"Illinois."
"You're sure?"
"One thing I'm sure about, mister, is license plates."
Not too difficult to figure out what had happened. The heavyset guy, whoever he is, waits till Pete heads back to the office, and then uses some kind of tool to get in my room. Obviously, a pro.
I picked up the phone again. Pete looked nervous. "It's Payne again. You have anybody currently registered here from Illinois?"
She checked. "No." Then, "How's it going with Pete?"
"Just fine. Thanks." I hung up and turned to Pete. "You wouldn't happen to remember the plate numbers, would you?"
"'Fraid not. For one thing, my memory ain't so hot these days. And for another thing, it never even crossed my mind."
"I'm sure it didn't. Thanks, Pete."
"That's all, huh?"
"That's all. Thanks again."
He latched his thumbs on either side of his bib straps and looked around the room and said, "You'd really be surprised about what people leave right out in plain sight. It's almost like they want you to steal it, you know that? Just like they're beggin' you, in fact."
The knock came about a half hour later. I was mindlessly channel-surfing. They had a dish antenna. On one of the talk shows a neo-Nazi named Fred goose-stepped up and down the audience aisle until an audience member attacked him. A good-looking Wall Street woman told me how to invest my money. A very young Roy Rogers sang a song to his horse Trigger. A KKK member with a real bad complexion told a talk show host that "good ordinary white men" were the most discriminated-against minority group in the USA. And a voluptuous woman in a cowboy hat and snug-fitting and very spanglycowgal shirt assured me that even I of the lead foot could learn all the latest line dance moves right in the shamed darkness of my living room. I just kept surfing. Maybe I was looking for God-as opposed, I mean, to all the TV ministers so eager for my bankbook.
I was grateful for the knock.
I put the surfer stick away and went and answered the door and there stood Tandy West.
"Still a channel surfer, I hear."
The door, apparently, wasn't real thick.
"Yeah. I couldn't decide between wrestling and women who got probed while in the hands of aliens."
"Maybe that's what I need, Robert," and I could see she was only half-kidding. "A little alien probing."
The psychologists and psychiatrists who had examined her over the years trying to determine the authenticity of her "gift" had also noted that she was manic-depressive. Severely so. She had long been a Lithium baby.
"You want to come in?"
"I was hoping you'd take me for a ride."
"Anywhere in particular?"
"Back to the asylum."
"Any particular reason?"
"A couple of particular reasons. I thought I'd explain on the way."
"Long as I'm back to keep my bowling date."
"I still think she's got a crush on you."
"And I still think she just wants to pick my brain."
"How's your love life?"
I looked over at her. "You've really changed."
"I know. I'm not the virgin girl anymore." She looked out at the country road. It was late afternoon. The impending dusk was already casting long shadows and touching all the autumn foliage with dramatic life. The pumpkins in the field, orange and round as merry balloons, looked especially festive. One of nature's little jokes, I suppose, to make the season of death so seductive.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have said that."
"Well, since you asked, not all that good."
"How about that rich woman you were living with?"
"Went back to her ex-husband."
"I thought he was such a bastard."
"He is."
"So you're not involved right now."
"Not by choice, unfortunately."
More staring out the window. "I either have too little sex or too much."
"Right now I think I'd opt for the latter."
"Maybe you'll get lucky with the police chief tonight."
"I doubt it."
Then, "You think I could sleep in your room tonight?"
"Sure. But why?"
She turned back the cuff of her white shirtsleeve. First the left one. Then the right one. She'd done a pretty good job of it. Somebody must have found her in time and gotten her to a hospital. She had pale skinny little-girl wrists, and the razor scars were sad and lurid and ugly.
"What's that all about?" I said.
"I got real depressed a while back."
"Apparently."
"Maybe I won't want to have sex tonight."
"That's all right."
"If it gets real rough for you, I'll give you a hand job."
I smiled. "Boy, you have changed." Then, "You going to tell me about your wrists?"
She looked over at me with her sweet little waif face, glassy tears in her eyes, and shook her head.
I didn't push it.
The shadows, and the darkening sky, and the chill drop in temperature, lent the land around the burned-out asylum a forlorn quality I hadn't sensed in full daylight. The songbirds in the fading tree light were melancholy, and even the dogs down the hill near the horse meadows sounded lonely. It was true. You could almost hear the screams of those who'd died in the fire.
"You mind if I just walk around a while and not talk?"
"Fine."
"I mean alone."
"No problem."
She walked around alone. No problem. I watched a mother raccoon in a tree try to get one of her babies down from a topmost branch. The baby was swaying back and forth and making fear sounds. The mother moved with great delicacy and picked the kid up by the back of the neck and brought it back to safety. In the midst of all this desolation, it was a life-affirming act.
The moon came up. A half moon, it was, clear and radiant as the finest diamond, its luminosity ancient and brand-new at the same time, a marker of our entire brief span on this world that would never quite be ours. It was fun sometimes to think of what species would eventually replace us; sometimes, it was fun; other times, it was scary.
"Damn," she said, sitting down next to me on a fallen tree.
"What?"
She put her small hand on my arm. "You mean you haven't figured it out yet?"
"Figured what out yet?"
She hesitated a moment. Then, "You remember when we worked together on those two cases? I had genuine psychic visions."
"You sure did."
"I was the one who found the bodies."
"You sure were."
"So you didn't doubt my abilities at all."
"Of course not. Remember, toots, I was the one who sent you to Quantico to meet the paranormal unit."
Another pause. "I lost it."
"Lost what?"
A barn owl burst into night song. Dismay and loneliness filled the forest around us, his call that plaintive.
"I lost my powers."
"I didn't know you could lose them."
"I tried to cash in. That's what Laura and I fight about all the time. The agreement we had when I started the show was that there wouldn't be any fakery or showbiz bullshit. You know?"
"Sure."
"Well, they were ready to dump us after three episodes. The ratings were terrible. So Laura and Noah decided that we needed fakery and showbiz bullshit right away. And the more the better. I fought against it, but I eventually went along because I was getting used to the life."
"The life?"
"You know. Being a celebrity. Limos everywhere. Flying to London and Paris. Having a very nice bank account. For our parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary, we were able to buy them a nice new house and get Mom a housekeeper twice a week. I even made the tabloids. They had me paired off with this rock singer I'd never even heard of before. But it was all pretty cool stuff for a small-town girl like me."
"I'm sure it was."
"Laura and Noah moved us away from people with real paranormal powers. They weren't very dramatic on TV. I mean, I had to admit that myself. There was this crippled woman from Boston, for instance, and I think she really had the power to heal people. Not all people, not all the time. But I think she was genuine. I wanted her on the show. I insisted we tape a segment with her. She was a very sweet, middle-aged woman in a wheelchair, but she had these facial tics. And when I saw the tape of her, I had to admit it was bad TV. She'd make the audience uncomfortable. So we ended up with this 'healer' who used to be a stage magician. It was total bullshit and the people who claimed he'd healed them were all lying. I suppose he paid them. But our ratings quadrupled. Then Laura suggested alien abductions. And then Noah said how about past lives. And then the show started getting into spirit possession and ghosts-none of it legitimate study, which would have been fine, but just showbiz crap."