Swenson started to walk away, but Starlene grabbed her arm. Swenson's face was blank, as impassive as the stones of Wendover.
"Tell them to give it up," Starlene said. "People shouldn't try to play God."
"Who's playing? You set us back a few years, but you know what else Freeman said? On one of the tapes, when he was six, and Kenneth Mills was first teaching him ESP?"
Starlene looked back at the kids. She wasn't sure she wanted to know.
"He said, 'Daddy, is this what it's like when God talks to you?'"
Starlene looked at the sky, a large blue thing stretching beyond imagination, endless and unforgiving, built of impossible pieces.
"Now get the hell out of here," Swenson said. "From now on, this is none of your business."
Starlene went to Dipes and Isaac and put her arms around them. "We need to talk," she said.
FIFTY-TWO
"Charlie."
"Yeah?" Charlie was in a bad mood. Nothing new there. His wife was diddling around with a manufactured home salesman, and the eleven Miller Lites had been great last night, but weren't so hot this morning. He'd busted his thumb with a hammer and, worst of all, this week's paycheck was already spoken for. So the last thing he wanted was a jaw session with Jack Eggers.
Jack wiped gypsum dust from his nose. "Look at this."
Charlie's hip was pressed against a piece of sheet rock, holding the weight until he could get some nails in. "Come on, let's get this room hung and get out of here."
"This is fucked up."
You 're the fucked-up one, Jack.
Charlie pounded some six-penny nails into the sheet rock. Once the piece was tacked in place, he slipped his hammer into the sheath on his tool belt. He ran his tape measure to the ceiling. One more sheet and they'd be in the hall. And that was fine with Charlie, because this room was giving him the creeps, even with the quartz work lamps blazing hot enough to spike his eyeballs.
"Give me a hand here," Charlie said. Jack didn't answer.
Charlie turned. Dust swirled in the glow of their lamp. Jack stood in the center of the room, the light throwing his stooped silhouette onto the unfinished gray wall. Jack's hair was white from the gypsum. He was staring at the floor.
"Ain't got time for this." Charlie's hangover pulsed through his sore thumb like a truck barreling through a garden hose. "We got to get it taped and sanded. Painters will be in by Friday, and nobody can fuck up a subcontract like a painter. I want to get my check and be gone, else it'll be 'Fix this' and 'Patch that' till hell freezes over."
Jack continued staring at the floor. "You can cover it up, but it'll still be there."
Charlie shivered, even though sweat trickled down his back, the dust making a paste on his skin. He and Jack had hung a bedroom once for the widow of an ex-cop. The cop had blown his head off with a twelve-gauge, got brains and slime and blood all over the wall. All in the wall, because the studs, insulation, and siding had been pocked with dried meat. They'd slapped three-quarter-inch sheet rock over it, taped and troweled the cracks, but that smell of death had been just as strong as before.
You can cover it up, but it'll still be there. That's what the cop's widow had said.
"What the hell, Jack, it's coffee break." Charlie's throat was dry from the dust. He had a couple of fingers of Jim Beam resting in the bottom of his thermos, just waiting for ten-thirty.
"Nobody's been in here, have they?" Jack said.
"Nobody but us chickens." A crew was hanging some windows upstairs in the building's west wing, but they were so far away that Charlie only heard an occasional shouted cussword or dropped tool.
"Then how did that get there?" Jack pointed to the floor.
Charlie's tape measure slid into its box, rattling like a metallic snake.
Don't look, Charlie ordered himself. Damn you, don't look.
He'd seen plenty enough funny stuff in the two days they'd been hanging this section of the basement. Little movements out of the corner of his eye. Sometimes he'd turn to catch them, but there'd be nothing but the softly spinning dust. That wasn't so bad, he could chalk that up to the swimming eyes that came from hoisting a few too many.
Except he'd heard those rumors about the kids. What had happened here, and why the building's new owners were so desperate to give it a facelift and move it on me market. To make it go away.
Charlie swallowed, the dust like gravel going down.
Jack said, "You're in such a pissy mood today I didn't figure you for jokes."
"I ain't joking today, I'm working. You ought to be, too."
Jack looked up at Charlie. Jack's tongue was set between his teem as if he were thinking hard. Usually, Jack couldn't get lost in thought if you gave him a Chinese map with nothing but left turns.
"You didn't do it, did you?" Jack asked, then turned and stared at the floor again.
"All right, goddamn it." Charlie's voice bounced off the flat, empty walls and the echo slapped his eardrums. He set down the sheet rock and stomped over to Jack. "Now what me hell is it I didn't do?"
Jack pointed.
Charlie looked at the floor. His balls shrank and his heart took an accounting of a lifetime of cigarette smoking.
You can cover it up, but it'11 still be there.
Whatever happened here still lived in the walls, just like at that suicide cop's house. Charlie's hands shook, and he knew the two fingers in the thermos wouldn't be nearly enough. He'd be knocking off early today, calling the contractor and playing sick from the safety of his apartment couch. Maybe if he drank enough, he wouldn't be sick anymore. Maybe he'd drink himself sane.
The floor was covered in a fine silt of dust, marked by their footprints.
Among them, scrawled so that the concrete floor showed cleanly, was a single word:
Free.