"Dick sent me," I said.
After a long moment the gate rolled crankily open. I drove in.
Chapter 22
Her hair was long and straight and bleached and deader than the Dead Sea Scrolls. She lay on the living-room couch under a handmade quilt with her arms stretched out on top of it, palms up, like an ascetic nun waiting to receive the stigmata. She couldn't have been more than seventeen.
A vague, frayed lady who had to be Mrs. Fram had ushered me into a tiny Formica dining room and asked me to wait. Unwatered house plants languished despondently in a window box. Mrs. Fram was either the most laid-back woman I'd ever met or the most heavily sedated.
"Sit," she'd said blearily. "There's four chairs." There were six. On the wall was an absolutely enormous color photograph of her and Jessica. It might have been taken before World War I for all the resemblance it bore to Mrs. Fram.
"Pretty picture," I said conversationally.
"Uh," she said, looking at it as though she'd never seen it before.
"Spontaneous generation," I suggested. "Pictures are always appearing on my walls too."
She watched my mouth as I talked, looking like a lip-reader trying to follow a silent movie. Then she took a woozy look at the picture.
"Me and Baby," she said. "Sit. You just missed Hermia. She'll be back."
Since I was already sitting, there wasn't much for me to do. "I'm not here to see Hermia," I reminded her.
"Dick sent you," she said with an effort. She might have been pretty once-the picture certainly suggested that she had-but now the flesh hung slack and heavy on her face, and deep circles had worn themselves darkly and permanently into the pouchy area beneath her eyes. The creases around her eyes and mouth, even the creases in her forehead, all pulled downward. It was a face created by erosion. "Dick," she said again in a harsh tone. "He was here. Just a couple days, I think."
"Well," I said brightly, "he's sent me this time. I think you said Jessica was in bed." I wiggled my eyebrows encouragingly. It was like talking to someone a hundred yards away; I found myself using body language to get the point across.
And a lot of good it did, too. She looked at me as I talked, and then, when I finished, she went on looking at me. I had a feeling she'd forgotten what I'd said. Then she said, "Tuesday. It was Tuesday." Satisfied with her feat of memory, she scratched her forearm absently for a moment. Then she told me to sit down again, pivoted uncertainly, and left the room. She dragged her feet when she walked, and her shoes slapped against the floor. "Baby?" I heard her call. "Baby. Time to get up."
I spent the next ten minutes or so watering plants and snooping through the mail on the dining-room table. Quite a lot of it was from the Church: invitations to Revealings, an announcement of a retreat to be held up in Ojai, a strong suggestion that members consider establishing a system of annual tithing, a sort of pre-Christmas sale on certain advanced levels of Listening. Most of it was bulk stuff; ex-Speaker or not, Jessica didn't seem to be on any special mailing list.
At the bottom of the pile was a color photo of Angel and Mary Claire, the new one with the kitten in it. At first glance it looked like the kind of thing a junior-high-school kid might do-blacking out front teeth or drawing in a mustache. But it was more spiteful than that.
Holes had been poked through Mary Claire's eyes. A bullet-entrance wound had been painstakingly drawn into the center of her forehead, and vivid red ink poured from it. Her bosom had been slashed raggedly with a razor blade.
Nothing had been done to Angel.
The picture was an unsettling combination of immature malice and adult hatred. It looked like the kind of thing the cops found hanging in David Berkowitz's bedroom when they finally nailed him as the Son of Sam. The person who'd done it wasn't all there, but she had her hatred down cold. And, of course, it had to be Mrs. Fram.
I heard her shoes slapping against the hallway floor and shoved the picture back under the pile of mail. She pushed the door leading to the hallway closed from the other side before she passed by it. Apparently I wasn't to see Baby until Baby was ready. 'There, Baby," she said from the living room. "Right there. Right there."
There was some muffled moving around. "Cover up, now," Mrs. Fram said in her slurred, mannish voice. " 'Tsa man, you know. A man from Dick."
"Dick," said a small voice. "Dick's not coming?"
"I don't know," Mrs. Fram said curtly. "Scoot up a little."
"But I need him to come. He has to come." The voice was thin and querulous, like that of a young actress trying to play an old woman.
"Hush. You hush. How do we know why this man's here?"
I stepped back from the door just as Mrs. Fram came through it. "Okay now," she said, concentrating her gaze in my general direction. "Baby's in there." She waved a hand behind her, in toward the living room. She went to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat heavily. She looked without interest at the pile of mail. I went into the living room.
"Hello, Jessica," I said.
She'd been rouged and lipsticked crudely for the occasion, but the patches of color only heightened the pallor of her skin. The dead hair had been brushed straight down and then lifted and held in place with a black bow. She looked like a teenage Miss Havisham.
"Is Dick coming?" she asked.
"Not right now," I said. "Maybe later, though."
She clenched both her thin fists and tightened her mouth childishly. "He likes to make me wait," she said. "He enjoys it."
"Wait for what?"
"The little yellow ones."
Mrs. Fram coughed in a tubercular fashion in the next room while I evaluated this. "Don't you have enough left for today?"
"Of course I do," she said impatiently. "Enough for tomorrow too. But he knows I get nervous when I get low. He likes it. I know he does."
"No, he doesn't," I said. "He just doesn't want you to have too many of them. He's just being careful."
"That's what he says. That's what Aunt Hermia says too."
"Well, and they both care about you, don't they?"
"I guess so," she said reluctantly.
"What does your mother say about it?"
"Her," Jessica said. "What does she know?"
"Is Aunt Hermia really your aunt?"
"No." Jessica gave a spiteful little smile. "She's the dragon at the door," she said, "and I'm the fair maiden. We should have a house with a tower so I could sleep in the very top room, and we could chain Aunt Hermia to an iron post next to the front door."
"And where would your mother sleep?"
"On the floor if she wanted to. She does about half the time anyway. Sometimes she sleeps standing up, like horses are supposed to."
"Jessica," I said, "You never Speak anymore, do you?"
"No," she said, looking directly at me for the first time. "That's finished. It ended when I got sick."
"And what's wrong with you?"
"I've got a Wasting Disease," she said with a certain amount of pleasure. "I can't pronounce it, but Dick says it's getting better."
"Have you tried to Speak?"
"You can't try. Don't you know anything? It's either there or it isn't."
"What is?"
"The Voice, silly. What else?"
"And where does the Voice come from?"
"I don't know. I don't remember hearing it. I just know that I heard the tapes later, and it was my voice saying all those things, except not my voice exactly."
"When was the first time you Spoke?"
"I was twelve."
"Where were you?"
"In Dick's office. His office then, not his office now."
"And what happened?"
"He was examining me."
"For what?"
"To see if I could be the Speaker," she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "Anna was dead."