FOUR
“Here’s what I think is happening,” Eddie said. “Suze, Jake, feel free to step in if you think I’m getting it wrong. This guy Cal Tower’s some sort of custodian for the rose. He may not know it on a conscious level, but he must be. Him and maybe his whole family before him. It explains the name.”
“Only he’s the last,” Jake said.
“You can’t be sure of that, hon,” Susannah said.
“No wedding ring,” Jake responded, and Susannah nodded, giving him that one, at least provisionally.
“Maybe at one time there were lots of Torens owning lots of New York property,” Eddie said, “but those days are gone. Now the only thing standing between the Sombra Corporation and the rose is one nearly broke fat guy who changed his name. He’s a . . . what do you call someone who loves books?”
“A bibliophile,” Susannah said.
“Yeah, one of those. And George Biondi may not be Einstein, but he said at least one smart thing while we were eavesdropping. He said Tower’s place wasn’t a real shop but just a hole you poured money into. What’s going on with him is a pretty old story where we come from, Roland. When my Ma used to see some rich guy on TV—Donald Trump, for instance—”
“Who?” Susannah asked.
“You don’t know him, he would’ve been just a kid back in ’64. And it doesn’t matter. ‘Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,’ my mother would tell us. ‘It’s the American way, boys.’
“So here’s Tower, and he’s sort of like Roland—the last of his line. He sells off a piece of property here and a piece there, making his taxes, making his house payments, keeping up with the credit cards and the doctor bills, paying for his stock. And yeah, I’m making this up . . . except somehow it doesn’t feel that way.”
“No,” Jake said. He spoke in a low, fascinated voice. “It doesn’t.”
“Perhaps you shared his khef,” Roland said. “More likely, you touched him. As my old friend Alain used to. Go on, Eddie.”
“And every year he tells himself the bookstore’ll turn around. Catch on, maybe, the way things in New York sometimes do. Get out of the red and into the black and then he’ll be okay. And finally there’s only one thing left to sell: lot two-ninety-eight on Block Nineteen in Turtle Bay.”
“Two-nine-eight adds up to nineteen,” Susannah said. “I wish I could decide if that means something or if it’s just Blue Car Syndrome.”
“What’s Blue Car Syndrome?” Jake asked.
“When you buy a blue car, you see blue cars everywhere.”
“Not here, you don’t,” Jake said.
“Not here,” Oy put in, and they all looked at him. Days, sometimes whole weeks would go by, and Oy would do nothing but give out the occasional echo of their talk. Then he would say something that might almost have been the product of original thought. But you didn’t know. Not for sure. Not even Jake knew for sure.
The way we don’t know for sure about nineteen, Susannah thought, and gave the bumbler a pat on the head. Oy responded with a companionable wink.
“He holds onto that lot until the bitter end,” Eddie said. “I mean hey, he doesn’t even own the crappy building his bookstore’s in, he only leases it.”
Jake took over. “Tom and Jerry’s Artistic Deli goes out of business, and Tower has it torn down. Because part of him wants to sell the lot. That part of him says he’d be crazy not to.” Jake fell silent for a moment, thinking about how some thoughts came in the middle of the night. Crazy thoughts, crazy ideas, and voices that wouldn’t shut up. “But there’s another part of him, another voice—”
“The voice of the Turtle,” Susannah put in quietly.
“Yes, the Turtle or the Beam,” Jake agreed. “They’re probably the same thing. And this voice tells him he has to hold onto it at all costs.” He looked at Eddie. “Do you think he knows about the rose? Do you think he goes down there sometimes and looks at it?”
“Does a rabbit shit in the woods?” Eddie responded. “Sure he goes. And sure he knows. On some level he must know. Because a corner lot in Manhattan . . . how much would a thing like that be worth, Susannah?”
“In my time, probably a million bucks,” she said. “By 1977, God knows. Three? Five?” She shrugged. “Enough to let sai Tower go on selling books at a loss for the rest of his life, provided he was reasonably careful about how he invested the principal.”
Eddie said, “Everything about this shows how reluctant he is to sell. I mean Suze already pointed out how little Sombra got for their hundred grand.”
“But they did get something,” Roland said. “Something very important.”
“A foot in the door,” Eddie said.
“You say true. And now, as the term of their agreement winds down, they send your world’s version of the Big Coffin Hunters. Hard-caliber boys. If greed or necessity doesn’t compel Tower to sell them the land with the rose on it, they’ll terrify him into it.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. And who would stand on Tower’s side? Maybe Aaron Deepneau. Maybe no one. “So what do we do?”
“Buy it ourselves,” Susannah said promptly. “Of course.”
FIVE
There was a moment of thunderstruck silence, and then Eddie nodded thoughtfully. “Sure, why not? The Sombra Corporation doesn’t have a topping privilege in their little agreement—they probably tried, but Tower wouldn’t go for it. So sure, we’ll buy it. How many deerskins do you think he’ll want? Forty? Fifty? If he’s a real hard bargainer, maybe we can throw in some relics from the Old People. You know, cups and plates and arrowheads. They’d be conversation pieces at cocktail parties.”
Susannah was looking at him reproachfully.
“Okay, maybe not so funny,” Eddie said. “But we have to face the facts, hon. We’re nothing but a bunch of dirty-ass pilgrims currently camped out in some other reality—I mean, this isn’t even Mid-World anymore.”
“Also,” Jake said apologetically, “we weren’t even really there, at least not the way you are when you go through one of the doors. They sensed us, but basically we were invisible.”
“Let’s take one thing at a time,” Susannah said. “As far as money goes, I have plenty. If we could get at it, that is.”
“How much?” Jake asked. “I know that’s sort of impolite—my mother’d faint if she heard me ask someone that, but—”
“We’ve come a little bit too far to worry about being polite,” Susannah said. “Truth is, honey, I don’t exactly know. My dad invented a couple of new dental processes that had to do with capping teeth, and he made the most of it. Started a company called Holmes Dental Industries and handled the financial side mostly by himself until 1959.”
“The year Mort pushed you in front of the subway train,” Eddie said.
She nodded. “That happened in August. About six weeks later, my father had a heart attack—the first of many. Some of it was probably stress over what happened to me, but I won’t own all of it. He was a hard driver, pure and simple.”
“You don’t have to own any of it,” Eddie said. “I mean, it’s not as if you jumped in front of that subway car, Suze.”
“I know. But how you feel and how long you feel it doesn’t always have a lot to do with objective truth. With Mama gone, it was my job to take care of him and I couldn’t handle it—I could never completely get the idea that it was my fault out of my head.”
“Gone days,” Roland said, and without much sympathy.
“Thanks, sug,” Susannah said dryly. “You have such a way of puttin things in perspective. In any case, my Dad turned over the financial side of the company to his accountant after that first heart attack—an old friend named Moses Carver. After my Dad passed, Pop Mose took care of things for me. I’d guess that when Roland yanked me out of New York and into this charming piece of nowhere, I might have been worth eight or ten million dollars. Would that be enough to buy Mr. Tower’s lot, always assuming he’d sell it to us?”
“He probably would sell it for deerskins, if Eddie’s right about the Beam,” Roland said. “I believe a deep part of Mr. Tower’s mind and spirit—the ka that made him hold onto the lot for so long in the first place—has been waiting for us.”
“Waiting for the cavalry,” Eddie said with a trace of a grin. “Like Fort Ord in the last ten minutes of a John Wayne movie.”
Roland looked at him, unsmiling. “He’s been waiting for the White.”
Susannah held her brown hands up to her brown face and looked at them. “Then I guess he isn’t waiting for me,” she said.
“Yes,” Roland said, “he is.” And wondered, briefly, what color that other one was. Mia.
“We need a door,” Jake said.
“We need at least two,” Eddie said. “One to deal with Tower, sure. But before we can do that, we need one to go back to Susannah’s when. And I mean as close to when Roland took her as we can possibly get. It’d be a bummer to go back to 1977, get in touch with this guy Carver, and discover he had Odetta Holmes declared legally dead in 1971. That the whole estate had been turned over to relatives in Green Bay or San Berdoo.”
“Or to go back to 1968 and discover Mr. Carver was gone,” Jake said. “Funneled everything into his own accounts and retired to the Costa del Sol.”
Susannah was looking at him with a shocked oh-my-lands expression that would have been funny under other circumstances. “Pop Mose’d never do such a thing! Why, he’s my godfather!”
Jake looked embarrassed. “Sorry. I read lots of mystery novels—Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Ed McBain—and stuff like that happens in them all the time.”
“Besides,” Eddie said, “big money can do weird things to people.”
She gave him a cold and considering glance that looked strange, almost alien, on her face. Roland, who knew something Eddie and Jake didn’t, thought it a frog-squeezing look. “How would you know?” she asked. And then, almost at once, “Oh, sugar, I’m sorry. That was uncalled-for.”
“It’s okay,” Eddie said. He smiled. The smile looked stiff and unsure of itself. “Heat of the moment.” He reached out, took her hand, squeezed it. She squeezed back. The smile on Eddie’s face grew a little, started to look as if it belonged there.
“It’s just that I know Moses Carver. He’s as honest as the day is long.”
Eddie raised his hand—not signaling belief so much as an unwillingness to go any further down that path.
“Let me see if I understand your idea,” Roland said. “First, it depends upon our ability to go back to your world of New York at not just one point of when, but two.”
There was a pause while they parsed that, and then Eddie nodded. “Right. 1964, to start with. Susannah’s been gone a couple of months, but nobody’s given up hope or anything like that. She strolls in, everybody claps. Return of the prodigal daughter. We get the dough, which might take a little time—”
“The hard part’s apt to be getting Pop Mose to let go of it,” Susannah said. “When it comes to money in the bank, that man got a tight grip. And I’m pretty sure that in his heart, he still sees me as eight years old.”
“But legally it’s yours, right?” Eddie asked. Roland could see that he was still proceeding with some caution. Hadn’t quite got over that crack—How would you know?—just yet. And the look that had gone with it. “I mean, he can’t stop you from taking it, can he?”
“No, honey,” she said. “My dad and Pop Mose made me a trust fund, but it went moot in 1959, when I turned twenty-five.” She turned her eyes—dark eyes of amazing beauty and expression—upon him. “There. You don’t need to devil me about my age anymore, do you? If you can subtract, you can figure it out for yourself.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Eddie said. “Time is a face on the water.”
Roland felt gooseflesh run up his arms. Somewhere—perhaps in a glaring, blood-colored field of roses still far from here—a rustie had just walked over his grave.