“I didn’t imagine it. I didn’t.” But already she was beginning to wonder. Perhaps she had imagined the moths, too.
“Even if you did, those glowing handprints and footprints are definitely X-Files material.” Garth brightened. “I’ve got all those shows on disc, and they hold up remarkably well, although the cell phones they use in the first two or three seasons are hilarious. Let’s go back to the house and smoke up and watch some, what do you say?”
Michaela did not want to watch The X-Files. What she wanted was to drive to the prison and see if she could score an interview with the woman of the hour. It seemed like an awful lot of work, and it was hard to imagine persuading anyone to let her in looking as she did now (sort of like the Wicked Witch of the West, only in jeans and a shell top), but after what they had seen up here, where that woman had reportedly made her first appearance . . .
“How about a real-life X-File?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s take a ride. I’ll tell you on the way.”
“Maybe we could try this stuff out first?” He shook the Baggie hopefully.
“Soon,” she said. It would have to be soon, because weariness surrounded her. It was like being stuck in a suffocating black bag. But there was one tiny rip in it, and that rip was her curiosity, letting in a shaft of bright light.
“Well . . . okay. I guess.”
Garth led their return down the path. Michaela paused long enough to take a look back over her shoulder, hoping to surprise the amazing tree back into existence. But it was just an oak, broad and tall but not in the least supernatural.
The truth is out there, though, she thought. And maybe I’m not too tired to find it.
7
Nadine Hicks was of the old school; in the days before Aurora she had been wont to introduce herself as “Mrs. Lawrence Hicks,” as though by marrying her husband, she had to some degree become him. Now she was wrapped up like a wedding present and reclining at the dining room table. Set in front of her was an empty plate, an empty glass, napkin and cutlery. After letting Frank into the house, Hicks brought him into the dining room, and the assistant warden sat down at the cherrywood table across from his wife to finish his breakfast.
“I bet you think this is weird,” said Hicks.
No, Frank thought, I don’t think arranging your cocooned wife at the dining table like a giant mummified doll is weird at all. I think it’s, oh, what’s the word? Ah, there it is: insane.
“I’m not going to judge you,” Frank said. “It’s been a big shock. Everyone’s doing the best they can.”
“Well, Officer, I’m just trying to keep to a routine.” Hicks was dressed up in a suit and he’d shaved, but there were huge bags under his eyes and the suit was wrinkled. Of course, everyone’s clothes seemed to be wrinkled now. How many men knew how to iron? Or to fold, for that matter? Frank did, but he didn’t own an iron. Since the separation, he took his clothes to Dooling Dry Cleaners, and if he needed a pair of creased pants in a hurry, he put them under the mattress, lay down for twenty minutes or so, and called it good.
Hicks’s breakfast was chipped beef on toast. “Hope you don’t mind if I eat. Good old shit-on-a-shingle. Moving her around works up an appetite. After this, we’re going to sit out in the yard.” Hicks swiveled to his wife. “Isn’t that right, Nadine?”
They both waited a couple of pointless seconds, as if she might respond. Nadine just sat there, though, an alien statue behind her place setting.
“Listen, I don’t want to take up too much of your time, Mr. Hicks.”
“It’s fine.” Hicks scooped up a toast point and took a bite. Droplets of white mush and beef splatted down on his knee. “Darn it.” Hicks chuckled through his mouthful. “Running out of clean clothes already. Nadine’s the one who does the laundry. Need you to wake up and get on that, Nadine.” He swallowed his bite, and gave Frank a small, serious nod. “I scoop the litter box and take out the trash on Friday mornings. It’s equitable. A fair division of labor.”
“Sir, I just want to ask you—”
“And I gas up her car. She hates those self-service pumps. I used to tell her, ‘You’ll have to learn if I predecease you, honey.’ And she’d say—”
“I want to ask you about what’s going on at the prison.” Frank also wanted to get away from Lore Hicks as quickly as possible. “There’s a woman there that people are talking about. Her name’s Eve Black. What can you tell me about her?”
Hicks studied his plate. “I would avoid her.”
“So, she’s awake?”
“She was when I left. But yes, I would avoid her.”
“They say that she sleeps and wakes. Is that true?”
“It seemed like she did, but . . .” Hicks, still staring at his plate, angled his head, as if he were suspicious of his shit on toast. “I hate to beat a dead horse, but I would let that one go, Officer.”
“Why do you say that?” Frank was thinking of the moths that had burst up from the clipping of web that Garth Flickinger had lit. And the one that had seemed to fix its eyes on him.
“She took my phone,” said Hicks.
“Pardon? How did she do that?”
“She threatened me with rats. The rats are with her. They do her bidding.”
“The rats do her bidding.”
“You see the implications, don’t you? Like every hotel, every prison has rodents. Cutbacks exacerbate the problem. I remember Coates complaining about having to cancel the exterminator. No room in the budget. They don’t think about that at the legislature, do they? ‘It’s just a prison. What are a few rats to an inmate, when they are rats themselves?’ Well, what if one of the inmates learns to control the rats? What then?” Hicks pushed his plate away. Apparently his appetite had left him. “Rhetorical question, of course. Legislature doesn’t think of things like that.”
Frank hovered in the doorway of the Hickses’ dining room, contemplating the likelihood that the man was suffering from hallucinations brought on by stress and grief. But there was the fragment of web that had turned into moths—what about that? Frank had seen it happen. And hadn’t a moth stared Frank down? That might have been a hallucination (he himself was suffering from stress and grief, after all), but Frank didn’t really think so. Who was to say that the assistant warden hadn’t completely lost his marbles? And who was to say he wasn’t telling the truth?
Maybe he’d lost his marbles because he was telling the truth. How about that for an unpleasant possibility?
Hicks stood up. “Since you’re here, would you mind helping me carry her outside? My back’s aching, and I’m not exactly young anymore.”