I shivered, but I don’t think it was because of the cold. In fact, the little space heater was beginning to warm the place up pretty nicely. It was just kind of spooky being here with her, listening to her weaving between craziness and good sense. So many insane things had happened to me in the last couple of days, it was getting hard to tell which was which.
“They’re all around, you know,” she said.
I licked my dry lips. “Oh yeah?”
“Mm-hmm. The ones from the hospital. Trying to take me back. The ones who are trying to get you. They’re everywhere.”
I nodded. Again, it was sort of crazy and sort of true at the same time.
“You can’t know who to trust,” she said.
“That’s right. I don’t,” I told her.
“You don’t know how to escape.”
“I don’t. They’re everywhere, looking for me.”
“Mm-hmm. Jane knows. Every time you think you’ve figured out what’s what, they change the whole face of things, don’t they?”
“Yes!”
“Pretty soon you’re not even sure who you are anymore. You’re not even sure if their lies are really lies and your truth is really true.”
I shook my head. “I just wish I could remember.”
“Mm-hmm. Jane knows.” She looked at me hard with her big, quick, almond eyes. Her round, innocent face was very serious and intense beneath all the grime. It was as if she felt we had connected with each other, that we were on the same wavelength. It gave me a weird feeling, to understand her, to be in sympathy with her, and to know she was completely mad.
“They want to take away your freedom,” she said.
“They do,” I said. “They do.”
“They want to kill you.”
“I know it.”
She looked back and forth, this way and that, as if they might burst in on us any minute. “They have plans. Big plans.”
“I know! They want to kill Richard Yarrow!”
I don’t know why I told her that. It just sort of came out of me. I mean, we were talking and she was describing things so exactly. I just sort of fell into the conversation as if I were chatting with a sane person. Well, why not, you know? I was all alone, after all. I had no one else to share things with. There was just me and Crazy Jane.
“Richard Yarrow,” Jane answered in a hushed, awestruck voice. Her green eyes darted back and forth.
I nodded. “He’s coming to visit the president tomorrow. They’re planning to kill him somehow, and I don’t know what to do. Everyone wants to arrest me and no one will believe me.”
“They’ll never believe you,” Jane echoed.
“I know. And I can’t just sit by and let Yarrow die.”
“Yarrow,” she echoed. Then her mouth formed a circle. Her big eyes got bigger still. “O-o-o-oh,” she said on a great long breath. “I know Yarrow.”
As I sat in the canvas chair, watching, she set her soup bowl aside and came off the mattress. She started to crawl along the floor on her hands and knees, her eyes searching the newspapers lying under her. The newspapers crinkled and crunched as she moved over them. Soon, comically enough, the cats finished eating and came over and joined her. They rubbed up against her flanks. The four of them-the lady and the cats-crawled around the floor on all fours, Jane’s eyes scouring the newspapers the whole time. It was one of the strangest things I think I’d ever seen.
Finally, she repeated, “Yarrow.” She picked another newspaper page up off the floor. Carrying the page, she crawled back to the mattress with the mewing cats crawling after her. When she’d sat down again, the cats climbed up on her and gathered in her lap. She handed the newspaper page over to me.
153 Closed for Yarrow Visit, the headline read. There on the paper was a map very similar to the map I’d seen on TV earlier. It showed Richard Yarrow’s route from the airport to the president’s vacation home in the Green Hills. Underneath that was a photograph. It showed a whole bunch of state troopers in their khaki uniforms talking to four men in dark suits. The photograph’s caption said: “Secret Service agents brief state troopers on security arrangements for Yarrow’s 11 a.m. arrival.”
I glanced over the news story. The lady sat on the mattress, watching me over the cats and murmuring to herself. The three cats stretched their faces up to her face and rubbed their bodies up against her.
There was nothing much in the newspaper story that I didn’t know already. Yarrow had worked out a new plan to root out terrorism in the United States, and he was coming to present the plan to the president. In a recent speech, Yarrow had said that he felt the threat of terrorism here at home was increasing and had to be dealt with harshly.
I was about to hand the newspaper back to the lady when something in it caught my eye. I wasn’t sure at first what it was. Something in that photograph of the Secret Service men with the troopers. I kept looking it over and it kept bothering me, but I couldn’t tell why.
Then, all at once, I got it. It was the face of one of the agents-one of the men in the dark suits. I had seen it before. But where?
I stared at the face, trying to remember. It came to me. It was back in Centerville. Back when they were taking me out of the jail to the cruiser. Just before the man came up behind me and whispered to me and broke my handcuffs, I had seen someone, someone in the crowd. I remembered now. I had had a strange feeling, as if I recognized this person, as if I knew him from somewhere.
Now there he was again: one of the Secret Service agents in the photograph. It was the same man, the same handsome face with the same floppy blond hair. Looking at him gave me the same feeling too. I knew him from somewhere. I couldn’t quite remember where it was. It was as if his name was right on the edge of my mind and I just couldn’t bring it out. The harder I tried to remember, the more it seemed to slip away from me.
They always tell you when you can’t remember something, the best thing to do is stop thinking about it. But I couldn’t stop thinking about this. It didn’t make any sense. Why would I know a Secret Service agent?
It was no good. I couldn’t figure it out. I gave up. Once again, I was about to hand the newspaper back to Jane.
Then, just like that, the name came out of me. “Orton,” I said aloud.
For once, the lady stopped her murmuring. She went very still. She stared at me as if I had said something bizarre or amazing. “Orton,” she repeated.
“The guy in the newspaper,” I said. I don’t know if I was talking to her or to myself, but it helped me to say it out loud somehow. “The guy in the picture. I think I know him. I think his name is Orton.”
Again, she spoke the name back at me, drawing out the syllables in her weird, dreamy way. “Orrrrtoooon.”
And with that, those other voices came back to me, my memory of those voices outside the torture room door:
Homelander One.
We’ll never get another shot at Yarrow.
Two more days. We can send Orton. He knows the bridge as well as West.
“Orton,” I whispered. “That’s right. They’re sending him to the bridge.”
“To the bridge,” whispered Crazy Jane, slapping her forehead.
“That’s where they’re going to do it.”
“That’s where they’re going to kill Yarrow,” she said.
“Yes!”
My eyes moved from the photograph back to the map-the map that showed the route of Secretary Yarrow’s trip from Centerville to the president’s home. Sure enough, there it was, marked clearly on the page: the Indian Canyon Bridge.
“There it is,” I said. I handed the page to her, pointing at the map. “There.” She took it, looked at it. “Orton is going to kill Yarrow tomorrow right there on that bridge,” I told her.
Crazy Jane stared at the paper. Then she let out a little gasp and lifted her eyes to me. The cats mewed and rubbed against her.
“Oh, Charlie,” she whispered. “You have to stop him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Cans She made a bed for me on the floor: just a pile of newspapers for a pillow, really, and an old rag of a blanket to pull up over me. She turned off the light and went back to her mattress. I lay on the floor in the dark nearby.