کتاب 08-02

2

Someone slapped her, turned her head halfway around.

“I’n slurry,” Harper said, trying to apologize, sure she had done something wrong but unable to remember what it was.

Jamie Close slapped her again. “You aren’t yet, but you’re going to be. Stand the fuck up. I’m not carrying your fat ass, bitch.”

There was someone on either side of her, pulling her to her feet by her arms, but every time they let go, her legs went boneless and folded under her and they’d have to grab her again.

“Be careful,” Carol said. “The baby. The baby is an innocent in this. If the baby is harmed, someone will answer for it.”

The world was a bad Picasso. Carol’s eyes were both on the left side of her face and her mouth was turned sideways. Harper was in the waiting area now, but the room was different, the geometry no longer made sense. The left wall was only about the size of a cupboard, while the right-hand wall was as large as a drive-in movie screen. The floor was so tilted, Harper was surprised anyone could stand upright.

Ben Patchett stood behind Carol. Ben had a mouthful of little ferret teeth and little ferret eyes set in his round, smooth face. Those eyes flashed yellow with fear and fascination.

“Give me four hours with her,” Ben said. “She’ll tell me everyone who was in it with her. She’ll give up the whole conspiracy. I know I can make her talk.”

“You can also make her miscarry. Didn’t you hear what I just said about the baby?”

“I wouldn’t hurt her. I just want to talk to her. I want to give her a chance to do the right thing.”

“I loved Father Storey,” Harper tried to say to Carol—this seemed an important fact to establish. What came out, though, was, “I luffed other stories.”

“No, Ben. I don’t want you to question her. I don’t want her help and I don’t want her information. I don’t want to hear her side of the story. I don’t want to hear another word out of her lying mouth.”

Harper swung her gaze to Ben and for a moment her vision sharpened and things came into focus. Her voice came into focus, too, and she spoke six words, enunciating them with the care and precision of the profoundly drunk. “She and Michael set Harold up.”

But reality was too much effort to maintain. When Carol replied, her mouth was on the wrong side of her face again.

“Make her be quiet, Jamie. Please.”

Jamie Close grabbed Harper’s jaw and forced her mouth open and rammed in a stone. It was too big. It felt like it was the size of a fist. Jamie held her mouth shut while someone else wrapped duct tape around and around her head.

“Everything you want to know you can find out from Renée Gilmonton or Don Lewiston later,” Carol said. “We know they were in it, anyway. We’ve got Gilmonton’s notebook. We know they were both candidates to run the show. Only five votes for Gilmonton, that must’ve hurt her pride.”

“And four votes for Allie,” Michael said, from somewhere off to Harper’s right. “What about that?”

Carol’s features floated around her face like flakes of snow drifting dreamily through a snow globe, an effect Harper found nauseating.

“We’ll give her a chance,” Carol said. “We’ll give her a chance once and for all to do the right thing. To show she’s with us. If she doesn’t take it, then there’s no helping her. She gets whatever Renée Gilmonton and Don Lewiston get.”

A girl spoke from somewhere behind Harper. “Mother Carol, Chuck Cargill is outside. He’s got something to tell you about Don Lewiston. I think it’s bad.”

Harper was queasy and the thought crossed her mind that if she vomited, she would probably choke to death on it. Rough stone scraped the roof of her mouth and flattened her tongue. Yet something about it—the cold of it, the rough texture—was so real, so concrete, so there, she felt it pulling her out of her foggy-headed daze.

The waiting room was crowded: Ben, Carol, Jamie, four or five others, Lookouts with guns. Michael stood in the doorway to the ward. Torchlight flickered—but not within the room, which was lit only by a pair of oil lamps. Harper had, for a long time, been aware of what she thought was a murmur of wind in the trees, a restless sigh and whoosh, but now she determined that sound was the noise of an agitated, restless crowd. She wondered if the whole camp was out there. Probably.

You are going to be killed in the next few minutes, she thought. This was her first clear notion since being slapped awake, and no sooner had the idea passed through her mind than she shook her head. No. She wasn’t. John was. They would kill her later, after they yanked the baby out of her.

“Send him in,” Ben Patchett said. “Let’s have it.”

Soft, nervous voices. The door creaked open on its spring, banged shut. Chuck Cargill stepped around Harper and presented himself to Carol. He looked ill, as if he had just had the wind knocked out of him, his pale face framed by bushy sideburns. His jeans were soaked to the thighs.

“I’m so sorry, Mother Carol,” he said. He was shaking, from the cold, or nervousness, or a combination of the two.

“I’m sure you have no reason to be, Cargill,” Carol told him, her voice thin with strain.

“I went over to the Fireman’s island with Hud Loory, just like Mr. Patchett told us, to get Mr. Lewiston. He had the tarp off the boat and some sails hung over the sides to air them out or something. We thought he was belowdecks. We thought he didn’t know we were there. We thought we had the drop on him. There was a rope ladder hanging off the side of the boat and we started climbing up it, quiet as anything. But we had to put our rifles over our shoulders to climb. Hud was up front, and when he pulled himself over the side of the boat, that old—that old basstid thwacked him with an oar. Next thing I knew I was looking up into the barrel of Hud’s rifle.”

No one spoke and Cargill seemed to have momentarily lost his capacity to continue. The pieces of Carol’s face had stopped drifting around, and her features finally stuck more or less where they belonged. Harper could keep them from floating loose through an intense act of concentration, although the effort was giving her a headache. Carol’s lips were white.

“Then what happened?” she asked at last.

“We had to do it. We had to,” Cargill said, and he sank to one knee and took Carol’s hand and began to sob. A green bubble of snot swelled in his right nostril. “I’m so sorry, Mother Carol. I’ll take a rock. I’ll take a rock for a week!”

“Are you saying he’s gone?” Carol asked.

Cargill nodded and rubbed his tears and snot on the back of her hand, held her knuckles to his cheek. “We put the boat in the water. He made us. When Hud came around he made us help him launch the boat at gunpoint. He took our guns and—and he went. He just went. There was nothing we could do. He got the sails up like there was nothing to it and we—we threw some rocks, you know, we told him—we told him he’d be sorry—we—we—” Another sob broke forth and he shut his eyes. “Mother Carol, I swear to you, I’ll take a rock for as long as you want, just don’t make me go away!”

Carol let him blot his tears against her hand for another moment, but when he began to kiss her knuckles, she looked sidelong at Ben Patchett. The big cop stepped forward and gripped the boy by the shoulders, prying him free and standing him up.

He said, “You can go over what happened with me another time, Chuck. Mother Carol lost her father tonight. This isn’t the moment to blubber all over her. You don’t have anything to blubber about anyway. This is a place of mercy, son.”

“For some,” Jamie Close said, in a low voice.

Harper, though, felt a relief—an easing of pain—not unlike the passing of a contraction. Don was away. Ben wasn’t going to use pliers or a dish towel full of rocks on him to make him talk. Jamie Close wasn’t going to force a stone into his mouth and stick a noose around his neck. The thought of Don on a boat with the icy breeze whipping his hair back from his brow, and the sail straining and full of wind, made Harper feel a little better. Don would be angry, maybe, cursing and trembling, furious with himself for leaving behind so many good people. She hoped he would make his peace with it. It was stay and die or run while he had a chance. She was glad at least one of them was going to survive the evening.

“Mother Carol,” Michael said, from over by the door into the ward. For the first time, Harper heard it: the soft tone of reverence in his voice that suggested not just affection but obsession. “What do you want to do with the Fireman? I can’t keep him drugged forever. We’re already out of the Versed. I used the last of it.”

Carol lowered her head. The flame light of the oil lamp turned the sharp angles of her bare skull to bronze. “It can’t be up to me. I can’t think. My father always said when you can’t think you have to be quiet and still and listen for God’s small voice, but the only voice I hear is the one saying, Make this not true over and over. Make this not true. Make my daddy alive. My father wanted me to love and look after people, and I don’t know how to do that now. Whatever we do with the Fireman, it can’t be up to me.”

“Then it should be up to the camp,” Ben said. “You have to say something to them, Carol. They’re all out there and half of them are witless with fear. People are crying. People are saying this is it, this is the end of us. You need to talk to them. Tell them what you know. Put the story in front of them. If you can’t hear God’s small voice, you can at least hear theirs. All those voices got us through the last nine months and they can get us through tonight.”

Carol swayed, staring at the floor. Michael put his hand on her bare arm—she wore a silky pink pajama top with short sleeves, too thin for the cold night—and for a moment his thumb slid gently up her shoulder, a lover’s caress that no one seemed to observe but Harper herself.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll bring them before the camp.”

“In church?” Ben asked.

“No!” Carol cried, as if this were a somehow obscene suggestion. “I don’t want either of them ever going in there again. Somewhere else. Anywhere else.”

“What about Memorial Park?” Michael asked, his thumb moving gently up and down along the back of her arm again.

“Yes,” Carol said, her eyes wide and unblinking and unfocused, as if she had had a little hit of Versed herself. “That’s where we’ll gather. That’s where we’ll decide.”