Pete and Kootie had paused in their phone-assembly work to stare at Plumtree, and Mavranos was frowning and tapping the revolver barrel against his thigh.
Now Angelica could hear what Plumtree was whispering: “—Ghost! In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost! In the name of—”
“What is it that this reminded you of?” Angelica asked the woman in a voice just loud enough to override the frantic whispering. “Whatever it is, it’s not here. Only this little drawing is here.”
“Let me,” said Cochran. He stepped forward and knelt beside the stiff, shaking Plumtree. “Jams,” he said to her, “this is 1995, the eleventh of January, Wednesday, probably getting on for midnight. You’re in Long Beach, and you’re twenty-eight years old.” He looked at the Sol card that was still face up on the couch cushion; he turned it face down, and then he glanced up at Angelica. “She has a recurrent nightmare, of the sun falling out of the sky onto her, knocking her flat.”
Plumtree’s eyes opened and she lowered her hands, and she blinked around at everyone staring at her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Was I yelling?”
Angelica smiled at her. This, she thought, must be one of her other personalities. How I do love the histrionics and theatricalities of dissociatives. “No,” Angelica said patiently. “The gentlemen were wanting help with their telephone.” Plumtree’s mention of herbs a few moments ago actually had reminded her of a crucial part of the telephone; she looked over at Johanna and said, “You remember the mix we cooked on the stove, two years ago? You’d better get a pot of it going—Pete would have forgotten it, being all wrapped up in his hardware. The mint—the yerba buena leaves—you can pick out back by the garage, and there’s tequila in the cupboard, unless Arky’s drunk it all up.”
“It’s your bourbon I drank up,” Mavranos said defensively. “I don’t touch tequila.”
Angelica clasped her hands and turned back to Plumtree. As casually as she could, she asked, “Do you remember much about the hospital you were in, when you were two? Did it have…lawns, playrooms, a cafeteria? Try to picture it.”
“I only remember the room I was in,” Plumtree said. “There were get-well cards on the table by the bed,” she added helpfully.
“Close your eyes again, but this time relax.” When Plumtree complied, Angelica “you’ll find you can remember details very clearly, especially from when you were young, if you clear your mind of every distraction and just relax. And you’re safe here with us, so you can relax, can’t you?”
Without opening her eyes, Plumtree said, “You’re right here, Scant?”
Cochran clasped her shoulder. “Right here.”
“Then I can relax.”
“So…remember the hospital room,” said Angelica. “What did it smell like?”
“…Fresh-peeled adhesive tape,” Plumtree said dreamily, “and laundry baskets, and the woody taste of Fudgsicle sticks once you’ve sucked all the ice cream off, and shampoo.”
“And what did the room look like?”
“There was a window—there was a window!—with metal venetian blinds to my left, but I could only see part of a tree branch through it; the wallpaper was lime green, and there were dots, little holes, in the white tiles on the ceiling—”
Plumtree’s eyes were still closed, and Angelica permitted herself a faint nod and a tiny mild smile of triumph. “Why,” she asked in a voice she forced to sound careless, “couldn’t you see anything more out the window?”
“I didn’t go over to it, to look out.”
“Were you…afraid to?”
“No, it was on the ground floor. I just didn’t get out of bed at all, even to go to the bathroom. I had to use a bedpan, though I was certainly not wearing diapers anymore, by then.”
“Can you see the room? All the details?”
“Sure.”
“Look at yourself, then, at your arms and legs. Why didn’t you get out of bed?”
“I—I couldn’t!—not with a cast on my leg and my arm in a sling—!”
Plumtree’s eyes sprang open, and it was all Angelica could do to maintain her gentle smile—for she was abruptly, viscerally certain that it was an entirely different person now behind the Plumtree woman’s eyes. Angelica made herself go on to note the physical indications—the tightened cast of the woman’s mouth and jaw, the wider eyes, the newly squared shoulders—but the conviction had come, indomitably, first.
Plumtree turned her head to look at Cochran, who flinched slightly but kept his hand on her shoulder.
“How’re you taking all this?” he asked her nervously.
“Upon my back,” Plumtree said in a flat voice, “to defend my belly; upon my wit, to defend my wiles; upon my secrecy, to defend mine honesty; my mask, to defend my beauty; and you, to defend all these. And at all these wards I lie, at a thousand watches.”
“Now who just left?” demanded Spider Joe from the corner.
“Wow,” said Angelica humbly.
Plumtree had lowered her face into her hands, and now she looked up, squinting “Wha’d I miss?” she asked irritably “Do you people have such a thin as a beer around here?”
The woman has shifted again, Angelica thought. I may talk myself out of it eventually, but right now I’m a believer in MPD.
“Yes,” she said, just to get away from this woman who was such an affront to her professional convictions. “Right. A beer. I’ll get one of Arky’s for you.” But she was still too shaken by what she had deduced about Plumtree’s condition to stand up right away; and she was wondering if the telephone call would even be possible with Plumtree here on the premises.
“Coors, that means,” sighed Plumtree.
“This stuff on the desk here is the antenna,” Pete was telling Scat and Oliver, “but we can’t be in the room with it, or the carborundum bulb and the rectifying lens will just pick up on our living auras. Let’s set up the actual telephone receiver in the laundry room. That used to be the kitchen, before one of our remodeling campaigns, and it’s where we did it before.”
And you don’t want to do it in the current kitchen, right in the presence of the dead king, Angelica thought as she finally stood up, dizzily, from the couch. Well, neither do I.
She paused in the kitchen doorway, standing back against the doorframe to avoid getting tangled in Spider Joe’s arching antennae. “How are you planning to scramble the call?” she asked Pete. “Even if Sherman Oaks and this bad psychiatrist already know where we are, there’s no use in lighting a beacon for every other smoke-fancier in the L.A. area, if we can help it.”
Pete held up his hands and made dialling motions with his forefingers. “I’ve still got antique hands.”
“Yeah,” said Angelica uncertainly, “but they’re yours now.”
Pete lowered his hands. “I guess you’re right. I’ve even put a few new scars on ’em in the last two years.”
“You do hand transplants, lady?” Plumtree asked Angelica. “You sound more like Dr. Frankenstein than Dr. Freud.”
“Yeah,” said Mavranos, frowning like someone having health-insurance billing explained to them, “what’s all this Beast-With-Five-Fingers talk?”
“Sorry,” said Pete. “The magician Houdini had a customized mask made in the twenties, see, sort of a decoy with a magical spell on it, to make it look like he was where he wasn’t. It was plaster casts of his hands, and his actual cut-off dried thumb, and if you were carrying the lot when bad magicians focussed on you, you’d suddenly take on the physical appearance of Houdini—short stature, dinner jacket with break-away sleeves, curly hair, the whole outfit. And—”