Set This House in Order (52 page)

Mouse leans back against the soda machine and slides down until she is sitting on the sidewalk with her knees up under her chin. She drinks warm ginger ale and feels wretched. People coming in and out of the grocery store give her funny looks, as if she were a homeless person.

She
feels
homeless. She's got no motel room, no safe place in this town where she can go to sleep for a few hours. And she can't go somewhere else, because even if she were willing to abandon Andrew—the way
he
abandoned
her,
she thinks petulantly—she can't drive. A lot of the vodka that Maledicta drank got left behind in the bar, but enough of it is still in Mouse's system that she doesn't dare get behind the wheel.

The only remotely good thing about her current circumstance is that she's pretty sure Officer Cahill won't be bothering her again. When Mouse ran out of the bar he was still in the men's room, cleaning himself up, but that was just a temporary measure—he's going to have to go home and change, and probably take a long hot shower. Mouse knows she shouldn't be happy about this—she should be disgusted with herself, and furious with Maledicta—and she is—but at this point anything that cuts down the number of obstacles between her and a clean getaway from this town is a welcome occurrence.

“Come on Andrew,” she says. “Come back. Let's get out of here.”

But it's a while yet before Andrew comes back. The sound of his voice
rouses Mouse from a drunken doze; she wakes confused, needing a swallow of warm ginger ale—it's gone flat now too, yuck—to remind her where she is.

Andrew is across the street, shaking hands with Chief Bradley through the window of the chief's police car. “Seven-thirty tonight,” Mouse hears Andrew say; then he steps back, and the chief drives off.

Mouse gets up from the sidewalk. “Andrew!” she calls.

He turns towards her, caught off guard, in his surprise looking almost hostile…but then he smiles. “Hey there, Penny!” he greets her. “How's it going?”

Mouse waits for another car to pass and crosses the street. “Andrew,” she says, drawing near him. “Where were you?”

“Chief Bradley's house.” Belatedly picking up on her mood: “Gosh, Penny, I hope you weren't worried.”

“I
was,
” says Mouse. “But never mind that now. Are you ready to go?”

“Well, actually,” he says, “that's kind of what I came back to tell you: I can't leave yet.”

“What?”

“I've decided to sell the cottage to Chief Bradley,” Andrew explains. “It won't be official until I can establish clear title to it myself, of course, but we've agreed to do the deal, and he's even going to give me a down payment. I'm going back to his house tonight to pick up the money.”

“Tonight? So we have to stay here?” Please, no.

“
We
don't have to stay,” Andrew says. “I have to, but there's no reason for you to hang around. In fact, if you wanted to head back to Seattle on your own…”

“No,” says Mouse. “I can't do that.”

“Sure you can. Don't worry about me, I—”

“No, I mean I
can't
do that. Maledicta got us drunk, got
me
drunk. I can't drive.”

“Oh.” He leans forward, sniffs. “Wow! Gee, Penny…”

“So I need you to do it.” Mouse shoves her car keys into his hands before he can refuse. “Please…just take me somewhere, anywhere I can rest. And then if you want to borrow the car and come back and see Chief Bradley tonight, I guess that's OK, I'll just wait for you wherever.”

Andrew bounces the keys in his palm and looks thoughtful. “Hmm, OK, I suppose that could work…”

“Only let's
go,”
Mouse stresses. “I can't stand up much longer.”

“Sure.” He's smiling again. “You just lie down in back, I'll take care of the rest.”

Before stretching out on the Centurion's back seat, Mouse rolls down the windows, hoping that fresh air will counteract any lingering urge to vomit. It works: her stomach lurches a little while Andrew is pulling out of the parking space, but once they are on the move the cool breeze is very soothing. “Just one other thing…” she says, her eyes drifting closed.

“Hmm? What's that?”

“I could really use a drink of water. Could you run in somewhere, and get me…”

“Sure thing, Mouse,” he says. “You relax, I'll get right on that.”

“Thanks…” She settles down, lulled by the smooth forward motion of the car, and—

—something is tickling her eyelid. A breeze is still blowing through the windows, but less steadily now; the Centurion is stopped somewhere. Mouse lifts a hand to her face, bats sleepily at the thing tickling her. A leaf.

She sits up, blinking away sleep. She tries to call Andrew's name, but her mouth and throat are totally dry. She glances at the driver's seat and sees that it's empty.

Mouse assumes they are at a rest stop off the highway somewhere. Andrew must have gone to get her water. She yawns deeply, and is surprised by how much better she feels: she's parched and she has a headache, but she's sobered up quite a bit, and if she didn't know any better, she'd almost think she'd been asleep all afternoon.

Huh. That's funny. According to the dashboard clock, Mouse
has
been asleep all afternoon. And—taking a good look outside, now—this is a very unusual rest stop: the parking lot is covered in grass, and there are no gas pumps or fast-food restaurants, just a single white cottage-like structure, tilted to one side…

Oh God.

Mouse twists around to look out the back window, hoping that this will turn out to be some sort of mirage. But there's no rest stop behind the car, either, just a dirt road that is becoming all too familiar.

Why would Andrew have come back here?

On second thought, never mind—Mouse doesn't care why. She just wants to get out of here. She leans over the seat back and honks the Buick's horn. Short honks, first, and then a sustained blast that causes birds to take flight from the surrounding trees. But Andrew does not come running.

Damn it. If the keys were in the ignition, Mouse would be tempted to drive away—she's sober enough, now—but they aren't, and anyway she knows it would be wrong to just leave. Whatever is going on here, it's at
least partly her own fault. If she hadn't been too drunk to drive in the first place…

Mouse gets out of the car and goes up to the cottage. There's no answer to her knock on the front door, and she can't remember which stone the key is hidden under. She walks around the side of the cottage. Here she finds a clue to what Andrew may have come back for: the broken bracing planks have all been cleared away, and those planks that are still intact have been set back up, spaced evenly to conceal the fact that there are fewer of them now. Chief Bradley will probably still notice, but without the debris lying around he'll have a hard time figuring out what happened.

Mouse continues around to the back door, which is unlocked. Inside, the cottage is dead quiet—strong circumstantial evidence that nobody's home. She takes a look around anyway. Andrew is not in the kitchen, the pantry, the living room, or anywhere in the ground-floor bedroom that can be seen from the doorway. Mouse goes to the attic door next. She pokes her head in the stairwell and listens; there's no sound, not even the chittering of squirrels. Andrew could still be up there, lying comatose on the cot again, but if he is, he's on his own; not even a promise of fresh water could get Mouse to climb these stairs alone.

Water. The kitchen sink is right behind her; she opens both taps, but not a drop comes out. She makes a second check of the pantry, searching for beverages this time. Many of the glass jars contain vegetables or fruits preserved in liquid, but Mouse isn't desperate enough to drink vinegar or heavy syrup. As for the canned goods, it's obvious from the selection that Andrew's mother made a lot of soups and stews: there's an entire shelf stocked with nothing but salted beef broth, salted chicken broth, and condensed clam chowder.

She returns to the sink and looks out the window at the backyard, just in case someone's come by and installed a fountain in the last two minutes. No one has, but there is something else that's different: the footpath gate is hanging open.

The gate was closed when she and Andrew were here earlier today. Mouse tries to remember whether it was still closed when she came around the side of the cottage just now, but she can't recall.

Mouse stares at the footpath, and envisions the lake at the other end of it. About half a mile, Andrew said. She does not really want to go down there, but her options are limited. It's a much longer hike back to Seven Lakes, and she's not going to find Andrew or her car keys in town.

The woods beyond the gate are dense and shadowy; Mouse walks
quickly. Soon enough she glimpses the lake through the trees up ahead. Even from a distance the water looks inviting; Mouse speeds up to a jog, and nearly goes tumbling when the path takes a final unexpected dip.

Quarry Lake is pretty much the way Andrew described it from his—or the Witness's—memory. A few things are different: there are no big shrubs at the end of the footpath, and the “island” at the Lake's center is even smaller than Andrew made it sound, really just a tip of rubble sticking up above the surface of the water.

The lake is certainly deep and cold—and the water is delicious. Mouse cups her hands and scoops up mouthful after mouthful, until her stomach starts to cramp in protest. She pauses then, breathing hard, and becomes aware of a figure standing in the periphery of her vision.

“Hello, Penny,” Andrew says.

Mouse, her voice restored, lets out a healthy squeak and falls over.

“Penny…” Andrew says. He holds up his hands reassuringly……and right in the middle of the gesture changes his mind, deciding not to bother.

“Forget it,” he says. “You aren't worth the effort.”

Mouse looks up at him and blinks. “Andrew?” she says.

He doesn't bother to correct her, just stares at her contemptuously until she figures it out.

“No,” Mouse says. She rises slowly to her feet. “Not you. You can't—”

“Can't
what
?” says Gideon. “Can't be out? And why's that, exactly? Because Andrew's brave and true? Because he doesn't run away from his responsibilities?” He laughs. “Andrew's not even real,
Mouse.
”

“He
is
real!” Mouse protests. “He, he is brave.”

“Compared to you, maybe. But it doesn't matter how brave he acts; he was born out of fear and weakness, and in the end that's all he really is: fear and weakness. Aaron's fear.” Gideon is grinning as he says this, showing teeth, but his hands make little trembling movements of suppressed rage. “Aaron! Bad enough he steals my life, gives away my property, and tries to keep me bottled up like a goddamn genie! But after all that, to turn around and just…
abdicate,
like he didn't even want it himself…Ah!” For a moment he's so mad he can't speak. “You have no idea, the frustration…but weakness is weakness. It was just a matter of biding my time, waiting for the right moment.”

Mouse doesn't say anything to this, but Gideon suddenly glares at her as if she'd contradicted him. “I know what you're thinking,” he says. “You're thinking I already got out once before and couldn't hold it. You're thinking
I may keep the body for a day or even a week, but eventually Andrew will rally.”

“I didn't—”

“Well
fuck you,
Mouse!” He stoops and snatches up a rock; Mouse flinches, but rather than throw it at her he skims it out over the lake. It's a weak toss, and the rock only skips a couple of times before sinking; Gideon, seeming pleased rather than dissatisfied by this, watches as the splash-ripples spread across the lake's surface and begin to fade. Then he says: “Andrew won't be back. I wasn't really ready, before. But this time I put him down properly.”

“So what…what happens now?” says Mouse.

“I told you what happens now: I'm selling the cottage to Chief Bradley. Once I've got my money—all of it—I'm going to get the hell out of here. Go somewhere new, and start living the life I was meant to live.”

“You know I'm not going to help you.”

Gideon laughs at her. “You think I
need
your help? Here…” He fishes her car keys out of his pocket and tosses them at her feet. “Go ahead, take off. Go back to Seattle. Get yourself some therapy. Hah!”

Surprised, Mouse picks up the keys.

“What?” says Gideon. “Were you expecting me to hold you prisoner or something?”

Actually, yes, she was expecting something like that.

“Why would I want to?” he says. “I'm not afraid of you, if that's what you're thinking. There's nothing you can do to stop me.”

Mouse isn't so sure about that—she seems to recall doing a pretty good job of stopping Gideon the last time he was out—but her look of skepticism gets him laughing again.

“What?” he challenges her. “What do you think you can do? Report me to the police for stealing Andrew's body? I'd love to see you try to explain that one to Jimmy Cahill. Or Chief Bradley—try telling him he can't have the cottage after all, because he's dealing with the wrong Andy Gage now. Even if you could get him to believe that, do you think he'd care?”

Mouse closes her hand around the keys. “You still need a ride to Chief Bradley's house tonight.”

“Not really. I could walk there if I had to—I used to go for long hikes around here all the time. But I won't have to walk. You'll take me.”

“No, I won't.”

“I think you will. You don't believe me when I tell you Andrew isn't coming back. You think he is, and until you think otherwise, you're going to
want to stay close to me. And that means when it's time to go to Chief Bradley's, you're either going to have to drive me there, or follow me in your car at four miles an hour—if I'm nice enough to hike along the roadside.” He shrugs. “I think you'll give me the lift.”