20
It rained for hours and hours. It rained as if the storm owned the world.
“Screw this,” said Monk, and turned the car off except for the hazard lights. Patty still wasn’t answering the phone. She must have called it a night and gone to bed early. Couldn’t be many customers out on a night like this. Patty took the occasional pill, or smoked a lot of weed. Anything to hush the voices in her head. Monk could relate. So, maybe he should just let her sleep. If the storm wasn’t so bad he would just head over to his own new place. Sack out, unpack in the morning after he checked on Patty.
Through the slanting rain he saw the ranks of birds and had to spend some time thinking about that. He was familiar with them, or something like them. There had been a thing back in New York where black birds—nightbirds—played a part. Those fuckers had been evil as shit and Monk felt his heart racing as he struggled to get a read on the ones here. He was pretty good at reading people, always had been. Useful in his trade. If you can’t read people then you’re no damn good as either a PI or a skip-tracer, and he was good at both.
How do you read the black-within-black eyes of birds, though? Especially seeing them through a downpour and at a distance.
And yet …
There was something he could feel. Actually, quite a few things, most of them not so good. He was worried about Patty. He didn’t dig the vibe of this town one little bit—though he had to admit the town’s reputation was probably coloring that. He didn’t like the storm at all. It felt wrong in some unspecific way.
The birds, though. When he looked at them he didn’t get the feeling he usually got when there was maybe someone out in the tall grass, watching him through a sniper scope, adjusting for windage and elevation. An itchy spot between his shoulder blades. None of that.
The birds did not feel like a threat. If anything they felt like they were on his side. But that thought itself was weird, and Monk didn’t have a mental hook to hang it on. So he left it for now. His doors were locked and the windows up.
“I’m so goddamn tired,” he told the storm.
It rumbled in reply, sounding like someone dropping fifty bowling balls. Monk pulled his leather jacket out of the backseat, put it on, zipped it to his chin, stuck his hands in his pockets, and went to sleep. Dreams were waiting and they took him with cold, pale fingers and dragged him under.
The nightbirds stood vigil around him.
INTERLUDE THREE
THE LORD OF THE FLIES
“When you say that you can’t remember your mother, do you mean just her face?”
Owen Minor shook his head, annoyed because this was the fifth or sixth different way the therapist asked the same question. The woman simply could not get the idea straight.
“No,” he said with the kind of false patience foster kids learn for all such sessions. The key was always to walk the line between calm self-assurance and acceptable emotionality. Never too cold, never too enthusiastic. Not too much grief, or love, or anger, or anything. The key was to be, or at least appear to be, balanced. In control. Safe. “No, it’s just that I don’t remember much about her at all.”
The therapist, Mrs. Green, was a goat-faced forty-something with too much nose, not enough chin, and ears that stuck out like open car doors. Her face might have been comical if she had a shred of personality. Mrs. Green glanced at his file.
“She passed away three years ago?”
“Yeah,” he said and then corrected it. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And you were nine?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mrs. Greene nodded. “Do you have photos of her?”
“Sure,” said Owen. “I have a bunch of them.”
“Then how can you not remember what she looked like?”
Owen clenched his fists in his lap, careful that his crossed leg hid them. He wanted to punch her, to slap her. Instead he took a breath, adjusted his tone, and said, “I know what she looked like. But I can’t remember her.”
“What about her can’t you—?”
“Everything,” said Owen. “I know I had a mother. I know I lived with her until she died. I know there was a funeral and all. I know what I should know, but I don’t remember her. I remember where I grew up—the house, my bedroom, the living room furniture, the color of the kitchen walls. I can remember going to school. I remember my teachers. I can remember the lady who lived next door—Gracie Thompson. But I don’t remember my mother being any part of all that.” He paused, fishing for what he thought she would want to hear. “I want to remember her. Why can’t I?”
Owen was happy with the amount of emotion he put into his voice. He watched her eyes and saw when her professional detachment turned to compassion. That would influence her report for the foster agency.
He was twelve but he understood how the whole thing worked.
He was not particularly upset at the loss of all memories associated with his mother. They had been fading since she died, and from what he read in his diary, she’d been a slut, a drunk, and a shit. It was better not to have to lug around any memories that related to the stuff in that journal. The beatings. The nights he had to spend in the closet because of something he did that she didn’t like. Or when she made him sit in the cold parked car while she had a guy over. Sometimes she gave him a blanket and a box of Trix to munch on, mostly she forgot to even bother. He remembered sitting in the car, but he didn’t remember her. Not even a moment of her. Nothing.
Owen sat and listened as the therapist explained traumatic memory loss, and variations on the stages of grief, and all of the other stuff she’d been trained to say. He’d read up on what to expect from people like her. He was prepared and had rehearsed what to say and how to inflect it.
She talked.
He sat.
She tried to reach him.
And he let her think she had.
The only hard part was trying not to smile.
21
Orson Hardihey sat in his car and did not even hear the rain.
He should have, because it hammered down furiously on the metal roof above him and the windshield through which he stared. Should have. Did not.
He sat there, hands on the curve of the steering wheel, looking at the fly crawling across his knuckles. It was fat and gleamed with an oily opalescence. Tiny legs picking their way delicately over his calloused knuckles. Multifaceted eyes somehow mirrored, showing hundreds of different miniature versions of Orson’s face. That’s how Orson saw it anyway. Hundreds of reflections, and in each one his own mouth smiled at him. Smiled with his own mouth but not with his own smile.
The smile was oily and sickly and wrong.
The fly crawled, making sure never to turn its eyes and those smiling mouths away.
Orson looked at the house at the end of the driveway. His headlights only reached as far as the porch steps, but that was enough. He could see the house. The locked door. The drawn shades against which shadows moved like images from some antique camera obscura. A woman shape. Children shapes. Cavorting, distorted by angle and distance and the vagaries of flickering light from a fireplace. Goblin shapes. Orson saw them and hated them and loved them and wanted them and despised them.