She came around once during the night and realized the rain had stopped.
The silence was profound.
George Swarthout was sitting in a chair in the corner, reading a magazine in the soft glow of a table lamp with a mother-ofpearl shade.
She wanted to speak to him, wanted to know if everything was all right, but she hadn't the strength to sit up or even talk. She closed her eyes and drifted down into darkness again.
She came fully awake before seven o'clock, feeling fuzzyheaded after only four and a half hours of sleep. Joey was snoring softly. She left George watching over her son, went into the bathroom, and took a long, hot shower, wincing when water got under the bandage on her hip and elicited a stinging pain from her still-healing wound.
She finally stepped out of the shower, toweled dry, applied a new bandage, and was pulling on her clothes when she sensed that Joey was in trouble, right now, terrible trouble; she felt it in her bones. She thought she heard him scream above the rumbling of the bathroom's exhaust fan. Oh Jesus no. He was being slaughtered out there in the bedroom, hacked to pieces by some Bible-thumping maniac. Her stomach tightened, and her skin goose-pimpled, and in spite of the moaning bathroom fan she thought she heard something else, a thump, a clubbing sound.
They must be beating him, too, stabbing and beating him, and her lungs blocked up, and she knew it, knew Joey was dead, my God, and in a wild panic she pulled up the zipper on her jeans, didn't even finish buttoning her blouse, stumbled out of the bathroom, shoeless, with her wet hair hanging in glossy clumps.
She had imagined everything.
The boy was safe.
He was awake, sitting up in bed, listening wide-eyed as George Swarthout told him a story about a magic parrot and the King of Siam.
Later, worried that her mother would hear about their problems on the news or read about them in the papers, she called, but then wished she hadn't. Evelyn listened to all the details, was properly shocked, but instead of offering much sympathy, she launched into an interrogation that surprised and angered Christine.
"What did you do to these people?" Evelyn wanted to know.
"What people?"
"The people at this church."
"I didn't do anything to them, Mother. They're trying to do it to us.
Didn't you hear what I said?"
"They wouldn't pick on you for no reason," Evelyn said.
"They're crazy, Mother."
"Can't all of them be crazy, a whole churchful of people."
"Well, they are. They're bad people, Mother, real bad people."
"Can't all of them be bad. Not religious people like that.
Can't all of them be after you just for the fun of it."
"I told you why they're after us. They've got this crazy idea that Joey-"
"That's what you told me," Evelyn said, "but that can't be it. Not really. There must be something else. Must be something you did that made them angry. But even if they're angry, I'm sure they're not trying to kill anybody."
"Mother, I told you, they came with guns, and men were killed-"
"Then the people who had guns weren't these church people, " Evelyn said
" You've got it all wrong. It's someone else."
"Mother, I haven't got it all wrong. I-"
"Church people don't use guns, Christine."
"These church people do."
"It's someone else," Evelyn insisted.
"But-"
"You have a grudge against religion," Evelyn said." Always have. A grudge against the Church."
"Mother, I don't hold any grudges-"
"That's why you're so quick to blame this on religious people when it's plainly the work of someone else, maybe political terrorists like on the news all the time, or maybe you're involved in something you shouldn't be and now it's getting out of hand, which wouldn't surprise me. Are you involved in something, Christine, like drugs, which they're always killing themselves over, like you see on TV, dealers shooting each other all the time-is it anything like that, Christine?"
She imagined she could hear the grandfather clock ticking monotonously in the background. Suddenly, she couldn't breathe well.
The conversation progressed in that fashion until Christine couldn't stand any more. She said she had to go, and she hung up before her mother could protest. Evelyn hadn't even said, "I love you," or "be careful," or "I'm worried about you," or "I'll do anything I can to help."
Her mother might as well be dead; their relationship certainly was.
At seven-thirty, Christine made breakfast for George, Vince, Joey, and herself. She was buttering toast when the rain began to fall again.
The morning was so drab, the clouds so low, the light so dim and gray that it might have been the end rather than the beginning of the day, and the rain came out of that somber sky with gutter-flooding force. Fog still churned outside, and without any sun it probably would hang on all day, barely dissipate, and get blindingly thick tonight. This was.the time of year when relentless trains of storms could assault California, moving in from the Pacific, pounding the coastal areas until creeks swelled over their banks and reservoirs topped out and hillsides began to slide, carrying houses into the bottoms of the canyons with deadly swiftness. From the look of it, they were probably in the process of being run over by one of those storm trains right now.
The prospect of a long stretch of bad weather made the threat from the Church of the Twilight even more frightening. When winter rains closed in like this, streets were flooded, and freeways jammed up beyond belief, and mobility was curtailed, and California seemed to shrink, the mountains contracting toward the coast, squeezing the land in between.
When the rainy season was at its worst, California acquired a claustrophobic aspect that you never read about in tourist brochures or see on postcards.
In weather like this, Christine always felt a little trapped, even when she wasn't being hounded by well-armed lunatics.
When she took a plate of bacon and eggs to Vince Fields, where he was stationed by the front door, she said, "You guys must be tired. How long can you keep this up?"
He thanked her for the food, glanced at his watch, and said, "We only have about an hour to go. The replacement team will be here by then."
Of course. A replacement team. A new shift. That should have been obvious to her, but it hadn't been. She had grown accustomed to Vince and George, had learned to trust them. If either of them had been a member of the Church of the Twilight, she and Joey would have been dead by now. She wanted them to stay, but they couldn't remain awake and on guard forever. Foolish of her not to have understood that.
Now she had to worry about the new men. One of them might have sold his soul to Grace Spivey.
She returned to the kitchen. Joey and George Swarthout were having breakfast at the semicircular pine table which could accommodate only three chairs. She sat down in front of her own plate, but suddenly she wasn't hungry any more. She picked at her food and said, "George, the next shift of bodyguards-"
"Be here soon," he said around a mouthful of eggs and toast.
"Do you know who Charlie. who Mr. Harrison is sending? "
"You mean their names?"
"Yes, their names."
"Nope. Could be any of several fellas. Why?"
She didn't know why she would feel better if she knew their names. She wasn't familiar with Charlie's staff. Their names would mean nothing to her. She wouldn't be able to tell that they were Grace Spivey's people just by their names. She wasn't being rational.
"If you know any of our people and would prefer to have them work a shift here, you should tell Mr. Harrison," George said.