The Summer Man

Chapter FOURTEEN





John was pleased when Bob Sayers showed up on his doorstep just after sunset on the Fourth of July. He’d made no plans for the holiday, except to relax; it had been a long, surprisingly difficult week. His workload had gone from easily manageable to barely so in a matter of days, and while he welcomed the break from his mind-movies of Annie’s murder, he felt more than a little overwhelmed by the sudden step-up in intensity of some of his clients’ issues. One of his regular clients had been arrested for beating up his ex-wife, a turn John had truly never expected. Dale had grown up in an abusive household, but had worked hard to deal with his temper; he hadn’t had a physically violent outburst in years, since a college bar fight. After his divorce, Dale had been struggling with his anger…and had been doing pretty well, John thought. Except that the ex-wife now had a broken collarbone, wrist, and two ribs, plus about eighty stitches; Dale had beat her with a belt after learning that she meant to remarry. John had visited his client in county lockup, a strained conversation in a cold, stale room. Dale had seemed honestly baffled by his own behavior, like he couldn’t understand what had happened, or how. Which made at least two of them.

John had also had to refer one of his retired files, a woman he hadn’t seen in years, to a psychiatrist he knew, to put her through a full medical workup—the pleasant, outgoing woman he remembered had begun to exhibit symptoms of an acute psychosexual disorder. In barely a month’s time, she’d progressed from sudden, inexplicable fantasies to picking up strangers and taking them home with her. Such a sudden change without any apparent trigger suggested something physiological, an organic problem. He was worried about her; Nina McAndrews had sold John and Lauren their house and had come to see him a few years later for about six months, when she’d separated from her husband; overall, she’d struck him as fairly well-adjusted, if a little repressed. They’d never talked about her sex life—like a lot of Catholic ladies of her generation, Nina had felt uncomfortable talking about “those” things—but he’d never had any indication that she was headed toward such extreme behavior, either.

Dale and Nina were perhaps the most dramatic examples, but many of his clients were in trouble just lately, it seemed, and he’d been busy—not just seeing people, but digging through file notes and articles and the latest DSM for help; he was dealing with things he’d only read about, or seen as a resident: signs of late onset schizophrenia, borderline personality disorders, megalomania. For the first time since moving to Port Isley, he’d had to stop taking new patients. Candice was in a dither over the mountain of paperwork, insurance companies wanting estimates, forms to fax, addresses to bill…

“Think you can handle it all?” Bob asked. They sat on John’s back porch, drinks in hand, and listened to firecrackers off in the distance, only the die-hard and drunk still setting them off. It was probably after midnight. The woods of the park were cool; both men wore long sleeves.

John sipped his beer and leaned back in his sagging lawn chair. “Yeah, I can handle it. It’s my job, right?”

Bob hesitated, then said, “I mean, after what happened with Annie.”

It was the first time his friend had brought up the murders since arriving. John sighed, sinking farther into his chair. “Work is solace,” he said. “You’re a man’s man, you’re supposed to know that.”

Bob chuckled. “I suppose I do. I’ve written six months of editorials in the last two weeks.”

“How are you holding up?” John asked. Bob had been friendly with Annie.

Bob studied him for a moment, his gaze unreadable in the heavy shadow—the only light came through the living room window, pale and diffuse.

“I don’t know,” Bob said finally. “I’ve been drinking too much, but I guess that’s nothing new. Been kind of…introspective, I guess. I’ve certainly been keeping busy, with the paper…” He trailed off for a second, then added, “And some research I’ve been doing. For the last week or so, I’ve been pursuing some crazy thoughts, I guess you’d say.”

“Really,” John said. A deliberate opening for Bob to elaborate, if he wanted.

“You going to analyze me, Doc?”

John grinned. No getting anything past Bob Sayers. “Heaven forbid. Talk if you want. I promise not to give advice unless you pay me.”

Bob sipped from his drink. He’d brought a bottle of whiskey over—he said beer was for doctors and sailors—and had been drinking it neat all evening, although John had yet to see any sign that the aging reporter was drunk. “You ever heard of anything called mass psychogenic illness, or MPI?”

“Group hysteria?” John asked. “You think…you think that teacher and Rick Truman, killing those people…”

“And other assorted weirdnesses,” Bob interjected. “People aren’t acting themselves lately, have you noticed?”

John thought about Dale and Nina…and a dozen others he’d seen in the last week. It was tempting to wish there was some common cause.

“Well, yes, but it’s not unusual for a tragedy in a small town to have an effect on the community,” John said. He felt like he’d been saying that a lot lately. “Sometimes a profound one.”

“I wonder,” Bob said. “You said yourself that your caseload has doubled, right? I finally got around to checking the police blotter, something I’d been neglecting since Annie…since that night. You realize our crime rate has gone up about a hundred percent in the last month? Compared to June last year? Domestic abuse, vandalism, harassment complaints…granted, it’s summer, but as far as I can tell, things’ve never been this bad.”

“Right, but two sets of murders in just a couple of weeks…” It was his turn to trail off. A great number of his current appointments had been made before the first murder. If there were some commonality…

He promptly shook the idea. “Insanity isn’t contagious, Bob.”

“Not necessarily insanity,” Bob said. “I got online—amazing, what’s out there now—and found some interesting things.”

“About mass hysteria,” John said. He remembered reading a fairly recent article on sociogenic or psychogenic illnesses—groups of people, usually in small, isolated communities, who suddenly started to exhibit the same psychosomatic symptoms. There’d been a group of kids at a summer lunch program in Florida, back in the early nineties, who had all been convinced that they were suffering food poisoning—of the 150 children there, almost half were vomiting and fainting, any number hospitalized, and all because one of the kids said they felt sick, and someone had said poison a little too loud. Turned out the prepackaged food, the servers and tables, the kids themselves had tested clean…but the rumor had spread, the perceived sickness spreading with it. The article had cited a couple of other examples.

“That’s where I started,” Bob said. “I surfed, I believe the young folks still say—I looked at anything having to do with groups of people, all being affected in some negative way. Chemical spills, mercury poisoning, copycat killers…you know, there are clusters of suicides that pop up every now and then, bunches of teenagers all cutting their wrists or turning on their cars in closed garages? Just because they heard about some other teens doing it?”

“The Werther effect,” John said, nodding. His college roommate had done a paper on it, concerning the impact of media coverage on teen suicides. The name came from a book written by Goethe in the late 1700s about a young man named Werther who shot himself after a failed romance—and upon its publication, a number of young male readers followed suit, even dressing in the clothes that young Werther had preferred. “There’s a whole set of ethical choices that the media has to make when anyone commits suicide. They have to be especially careful with teenagers killing themselves. Developmentally, they’re particularly susceptible.”

“Don’t teach your grandpa how to suck eggs,” Bob said, his expression amiable. “I was on a paper for something like half a century, wasn’t I? I was asking if you knew anything about it.”

John grinned. He didn’t sit around analyzing his friendship with Bob or why he liked the man so much—he tried not to, anyway—but he thought that the fact Bob said things like don’t teach your grandpa how to suck eggs had something to do with it. “So, you think people are catching crazy? Is that what this is about?”

He said it lightly, but Bob seemed to really consider the question, his lined face set in thought. “Maybe, maybe not,” he said finally. “I mean, there are cases on record. Isolated communities swept up in bizarre epidemics—the Salem witch trials, obviously, but there are others. Near some village in Africa—next to Kenya, I think—thousands of people were caught up in laughing fits sometime in the early sixties. This lasted for months, people suddenly breaking into episodes of uncontrollable laughter.” Bob drank, then added, “Not that it was funny. There was also a lot of crying reported, rashes, pain, breathing problems…”

MPI again. “Let me guess,” John said. “Political instability?”

Bob nodded. “Change of borders, change of power. The popular theory is that everyone was just stressed as hell.”

“Port Isley isn’t exactly isolated,” John said. In the park, a string of loud pops and a teenage shout of glee.

“Why, ’cause you can drive out of it? Because you can be in Seattle within an hour, assuming you can catch the Angeline ferry on schedule?” Bob scoffed. “We don’t feel isolated because we’ve got computers and cell phones and cable news, but we are pretty much alone out here. Port Angeles’s our closest neighbor, and she’s a twenty-minute drive on a good day.”

“I didn’t mean geographically,” John said. “Psychologically. Having phones and the net and the news does make a difference when it comes to that kind of hysteria. We have input from the rest of the world, especially with the summer people here. Not to mention better science. And no common religion. Besides which, no one is actually sick, per se.”

“Yeah, I noticed that,” Bob said, and sighed. “It’s probably nothing.”

“It is interesting,” John said. Assuming you accepted the premise that an entire town was going off the deep end, trying to unravel the whys and wherefores was a challenge, at least. “You really think there’s…something going around?”

“You’re the shrink; you tell me,” Bob said. “Are people crazier than usual?”

John was reflexively ready with a no, of course not, but the beer, the relaxed attitude, feeling not-bad for the first night since Le Poisson, he gave it some real thought. He was getting more business, that was true—a lot more. And not the standard feed of depression, divorce, midlife crisis, what he’d mostly dealt with since putting out his shingle. People were generally too complex to fit neatly into categories, and he felt he did his clients a disservice by pigeonholing them…but it seemed, lately, he’d spent an awful lot of time just trying to find the right labels, to figure out what was going on, to try to provide some help. For lack of a better term, people were acting crazier.

Not all of them. Marianne, his incest survivor, had canceled her last appointment with a smile in her voice. Four, five of his regular patients had cut their times, come to think of it, all for reasons of improved mental state. If there was a psychological bug going around, it wasn’t making everyone sick.

“Are you feeling…different?” John asked.

“Drinking too much, like I said,” Bob said. “I’ve been thinking about my life, remembering things…nothing else, unless you count my dust-covered reporter’s instincts stirring.” He smiled and sipped his whiskey. “A last gasp, perhaps.”

Lauren, John thought, asking himself the same question. Before his too-brief relationship with Annie Thomas, he’d been thinking a lot about Lauren, about women in general…he’d been feeling something, no question; he’d even been planning to talk to Phillip about it. But since Le Poisson, thinking differently had been par for the course. He’d been traumatized, for f*ck’s sake.

Annie’s dress, her bleeding red dress…John promptly took a healthy swallow of his own beer. He wasn’t drunk, but his pleasant buzz was starting to fade, and he wanted it back. “Actually, I’ve been feeling pretty crazy myself, lately,” he said. “But I think that’s to be expected.”

Bob was about to say something else when the phone in John’s shirt pocket chirped and vibrated, a startling burr of motion. He held up a hand and fished the cell out to see who was calling so late. His voice mail listed his cell in case of emergencies, though he couldn’t remember the last time a patient had called the number on a weekend.

The listing was Good Samaritan, Port Isley’s tiny hospital.

“I should take this,” he said, and stood up on Bob’s nod of acquiescence, opening the cell as he walked to the back door, nearly tripping over one of Lauren’s flowerpots that he had yet to toss.

“This is John Hanover,” he said, stepping into the bright kitchen, and the woman on the other end started talking, her words high and too fast.

“Dr. Hanover, it’s Sarah Reed, Karen’s sister? Karen Haley? She was your patient for a while, after Byron died. Her husband, Byron. We met at the picnic, I was there with Karen and my son, Tommy. I’m sorry to be calling so late. Karen really needs you, can you come? Can you come right now? To the hospital?”

“I remember you, Sarah,” John said. He kept his voice soothing and low. “Take a breath and tell me what happened.”

“Karen was aa…” A shuddering breath, and when she spoke again, he could hear the tears in her voice. “Attacked. She was attacked and, and sexually assaulted a few hours ago at the fairgrounds. By a group of boys.”

John felt suddenly sober. “Oh my God. Is she hurt, is she badly hurt?”

“She’s hurt,” Sarah said. “And the police keep trying to talk to her, this Chief Vincent, he keeps asking all these questions and she’s, she’s really not doing very well. And she needs to see someone, now, and you were her doctor, she’s always spoken so highly of you…will you come? I’m sorry, I know it’s late, but I don’t know who else to call. Do you think you could come?”

John checked his watch, assessed his ability to drive. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

Sarah let out a soft sob. “Thank you, thank you so much,” she said, and hung up.

John stepped back out on the porch. “I’m sorry, Bob,” he said. “I’ve got to cut out for a while. You’re welcome to stay—the guest room sheets haven’t been changed in a while, but it’s not like they go bad or anything, right?”

“What’s up?” Bob asked, rising from his chair.

“Ah, an old client of mine, she got hurt,” John said. “And it sounds like the cops are being insensitive. I have to go down to Good Sam. There’s leftover pizza in the oven; have some pizza, watch a movie or something…” His thoughts were racing, jumping ahead to finding his keys…chew some gum in the car, bottle of water on the drive…he didn’t see the look on Bob’s face.

“Was she raped?” Bob asked.

John stopped thinking about his keys and stopped and looked at his friend, replaying what Bob might have heard from his end of the conversation. He was pretty sure he hadn’t mentioned anything specific, although he supposed there might have been some inference—

“Gang-raped, by a bunch of teenage boys?” Bob asked, stepping closer. His lean, weathered face was too pale. “At the fairgrounds?”

“How did—could you hear that?”

Bob’s expression tightened at John’s inadvertent confirmation. “I’ll tell you on the way to the hospital,” he said. “If you wouldn’t mind giving me a lift. I’m not in much condition to drive.”

“I don’t think the, ah, family would appreciate having the press show up,” John began, but Bob was shaking his head.

“It’s not like that,” he said. “This isn’t a story. Or it is, but not one that’ll ever see print. It’s—I may have information for the police, that’s all. I won’t be bothering her family.”

John stared at him a moment. If Bob was drunk, he still saw no sign…and the reporter’s expression was set. “Yeah, OK. You’ll tell me what this is about?”

Bob nodded slowly. “People aren’t acting themselves,” he said, seemingly as much to himself as to John. “Let me hit the head; I’ll meet you at the front door.”

“Sure,” John said, telling himself that Sarah’s voice must have been audible to Bob somehow. It didn’t seem possible—

—isn’t possible, his brain affirmed.

—but what other explanation made any sense? Maybe there had been some gang rapes in Port Angeles or over in Jackson, something he hadn’t heard about. Of course, that must be it. He settled on the thought with relief; Bob had heard something about some other related crime or crimes, maybe from the police, for the paper. For a moment, John had thought…

He shook it off; it wasn’t the time for flights of fancy. Karen needed a friendly face. He’d done a rotation through a rape counseling center as a resident, liked to think he’d at least been competent…he hoped he could be useful.

Karen Haley. Goddamnit. He knew that rapists were troubled, broken people, that many had been victims of abuse themselves, as children…he’d never had any sympathy for their actions, but he’d tried to understand, through his filters of training, how they had come to be, what he might do if he had a client with those tendencies.

Dead men don’t rape, he thought now, remembering the scrawled graffiti from some random wall in the city, and found that he agreed too fiercely to wonder at his sudden change of heart.





Bob told John about the girl, Amanda, and her friend, whom he’d met and talked with at the picnic, as John drove them to Good Sam. About how Amanda had foreseen the rape, just as she’d predicted Lisa Meyers’s death…and his impressions of the two young people as honest and sincere. The doctor was skeptical, to say the least. Bob had always suspected that John was a little too bright in that way that precluded real open-mindedness—the intellectual liberal curse, perhaps, to believe that they knew everything because they’d read an article about the law of large numbers and a book or two on the invention of God.

Still, John had the decency not to point and laugh, and Bob didn’t take offense at his less-than-enthusiastic response; John was preoccupied, worrying about his patient, and Bob had more than enough to chew over without trying to convince anyone of anything. That little punk-rock girl, all of seventeen…Bob kept trying to make the scenario plausible, imagining that Amanda and Devon had planned everything, perhaps even paid their cohorts to attack a woman, to substantiate their story—maybe they meant to sell it; maybe Amanda was plotting to become the next John Edwards, or whatever psychic marvel was popular these days, and they’d set Bob up as their credible witness. The idea was far-fetched, but certainly not as out-there as precognition. There was the even simpler explanation, that it was a coincidence. Rape wasn’t common in Port Isley, but it wasn’t unheard of, either.

The thing was, he believed Amanda Young’s story. Not because he was open-minded, although he fancied that he was, or because he believed that there was more to life than what the sciences had figured out, although that was true, too. He just thought she was telling the truth.

And she’s seen two separate events before they happened, now; at least two. And what did that mean? Only that he wanted to talk to her again, as soon as possible. And he needed to find Stan Vincent, to see if that kid, Brian Glover, was a suspect yet.

They pulled into Good Sam’s main parking lot, adjacent to the ER. There were a handful of hybrids and SUVs parked close to the entrance, summer folk, probably escorting their firecracker-injured kids through the urgent care. There were also two PIPD units parked at the reserved spots in the front, next to one of the hospital’s ambulances. One of them was the chief’s.

What am I going to tell him? Bob considered his options as John pulled into a space at the end of the line. Stan Vincent had always struck him as a pragmatist; walking up to him and announcing that a psychic had fingered the rapist wasn’t going to fly. On the other hand, if there was a chance that Amanda might have seen something else, or was going to, maybe it’d be better to tell the truth, to establish that she shouldn’t be dismissed as a crank…

Bob felt a tightening of his gut. If he’d believed their story, he could have prevented what had happened…but to be fair, how could he have believed it? What sane person would have?

“I may be awhile,” John said. He and Bob both climbed out, John pocketing his car keys. “Do you want to meet up later, get a ride home?”

“No, I’m good,” Bob said. “I’m barely a walk from here. You do what you need to do, don’t worry about me.”

They started for the front entrance, hurrying. “Call me tomorrow, let me know…” John tried a smile. “Let me know if your teenager needs a therapist, I suppose.”

Bob smiled back at him, sure that his own looked just as distracted. “I have to find her, first. I’ll keep you updated.”

They walked in together and immediately saw Chief Vincent and one of his officers, Ian Henderson, standing by the pay phone at the far side of the room, talking. Bob could see their tension, their expressions, their stances betraying them, and hoped he wasn’t about to make a mistake. Bob and John exchanged farewells, and John hurried to the front desk. Bob popped an Altoid and walked toward the policemen, still not sure what he was going to say.

“Chief,” Bob said, nodding in greeting. “Officer Henderson.”

Vincent’s eyes narrowed. “What do you want?”

Bob raised his eyebrows, startled by the obvious antagonism. “Just to talk a minute.”

“I don’t have a minute,” Vincent snapped. “You want a story, call the office tomorrow.”

“I…ah, I may have some information for you,” Bob said. “About the attack.”

Vincent glanced at Henderson, back at Bob. “What attack is that?”

“The rape,” Bob said. “A woman was raped, is that right?”

“How did you hear about it?”

Bob looked to Henderson, saw Vincent’s grim suspicion mirrored on the other man’s face. Both men were looking at him as if he’d raped someone.

“I was at a friend’s house, and he got a call—”

“Who’s your friend?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Bob said. “Look, was the victim able to identify her attackers?”

Vincent’s gaze narrowed further. “You didn’t answer my question, Mr. Sayers.”

He didn’t anger easily, but the chief’s rudeness was starting to get to him…and it was also deciding his course of action, as far as how truthful to be.

“Brian Glover and a couple of his buddies were talking about attacking someone, at the town picnic,” Bob said. “I heard some other teenagers discussing it.”

Stan Vincent was suddenly close enough that Bob could feel his breath across his face, hot and sour. “Who? What teenagers?”

Bob took a step back, kept his expression impassive. “Some kids, I don’t know.”

“And you didn’t report it?” Henderson asked.

Bob couldn’t help a stab of guilt. “No. I mean, it was just kids, talking.”

Vincent’s eyes were cold and hard. “Talking about beating and raping a woman.”

“If I’d really believed it, I would have called you, obviously,” Bob said. “And I’m not saying this Glover kid did do it. I’m just telling you what I heard.”

“From ‘some other teenagers’ you don’t know, is that right?” Vincent asked. He made no effort to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

“That’s what I said.”

Vincent stared at him another moment, then nodded, once. “I’ll want you at the station, first thing in the morning. Don’t make me come get you.”

Bob stared back. He had no idea how to respond. Vincent finally looked away, to the other cop.

“Let’s go,” he said, and Henderson nodded, and both men started for the doors.

Bob watched them walk away, troubled by the brief encounter, by Vincent’s behavior. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but the anger, the abrupt dismissal…Stan Vincent wasn’t acting like himself either; not at all.

“What the hell is going on around here?” Bob murmured aloud, unable to imagine what the answer might be.





Amanda woke up as soon as she heard the car pull into the lot, headlights splashing across the wall in lengthening slats. She blinked at the digital clock on top of the TV, saw that it was just after four in the morning. Eric had left around midnight. He’d wanted to stay, but Amanda couldn’t think of a more embarrassing, personal, awful scene to witness: Grace would be shit-faced, as usual, they would fight, she was sure, and it would suck.

She sat up on the couch and turned the TV off, surprised that she’d fallen asleep; the fireworks had still been going strong when she’d dozed off. Postadrenaline crash, maybe. She’d been keyed up for a couple of hours after Peter had gone. Eric had wanted to call the cops, but Amanda knew she had to tell Grace first. Her mother would never forgive her if she called the police on her boyfriend without at least warning her. It was Saturday, which Grace always considered a license to drink excessively—but Amanda hoped it wouldn’t be too bad, that she’d be clearheaded enough to at least hear her side of the story. She had no doubt that Peter had shown up at the end of Grace’s shift to spin his own version of things. He might even come home with her, which would make the fight all the more ugly. She was glad she’d sent Eric home.

Amanda and Eric had stayed in. They’d smoked and talked and eaten and had finally had sex in her small bed as late twilight passed into dark, as the fan buzzed in the corner and the fireworks started in earnest. The assorted trash families that lived in the complex loved nothing more than to make shit explode, and the parking lot had been overrun with them, shouting and laughing in between the pops and whistles. Eric had been tender and gentle with her, touching her hair and face as they’d done it, and she hadn’t gotten off but it had been mind-blowingly intimate and therefore amazing, anyway. She’d been able to feel the way he wanted to protect her and how good he felt inside her…she hadn’t shied away from the emotional connection, from knowing what she couldn’t know, and she’d felt…engulfed by him, as he smiled into her eyes. It had been thrilling and frightening and beautiful.

Amanda folded her arms across her stomach, a hard, heavy knot as a car door slammed. A key scraped in the lock, and the headlights pulled away, the car’s engine rumbling loudly in the predawn quiet; it wasn’t Peter, then. One of the waitresses usually gave Grace a lift when she’d had a few too many.

Her mother opened the door and saw her on the couch, waiting—and gave her a look of such deep unhappiness, of anger and bitter regard, that Amanda felt suddenly very, very lonely.

It’s over, Amanda thought. The loneliness bloomed into sorrow. Grace had never been very good at the mothering thing, but she had tried; there’d been a few good years in there, before the drinking had gotten too bad, when it had just been the two of them. “Us against them, Manda-pie,” she’d say, and hug her tight-tight-tight.

It wasn’t fair…but then, it had never been fair.

“So,” Grace slurred, closing the door, tossing her keys on the coffee table. She threw them too hard, and they skidded over the edge. She unshouldered her purse, let it fall on the floor. “So, you wanna f*ck Peter, issat it?”

“He attacked me,” Amanda said, aware that it was useless.

“Right, right,” Grace said, her smile sad and sneering at once. “You come on to him and try to f*ck ’im behind my back, and now he attacked you.”

“I never came on to him. He’s lying.”

“I gave birth to you,” Grace said, her eyes welling up. “You were my baby.”

“He’s a liar,” Amanda said, her voice clear and cold. “He came in here and f*cking grabbed me. He was going to rape me.”

“I see how you are with him,” her mother said, like she hadn’t said anything. The tears spilled over, her mouth curved in sudden rage. “The way you look at him, the way you’re always touching him.”

Amanda stared. “What?”

“He tol’ me about you, calling him when I’m at work, pushing up against him—showing him your tits—”

“What?” Amanda couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “I would never!”’

Grace nodded, grinning now, her eyes shining. “Oh, yes. I’ve seen it. I tol’ myself it was a crush, that you’d never do that to me. I’m your mother; I’m the only family you have, after your father left me all alone…”

The mood shifts were fast, even for Grace. She bit at her lower lip, tears spilling again.

“I know I haven’t always been perfect, but I thought we were friends! I never thought that you would—that you could—” She broke down, sobbing.

Amanda watched, wondering. For most of her short childhood, she’d cried when her mother’s tears had started to fall. But they fell so often and almost always meant nothing the next morning. Her childhood had been pretty much over by the time she was twelve. Devon had printed out some stuff for her once from Al Anon, about how alcoholics were emotionally stunted by their drinking, unable to grow past the age they started, often as teens. Amanda had seen it play out every day of her life. Grace, drunk, creating dramas from nothing, from the air. Anger and blame, remorse and self-recrimination, tears and more tears; there were promises made, to do better, and sloppy, showy hugs, and always another drink, to celebrate. It was all about Grace, and Grace’s problems, and what she needed, and what she wanted. What Amanda wondered at now was how clearly she could really see it, the jagged, broken selfishness that her mother wore like a cloak, so wounded that she couldn’t allow anything else to grow, either.

“Mom,” she said, and felt her throat lock up anyway, understanding the reality of what was happening. “Mom, this is no good. We can’t talk when you’re drunk.”

“You’re not putting this off, sweetie,” her mother said, abruptly spiteful through her tears, vicious. “He told me what you were wearing when he came by. He told me what you said, how if he didn’t dump me you’d say he, he molested you.”

“And you believe him?” Amanda asked, feeling calmer than she’d expected—but more hurt, too, the ache like a rotten tooth in her stomach. How could her mother even think that of her? “I can’t stand him; don’t you know me at all?”

Grace stared at her, swaying slightly, her mouth turned down in an ugly grimace of crocodile sorrow. “I thought I did. Maybe when you were little. But you’re a grown-up now, all grown up, aren’tcha? You want to be a grown-up, you can pack your shit and get the f*ck out.”

“You believe him,” Amanda said, answering her own question.

“He told me weeks ago that you started flirtin’, and I thought he was—I thought he’d made a mistake. I didn’t know, then. But I been watching you, the way you look at him. The way you’re pushing yourself at him.” She was drunk enough to repeat herself, to forget what she was saying, but the words hurt all over again. “Showing him your tits, like some whore. And he came in tonight and said what you did, how you tried to kiss him, and then screamed when one of your friends knocked on the door.”

The suspicion was on Grace’s face in every line, every wrinkle. She looked old, witchlike, and her terrible smile quivered with the effort she was putting into holding it. “It was a setup, wasn’t it? I think you set him up, so you’d have a witness, so you could, could…” She grasped for the word. “Support your lies. That’s what he thinks, too. But he loves me, he loves me. Not you. He wants us to move in together, and you—I don’t want you here when that happens. I mean it. I can’t trust you.”

“Mom, listen to me,” Amanda said, standing so that she could meet her mother’s jittery gaze, so that she could make her mother see her. “He hit on me a couple of weeks ago. When I told him I’d tell you, he backed off. Tonight, he was going to do it, he was going to rape me. He would have if Eric hadn’t shown up. He told me that he was going to tell you I was the one who asked for it. He even told me how my story would play to the cops, if I reported it—how he’d make it look like I was trying to stay out of trouble by accusing him.” Even thinking about it now, she felt a chill of the dread she’d felt earlier, when he’d been touching her—understanding that he’d thought it all out, that he’d planned to force sex with her and get away with it. It was shocking, even for a mean bigot like Peter, that he could be so deliberately evil.

“Don’t you see what he’s doing? He’s a bad guy, Mom, he’s no good. Don’t let him do this to us.”

For just a beat, Grace stared at her, her face slack—and Amanda wanted to feel hope, wanted to think that she’d gotten through, but her mother’s feelings radiated from her like a dark aura of heat, of betrayal and mistrust. Her expression meant only that she was too drunk to process her daughter’s words.

“You’re the liar,” her mother said finally. “And a whore, prob’ly. Who’s your friend, anyway? Somebody else you’re f*cking? It’s no wonder your father left. I’da left, too, if I’d known what you were gonna turn into.”

Amanda felt empty inside. “That’s great, that’s really great. That’s awesome parenting.”

“You’re so mean to me,” Grace said. Fresh tears had sprung up. “I don’t need you around always telling me what a f*ckup I am. Why don’t you get your shit and get out?”

The last was nearly screamed. Grace had made the threat in the past, when she’d first caught Amanda smoking and again when she’d found weed in her bag last year, but those had been weepy, showy scenes; this time was different. Grace was different. Amanda’s emptiness filled with fear, with not knowing what would happen, where she would go. Devon? Eric? One of the cheap motels down on the highway? It was four in the morning. “Can I pack a bag, at least?”

“Pack a bag, take some money out of the tip jar,” Grace said. “Take all of it, because it’s all you’re getting from me. Just be gone when I get up.”

Her mother stared at her another moment, a caricature of bitterness, of self-absorbed addiction. “You were looking for an excuse to leave, anyway. Always were.”

The last word; Grace staggered toward her bedroom. The cheap interior door didn’t slam, but Amanda heard the lock click, heard her mother talking to herself in a loud, unsteady voice.

She sat back down on the couch, distraught and disoriented. It had all happened so fast. She took a deep breath, then another. Tomorrow morning Grace might regret kicking her out; she could wait. But even if Grace took it back, there was no reason to stay.

She’d pack some things, take the money—her mother stuffed most of her tips in a jar on top of the fridge, for groceries and bills; at any given time, there was a couple hundred dollars in the jar—and try to sleep another few hours, although she couldn’t imagine how, knowing that she was officially homeless. She’d go get some coffee, then find Devon. Devon would put her up, she knew, and his Uncle Sid was a decent man; she’d have a roof over her head for a while, until she could figure out what to do next. She had her savings, too; she could…could…

Her own tears came up, and she let herself topple, falling into the battered old couch with a soft wail. Even a month ago, she couldn’t have imagined this. Grace had been a pretty awful parent, as far as parents went, but there’d never been any question about Amanda being welcome in her home—in their home.

Everything is changing, she thought, which made her think of what she’d been seeing, what she’d been feeling, ever since that horrible vision of Lisa Meyers’s death…and she felt quite strongly now that the everything was connected somehow, the death and strangeness in her life and in Port Isley.

Amanda cried for a while, then got up to start gathering her things.