Mr. Thornton smiles and tips his round self forward to peer more closely at the patient, noting with approval that Mr. Suggs has been freshly shaved and even his eyebrows have been trimmed, and he asks why she brought him here. She explains that with all the terrible things that happened, there was no room for him at the hospital, and he says, yes, that’s what he understood. “Besides,” she says, lifting her reading glasses to her nose, “he’s better here. It’s more…particular.” Mr. Thornton gives her a comprehending gaze and nods his head and asks how much this private care will cost? She is prepared for this. She tots up the rent, her hours at theropest wages, breakfasts and suppers and hospital catering, cleaning and laundry, medical supplies, personal hygiene items, and extras, and Mr. Thornton says: “Let’s drop the extras and I think it can be arranged. I will organize a trust fund to cover it, which my law firm will administer, though we will again need witnesses, which I hope you can arrange. Until all the paperwork is completed, Mrs. Filbert, it is important that Mr. Suggs stay alive and more or less competent, even if only in this limited manner. I am still locating his many investments, which he managed entirely on his own and which are therefore less than wholly transparent.”
Over a pot of tea in the front room (Bernice, having donned an apron and rolled her sleeves up like in the pictures, serves him with the same quiet humility that Martha showed when Jesus came to raise her brother Lazarus, though her head is working more like Deborah’s or Judith’s), Mr. Thornton asks how Mr. Suggs is accepting his new circumstances, and Bernice tells him that she has not told him this is her own house and explains about her idea of the secret service protecting him from assassins in a hidden location. “Maudie, that head nurse you talked with, she saved his life when the bikers busted into the hospital asking exactly for Mr. Suggs and she sent them into the room of a man who had already died, but it was plainly him they wanted, and so I figured it was best to hide him for a spell, and that is what I told him.” He says he heard something of that story at the hospital and he congratulates her on her strategy, adding that protection of their patient’s health and well-being is their primary objective, and it is easier to discuss matters like this here than in the hospital with so many other people around, which was precisely what she wanted him to say. She shows him the white blouse on which, on the pocket, she has carefully stitched B.FILBERT SECRIT SIRVIS. He smiles in a kindly way over his triple chins and reminds her that people in the secret service do not usually advertise themselves so it might be best not to wear the blouse, and she agrees and puts it away again. “I was only beguiling the time,” she says.
He tells her that it is his understanding that at least one hundred seventy people will be charged with unlawful assembly, trespassing, illegal possession of lethal weapons, disturbing the peace, conspiracy to disturb the peace, and who knows what-all, and that as many as seventeen or eighteen people are to be charged with murder or conspiracy to murder or accessory to murder. “I will send you a list when I know it. You should let me know if there are any among them who are friends of yours, and I will see what I can do.” She says she will do that and asks if something can be done now for Mr. Roy Coates and his son Aaron, and Mr. Thornton shakes his head and says that he believes those two are among those charged with murder and are well-documented co-conspirators, so they are probably beyond his powers of influence. “Well, at least see what you can do for the boy,” she says, “on grounds of compaction.” She drops her spectacles to her chest and raises one brow to suggest a worried but considerate mind. Bernice feels more like the wilier mature Rebecca now, negotiating for her favorite son, though Aaron Coates is hardly known to her. She is thinking mainly about her friend Thelma and how impressed she will be if she is able to show how powerful she can be and is already imagining Thelma on the phone telling others. “He is young and still under his father’s influence and he lost his brother when them bikers burnt the boy to death in the trunk of the sheriff’s car which was a awesome desolation for him and mightily disturbed his spirit.”
And then, even as that horrible scene comes back to mind, sobering them both, a useful thing happens. Mr. Suggs can be heard grunting and whining in the next room, the only sounds he seems able to make when he’s awake, and she takes Mr. Thornton in there to introduce him. Mr. Suggs is alert and blinking away and wagging his finger. “I been telling Mr. Suggs, Mr. Thornton,” she says, “about how them motorcycle killers came after him in the hospital, hollering out his name, and tried to shoot him, and how a lot of people died and things got blowed all to flanders, and also about how that Mr. McDaniel drove a backhoe through all those poor people on the hillside and crashed into some school buses, but it’s all so terrible and peculiar, I don’t think he quite credits me,” and Mr. Thornton nods gravely and says, “I’m afraid it’s all true, Mr. Suggs. And more you have not yet been told. We are living through strange, dangerous times. I assure you, you can believe everything that Mrs. Filbert tells you.”
“The Cravens boy he had a wee nick cutting clean through his life line. I asked him how he done that. He didn’t know. Then ‘bird,’ he said. It give me a chill.” Staring into Glenda Oakes’ solitary eyeball gives Bernice a chill. It is like staring into the middle of nothingness. Hazel Dunlevy, before she got shot and died, looked at Bernice’s palm one day and said that there was trouble on her fate line but her life line was long and deep, and that was a mostly good thing. Bernice wonders what Glenda would say now that she reads palms instead of dreams, but she is afraid to ask. The woman has become gaunt and hollow-cheeked and seems to have taken a dark turning, or maybe it’s just the darkness in her has risen to the top, stirred up by the cruel times she has been through. She wears a gun in a holster and is holding a child who has been crying but now is only hiccupping. Glenda doesn’t know who the child is. His parents have not returned from the Mount of Redemption to claim him. “And then, when later I was trying to get all them children to leave the garden and head for the woods and away from the camp by pretending to have a little Injun race, Davey he started wailing in his bereft manner and crying out that he wanted his mommy, and I knew that something bad was going to happen. He run off with his sister afore I could stop them. The rest of us we wasn’t more’n a hunderd feet away, in under the trees and running doubled-over like all get-out, when there was a thunderous racket and the garden shed wasn’t there no more, nor not the two kids neither. And that night was when them two lovebirds come back. They been haunting the camp ever since. And they ain’t sorry for what they done. They’re just only missing their nest.”
“Is that what the gun is for?”
“No, you can’t shoot a ghost. But I think I may of seen Hazel’s husband Travers sniffing around out there at the edge. If he tries to get in any closer, I aim to kill him.”
The church camp does have an eerie haunted feel, even by day, the humid overcast adding to its gloom. When Lucy Smith’s husband Calvin, who took over as sheriff when Mr. Puller was crematized, stopped her outside the hospital and asked her if she’d do him the favor of visiting a person who was badly hurt, she’d thought he was talking about her friend Lucy, who she’d heard had survived the explosions but was somewhat bedazzled by the blow she took when her head bounced off the bank floor. But instead he drove her out here to the camp, which seems a completely different place from when she last visited it only three days ago. There is a heavy smell of wet ash and lingering wood smoke and, under the blackened trees, a weedy overgrowth springing up, aswarm with wasps and mosquitoes, and thick brown tire tracks ripping through all the green parts. The desolation, she thought, moving through it. The desolation. Most of the cabins are just black skeletal ruins. She saw a toilet standing alone on its plumbing where her sick bay once was and the sassy little Blaurock girl was sitting on it, still wearing her pink slipper, thumb in her mouth and shorts down around her ankles, while others watched and giggled. Two of the children she recognized as belonging to Glenda Oakes, so she supposed that lady must still be here. The little girl’s father was working on the ruins of the cabin next to the camp lodge, the one that used to belong to Sister Debra, making walls out of old blankets nailed to the charred corner posts and roofing it with tattered tarpaulins, and two others were helping him. Calvin asked her to say nothing about what she sees here, for he is under strict orders to clear the camp, and sooner or later must do so, but he wants to protect these few remaining people from further harm as long as he can. “If it was known they were here, people hate them so, some might try to take the law into their own hands.” Bernice gave him her word. She asked after Lucy and he said she had not yet got over what happened three days ago, and if Bernice is able she might pay her a visit and prescribe something for her nerves.