Paul would be home shortly and would know what to do. She sat beneath the kitchen clock to outwit time and force the hands to move faster. Outside a van door closed, and she saw Pat Delarosa walking up the grade of his lawn, a bouquet of yellow roses in his arms.
Fifteen minutes before six, footsteps clopped across the wooden porch, and then a quick knock. Fear froze her to the chair. But before the visitor could depart, she rose, dreading the possibility of a policeman, hat off in respect, sent to break the news, something awful, an accident, the hospital, please not the morgue. Through the side window, that boy appeared again, the brother, what-was-his-name? Wiley's brother. The older one. Give me a clue, she thought.
“Mrs. Quinn? Sorry if I'm interrupting your dinner.”
“Dennis, come in.” Still dressed in the University of Pittsburgh sweatshirt, he shuffled into the house. “Can I get you something? A cup of tea, perhaps?”
“Never touch the stuff,” he said. “Makes me jumpy.”
“Come in, come in.” She led him to the living room. “Have a seat. Have you heard from them? My husband should be home any minute.”
“The thing is, Mrs. Quinn, I have some sorta bad news. Not really bad, but… I think I know where they are. Not where exactly, but I think I know what happened.”
“Is everything all right? Is she okay?”
He leaned forward in the chair and stared at the floor. “The thing is, Mrs. Quinn, my car is missing. My Pinto.”
You'll have to drive him to the point, she told herself. “And you think Wiley took it?”
“I know he stole it, ‘cause he kept asking me if he could buy it from me, and I kept saying no, and, well, I know about the Angels.”
“Angels?”
He raised his head and looked her in the eyes. “Wiley, he's into some pretty heavy stuff. You know about Patty Hearst?”
“The bank robber they captured a couple weeks ago? The heiress?”
“And the Symbionese Liberation Army.”
A car pulled into the driveway, the headlights sweeping across the front window, and the boy stopped, allowing Mrs. Quinn to decide whether to wait for her husband rather than hearing the tale told twice. They arranged themselves on the edges of their chairs, backs ramrod straight, and cocked their heads to face him full on when Paul entered the living room. At first, his expression failed to register any difference, but gradually he came to realize who the visitor might be and why he was sitting next to his wife, whose eyes were fixed upon the very air, anticipating a story that floated in the space between them. Paul slowed the motions of his ritual, carefully folded his overcoat and balanced it on the top rail of a rocking chair, which pitched backward, then righted itself, and then he smoothed the gray hair at his temples, and thus ready, he moved swiftly, like a predator taking down the prey, to shake the boy's hand and offer an introduction.
Margaret spoke to him in a formal tone reserved to mildly shock his intermittent memory. “Dennis is Wiley's brother. You remember I told you over the phone that I went to see the Rinnicks this morning.” Her husband sat beside her and stared at the boy. “He's come to tell us about Erica.”
“You have some news?”
Denny cleared his throat and began again. “Do you remember when they kidnapped Patty Hearst, then it turns out she's been brainwashed into being one of them?”
“Are you saying Erica's been kidnapped?”
“No, not exactly. Wiley kinda talked her into going with him. To join the Angels. The Angels think that the people need to rise up and start a class war. A revolution.”
She asked, “Why are you kids always talking about a revolution? Against what?”
Ready to pounce directly from the chair, Paul leaned in tense and anxious. “But I thought that was all over. The authorities caught Patty Hearst.”
“It is all over, man. Vietnam is over. SLA. The old days are gone, no more people marching in the streets. All went up in smoke.”
Paul looked at Margaret for an answer. “What are these Angels?”
“Angels of Destruction,” Denny said. “Wiley found out about them through an ad in one of those underground papers, and he wrote to the PO box in the ad, and the guy starts sending him pamphlets and that. Propaganda, literature.”
“So he wants to be an Angel?” Paul asked. “He got Erica into this cult?”
For the first time that evening, Denny laughed. “Well, I wouldn't call it a cult, exactly. Might be some guy in his garage with a mimeo machine he stole from his high school. When he wasn't home, I'd go in his room sometimes and look through his stuff, and it was a trip.” From his pocket, he pulled out a sheet of yellow legal paper. “This is the kind of stuff the head of the Angels says: ‘No doom is ever executed on the world, whether of annihilation or any other chastisement, but the destroying angel is in the midst of the visitation.’ They call themselves the Angels of Destruction, and they are here to start some kind of holy war.”