I dropped my cane in shock and pressed my palms back against the wall where Linda’s younger self smiled brightly with her cleavage hanging out. “Linda,” I said breathlessly. “What the hell.”
“If they kill Johnny,” she said, “I’ll be a widow within a week. And I swear to God I will hunt down every last person responsible and murder you with my own hands.”
“I am not Johnny’s enemy,” I said in my most soothing tone. “Just tell me where he took Claybriar, the faun who was after him. If you do, I promise I will leave Johnny alone, and I’m almost positive I can get Claybriar to do the same. No one from the Project knows that Johnny’s staying here, and I won’t tell anyone, I swear on my life.”
“Your life?” She gave a strange laugh. “Just how much does that mean to you, anyway?”
“Here I am, panicking at the sight of a gun.”
Linda shook her head. “I can’t tell you where he is.”
“Why not?”
She clamped her mouth shut.
“Linda,” I pleaded, “I think Claybriar might be my Echo. If something happens to him, I’ll never know.”
The gun in her hand dropped slightly, then steadied on me again. “Johnny and David have been together almost fifty years. You can’t know what that means.”
“I want the chance to find out,” I said. “Please, Linda. If I have an Echo, I need him.” I felt tears start to my eyes. “I need him; I’m a mess.”
Linda’s gun wavered again. “I know,” she said, and exhaled. “Christ, David and his little projects.”
We both jumped as, through the open door behind Linda, we heard someone slam through the house’s front entrance.
“Linda?” came David’s voice from the same direction.
“We’re in the garage,” Linda called over her shoulder.
Berenbaum appeared in the doorway and hurried toward her, effortlessly taking the gun. “Linda, what the hell is going on here?” He added with a quick glance to me, “It’s a prop, not even loaded.”
I felt like a first-class dolt. David turned back to Linda, hands gently closing on her shoulders. “What did she do?”
“What did I do?” I said incredulously. “I answered the phone, and when I hung up she was pointing a gun at me!”
“She knows about the prisoners,” Linda told him.
The what now?
Berenbaum cringed. “They’re not prisoners. Anyway, you thought pointing a fake gun at her was going to give her amnesia? What the hell, Linda.”
They had to be talking about the missing commoners. Why did Linda think they were prisoners? Why did David disagree?
“I don’t know anything, I swear,” I protested. “No one said anything to me about—”
He kept grilling Linda as though I weren’t there. “What were you planning to do with her next? Hog-tie her and toss her in a closet and call Vivian here to wipe her memory?”
“That’s actually not a half-bad idea.”
“What?” I blurted.
Berenbaum still didn’t look at me. “Forget it,” he said to Linda. “Her mind’s got enough problems without Vivian messing around in there.”
Another slow shift in perspective. This time, I did not go gently, but held on fast. David couldn’t be dismissing me. He couldn’t have just reduced my mental illness to a punch line. I felt a need for support and bent to pick up my cane. The movement didn’t catch their eye; I probably could have walked past them and out of the house without their noticing. I wish I had.
“You certainly can pick them,” Linda said bitterly.
Give me two or three years, he had said to me, and I could have people willing to take a bullet for you. I would have taken a bullet for him after the first time he shook my hand. David, David, say it isn’t so.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he snapped at his wife.
“I mean of all the people you could have cheated with all these years, you pick that one?”
“Linda! For God’s sake! I would never touch her!”
The sheer horror on his face made my hands go cold. I leaned on my cane to keep from falling, but then I felt the break, like glass shattering inside me: that swift protective alchemy that turns hurt to white-hot rage.
“You can’t be serious,” Berenbaum said. “She’s not even—”
“Not even a person?” I snarled between gritted teeth. “Like those ‘prisoners’ of yours? I am a person, goddamn it, and I AM STANDING! RIGHT! HERE!”
I heard the sound of splintering safety glass, saw the spider-web of cracks. I hadn’t realized I’d started swinging the cane, but then it felt so good I couldn’t stop; I slammed it against that cherry-red finish, against the vinyl top, tearing it, against the side mirror, knocking it askew.
I would have fallen then, if not for the wall behind me. David vaulted across the hoods of both cars in rapid succession and grabbed me, pinned my arms back against the wall, his face as stricken as though I’d tossed a baby down a flight of stairs.