“Getting my ducks in a nice little row.”
There was a knock on the door, so I crossed the room and opened it. The Lindas stood there, smiling pleasantly, waiting. Ned rose from his chair and smiled too, at them first, then at me.
“Well, got to be getting back,” he said. “You mull it over, honey. So great to see my girls again. Ladies? A pleasure.”
The Lindas moved aside for him, and just like that he was gone.
I DON’T HAVE confidence we can run away again. For one thing it would clearly look illegal, now that he’s sought us out. And for another he’s obviously better at stealth than I am, and he does have friends. Whether Beefy John tipped him off or was only a witness, he has sources of information and I’m clearly not equipped to detect them.
The Lindas told me Lena was helping Don in the café; they sat and listened while I explained. I told them what my position was; they were sympathetic. And I didn’t have to persuade them Ned wasn’t the charmer people always think he is—maybe, as post-reproductive women, they were outside the field of his pheromones.
Almost as soon as Ned was gone the guests seemed to come out of the woodwork: the motel returned to life, with movement and light in the rooms, people talking and walking between them, breath visible in the cold. Don brought Lena back, and Kay and Burke were with them and made remarks about Ned’s shining car, his bodyguard/driver, his tailored coat and even the lamb, which lay abandoned in a corner of the room atop its pile of bright wrapping.
Laughter and conversation echoed from the walkway into our room. The day had passed quickly; before I knew it late afternoon was casting its long shadows.
Burke stayed a while after Don and Kay left, helping Lena tend to her bean plants in the miniature greenhouse. Some of them had sprouted; one was growing fast, already too tall for the container, and this they moved into a small pot he’d brought with him.
Eventually he got up to go and I thanked him for coming by, for all he did for Lena. As he was going out the door he turned and looked at me.
“You know, we have to look after each other,” he said quietly. “The people who’ve heard it.”
5
HURT, YOU WERE A CHILD AGAIN
I DIDN’T STOP BURKE FROM LEAVING, DIDN’T DO ANYTHING BUT watch as he headed off down the walkway. When he stepped into his own room I closed the door without noise and sat down on the bed.
Lena had her sheep on her lap and had found a buttoned opening in its stomach. Out of the opening, while I sat looking at her in a daze, she pulled a white-plastic box.
“That’s how she talks,” she said, and pushed a large, flat button on the box, which obligingly bleated out its eerie, falsetto prayer. “See? When you press the tummy she talks. It’s for babies. Mommy. I’m six. Can I throw away the talking part?”
“Of course,” I said feebly.
The strength had been pressed out of me; I was breathless and flat.
She turned a small screw neatly with her fingernail, impressing me, and extracted two batteries, which she placed neatly on her bedside table. She marched over to the trash can and dumped the box without ceremony.
“It’s not the lamb’s fault,” she said. “When she talks it makes me think how they took off her skin.”
“Oh, honey,” I said, reaching. “Don’t worry about that. OK? It’s sheepskin. No reason to think it’s from a baby. Maybe that sheep lived a long and happy life. Maybe it died of old age.”
“Maybe,” said Lena doubtfully.
“Can I see her for a minute?” I asked. It was occurring to me that the lamb could be a nanny cam, hold some kind of tracker. I’d been paranoid, this was paranoid, but then again in broad strokes I’d also been correct.
I held it and stared into its glass eyes, squeezed the face, inspected the nose and mouth.
With Lena in front of the TV I poured myself the glass of wine I’d been wanting. The people who’ve heard it, I thought. It had to mean what I thought it meant. So this wasn’t a random selection of winter travelers in Maine.
It was an enclave.
But I’d never told anyone about the voice—no one. That was what made my hands shake as I drank my wine.
“I’m going to take a bath, honey,” I told her, and carried my glass into the bathroom with me, leaving the door open. I thought the soak might calm me.
I’d have to ask Don, I thought as the water ran, it was the only course of action, I’d ask him now, and this time he’d have to tell me. Or I’d ask Burke how we came to be here, how it was that someone had known and how they’d summoned me, if that was what had happened.