“Celeste?” I said, puzzled. “What are you doing out here?”
She had a small screwdriver in her hand. On the floor beside her I saw a coffee can, a small length of copper wire, electrical tape, crimpers, a wind-up alarm clock, and a big Gucci handbag.
“Casey,” I called. “Come here please.”
“I’m busy.”
“Come here now.”
Casey must have heard something in my voice. She was out in a hurry. She looked at Celeste and put on her I’m-going-to-meet-another-one-of-Mother’s-strange-friends face.
“How long do we have, Celeste?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I think I’ve messed up the mechanism.”
I took Casey’s arm. “Go down and get Mrs. Lim and take her out of the building. There’s a phone across the street. Call nine-one-one and tell them there’s a bomb. They won’t believe you, so you argue with them until they decide to come. Got it?”
“A bomb?” Casey said, sarcastic.
“A bomb,” I said. “From across the street, have Mrs. Lim call anyone who might still be in the building and tell them to get out. Now.”
“This is a weird joke, right?”
“No joke.”
Casey looked at Celeste and decided to believe me. “Aren’t you coming?”
“I’ll be down,” I said, giving her a little push. “Now hurry.” As I said before, Casey never walks. And when she runs, she runs hard.
I squared off with Celeste. “Drop your tools and come down with me,” I said.
“It’s too late, Maggie.”
People facing death often say a lovely calm settles over them at the last moment. I hoped that impending death was not the reason I wasn’t incoherent with panic. More likely it was because Celeste was the most unlikely looking bomber imaginable. How many bombers wear silk and pearls to do their work?
“What were you planning to do,” I asked, “blow up the whole building?”
“No. Just you.” She held the screwdriver in her perfectly manicured hands. “And it wasn’t me. I mean, I didn’t make this thing. I saw you come in with your daughter. I didn’t want her to get hurt. I’m trying to disarm the damn thing, but I don’t know how.”
She was so mellow, so emotionally flat, that I knew she had to have taken something pretty heavy before she got here. “If you didn’t make the bomb, who did?”
“The resident pro. Made the one that got Rod, too.” She touched the coffee can with her shiny pump, made me real nervous. “I have the old book they used to use,” she said. “But all the research was done in the Cal library, and it’s a good thing no one was graded on it, because they made some terrible mistakes.”
“Mistakes?” My stomach made another somersault. I was remembering the whummp that kicked me after Rod fired his gun.
Celeste frowned, disapproving. “They got the explosives charts all wrong. Political types are not usually very good in physics, you know. You saw what happened in Berkeley.”
“How do you know the same thing won’t happen right here?”
“I don’t. According to the book, it’s only supposed to make a smallish fire.” She smiled at me coyly and shrugged, a matron puzzled by a new recipe. “Of course, this is the same device Arty Dodds was putting together when he was atomized.”
“Using the same directions?”
“Fragments of the book were found in the rubble. We all laughed about it, remember?”
“Let’s go down,” I said, moving toward the stairs.
She picked up the big Gucci bag, opened it, and dropped in her screwdriver. I expected her to follow me. I was no more than eight feet from the top of the stairs.
“Maggie,” she said in her sweet, cultured voice.
I turned and saw the automatic in her hand, and the little red dot on its side that warned that the safety was off.
I tried to sound calm. “You don’t want to make my daughter motherless, do you? Let’s go.”
“Oh, Maggot, I’m so tired.” She was stoned. I don’t know whether the drugs she had taken were kicking in or were wearing off, but I thought she wouldn’t be upright much longer. The disconcerting thing was that the hand that held the gun was steady, and she was intact enough to keep the sight aimed at my sternum.
I moved slowly toward her. Her pupils were soulless holes that held a beam on my face with the same black stare the gun held at my chest.
“Let’s go outside, Celeste.”
“What’s the point?” she sighed. “We can die here, or we can die out there. She’ll never leave us alone.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think? Aleda.”
This was a bomb of another sort. “You lie,” I said.
Celeste nodded. “I have to. Rod, too. My life may rest on a tissue of lies. But it’s my life. Emily had no right to decide for all of us that it was time to stop telling lies.”
“What lies?”
“About everything,” she snapped. “We all knew a firebomb had been set in the Berkeley labs. We all knew there were people working inside the lab. Aleda said it would be just a lot of smoke. We all knew she was lying. For twenty-two years, a whole generation, we covered for each other, we covered for her. One lie, and another, and another. A tower of lies. And I can’t climb down.” She rolled her eyes and seemed to lose her balance a little.
I had my eye on the gun barrel. “We’ll talk about it outside.”
She shook her head. “She’ll hear. She always knows things. All that time, she blackmailed us. And you know what we all did?”
“Tell me,” I said.
“Nothing. We did nothing.”
I shook my head. “Emily would never go along.”
“She did. Aleda had Em by the balls, too.” She thought about that a moment and waved it off. “You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Marc!”
“Marc was dead,” I said. I was edging backward toward the stairs.
“Baby Marc. Aleda had Marc’s baby. She was preggers when she took off. Or so she said. All those years, Emily had investigators looking for him. Couldn’t find him anywhere. You want to hear the weird part? Last week, someone claiming to be Marc found Emily.”
Something in the coffee can went click. I lunged, caught Celeste’s gun hand and forced it up and back until her grip released. She wasn’t very strong. The automatic fell to the floor and I kicked it away.
Like tugging a big rag doll, I pulled her down the stairs and out the front door.
“How’d you know what to do?” Mike asked as the fire trucks drove away.
“I watch TV,” I said. I was crushed against his chest and enjoying it very much.
Celeste sat quietly in a black-and-white police unit parked ten feet away at the curb, her hands cuffed and resting in her lap, her trim legs properly crossed at the ankles. After the bomb squad had gone, Celeste was the only curiosity left for the assembled crowd to gawk at. As they grew bored-she hardly blinked for them-they drifted off.
Casey, who had been answering questions posed by a hand-some young sprig of the law, walked over and shook my arm. “Were you scared, Mom?” Casey asked.
“I was a little nervous about what Celeste had in that can, but she just didn’t seem to have enough wits about her to be dangerous. Besides, I’m bigger than she is.”
Mike laughed. He was hanging on very tightly.
Caesar came stumbling along with two pals, passing a bottle in a brown bag among them. When he saw me, he took a long pull from the bottle and ambled over sociably.
“Hey, pretty lady,” he said.
“Hey, yourself,” I said.
He aimed the neck of the bottle toward Celeste. “See you found your friend you was lookin’ for. Fine lookin’ lady, ain’t she?”
I looked at Celeste’s trim legs again. “The lady who walks the walk? That’s her?”
“Like I say,” he nodded and passed his bottle on to a thirsty friend.
I looked up at Mike. “If Caesar’s right, Celeste was at the wishing well by Hop Louie’s just about the time he last saw Emily.”