Treasure Box (28 page)

"Lizzy, what if I hadn't found you?"

"But you did. Mrs. Tyler led you. As soon as she found me, she made you realize." Lizzy glanced around. "They're coming to question you. Don't let them see you talking to me—they'll think you're crazy. And don't leave my hand here, Quentin. I don't want to be tied to this place."

She disappeared. He reached down and picked up her desiccated hand and put it in his jacket pocket.

A policeman sauntered over to him. "You the one called this in?"

"I was here to see the house," said Quentin. "They drove up from Washington to show me the house."

"Somebody was in that place?"

"I just got here. I was out at their car, talking to Mr. Duncan, when the roof started collapsing. He yelled about Rowena and Roz being inside and he ran for the house and it caught him. I called for help but it was too late for any of them. Should I have gone in, Officer? I was so scared, I drove out here and my car got stuck but then I ran back and I thought I should try to help them but the house was collapsing and—"

"No, no, you did the right thing. If you'd gone in there you'd just be dead, too."

"It crushed him right there on the front porch." It took no effort at all for Quentin to let the emotion pour out, to dissolve in tears—of relief, of exhaustion, of grief for the good people who had died. All of them—even Roz. She was just a child. She never understood what she was doing until it was too late. Ray Duncan never understood anything at all.

"Here, man, come on, sit down, get in your car and sit down for a minute." The policeman opened the door and helped him in. "Wait here, will you? We've got questions, but there's no rush, you can get ahold of yourself first, OK?"

Quentin sat there, getting control of himself, as a fireman approached the cop who had been talking to him. "I can't believe a house could collapse like that. Must've had termites out the wazoo."

The cop shook his head. "Just before this call came in, we got word. The old lady used to live here, she still owns the place. She got her head blown off in a rest home upriver. Our own chief. Used to work here as a gardener. He went crazy and killed her and then blew off his own head." The cop looked away for a moment, as if to contain his own emotions. "Family man, decent guy, good boss, good
cop
. You never know."

"The owner of this house just got killed?"

"It's like the old lady's revenge, the house collapsing like that. It can't just be a coincidence, she gets murdered and then her house caves in."

Quentin spoke up from the car. "I think they were her family."

The cop and the fireman came closer. "What?"

"The Duncans. They said their mother owned the house, they were selling it for her. She was in a rest home up the river, they said."

"You mean the people inside the house were her kids?"

"And her granddaughter. All the family she had in the world."

"Dear God in heaven," murmured the cop. "The whole family in a single hour, a hundred miles apart."

"Nobody's ever going to believe a story like that," said the fireman. "Straight out of
The X-Files
."

They went on talking. Quentin closed his eyes. It was over. The ending was lousy, but it could have been worse. For him. For everybody.

Except Mike Bolt's family. It was hard to think how it could possibly be worse for them.

Sally Sannazzaro pulled up to the barricades in front of the rest home. The policeman recognized her, waved her in. They were bringing two bodies out of the building, both with sheets draped over their heads. News cameras flashed. TV crews shone floodlights that made it brighter than day on the bodies.

Chief Todd was standing by the ambulance. He waved her over, then thought better of it and walked to meet her as she got out of her car. "Nobody can figure out how he did it. My boys got here first, they verified that she was OK and then they stood watch at the door and they
swear
nobody could have got by them. But he did. Not one of them heard the shots, they just saw him standing in the doorway with a gun and she was already dead."

"And Bolt?"

"They couldn't even disarm him before he blew his own head off. That didn't stop them from pumping about eight more rounds into his body. Ms. Sannazzaro, we screwed up. I don't know how, because these aren't my worst guys. I don't know whether to fire them or drown them like puppies, I'm so mad. I'm so sorry."

She patted his shoulder and turned away. Tears ran down her cheeks. "I don't think it could have been stopped, Chief Todd," she said. "I think it was going to happen no matter what."

"I know you got a thousand things to take care of inside, the whole place is in an uproar, your staff will sure be glad to see you. I'll come by tomorrow and ask you some questions, all right?"

"Fine," she said.

She started for the entrance of the rest home. The newspeople noticed her and started firing off questions. She passed the ambulance as they loaded the second body onto it. She didn't pause to see which one it was. It didn't matter now.

All she knew was that there was only one person on God's green earth who could explain this all to her, and he was a crazy man wearing the dead woman's hair in a plastic bag taped to his chest.

Police questioning in two towns kept Quentin in the area for the next few days, and by then there was no reason to leave before the funerals. Besides, Sally Sannazzaro was there, also answering questions for the police, and then, after hours, assailing him with questions of her own.

Poor woman. She was trying so hard to believe him. Not a skeptic like Wayne Read, she nevertheless had no evidence for her own eyes, as Mike Bolt had had. It didn't help that immediately before he told her the true story, she read through his litany of deceptions to the police as he gave a more believable version of Mike Bolt's activities prior to going on his murderous mission.

Yet she stayed with him as much as possible during the days of inquisition and grief. It finally occurred to him that she stayed with him, despite her doubts, because she needed him right now. He was actually good for something that didn't involve money or opening boxes containing mythical beasts.

Before Mike Bolt's funeral, as he and Sally sat with Leda Bolt in her living room, he felt how empty and powerless his money was when pitted against real problems. Yet it could do something. He promised her that all her children would have a college education, that they would never lack for anything. If it was hard for them to continue living in Mixinack, he would pay for them to move anywhere they wanted.

"Why are you doing this?" she asked. "You barely knew Mike."

"I knew him better than anyone but you, in those last few days of his life. He became my friend. How long do you have to have a friend before you can help his family after he dies?"

She burst into tears.

In a few moments her crying softened and he spoke to her again, his hand on her bowed back. "Leda, it's going to be hard for you, but even harder for your kids. I don't know how to tell you in a way that will make you believe me, but it's true, and so I'm going to say it anyway. If you tell your kids that their father was a good man, through and through, that will be the truth. If you tell them that even though it was his body that held the gun and pulled the trigger, their father never chose to kill Mrs. Tyler, and if he chose to kill himself it was only because he thought he
had
killed her. But it wasn't him. It was someone else, someone who is dead now, too, using his body against his will. Your children are not the children of a murderer or a psychotic. Their father was sane and good. You married a fine man and he loved you with his whole heart and you made him happy. You should all be proud of him."

Leda cried all the harder as she turned and threw her arms around him and clung to him. He held her as she wept. Across the room from him, her hair bright in the light through sheer curtains, sat Sally Sannazzaro, watching him, tears on her own cheeks. She nodded to him. He had done well.

Quentin and Sally stood together beside Mike Bolt's grave with the Mixinack police department, the entire dozen of them, defiantly loyal to him no matter how he met his end. They knew without Quentin telling them that it wasn't the Mike Bolt they knew who did what was done at that rest home. And from the way they gathered around Leda Bolt and her children, Quentin suspected that the family would not be leaving Mixinack; they would be well watched over here.

Later that day, Quentin and Sally were perhaps the only mourners among the curiosity-seekers gathered at the four new graves in the old Laurent family cemetery. The walled graveyard was the only structure left standing on the Laurent estate. Quentin had already set Wayne Read to work buying the place. He planned to fence it from the road, fill in the foundation of the house, and let it go wild. A little nature preserve. A small, untended graveyard. Let the dead tend each other undisturbed. Let no house grow in this place for a hundred years. Somewhere the beast would be on the prowl again, searching for another heart, another host. But not in this place. This place had had the last of the dragon.

Finally it was over, and at the end of the day it came down to this: Quentin Fears and Sally Sannazzaro on the sofa of her apartment. It was time to face her unbelief in him. Because he didn't want to walk away and leave her in her doubts. "Sally," he said. "I didn't make this up. I'm not stupid enough to make up something this crazy. Until this century, most people believed in witches. The things that've happened here this week, the things that happened to me over the last year, they would have been a marvel or a horror, but not a surprise. We were just born in the wrong time, that's all."

"I don't know about that," said Sally. "I think a time without witches is better."

"But this
isn't
a time without witches. I wish it had been."

"It is now," said Sally. "In
our
lives, anyway."

"I hope."

"I'm taking your word for it that you're not insane."

"I was hoping you didn't make it a habit to invite psychos for long conversations over ice cream in your apartment."

"Ben and Jerry's soothes the savage breast a lot better than music," she said. She took another bite of Wavy Gravy.

"I have to ask you something, Sally," said Quentin.

"Go ahead. I don't have to answer."

"You're not a witch yourself, are you? Pretending to disbelieve my story so I won't suspect what you are?"

"Why do you ask? Are you feeling enchanted?"

"Maybe a little."

"That's the aftermath of grief and shock. You want to cling to somebody."

"True. But when the shock is over, and the grief is under control, won't I still want to cling to somebody? Isn't that, like, normal?"

"But you might be more selective in whom you cling to. I'm not a witch, Quentin, but people have called me similar things."

"Yeah, well, I'm a lonely recluse. It's either you in my life or I turn into Howard Hughes. My last chance. Save me, Sally."

"Are you really,
really
rich, Quentin?"

"Yeah. And thanks to Madeleine, I have political connections all over the country, too."

"Screw 'em. Let's just leave. Now that the funerals are over. Let's leave the country and go to Europe. South America. Africa. India. China. Australia."

"Are you serious?"

"Separate rooms, Quentin. I'm not that kind of girl. But you can afford it, can't you?"

"First class all the way."

"Let's see if we like each other when we're not making salads or running rest homes or watching decent people destroy themselves and each other."

"As long as you don't mind stopping in California first," he said. "I've got to put something back where it belongs."

She knew what he was talking about. She nodded and looked away as her eyes filled with tears.

"Do you have a passport?" he asked.

"No. How good are your political connections?"

"Get the picture taken and we'll see how fast the system can be made to work."

She reached over and took his hand. "If you ever take me to meet your parents, Quentin, I promise not to get along with them too well."

He laughed and looked down into his ice cream dish. "And if I ever think that you remind me of my sister Lizzy, I promise not to mention it."

She smiled. "Even if it doesn't work out, Quentin, I'm still glad I know you."

"Once you duct-tape a Ziploc bag to a man's chest, there's no going back."

She leaned her head on his shoulder. It felt very good. The weight of it. The smell of her hair. Her hand in his. It was different from the way it had been with Madeleine. There wasn't the same sharp thrill to it. It was quieter this time. But it was also better. Right from the start, it was better. If he had ever known a woman like Sally, perhaps he couldn't have been so completely fooled by a fake.

Or maybe he was being fooled again. After all, Madeleine had been created by an eleven-year-old girl—a gifted one, to be sure, but she got everything she knew about sex from books or from Quentin's own head. An adult witch with real experiences could do a better job, couldn't she?

He tried very hard to doubt Sally Sannazzaro's existence. To pretend that the pressure of her hand, the weight of her head, all was illusion. That her strength and kindness were drawn from his own need. That her temper and sternness had been created only to make her more plausible in the aftermath of Madeleine.

But when he opened his eyes, she was still there, looking up at him.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Trying to make you disappear."

She thought about that for a moment. "It isn't going to work," she finally said.

"Good," he said. And then he kissed her. It wasn't a perfect kiss. They bumped noses. They laughed. "If you're a fake," he said, "don't ever tell me."

And so they would go on, apart or together as love and chance and time might decree, surrounded always by the silent, beloved dead, and answering their silence with the shout of life. That was the invisible treasure box that Quentin had been given long ago but only now found and opened. There
was
power in it; the kind of power that disappears when it is taken, yet grows as fast as children when it is shared.

Copyright © 1996 by Orson Scott Card

ISBN 0-06-109398-X

Cover illustration by David Nielsen