Dylan believed, while his brain was scrambled, he’d said something about them dropping acid together and that’s what got Phil booted out of Drummond. Nobody ever said anything about it; so, after a while, Dylan had relaxed on that count. Besides, a lot of the guards did a hell of a lot worse than drop acid with their little charges and they never got reported. They just disappeared.
Child molestation.
“Holy shit,” Marshall murmured.
Phil wasn’t fired for dropping acid. He was fired because he’d dropped his pants. Marshall felt the betrayal as if it were yesterday, and he was still eleven years old. Phil was doing the boys. He started to cry again, rusting machinery grinding painfully. Abruptly, he stopped. Anger flared too hot for tears. Lightning-fast he smashed his fist into the wall between the studs.
“Crap,” he yelled. “That has got to be crap.” Phil never touched Marshall -Dylan. He didn’t do anything out of line, not once, not a look, not a smirk, nothing for four years. Phil never messed with any of the other guys either, not that Marshall knew of. And he would know. Everybody would know. The algebra teacher didn’t get talked about, and in lockup, there was nothing much to do but talk. Guards never snickered or sneered when he came by. There was nothing.
Phil wasn’t buggering his students.
“Why do you care now, for Christ’s sake?” Marshall asked himself. But he did care. A lifetime later, and he cared a lot. Phil was a hero in a world where there were too few heroes and more than enough villains to go around. He’d loved Phil. He’d told him so after the acid trip that had landed him in the infirmary.
No, he’d told Danny. Was that why Phil had gotten thrown out of juvie? Because a doped up kid said he loved him, and somebody figured it was more than just spiritual?
Marshall shook his head and then lowered it into his hands, his elbows braced on his knees to take the great weight of his thoughts. “Damn it.”
His life was coming apart, his wife was leaving him, and this was the time he’d chosen to lurk in the basement worrying about Phil Maris, who was most likely dead, or retired, or had rejoined the Peace Corps and gone to some disease-ridden hole to help more boys.
Pebbles pressed into his cheek. The pills. Danny’s pills. Something to help you sleep.
Marshall reached up and flipped on the stairwell light. His brother had said they were Valium. Marshall threw a couple of them into his mouth to swallow dry but a strangeness made him spit them back into his palm.
There was a wrongness about them. A wrongness about a lot of things. His on-again, off-again memory that worked fine between murders and attempted murders of small dogs; an axe that he didn’t remember using forty years ago but suddenly took to carrying up and downstairs in his sleep; Phil getting canned the day after Kowalski’s acid experiment; Mr. Leonard saying, “He owes you.”
Marshall desperately needed put the pieces together, but what he had weren’t solid enough to be referred to as pieces. Drifts of fog. Whispers in the dark. A long time ago Marshall had learned never to seek out the dark corners of his mind, never to listen to unauthorized murmurs. At eleven, he’d taken his dad’s old wood-chopping axe and butchered his mother, father, and his little sister, Lena. Then he killed Ginger, the family cat. All those years that quack Kowalski had been trying to get him to remember, Dylan had been trying to make sure that he didn’t. Not remembering was the only reason he didn’t have to be fed with a spoon or peeled off the ceiling every morning.
Dylan didn’t want to remember, and Marshall refused to look at those years. Both man and boy knew remembering would be the end of it. Nobody sane could stay sane having that knowledge in their bones.
This was the first time since the night Dr. K. and Phil had been thrown out of Drummond that he had thought about the bad old days. Or about how the bad old days had come along into the good old days, robbing him of Elaine and, now, of Polly, Emma, and Gracie, just as he had robbed himself, Rich, and the world of his mother, and dad, and little Lena.
Polly and her goddamn tarot cards.
A wrongness there as well. Marshall might be an insane mass murderer, but he wasn’t crazy enough to think a raddled old woman, subsisting on tourist donations, was privy to the secrets of the universe. Or his wife’s mind.
It was a trick. A con’s trick. It had to be. Somehow the reader had gotten hold of memories Polly thought were a secret. She must have told someone.
“No!” Marshall said abruptly.
She had told someone. She’d told him.
33
The habit of doing as his brother told him was strong, and Marshall took himself upstairs. He stopped beside the bed, where he’d taken to standing in recent days, doing his Superman routine, trying to look through the mattress with his X-ray vision to see if he had unwittingly secreted an edged weapon beneath. Tonight, he wasn’t looking for the axe. He was fixated on the pills Danny had given him.
Any other night, he would have swallowed a couple without much thought, looking forward to a good night’s sleep. Tonight, he found he had to know what the pills were. Exactly what they were. What they did. Who made them. What the side effects were.
So much was out of whack. Not so much that it showed up readily, not so much that people dialed 911 or checked into Betty Ford, but wrong-a note played sharp, a ping in the engine. When he got this feeling on a job site, he’d stare and pace, sometimes sleep at the construction site, waiting for the dishonest color or anachronistic pattern to reveal itself.
His wife and brother came and went in the dead of night like actors in a French farce.
An axe appeared and disappeared.
A scribbled note on the counter.
A tarot reading that told secrets and made threats.
There was nothing he could do about flitting axes, nothing he could say that wouldn’t frighten Polly further from him. But he could identify the medications he put down his throat night after night.
In less than a minute, Marshall descended the backstairs to his brother’s kitchen door. “Danny,” he called. “It’s me. Open up.” A light showed under the sill, but there was no response. “Hey!” He knocked and tried the knob. The door was locked.
A quick trip to the cellar for a spare key, and he let himself in. Music played softly-a sonata of some sort. Despite Danny’s efforts, Marshall managed to remain fairly ignorant in the field of performing arts.
“Dan? Danny?”
The bed was made, the towels in the bath dry and neat.
“Where the hell… ”
Danny’d said he was going to bed. Marshall pulled apart the slats in the blind and looked into the garden. His brother’s car was gone, the gate left open. Unless Danny’d left by the front door, Marshall would have seen him. Regardless of how Danny departed, Marshall should have at least heard the car leave.
He must have pushed the car out-easy enough with the gentle slope and concrete pad-and left the gate open. Why? Didn’t want to wake his brother? Danny wasn’t that considerate. Where had he gone at three in the morning-or four, or whatever the hell time it was?
To get lithium for his psychotic brother?
Psych ward. Cootie central. Marshall suppressed a shiver. It had been bad enough when he was a kid. Now, it would probably kill him. Shrugging off the thought as he had shrugged off legions of bat-black thoughts, he went to Danny’s office.
Marshall switched on the lamp. Magic beans, he thought, as he spilled the pills onto the smooth metal surface of the desk. Their shape was distinctive, but there was no lettering stamped on them. They might be too generic to trace. He found the Physicians’ Desk Reference in the bookcase, opened it on the desk, and searched by color, size, and shape. The pills were not generic.