Ree said Yeah, tough.
“Okay, so you get it. And what Damian and I had, it probably never would have lasted anyway. I know that. We were the same age, but he was way younger on the inside. Guys usually are, I think. But he was young more than most. Like, going off to play football in the park that day while our baby was home sick. That seemed normal to me then. He went off all the time like that. ‘I’ll be back,’ he’d say, or ‘Just going over to Rick’s,’ or whatever. I never questioned it. It didn’t seem like questioning was allowed. He’d butter me up. Flowers and whatever. Candy. New shirt from the mall. Stuff that’s nice for a second. But there was a part of him that was supposed to be funny, and it wasn’t. It was just unkind. Like, he’d pull up beside a lady walking a dog, and yell, ‘You look like twins!’ or he’d be strolling along and feint at some teenager going the other way like he was going to punch him, make the kid cringe. ‘I’m just playing around,’ he’d say. And the drugs, they soured him. He still did whatever he wanted, but it wasn’t happy-go-lucky anymore, the way he went about it. And his meanness got loose, like a dog off its chain. ‘Look at this stoned bitch, Bobby,’ he says to our son, and laughs like it’s hilarious. Like I was a clown in the circus. That kind of thing. I finally slapped him for it, and he punched me back. Then, when I punched him for that, he broke a bowl over my head.”
Ree said That must have hurt.
“Not so much as the feeling that it was what I deserved, me getting my junkie face beaten in by my junkie husband. I hate myself for that. I remember lying on the floor, seeing a nickel in the dust under the fridge, pieces of this blue bowl all around, and figuring that the next thing that would happen would be social services taking Bobby. And sure enough, they did. A cop carried Bobby out of my house, and my baby cried for me, and it should have been the saddest thing that ever happened, except I was so out of it, I didn’t feel anything.”
Ree said That’s sad.
6
Ten minutes had passed and Terry still hadn’t come out of the house next door to the Elways. Zolnik, read the mailbox. Lila didn’t know what to do.
Earlier, they had gone into the Elways’ house, making a wide half-circle around the blood-spattered area where the bodies had been, and entering through the front door. The baby, named Platinum by the Elway brain trust with typical care and understatedness, had been in her bassinet, peaceful as could be inside the kidney-bean-shaped cocoon that had formed all around her. Lila had been able to feel the shape of the infant’s body by pressing her hands against the cocoon. There had been something hilariously ghastly about that; it was like testing a new mattress, gauging it for firmness. But her smile had dried up on her face when Terry started to sob. It was after two in the morning. That made it twenty hours deep into the crisis, give or take, and thirty-five hours since her last shut-eye. Lila was blitzed, and her best deputy was drunk and maudlin.
Well, they were doing the best they could, weren’t they? And there was still all that cat litter spread over Mountain Road.
“No, there’s not,” she corrected herself. That was months ago. Maybe a year?
“There’s not what?” They were outside again, moving to the cruiser parked out in front of Roger’s house.
Lila, cradling the cocoon, blinked at Terry. “Was I talking out loud?”
“Yeah,” said Terry.
“Sorry.”
“This sucks so much.” He sniffled and started toward the Zolnik house.
Lila asked him where he was going.
“Door’s open,” he said, pointing. “It’s the middle of the night and their door is open. Need to check it out. I’ll just be a sec.”
Lila sat down in the passenger seat of the cruiser with the baby. It seemed like only a moment ago, but the digital readout said 2:22. She thought it read 2:11 when she had sat down. Twenty-two and eleven were not the same numbers. But eleven plus eleven made twenty-two. Which meant . . .
Eleven tumbled through her thoughts: eleven keys, eleven dollars, eleven fingers, eleven wishes, eleven tents in eleven campgrounds, eleven beautiful women in the middle of the road waiting to get run down, eleven birds on eleven branches on eleven trees—regular trees, mind you, not imaginary trees.
What was that tree? If things kept going like they were going, someone was going to hang that Evie woman from a tree, Lila could see that as clear as day, because it had started with her, somehow or other it had started with her and the Tree, Lila could feel it like the warmth of the cocooned infant in her lap, little baby Silver. Eleven babies in eleven lima bean cocoons.
“Platinum, Platinum,” she found herself saying. The baby’s stupid name was Platinum not Silver. Silver was the name of the judge. If Lila had ever known the name of the judge’s dead cat, she didn’t now. Clint’s daughter’s name was Sheila Norcross. Of course he hadn’t admitted it, what a disappointment, the worst disappointment of the whole thing, to not even admit it, that Platinum was his kid. Or that Sheila was his kid. Lila’s lips were dry and she was sweating even though it was cool in the car. The door to the Zolnik house hung open.
7
Whether Terry could have done anything for the guy or not, he wasn’t sure; it never even occurred to him to try. Instead, he sat on the bed and put his hands on his knees and took a few slow, deep breaths. He needed to try to get his poor old shit together.
The sleeper was on the floor. Webs covered her head and her hands, as well as her lower body. There was a pair of slacks, knotted together with a pair of underwear, tossed off in a corner. She was small, around five feet. From the pictures on the wall and on the bureau, she appeared to be in her seventies, perhaps older.
Terry figured that the man who had tried to rape her must have yanked her from the bed and onto the floor in the process of removing the slacks.
The rapist was on the floor, too, a few feet away. Actually, he didn’t look like a full-grown man; there was a teenage leanness to him. His jeans bunched around his ankles, stopped by a pair of sneakers. CURT M, read a Magic Marker label on the side of one of the sneaker soles. His face was a red slick. Breath stirred the bloody spit around his mouth. Blood continued to stream from his crotch area, adding to the swamp that had already formed in the rug. A stain colored the far wall of the room and below, on the floor, was a wad of flesh that Terry assumed were Curt M’s cock and balls.