The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (26 page)

Wallace pressed the button again. "Is she awake?"

"Uh, yes. I just finished feeding her."

"Oh, good." Wallace walked slowly, not acknowledging Delaney's sudden presence at his elbow. Delaney was afraid he would fall, shatter his fragile hip.

One of Wallace's private contractors had converted a guestroom into Helen's quarters. A rectangular suite with a long terrace over the garden. Hardwood floors and vaulted ceilings. They needed ample space to house her therapy equipment—the hydraulic lift and cargo net to transport her into the changing room, the prototype stander which was a device designed to prevent muscle atrophy by elevating her to a vertical plane on a rectangular board. She screamed torture when they did this every other afternoon and wouldn't quit until Cecil stuck headphones over her ears and piped in Disney music.

Helen lay in bed, propped by a rubber wedge and pillows. During the accident, her brain was deprived of sufficient oxygen for several minutes. Coupled with the initial blunt trauma, skull fractures and bacterial contamination, the effects were devastating. Essentially, the accident had rendered Helen an adult fetus. Her right hand, curled tight as a hardwood knot, was callused from habitual gnawing. She possessed minimal control of her left hand, could gesture randomly and convulsively grasp objects. Cecil splinted it a few hours a day, as he did her twisted feet, to prevent her tendons from shortening. Her lack of a swallow reflex made tube-feeding a necessity. She choked on drool. It was often impossible to tell if she could distinguish one visitor from another, or if she could see anything at all. Cortical blindness, the doctors said. The worst part was the staph infection she contracted from her open head wound. The dent in her skull would not heal. It refused to scab and was constantly inflamed. The doctors kept changing her medication and predicting a breakthrough, but Wallace could tell they were worried. She had caught a strain resistant to antibiotics and was essentially screwed.

"Hi, Mr. Smith." Cecil carefully placed the feeding apparatus into a dish tub. He was a rugged fellow, close to Helen's age. Built like a linebacker, he was surprisingly gentle and unobtrusive. He faithfully performed his myriad duties and retreated into the adjoining chamber. It was always him or his counterpart, the RN Kate, a burly woman who said even less than Cecil. She dressed in an official starched white pinafore over her conservative dresses and a white hat. Wallace always knew when she was around because she favored quaint, polished wooden shoes that click-clocked on the bare floors. Ginger Rogers, he privately called her. Ginger Rogers tapping through the halls.

Helen flinched and moaned when Wallace took her hand. Startle reflex, was the medical term. She smiled flaccidly, eyes vacant as buttons. She smelled of baby powder and antiseptic.

Wallace heard himself say, "Hey, darling, how was dinner?" Meanwhile, it was the raw wound in her forehead that commanded his attention, drew him with grim certainty, compounded his sense of futility and doom.

Abruptly exhausted, he whispered farewell to Helen and shuffled upstairs and crawled into bed.

3.

After the world waned fuzzy and velvet-dim, he was roused by the noises he had mentioned to Skip and Randy. The night noises.

He pretended it was a dream—the blankets were heavy, his flesh was heavy, he was paralyzed but for the darting of his eyes, the staccato drum roll in his chest. The noises came through the walls and surrounded his bed. Faint sounds, muffled sounds. Scratching and scrabbling, hiccupping and slithering. Soft, hoarse laughter floated up to his window from the garden.

Wallace stashed a .357 magnum in the dresser an arm length from his bed. He could grab that pistol and unload it at the awful giant he imagined was prowling among the rosebushes and forsythia and snowball trees. He closed his eyes and made fists. Could not raise them to his ears. The room became black as pitch and settled over him and pressed down upon him like a leaden shroud. Grains of plaster dusted the coverlet.
Pitter-pat, pitter-pat
.

4.

Detective Adams caught Wallace on a good morning. It was Wallace's fifty-first birthday and unseasonably cold, with a threat of rain. Wallace was killing a bottle of Hennessy Private Reserve he'd received from Skip as an early present and shaking from a chill that had no name. However, Wallace was coherent for the first time in months. Delaney had reduced the pills per Skip's orders and it was working. He was death-warmed-over, but his faculties were tripping along the tracks right on schedule. He toyed with the idea of strangling Delaney, of hanging him by the heels. His mood was mitigated solely by the fact he was not scheduled for therapy until Thursday. Possibly he hated therapy more than poor shrieking Helen did.

Detective Adams arrived unannounced and joined Wallace on the garden patio at the glass table with the forlorn umbrella. Adams actually resembled a cop to Wallace, which meant he dressed like the homicide cops on the television dramas. He wore a gray wool coat that matched the streaks in his hair. A square guy, sturdy and genial, though it was plain this latter was an affectation, an icebreaker. His stony eyes were too frank for any implication of friendliness to survive long. He flicked a glance at the mostly empty bottle by Wallace's wrist. "Hey there, Mr. Smith, you're looking better every time I swing by. Seriously though, it's cold. Sure you should be hanging around like this? You might get pneumonia or something. My aunt lives over in Jersey. She almost croaked a couple years ago."

"Pneumonia?"

"Nah, breast cancer. Her cousin died of pneumonia. Longshoreman."

Wallace was smoking unfiltered Cheyenne cigarettes in his plushest tiger-striped bathrobe. His feet were tinged blue as day-old fish. His teeth chattered. "Just when you think spring is here, winter comes back to whack us in the balls. One for the road, eh?"

Detective Adams smiled. "How's everything? Your hip . . .?"

"Mostly better. Bones are healed, so they say. Hurts like hell."

"How's your wife?"

"Helen's parents are angry. They want me to send her to Arizona, pay for a home. They're . . .yeah, it's screwed up."

"Ah. Are you planning to do that?"

"Do what?"

"Send her home."

"She's got a lot of family in the southwest . . .Lot of family." Wallace lighted another cigarette after a few false starts.

"Maybe sending your wife to Arizona is a good idea, Mr. Smith. Heck, a familiar setting with familiar faces, she might snap out of this. Never know."

Wallace smoked. "Fuck 'em. What's new with you, Detective?"

"Not a darned thing, which is pretty normal in my field. I just thought I'd touch base, see if any more details had occurred to you since our last palaver."

"When was that?"

"Huh? Oh, let me check." Adams flipped open a notebook. "About three weeks. You don't remember."

"I do now," Wallace said. "I'm still a little mixed up, you see. My brain is kind of woozy."

"Yeah," Adams turned up the wattage of his smile. "I boxed some. Know what you mean."

"You talk to Delaney? Delaney saw the whole thing."

"I've spoken to everyone. But, to be perfectly clear, Delaney didn't actually see
everything
. Did he?"

"Delaney shot the horse."

"Yes, I saw the casings. A fine job under pressure."

This had also been present in each interview; an undercurrent of suspicion. Wallace said, "So, Detective, I wonder. You think I smashed her head in with a mallet, or what?"

"Then broke your own hip and somehow disposed of the weapon before Mr. Delaney made the scene? Oh, I don't suppose I think anything along those lines. The case bothers me, is all. It's a burr under my saddle blanket, heh. We examined the scene thoroughly. And . . .without a horse carcass, we're kinda stuck."

"You think Delaney did it." Wallace nodded and took a drag. "You think me and Delaney are in it together. Hey, maybe we're lovers and Helen was cramping our style. Or maybe I wanted Helen's money. Oops, I have plenty of my own. Let me ponder this, I'll come up with a motive." He chuckled and lighted another cigarette from the dwindling stub of his current smoke.

Wallace's humor must have been contagious. Detective Adams laughed wryly. He raised his blocky cop hands. "Peace, Mr. Smith. Nothing like that. The evidence was crystal—that horse, wherever it went, just about did for the two of you. Lucky things turned out as well as they did."

"I don't feel so lucky, Detective."

"I guess not. My problem is, well, heck, it's not actually a problem. There's something odd about what happened to you, Mr. Smith. Something weird about that property. It's pretty easy to forget how it was, standing in there, in the barn, screening the area for evidence. Too easy. Those pylons were a trip. Boy howdy!"

"Don't," Wallace said. He did not want to consider the pylons, the traps or the graffiti. The imagery played havoc with his guts.

"Lately, I get the feeling someone is messing with my investigation."

"Please don't," Wallace said, louder.

"My report was altered, Mr. Smith. Know what that means? Somebody went into the files and rewrote portions of the paperwork. That doesn't happen at the department. Ever."

"Goddamn it!" Wallace slammed his fist on the table, sent the bottle clattering. His mind went crashing back to the barn where he had regained consciousness for several seconds—Helen beside him in the muck, dark blood pulsing over her exposed brain, surging with her heartbeat. He covered his eyes. "Sorry. But I can't handle talking about this. I don't like to think about what happened. I do whatever I can to not think about it."

"Don't be offended—I need to ask this." Adams was implacable as an android, or a good telemarketer. "You aren't into any sort of cult activity, are you? Rich folks get bored, sometimes they get mixed up with stuff they shouldn't. I've seen it before. There's a history in these parts."

"There's history wherever you go, Detective. You ought to ask the people who own that property—"

"The Choates. Morgan Choate."

"They're the ones with all the freaky cult bullshit going on."

"Believe me, I'd love to find Anton LaVey's nephew was shacking there, something like that. Solve all my headaches. The Choate place was foreclosed on three years ago. Developer from Snoqualmie holds the deed. This guy doesn't know squat—he bought the land at auction, never set foot on it in his life. Anybody could be messing around out there."

Wallace did not give a tinker's damn about who or what might be going on, he was simply grateful they would be grinding that barn into dust and fairly soon.

Detective Adams waited a moment. Then, softly as a conspirator, "Strange business is going on, Mr. Smith. Like I said—we checked your story very carefully. The Smith name carries weight in this neck of the woods, I assure you. My boss would have my balls if I hassled you."

"Come on, my pappy isn't a senator anymore. I'm not exactly his favorite, anyway."

"Just doing my job, and all that."

"I understand, Detective. Hell, bad apples even fell off the Kennedy tree. Right?"

"I'm sure you're not a bad apple. You seem to be a solid citizen. You pay your taxes, you hire locally and you give to charity."

"Don't forget, I donated to the Policeman's Ball five years running."

"That's a write-off, sure, but it's worth what you paid. Ask me, your involvement is purely happenstance. You're a victim. I don't understand the whole picture, yet. If there's anything you haven't told me, if you saw something . . .Well, I'd appreciate any help you might give me."

Wallace lifted his head, studied Adams closely. The cop was frayed—bulging eyes latticed with red veins, a twitch, cheeks rough as Brillo. Adams' cologne masked the sour musk of hard liquor. His clothes were wrinkled as if he'd slept in them. Wallace said, "As far as I'm concerned, it's over. I want to move on."

"Understandable, Mr. Smith. You've got my number. You know the drill." The detective stood, peered across the landscaped grounds to the forest. A peacock strutted back and forth. A neighbor raised them in the distant past; the man lost his farm and the peacocks escaped into the wild. The remaining few haunted the woods. The bird's movements were mechanical. Back and forth. "Do me a favor. Be careful, Mr. Smith. It's a mean world."

Wallace watched Adams climb into a brown sedan, drive off with the caution of an elderly woman. The brake lights flashed, and Adams leaned from the window and appeared to vomit.

Daylight drained fast after that.

5.

Wallace pulled on the loosest fitting suit in his wardrobe, which was not difficult considering how the pounds had melted from him during his long recovery. He knotted a tie and splashed his face with cologne and crippled his way downstairs to the liquor cabinet and fixed himself a double scotch on the rocks. He downed that and decided on another for the road. Sweat dripped from him and his shirt stuck to the small of his back and hips. He sweated nonstop, it seemed, as if the house were a giant sauna and yet he routinely dialed the thermostat down to the point where he could see his own breath.

Pain nibbled at him, worried at his will. He resisted the urge to swallow some of the heavy-duty pills in his coat pocket—promises to keep. Then he went somewhat unsteadily to the foyer with its granite tiles and a marble statue of some nameless Greek wrestler and the chandelier on its black chain, a mass of tiered crystal as unwieldy as any that ever graced the ballroom of a Transylvanian castle or a doomed luxury liner, and reported to Delaney. Delaney eyed him critically, dusted lint from his shoulder and straightened his tie while Wallace dabbed his face with a silk, monogrammed handkerchief, one of a trove received on birthdays and Christmases past, and still the sweat rilled from his brow and his neck and he wilted in his handsome suit. Delaney finally opened the front door and escorted him to the car. The air was cold and tasted of smog from the distant highway. Delaney started the engine and drove via the darkened back roads into Olympia. They crossed the new Fourth Avenue Bridge with its extra-wide sidewalks and faux Gaslight Era lampposts that conveyed a gauzy and oh-so-cozy glow and continued downtown past unlit shop windows and locked doors to a swanky restaurant called The Marlin. The Marlin was old as money and had been the
It
spot of discerning socialites since Wallace's esteemed father was a junior senator taking lobbyists and fellow lawmakers out for highballs and graft.