“I’m sure that’s not the first time you’ve said those words — and I’ll bet it won’t be the last.” I put my face really close to his, doing my best not to breathe in. “Now, if you don’t want me to swing you around in a circle until this arm of yours comes off, you’d better tell me what you’re babbling about.”
“The money Mr. Thursday gave me. It was ‘cause my boy died! He said so! There’s no crime in me having it!”
I shook my head. “He gave you money? How much?”
Now his eyes got shifty. “I don’t know. A couple of thousand…”
I lifted him higher. I heard something pop in his shoulder and he shrieked. “Don’t lie to me, Gentle.”
“A hundred thousand! He said it was a hundred thousand!”
I set him down. A hundred thousand? That was crazy. “Go get it.”
He came back with the suitcase cradled in his arms. I swear he was tearing up at the thought I was going to take it off him. I couldn’t help wondering if he’d ever expressed that much care and concern for his own son. “Open it,” I told him. He did. If it wasn’t a hundred thousand dollars, you could have fooled me. Stacks of new bills, side by side. I made a face and turned around, heading back toward the road. This whole thing was pissing me off.
“So…I can keep it?” he called.
“Far as I’m concerned. But you’d better keep your mouth shut about it or someone less genteel than me will come out here and take it away from you.”
Last I saw of him he was scurrying back toward his falling-down house, suitcase once more gripped tight against his chest.
It was well into the afternoon by the time I had hiked back to Albie’s mobile home. He met me at the front door.
“Guess what I found out,” he said. “Oh, and do you want some chili? I was just going to heat some up.”
“Later,” I said. “And you can tell me what you found out while you’re driving me back into town. We’re going to talk with that lying son of a gun Thursday before he takes off again.”
“Why’s he a liar?” Albie asked as he maneuvered his car out onto the main road.
“You remember him saying the murder was nothing to do with him, right? Well, he was just over at Bobby Gentle’s place and gave the guy a hundred thousand dollars. Does that sound like nothing-to-do-with-me money? Or like some kind of payoff instead?”
Albie whistled. “I never knew my little town was so exciting.”
I scowled. “In my business, there’s a thin line between ‘exciting’ and ‘multiple fatalities,’ and I hope we stay on one side of it.”
Nobody was in at the office, so I sent Albie into the coffee shop to buy me a couple of burgers and we sat in the car and ate while we kept a watch on the place. “So what did you find?” I asked him.
He handed me a stack of green print-out pages about the width of my thumb. My bigger thumb. “I pulled every story I could on weird stuff happening near that house, going back to the monastery days. There are lots of Indian legends, but they didn’t have what we’re looking for, of course…”
“And?”
“And guess what I found. Almost every single murder, UFO sighting, public panic, you name it, for the last hundred and forty years, happened on…”
“Thursday,” I said.
“Well, no. But you were half-right.”
I was stunned — my theory had just been shot to hell. I squinted at the print-out. “What do you mean?”
“Look. A few did happen on Thursday, or at least that’s when they were reported. And a few seemed to have happened on Tuesdays. But almost every other freaky thing — dozens of them — happened on a Wednesday, between midnight and midnight. Which, if you remember, was also when the Gentle kid must have died.”
So it wasn’t back to square one, after all. I felt mighty relieved. But it probably meant I was going to be spending at least another week on this one, so I was a bit disappointed, too. “Wednesday, huh?”
“Thursday.”
Now I was losing my temper. “But you just said…!”
“No, I mean that’s Thursday — over there.” He pointed to where a silky black Mercedes was just pulling into the reserved parking space in front of the office. “He’s back.”
We waited until he’d gone in before following. I didn’t want to spook him. I’d chased enough weirdos for one day.
The inner office door was locked, but I leaned on it and it popped open. Grayson Thursday looked up at us. He didn’t look as surprised as he should have, but I don’t think it’s because he was expecting us. He just wasn’t very good at showing human emotions.
“Okay,” I growled. “Sit down. You aren’t going anywhere until we have some answers.”
He did manage “puzzled” pretty well. “Didn’t we finish our conversation earlier?”
“Can that crap. Tell us the truth about Monk’s Point.” I flopped the stack of print-outs down on his desk. “Tell us why stuff’s been happening there for a hundred years, and probably more. And why it always seems to happen on the same damn day of the week.”
His mouth worked for a moment. He really didn’t look right and it was starting to bug me. If you’re going to wear a disguise, at least try and be convincing. I yanked out my gun and stuck it in his face. “I’m losing my temper here. You’re a lousy fake, you know? Your watch is upside down, your shoes are on the wrong feet, and your pupils don’t contract when the light changes. Now talk to us or I’ll blow your head into little bits. That may not bother you personally very much, but I’m betting it will be at least an inconvenience.” I was also betting on the fact that he wouldn’t know and couldn’t guess that I’m not the kind of guy to shoot except in self-defense. Sometimes when you’re huge and red and scary-looking like me, a bluff is your best move.
He waved his hands frantically. “No! Don’t! We have no right!”
Now he’d confused me again. “No right to what?”
“We have no right to damage this body.” He patted himself gingerly, as if it was a rented tux and he was afraid he might wrinkle it. “It is only borrowed. Its owner is in a comatose state, but he may recover someday. Please do not ignite your weapon.”
I turned to Albie Bayless, who looked pretty confused. I felt sorry for him. Even I’m not completely used to this stuff, even though I do it for a living. “Sit down, Albie,” I said. “I think we’re finally going to get some answers.”
“As you’ve guessed,” Grayson Thursday said, “my people are not natives of your earth. Or, to be more exact, we are native only to a small part of your world — the portion that happens on the day you call Thursday.”
“I’m lost already,” said Albie cheerfully. “Or I’ve finally gone crazy.”
“Our dimension intersects with yours, but at an angle, so to speak — our lives only touch yours once every seven of your days. We have explored your dimension, but we have no physical existence here and normally cannot interact with the inhabitants, so our visits had only ever been for the furtherance of science…until things went wrong. You are so far from us, so different, that other than these few scientific expeditions we might as well be in different universes.”
“Thursday’s child has far to go,” I said.
“What’s that?” Thursday asked.
“A nursery rhyme. Bayless, you must know it. ‘Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace, Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go…” And Grayson’s people are Thursday’s children, I guess.”
Grayson Thursday nodded. “Very appropriate — disturbingly so. Because it is not us but Wednesday’s Children who are the problem. The are indeed ‘full of woe’, and it is our fault. We bred them too well. We gave them enough life to be aware of their own condition, their own…shortcomings.”
“Okay, now you lost me,” I said. “Try again.”
“We are an old race.” He shook his head. “We were tired of striving, of struggling. We wanted rest. So we created a race of servants for ourselves. Not like us — we made them primitive, without emotions…or so we thought. Creatures that would not object to servitude.”