'You're making all of this up. You must be.'
Alice tapped the report in front of her. 'It's all here, Liz. Some of it wouldn't stand up in court, but the operative says none of the people he talked with would have a reason to lie. Ed's father called Ed his "good luck charm". At first, nobody objected to the boy even though it was illegal for him to be in the casinos. His father was a prize fish. But then the father started sticking just to roulette, playing only odd-even and red-black. By the end of the year the boy was
off-limits in every casino on the strip. And his father took up a new kind of gambling.'
'What?'
'The stock market. When the Hamners moved to L.A. in the middle of 1961, they were living in a ninety-dollar-a-month cheese box and Mr Hamner was driving a '52 Chevrolet. At the end of 1962, just sixteen months later, he had quit his job and they were living in their own home in San Jose. Mr Hamner was driving a brand-new Thunderbird and Mrs Hamner had a Volkswagen. You see, it's against the law for a small boy to be in the Nevada casinos, but no one could take the stock-market page away from him.'
'Are you implying that Ed. . . that he could. . . Alice, you're crazy!'
'I'm not implying anything. Unless maybe just that he knew what his daddy needed.'
I know what you need.
It was almost as if the words had been spoken into her ear, and she shuddered.
'Mrs Hamner spent the next six years in and out of various mental institutions. Supposedly for nervous disorders, but the operative talked to an orderly who said she was pretty close to psychotic. She claimed her son was the devil's henchman. She stabbed him with a pair of scissors in 1964. Tried to kill him. She. . . Liz? Liz, what is it?'
'The scar,' she muttered. 'We went swimming at the University pool on an open night about a month ago. He's got a deep, dimpled scar on his shoulder. . . here.' She put her hand just above her left breast. 'He said . . .' A wave of nausea tried to climb up her throat and she had to wait for it to recede before she could go on. 'He said he fell on a picket fence when he was a little boy.'
'Shall I go on?'
'Finish, why not? What can it hurt now?'
'His mother was released from a very plush mental institution in the San Joaquin Valley in 1968. The three of them went on a vacation. They stopped at a picnic spot on Route 101. The boy was collecting firewood when she drove the car right over the edge of the drop-off above the ocean with both her and her husband in it. It might have been an attempt to run Ed down. By then he was nearly eighteen. His father left him a million-dollar stock port-folio. Ed came east a year and a half later and enrolled here. And that's the end.'
'No more skeletons in the closet?'
'Liz, aren't there enough?'
She got up. 'No wonder he never wants to mention his family. But you had to dig up the corpse, didn't you?'
'You're blind,' Alice said. Elizabeth was putting on her coat. 'I suppose you're going to him.'
'Right.'
'Because you love him.'
'Right.'
Alice crossed the room and grabbed her arm. 'Will you get that sulky, petulant look off your face for a second and think! Ed Hamner is able to do things the rest of us only dream about. He got his father a stake at roulette and made him rich playing the stock market. He seems to be able to will winning. Maybe he's some kind of low-grade psychic. Maybe he's got precognition. I don't know. There are people who seem to have a dose of that. Liz, hasn't it ever occurred to you that he's forced you to love him?'
Liz turned to her slowly. 'I've never heard anything so ridicul6us in my life.'
'Is it? He gave you that sociology test the same way he gave his father the right side of the roulette board! He was never enrolled in any sociology course! I checked. He did it because it was the only way he could make you take him seriously!'
'Stop it!' Liz cried. She clapped her hands over her ears.
'He knew the test, and he knew when Tony was killed, and he knew you were going home on a plane! He even knew just the right psychological moment to step back into your life last October.'
Elizabeth pulled away from her and opened the door.
'Please,' Alice said. 'Please, Liz, listen. I don't know how he can do those things. I doubt if even he knows for sure. He might not mean to do you any harm, but he already has. He's made you love him by knowing every secret thing you want and need, and that's not love at all. That's rape.
Elizabeth slammed the door and ran down the stairs.
She caught the last bus of the evening into town. It was snowing more heavily than ever, and the bus lumbered through the drifts that had blown across the road like a crippled beetle. Elizabeth sat in the back, one of only six or seven passengers, a thousand thoughts in her mind.
Menthol cigarettes. The stock exchange. The way he had known her mother's nickname was Deedee. A little boy sitting at the back of a first-grade classroom, making sheep's eyes at a vivacious little girl too young to under-stand that - I know what you need.