matter of belief.”
Evan didn’t know what to say.
Flaunter said it for him: “Oh Jesus, I’m frightened!”
Another branch crashed somewhere deep in the graveyard.
Evan wanted to tell him not this time, Rupert, it’s not God this time, your faith is intact, but the eye closed again, and rain sluiced across their faces, and he touched the man’s shoulder and said instead, “God speed.”
Something touched his shoulder.
He whirled, still crouched, and angrily slapped away a portion of the branch shoved against him by the wind.
When he turned back he knew, and in knowing rose and left the graveyard.
The drive back was slow.
Rage at Paul made it nearly impossible to breathe; sadness, not quite grief, made his breathing hitch. He rolled down the window, not caring about the rain, he was already so drenched he might as well be naked, and took a series of deep breaths as he followed the road and the village grew and the High Street widened and there, standing on the sidewalk, Addie with her black bag, brown hair blackened, face smudged.
He pulled over.
She climbed in.
“Bad?”
“Not as bad as could be.”
He sat there, not knowing where to go next. When a panda car pulled up alongside him, a policeman asking him to move off the main road, Evan told him about Rupert Flaunter. Addie gasped. The policeman nodded solemnly and asked him again to move on.
He did, and turned right at the first intersection, hissing through streets of brown brick rowhouses, their already dying gardens half-beaten to the ground. Cars at the curbing. No one on the sidewalks. A waste bin rolling around near a storm drain, rattling on the tarmac, drummed on by the rain.
They reached a small playing field, goalposts grey, no netting, and he followed the streets around it until they faced the center of town.
He parked.
“This is dumb,” he said. “There’s no way anyone will believe that it’s all Paul’s fault.”
“Is it?”
“You know it is.”
“How?”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Ludden already asked me that, and if I had a concrete answer, I’d tell you. But I don’t know. I just know.”
“So many people,” she whispered.
He looked at the field, at the goalposts, and saw Paul.
“Jesus.”
He was out of the car before Addie could say a word. Running across the grass. Arms tucked to his sides.
Paul stood at the far side, head up, water dripping from his hat. He didn’t move. He waited.
Evan felt the rage fold his hands into fists, narrow his eyes, draw his lips tight across his teeth. He didn’t care if anyone could see them; he was going to strangle the man, kick him to death, tear out his goddamn heart if he had to.
Paul’s head jerked slightly.
Evan slowed, looked back, saw Addie following. “No,” he called, and waved her back. “Addie, no!”
Paul laughed, the high-pitched shrill of a madman, and slapped his knees in delight.
Evan stopped just six yards away. “I’m going to kill you.”
“Oh, I wish you would,” Paul said unconcernedly. “Truly, I wish you would. But as I believe I already told you, I’m not quite ready for that just yet. How are you, Addie? Practice doing well?”
Addie stopped level with Evan, though some distance away; three points of a triangle, Paul at its head.
Paul’s face was jaundiced, even in the hat’s shadow, and when the wind caught the brim and threatened to take it, the hand that clamped the crown was vein and bone. The other hand was still gloved.
“My god,” Addie said, but she didn’t move forward.
“How?” Evan demanded, a gesture toward the fire on the far side of all the housing.
Paul smiled. “Well, I suppose you could say I’ve cursed this place, Ev. Yes, I suppose you could say that.”
Addie held her bag to her chest; the bag was open.
“I don’t believe it.” He took a step closer. “It’s nonsense, Paul. All you have to do is think about it. Whatever you’ve got has made you crazy.”
Paul shook his head. “Oh, you do believe it, Evan. I know you do. Perhaps I was exaggerating when I said ‘cursed,’ but the end’s the same, wouldn’t you say?” He winked. Slowly. “You believe it, my friend. You just don’t want to.”
Another step. “It’s crazy.”
“Paul?” Addie said. The bag was closed, at her side.
“You know, my dear, I had once hoped, long ago, that perhaps you’d give up that ridiculously sainted profession of yours and join me—join Evan and me, actually—in our ghoulish pursuit of history. It’s much more rewarding, and exciting, than watching your patients die, wouldn’t you think? Ours, as it were, are already dead.”
Evan and Addie as one—another step.
Paul smiled.
“Look,” Evan said evenly, “you told me you were going to kill us.”
“But I am, aren’t I?”
“What? How the hell do you figure that? You’ve just about killed everyone else but.” He glanced at Addie, saw her left hand behind her back. Something there. A syringe. “So we’re here now. So why don’t you try it?”
“Evan,” Paul chided, “it doesn’t work that way. You know that. You’ve seen. You have.”
Addie sprang for him, Evan a second later, a second too late as Paul clubbed her aside with his gloved hand, then used it to grab Evan’s collar, the bare hand between them.
Evan smelled death.
But when he struggled, grabbing Paul’s wrist in both hands, the gloved grip tightened, and the sight of that scabrous hand suddenly between their faces froze him. He couldn’t not look at it, though he saw between the spread fingers the dead look in Paul’s eyes.
Addie moaned.
“Ah no, Evan, not this way. Not this way at all.” A smile, water spilling from the hat, the wind rising again. “Think about it, Ev. Think hard. I’m killing you, you fool, and you don’t even know it.”
He threw Evan aside as if he weighed nothing, dropped quickly beside Addie and said, “Listen to me, bitch, you’ll be dead by week’s end. Ask your lover. He knows.” And he slapped her again, rolling her over, making her cry out.
Evan to his feet.
Paul holding out the bare hand and casually slipping on its glove.
“The taxi,” Paul said. “I give you that free because you’re too dim to remember.”
As Evan vacillated between helping Addie and charging Burwin again, Paul backed away, nodding, waving his hand as if he were royalty dismissing a peasant. When he suddenly turned and ran, Evan ran a step toward him, cursed, and hurried to help Addie back to her feet.
“Take me home,” she said shakily.
He looked at the rain falling where Paul had stood, had run. “I’ll do better than that. Where’s your passport?”
Thirty-One
Addie stared at him as he sped through the back streets, fishtailing around corners, leaning on his horn whenever someone got in his way. He knew she was watching, could feel her struggling for the right question. He didn’t help. Couldn’t. She had to know for herself why, because no amount of explanation would truly convince her.
Like Flaunter had said, it was a matter of belief.
A matter of faith.
Paul was right.
Evan believed now that if he stayed in Bettin Wells, sooner or later he would die. Murder it would be, though murder couldn’t be proven. He would die as much of terror as of anything physical. Terror because he wouldn’t be able to leave the house, ever, for fear of happening upon an accident in which he was the luckless victim. Like Purdy. Minding his own business and some drunk loses control of his car, or something falls from a ledge, or he slips, or …
The next thing would be locking himself in one room, then staying in bed or on a chair.
Slow death.
Scared to death.
Unless he got away from Paul.
“Evan?” A plea for understanding.
“Simple,” he said, mauling the car around a turn that shot him onto the High Street just below the Cross and Sword. “You’re staying at my place tonight, no arguments. First thing in the morning I’m pulling all my money from the bank and I’m taking the first flight out of Heathrow for the States.”
“You can’t.”
“Of course I can. And you’re going with me.”
She shook her head. “That’s impossible.”
“So’s dying,” he told her, swerving into the fork. “At least for now.” A thumb jerked over his shoulder. “It’s easy, Addie—as long as we stay here, there are going to be accidents. Some of them as bad as the fish ’n’ chips place. People are going to be hurt, they’re going to die, because Paul wants us caught up in one of them. And it’ll happen, sooner or later.”
“I don’t …” She shook her head again and stared out the window, didn’t move when he braked into a turn and nearly slammed into the closed garage door.
He touched her arm. “C’mon.”
And once inside he double-checked the windows, double-locked the doors, and brought her a large glass of whiskey.
They sat facing the window.
The wind had stopped; the rain fell harder.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, and said, “Don’t,” when he shifted to speak. “I’ve been trying to understand why.”
“Why us, or why Paul?”
“Yes to both.”
His expression told her he had no answer to the latter, and she ought to know, now, the answer to the first.
“You make plans,” she said, talking to the window and the rain that snaked down it. “A nice little practice in a nice little town. No riches, surely, but a comfortable life nonetheless. And then things happen and you wonder why you bother to make plans at all.” She looked at him, looked back. “You’ve no control, you see. You’ve no control at all.” Tears in her voice. “And when you try to get it back, that control you thought you had, it only gets worse, don’t you see? It only gets worse, and you’re deeper in than when you started.”
He sipped his own drink, afraid to say anything because he sensed she had come to the same threshold as he—the threshold of belief in what Paul was doing out there, in the storm. If he nudged her, she’d shy away, and in shying away might try to contact Paul again.
They drank, and watched the rain.
She made one call—to a colleague, to cover her practice while she was gone.
“Why,” she asked when she hung up, “doesn’t he just kill us outright?”
“You heard him.”
“Yes, but why?”
Evan massaged his brow with his fingertips. “Torment, Addie. Nothing more than torment. He’s mad. Crazy mad, I mean.”
Dark afternoon gave way to darker night.
He dozed after his second glass, maybe his third, he couldn’t remember, and when he woke up she was standing at the window, a palm against the glass. Looking out. Head tilted. Free hand on a hip, massaging it lightly. When he stirred, she turned and he could see the faint glow of her teeth.
“He has some sort of power, doesn’t he?” she said.
He rubbed his eyes, licked his lips. “I don’t know. I mean, I’m not sure that it’s really a power the way you mean it—to cause things to happen.”
“A psi power,” she said, not moving, the dark behind her. “He can make things happen.”
A moment’s thought: “Maybe. All things considered right now, it’s as good an explanation as any, I suppose.”
“No!” she snapped, nearly yelling. “It’s not very good at all, damnit, Evan! It’s insane. It’s not possible.”
His temper lurched. “Then you tell me, okay? Tell me why we’re hiding here from your husband, Addie. Tell me why he’s falling apart, literally falling apart.” A disgusted wave shut her up. “No disease, Addie, you know that now. He’s not sick the way your doctoring understands it.” He reached for his glass, found it empty, held it anyway, turning it slowly in his hands. “And I don’t particularly care if it’s possible or not. I’ve seen it in action. And you have, too. Whatever it is, he’s got it, and if we don’t leave, we’ll be trapped here, waiting, until he decides to use it against us.”
She moved away from the window toward the door, turned from the door toward the stairs. “We’re still soaked, you know. We’d better change clothes.”
He watched her climb until the wall hid her, then clamped his teeth against a violent chill. Immediately, he set the glass down and stood, stripped, and went upstairs to his room. Addie was in the shower, steam curling around the edge of the not-quite-closed door. He stood in the bedroom, naked, and raked through his drawers until he found his passport and passbook. A check of the balance after turning on the dresser lamp told him there’d be plenty for their tickets, with not much more left over; he prayed that Addie had some money stashed away.
The shower stopped.
He grabbed up a pair of dry jeans and held it in front of him as he walked into the hall. When she came out, towel clasped to her chest, most of her legs exposed, they stared at each other, examined each other in the steam-fog that cloaked them before drifting to the ceiling.
“If I may say so,” she said, moving aside to let him pass, “we look rather stupid.”
“Silly,” he told her. “There’s a difference.”
