“Bertram, if this is about the—”
“Don’t say their name!” he said, panicked. “For goodness’ sake, you have no idea of the range of their scans. In 2004—”
“Bertram.”
“—a soldier in Srinagar—”
“Bertram, I need you to focus.”
“Focus?” he said, wounded. He exhaled loudly into the phone. I could picture him bent over his knees, the cell phone mashed into his face. “I am more focused than I have ever been in my life.”
I stepped away from the phone, shaking my head, and the receiver cord brought me up short. I turned around as Mother Mariette O’Connell walked through the front door.
She was dressed in a silver nylon jacket, padded and stitched in a diamond pattern, zipped up to her neck. She glanced in our direction and then went left, toward the front desk.
She stopped.
“Here’s the deal,” I said to Bertram, speaking quickly. “Don’t call my mother. Don’t call my brother or sister-in-law. And do not, under any circumstances, go near their houses. The next time they see you, they’re going to call the cops. Do you understand?”
O’Connell turned, frowning. Her eyes narrowed. Bertram breathed into the phone. “Del, I’m just trying to—”
I thunked the big receiver onto the metal hook—an old-fashioned pleasure that cell phones couldn’t match—and then O’Connell was marching toward me. “What the fuck are you doing here?” she said. Lew didn’t budge from the table. The coward.
“It’s imperative that you and I talk,” I said. A moment later I was sitting on the ground.
“Ouch,” Lew said.
“Can somebubby gib me a nabkin?”
Louise came out of the kitchen holding the coffee pot, and froze. O’Connell turned away, shaking out her hand. My teeth must have broken the skin of her knuckles.
Lew pulled a tuft of napkins from the chrome dispenser, dropped them on my lap. I dabbed gingerly at my lower lip. I was in no hurry to get up.
“What did you do to her?” Louise demanded.
O’Connell spun back toward us. “And who are you?” she asked Lew.
He held up his hands. “I’m the driver.”
“Then you know your way back,” she said. Without turning away from Lew she looked at me, raised her arm, and pointed: a wrath-ofGod, get-thee-to-a-nunnery point. I didn’t know anyone outside of the
nuthouse who looked comfortable wielding a gesture like that, but she was a natural.
“I told you in Chicago,” she said. “I can’t help you. You were traumatized by a demon as a child? See a therapist. You have no right to come to my hometown, bother my friends, and harass us. Go home, Mr. Pierce.”
I carefully peeled the napkins away from my lip, stared at the bright red blot. My mouth still stung, and more blood welled to the surface. I looked up at her until she dropped the finger.
“I guess Toby had you pegged wrong,” I said.
“Who?” Louise said, shocked.
“The Shu’garath? The gigantic guy who swims around in the lake?”
Louise said, “Toby talked to you?”
“Toby doesn’t talk to people,” O’Connell said.
“Well he talked to me. He’s a nice guy, though I wish he had warned me about your right hook.” A warm dollop of blood seeped over my lip like gravy, and I patted at it. “He said that of course you’d help me. Said that if anybody could help me, it was you.”
“I’m retired,” O’Connell said.
Louise looked from me to O’Connell, her bird eyes expectant. We followed O’Connell’s Toyota pickup down the highway. Gray primer blotches covered the once-blue truck like a tropical disease. A few miles north of the motel she turned onto a steep dirt road that looked like it had been shelled by artillery. The pits were much deeper than the Audi’s clearance, and Lew had to ease in and out of them at an angle to avoid bottoming out. O’Connell immediately left us behind, and the next time we saw the pickup it was parked in a muddy clearing. On one side of the clearing was a steep drop-off, Harmonia Lake spread out below. On the other side was a collection of low, ramshackle structures. Or maybe one complex structure. It was hard to tell.
At the center of the cluster was a mass of rounded aluminum that used to be a silver Airstream trailer. The trailer had grown several new rooms, as well as a couple of porches, a deck, two open-sided sheds, and many awnings, constructed of barn-wood planks, vinyl siding, and rusting sheet metal. Covered walkways, roofed in thick green plastic and floored with sections of warped plywood, connected to a Plexiglaswalled greenhouse and two garages. One garage door was open, revealing an old pontoon boat surrounded floor to ceiling by industrial junk.
Lew and I walked gingerly over the muddied driveway and reached one of the front porches. A door had been left open for us. Next to the frame was a driftwood sculpture like those at the motel, all glossy hooks and barbs. The wall below it was stained, the deck glittering with fish scales, as if she’d been hanging her catch of the day on the thing. Lew gave me an appalled look.
I knocked on the frame, and could see O’Connell moving in a distant room.
“Take off your shoes and have a seat,” she called.
“What are these sculpture things, folk art?” I said. “They were at the motel, too.”
She didn’t answer. The front room was long and low-ceilinged, three barn-plank walls secured to the naked, curved side of the Airstream trailer by angle irons. The wooden walls were insulated almost floor to ceiling by books, on shelves built out of the same knotted wood as the planks. A few spaces had been hollowed out of books to make room for odd bits: two huge open-faced stereo speakers like the kind I used to have in high school; an undersized, cheap-looking electronic organ that looked like a starter instrument for ten-year-olds; a framed picture of the pope.
The largest hole accommodated a cast-iron wood stove squatting on a platform of bricks. The books were kept back from the stove and the big pipe that ran up to the ceiling, but not far enough for my comfort. The room looked like it could go up in a flash. Arrayed around the stove were four worn, comfortable-looking armchairs upholstered in oranges and browns, on a carpet of 1974
gold shag. Lew sniffed and rubbed his nose. Dust mites that had been
evolving for decades in the room’s substratum clacked their mandibles in anticipation.
Something about the picture of the pope looked off, and I leaned closer. It was John Paul II, looking saintly. The picture had been ripped into ragged pieces and then carefully taped back together. O’Connell came through the hatchlike doorway in the side of the trailer. For some reason I expected her to offer tea, but her hands were empty except for a pack of cigarettes. The jacket was gone. She wore a knobby silver cross over a faded black concert T-shirt for Tonton Macoute, a band I’d never heard of. It was the first time I’d seen her without the voluminous cassock or some other bulk hiding her shape. I couldn’t decide her age: Thirtythree? Forty-two? She was a small thing, with thin arms and a narrow waist. She had breasts.
“Sit,” she said.
We both sat. I didn’t look at Lew—I was afraid he was rolling his eyes. O’Connell remained standing, her arm on the back of the armchair opposite us. Next to the chair was a floor lamp with a round glass table at its middle. The tabletop had just enough space for an ashtray heaped with ashes and broken-spined butts. Her chair, obviously.
“So what is it you want from me, then?” she asked. I looked at Lew, but he was studying his hands. O’Connell made a disgusted noise. “Come on now, you can say it. You think you’re the first person to come after me with that religious glow on his face?”