But what to do about the maddening shadow figure of Andrew C. Lewis? Hawkin's eyes were caught by the enthusiastic rooting of the eel-like loach in the gravel, and his mind wandered into a side track. What, he mused, does that C stand for? Charles? Clifford? Coleoptera? The father's name on the transcript had been Edward, or Edmund… He caught himself angrily and dragged his wayward thoughts back to the problem at hand. Lewis was on Tyler's Road; Hawkin knew it in his very bones. If he had not made a break for it by now, he wouldn't, not until he knew for certain that Vaun was not about to die. Perhaps not even then, if he felt sure enough that he had covered his tracks. Andy Lewis was not a man to panic blindly. How best to find him? And, once found, how to tie him to the wispy bits of circumstance, how to weave his involvement into a fabric strong enough to hold up in court? How to spin a sliver of wood, a hypothetical tattoo, and a deliberate concealment of identity into a rope strong enough to hang a man? Best would be if Lewis could be forced into an incriminating bolt—that would help to solve both problems at once. Hawkin lay there considering and discarding options and ideas, building up a plan around the geography and the psychological makeup of his prey and the people he had to work with.
The level in his glass went down very slowly, but eventually it was dry, and he sat up.
Twenty-four hours, he thought. If nothing's happened in twenty-four hours—no photograph has appeared, no description has clicked—I'll bring down the retired sheriff and Coach Shapiro and anyone else I can find and drive them up and down Tyler's Road in Trujillo's shiny new wagon until one of them says, "Say, wait a minute…" Tomorrow night I'll decide whether or not to turn Tyler's Road inside out. The thought of that possibility gave him a moment of pleasurable anticipation, seventy-four long-haired adults and twenty minors dragged in and printed and grilled until something gave under the pressure.
(I wonder what that C stands for? he thought in irritation.)
Yes, something will happen. If not tomorrow (today!) then Wednesday for certain. As for Monday, he could end it content that he had done all he could.
He put his glass on the table, said good night to the fish, and went to bed.
He was not to know until the sun rose that succumbing to the day's all-too-rare glow of satisfaction had been a mistake.
Two hours to the south a woman with black curls lay in a hospital bed, her hands tucked neatly beneath the crispcov ers, her remarkable ice-blue eyes staring, unblinking, up into the dim room. The hour was very late, or very early, but a disturbance down the hall and the rapid departure of a much-attended gurney had brought her eyes open some minutes before. One could not say that she was awake, exactly; only that her eyes were currently open, where before they had been closed.
The room's machinery had been edged back from the bed, save for the tall pole with the intravenous drip and the rolling cart with the monitor, whose wires were connected to little round sensors taped onto the woman's chest. The tracery of the heartbeat was slow but regular, and the cart would be removed later that day.
The woman did not know that, though. There was considerable debate over what she did, or would, know. The bruised puffiness of her mouth had subsided, the marks of her resurrection were fading, but Vaun Adams had given no sign of anything other than a mere physical presence. The words "brain damage" and "oxygen deprivation" had slid into the room and been carried away again, but they waited just outside her door and would return.
The room was lit solely by the corner reading lamp that sent its beam across the guard's paperback novel and laid a stretched circle of light along the wall and across a corner of Vaun's bed. She gazed passively up at the reflection of her face in a bit of polished metal overhead, distorted but familiar. One tiny part of Vaun saw it and recognized it, but that part was disconnected from her now, in abeyance, hiding.
The brain of the woman who had been Vaun Adams and Eva Vaughn was not physically damaged, not badly at any rate. Her mind, however, and her spirit—those had been severely wounded. The spark of being that was Vaun Adams, the spark that had flamed into being as Eva Vaughn, lay smothered beneath a burden that had finally proven intolerable. Vaun was covered by a blanket of despair, a thick, gray blanket that was crushing her, stifling her will to move and create and live, a thick gray blanket that said, "Enough."
Enough.
Enough was the ruling principle that governed what there was left of this life. Enough. I can no more. Since I was two years old I have fought for the right to be what I am, and I can fight no longer. I yield. I give up. I can no more. Enough.
I choose to die.
The blue eyes were still open when a nurse came in ten minutes later to check the drip. Vaun's ears registered sound waves, and some dim hidden part of her automatically deciphered them as words, but they did not connect, did not penetrate the thick gray blanket. The nurse leaned over her eyes, and behind the white shoulder appeared the face of a man above a dark uniform. More sounds came, a few squawks and a rumble, and the male face withdrew.
The nurse addressed Vaun with professional cheeriness, though even the guard could hear the uneasiness in her voice. Vaun was a problem, a VIP who was in an unclear state of either arrest or protection, or both. She was also, to all appearances, a vegetable. This mysterious black-haired woman with the unseeing, crystalline eyes gave a number of people the creeps, and the night nurse was one of them. She left after servicing the body in the bed, and eventually the eyes drifted shut again.
In the dark hills between Vaun Adams's hospital bed and the city where two detectives slept, a shadow moved onto Tyler's Road. The man who had been Andy Lewis closed the door on its oiled hinges and slipped silently away from the house he had thought of as home these last years. He felt no regret at leaving the woman who slept behind him in the bed he had built from a single oak tree, and only slight regret at leaving the child in the room his hands had made. There was no room for any feeling other than the white-hot, piercing-cold, all-consuming rage that trembled and bubbled throughout his body like dry ice furious in a bucket of water. In his mind's eye the leaves scorched and blackened overhead, small animals dropped down dead with his passing, the road cringed from his boots—and Vaun Adams woke screaming from her hospital bed to feel the approach of his terrible hate.
None of these things happened, of course. The muted beep of Vaun's monitor kept its hypnotic rhythm, small night animals rustled leaves, a dog barked once, the breeze from the ocean stirred the fragrant needles.
By dawn he had crossed the mud slide's remnants, avoided the guards posted at the upper end of Tyler's Road, and entered the adjoining state park. At eight a neatly dressed man with a mustache, carrying a thick briefcase, caught a ride with a computer programmer who worked over the hill. The driver's daughter was with him in the front seat, going to spend the day with her grandmother. The child was six years old and had shiny brown hair and one loose front tooth, which she delighted in wiggling precariously with her tongue. The man who had been Andy Lewis smiled at her with his charming smile, chatted easily with her about kindergarten and with her father about computers and the problems of remote automobile breakdowns, and thanked them both when they got to San Jose. By noon he was in Berkeley, completely invisible.
Long before that—shortly after he left the park, in fact— Angie Dodson woke to find that her husband was gone.
21
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