Forty-eight
Lauren Ainsworth might have made a pretty darn good NASCAR racer. Considering the extent to which she combined speed with caution, maybe it would be better to compare her to an ambulance driver. I knew the Expedition would have plenty of power, but I worried about its higher center of gravity, which could be a problem with any SUV. If she cornered too fast on a road not banked quite like it ought to be, we had a higher chance of rolling than we would have had with the BMW. We hadn’t gone a mile before I stopped fretting about that, because she was in complete control, the Expedition a glove and she the hand within it.
Never taking her eyes off the highway, she said, “Who’s blowing things up, what’s happening at the fairground that you have to be there yesterday?”
“I need to think, Lauren. Sorry, but I need to think. I’ve got this brain-buster thing to figure out.”
“You figure,” she said. “Don’t pay any mind to me.”
The first thing I thought about was the woman cultist, how she had looked in the study, after she’d thrown aside the useless rifle. Her face had been wrenched with anger and hatred. And yet she had reminded me of the drifting corpses in the dream, whose faces had been contorted in expressions of terror. Later, when she manifested in the hallway and went poltergeist, her hatred and rage had been still worse, demonic—and yet again I had thought of the drowners in the dream.
I remembered the last scene of that watery nightmare. The corpse of a little girl, maybe seven years old. Blond hair billowing around her head as the currents brought her alongside me. Her protruding, bloodshot eyes had rolled and focused on me. A froth of gas bubbles burst from her open mouth. And with them came a word: Contumax.
With that, I had exploded out of the dream, sitting straight up in bed, flailing at the sheets, heart racing. I had been terrified not merely by the vision of a drowned Pico Mundo, but also—and perhaps primarily—by that blond child who’d spoken the first word of the cult’s two-word greeting. Contumax. Potestas. Her expression hadn’t been one of extreme fright, had it? No. On reconsideration, her eyes had bulged and rolled like those of a maddened beast, and her expression had been one of white-hot rage, beyond rage, fury. But a child that young wouldn’t be a member of the cult. She had frightened me awake, but she hadn’t been what she appeared to be, hadn’t been a threat, had been instead a victim.
I thought of Connie, sister to Ethan, the young woman who had painted me as a harlequin at Face It. Raven hair and celadon eyes. She had been in the dream, too, a drowned corpse drifting in the eerie light of the submerged town. I went to the cauldron of memory and tried to conjure that part of the dream in my mind’s eye. The scene emerged: Connie’s face but not as she was in life, as she had been in the dream of death. Either I had misremembered her expression when I woke from the nightmare, or I was misremembering it now, for this time I saw not choking terror in her face but extreme rage. And more than rage. Savage intent. Hatred. Agony, too. And anguish. And fear, yes, but the fear wasn’t dominant, as I’d previously recalled; it was only one element in an extraordinary mien of twisted and tortured emotions.
We had reached a more populated portion of Pico Mundo, and when Lauren turned a corner, traffic clogged the way ahead. At once she hung a U-turn, arcing back into the intersection from which we had just come, eliciting a Gershwin symphony of shrill horn blasts as indignant drivers gave her the what-for. She swung into a street that led in a direction we didn’t want to go, turned right into an alleyway that paralleled the jammed street and did go the direction we wanted.
She said, “How crazy do I have to be? What’s at stake, Oddie? Tell me what’s at stake.”
“Everything,” I said, somewhat surprised to hear such certainty in my voice. “Everything’s at stake. Thousands of lives, the whole town, maybe more than that, maybe much more.”
She glanced at me, shocked. “Thousands?”
“Tens of thousands,” I said, speaking intuitively now, better understanding the dream.
She said, “Worse than the mall … back then.”
“Much worse. Immeasurably worse.”
The alley was narrow. Businesses backed up to it, some of them restaurants that were still open and busy at that hour. If an unwary kitchen staffer threw open a door and took a few quick steps into the alleyway, we might not be able to stop in time if we were going too fast.
She pressed down on the accelerator and at the same time began to pound the horn incessantly, warning off anyone who might be about to step in our way. The tires stuttered over cobblestones as old as any pavement in Pico Mundo, and we flashed past hulking Dumpsters with little room for error.
Trying to tune out the blaring horn, the racing engine, the periodic shriek of brakes, I returned to the brain-buster mystery that I needed to solve. If the faces of all the drowned people in the dream had not been fixed in expressions of terror … If fear and agony and anguish, although present, were lesser elements, and if their faces were frozen instead in screams of rage, contorted by hatred, were they the victims of violence or the perpetrators of it? Or could they somehow be both the victims and perpetrators?
As I’d told Chief Porter, certain of my prophetic dreams could be taken literally, but others were figurative. The meaning of them needed to be deciphered from symbolic imagery. And though I could make delicious fluffy pancakes every time I mixed the batter, I was not as reliably able to interpret my dreams.
Sometimes I wondered if I had everything backward, my life and purpose and meaning all backward. Maybe the best thing I had to offer was fry cookery of a high order, and maybe my paranormal abilities were nothing more than the equivalent of a talent for farting on command, better repressed than indulged. I, no less than anyone, was capable of self-delusion, of pride that led me to embrace a grander image of myself than was the truth.
If the people of Pico Mundo were destined to become both victims and perpetrators of violence, if I’d mistaken their expressions of rage-hatred-agony-anguish for terror, then perhaps I was wrong to think that the image of a flood should be taken literally, no matter how real it had seemed. Maybe the dam wouldn’t be blown. Maybe there would be no tsunami from any source. But then what did the water mean?
“We’re here,” Lauren Ainsworth declared, pulling to a stop on the shoulder of the highway, across from the main entrance to the Maravilla County Fairgrounds.
My watch read 10:39, and I said, “You made incredible time, ma’am. I owe you one.”
I holstered the Glock.
When I looked up, I saw that Lauren, who had been a rock until now, had stopped repressing her emotions. Tears streamed down her face. She leaned over the console, put an arm around my shoulders, and pulled me toward her until her forehead and mine met. “You don’t owe me one, Oddie. I owe you everything. You saved our lives.”
Because I still didn’t know what horror was coming, she and the girls might yet be dead before the night was done. “Get the girls to your sister’s house in the heights, ma’am. Maybe it’ll be safer in the heights.”
She kissed my cheek and let me go, but then the twins wanted to kiss me on the cheek, too. Also in tears, Veronica leaned forward from the back and then Victoria, weeping as well, but that wasn’t the end of the good-byes.
Muggs scrambled off the backseat. Standing with his hind feet on the floor, he pawed forward between the front seats and came face-to-face with me. I would have been fine with a dog kiss, as long as it was on the cheek; but Muggs had something else in mind. His eyes met mine, and he grew very still, his gaze penetrating, his demeanor solemn. As when I had met Lou Donatella, the dwarf in a bear suit, I thought, This is A Moment, stay with it. Also as when I’d met that little person, I had no idea what I meant by A Moment.
Muggs and I remained eye-to-eye just long enough for the girls and their mother to recognize the strangeness of this final good-bye, if that’s what it was. Then the dog shook his head, flapping his floppy ears, and terminated our moment with a sneeze.
“Got to go,” I said, and threw open the passenger door.