“Trust me, I know. Clint was surprised it was so easy to pull off the heist. I was, too, to be honest. We had a good laugh. I thought you were a little more on top of things. My mistake.”
“You should give yourself up, Ms. Black.” Frank concentrated on measuring his words. On keeping the redness that wanted to overtake his mind at bay. “Or you should give this—thing up. Whatever it is. You should do that before anyone gets hurt.”
“Oh, we’re pretty well past the getting-hurt stage. Judge Silver, for instance, got a lot more than hurt. As did Dr. Flickinger, who actually wasn’t such a bad fellow when his head was clear. We’re in the mass extinction stage.”
Frank choked the wheel of the cruiser. “What the fuck are you?”
“I could ask you the same question, but I know what you’d say: ‘I am the Good Father.’ Because with you it’s all Nana-Nana-Nana, isn’t it? The protective daddy. Have you thought even once about all the other women, and what you might be doing to them? What you might be putting at risk?”
“How do you know about my daughter?”
“It’s my business to know. There’s an old blues song that goes, ‘Before you accuse me, take a look at yourself.’ You need to widen your perspective, Frank.”
What I need, Frank Geary thought, is my hands around your throat. “What do you want?”
“I want you to man up! I want you to man the fuck up and make this interesting! I want your precious Nana to be able to go to school and say, ‘My daddy isn’t just a civil servant who catches feral cats, and he isn’t just a guy who punches walls or pulls on my favorite shirt or yells at Mom when things aren’t going his way. He’s also the man who stopped that wicked old fairy who put all the women to sleep.’?”
“Leave my daughter out of it, you bitch.”
The teasing note evaporated from her voice. “When you protected her at the hospital, that was brave. I admired it. I admired you. I truly did. I know you love her, and that’s no small thing. I know, in your way, all you want is the best for her. And that makes me love you a tiny bit, even though you’re part of the problem.”
Ahead, the first two vehicles were pulling to a stop beside Reed Barrows’s dented cruiser. Frank could see Barrows walking to meet them. Further on, he could see the bodies in the road.
“Stop this,” said Frank. “Let them go. Let the women go. Not just my wife and daughter, all of them.”
Evie said, “You’ll have to kill me first.”
8
Angel asked who was this Frank that Evie had been talking to.
“He’s the dragonslayer,” Evie said. “I just needed to make sure that he wasn’t going to allow himself to be distracted by unicorns.”
“You are so fuckin crazy.” Angel whistled.
Evie wasn’t, but it wasn’t an issue to debate with Angel—who, anyway, was entitled to her opinion.
CHAPTER 9
1
The fox comes to Lila in a dream. She knows it’s a dream because the fox can talk.
“Hey, babe,” he says as he pads into the bedroom of the house on St. George Street she’s now sharing with Tiffany, Janice Coates, and two of the docs from the Women’s Center—Erin Eisenberg and Jolie Suratt. (Erin and Jolie are unmarried. The third Women’s Center doctor, Georgia Peekins, lives on the other side of town, with two daughters who sorely miss their big brother.) Another reason to know this is a dream is that she’s alone in the room. The other twin bed, where Tiffany sleeps, is empty and neatly made up.
The fox puts its cunning forepaws—white rather than red, as if he has walked through fresh paint to get here—on the quilt that covers her.
“What do you want?” Lila asks.
“To show you the way back,” the fox says. “But only if you want to go.”
2
When Lila opened her eyes, it was morning. Tiffany was in the other bed where she belonged, the blankets pushed down to her knees, her belly a half-moon above the boxer shorts she slept in. She was over seven months now.
Instead of going to the kitchen to brew up a nasty-tasting mess of the chicory that served them as coffee in this version of Dooling, Lila went straight down the hall and opened the front door to a pleasant spring morning. (Time passed with such slippery limberness here; watches kept ordinary time, but there was really nothing ordinary about it.) The fox was there as she’d known it would be, sitting on the weed-choked slate path with its brush of a tail curled neatly around its paws. It regarded Lila with bright interest.
“Hey, babe,” Lila said. The fox cocked its head and seemed to smile. Then it trotted down the path to the broken street and sat again. Watching her. Waiting.
Lila went to wake Tiffany up.
3
In the end, seventeen residents of Our Place followed the fox in six of the solar-powered golf carts, a caravan trundling slowly out of town and then along what had been Route 31 toward Ball’s Hill. Tiffany rode in the lead cart along with Janice and Lila, grousing the whole way about not being allowed to ride her horse. This had been nixed by Erin and Jolie, who were concerned about the strength of Tiff’s contractions when she still had six or eight weeks to go. This much they had told the mom-to-be herself. What they hadn’t passed on (although Lila and Janice knew) were their worries for the baby, which had been conceived while Tiffany was still using drugs on a daily—sometimes hourly—basis.
Mary Pak, Magda Dubcek, the four members of the First Thursday Book Club, and five erstwhile Dooling Correctional inmates were going. Also along was Elaine Nutting, formerly Geary. She rode with the two lady docs. Her daughter had wanted to come, but Elaine had put her foot down and kept it down even when tears began to flow. Nana had been left with old Mrs. Ransom and her granddaughter. The two girls had become fast friends, but not even the prospect of spending a day with Molly had cheered Nana up. She wanted to follow the fox, she said, because it was like something out of a fairy tale. She wanted to draw it.
“Stay with your little girl, if you want,” Lila had told Elaine. “We’ve got plenty of people.”
“What I want is to see what that thing wants,” Elaine had replied. Although in truth, she didn’t know if she did or not. The fox—now sitting in front of the slumped ruin of Pearson’s Barber Shop and waiting patiently for the women to assemble and get moving—filled her with a sense of foreboding, unfocused but strong.
“Come on!” Tiffany called grumpily. “Before I need to pee again!”
And so they followed the fox as it trotted out of town along the faded white line in the center of the highway, occasionally looking back to make sure his troop was still there. Seeming to grin. Seeming almost to say, There sure are some fine-looking women in the audience today.