Fear itself: a novel (28 page)

Except, of course, that he didn’t have a computer any longer—or a CD collection, or an address. It was a strange dual state of mind Simon found himself in, as the Volvo rolled across the great iron bridge spanning the Mississippi above La Crosse. He was an intelligent man, and as Sid Dolitz had pointed out to Pender only five days earlier, his
manie
was decidedly
sans délire:
on one level, he understood that life as he’d known it was over. He was a fugitive now, condemned to a short, harried existence and a violent end, either at his own hands or those of law enforcement.

But on another, deeper level, down where the personality takes root, Simon’s grandiose sense of himself, the preternatural confidence of the psychopath, and the inability to empathize with others (Missy didn’t count, Sid would have said; psychologically, pathologically, to Simon she was not an
other,
but an extension of his
self
) or to appreciate that others lived on the same plane of consciousness as himself, with the same interior life, all combined to render Simon constitutionally incapable of imagining the universe continuing after his death. In this regard, for all his intelligence and awareness, Simon was like an infant, unable to establish any boundaries between itself and the outside world, to say this is where I end and the world begins. Simon was the universe and the universe was Simon, unable to comprehend the inevitability of its own nonexistence.

And yet here he was, hurtling toward a certain bloody death.

Instinctively, without being consciously aware of the problem, Simon knew the solution: purpose, focus, concentration. Whenever he found his thoughts drifting as he drove (and he’d been driving since 6
A
.
M
.), whenever the riotous autumn colors, the lush music, or the elemental joy of highway speed failed to hold his interest, he turned his thoughts to Pender.

Pender, who was responsible for Missy’s death. Pender, who was responsible for Simon’s own exile. Pender, Pender, Pender: Simon kept the image of that bald, scarred melon of a head, those ridiculous clothes, that fatuous grin, in front of him always as a lodestar. Every mile he put behind him, he told himself, brought him another five thousand two hundred and eighty feet closer to wiping the smirk right off that fat face, and replacing the dull, self-satisfied expression with one of pure, sweet fear.

“Don’t move,” called Dorie when Pender opened his eyes.

“Why not?” He’d been dozing on a picnic blanket spread out under a wind-sculpted cypress tree at Lovers Point while Dorie painted; now he opened the other eye and saw that she’d moved back another fifteen yards or so and had swung her chair and easel around to face him.

“You’re in the picture now.”

“Wait.” Pender, feeling the breeze on his scalp, assumed his beret must have slipped off. He started to look around for it. Dorie called to him not to move again. “But my hat, I need my—”

“It’s over here.” She was seated behind and slightly to the right of her easel, glancing back and forth between subject and canvas, painting rapidly with her left hand. Even at this time of day, the light was constantly changing; take too long and you find yourself finishing a different painting than the one you’d started. “I had to take it off.”

“What do you mean you ‘had to take it off’?”

“The brown just bled. Into the tree trunk. Behind you,” she called between brushstrokes. “I needed the splash. Of pink. For the composition. Now quit. Fidgeting.”

“I want my hat.”

“Think of it. As a sacrifice. To art.” But much as she hated to interrupt her work, Dorie could sense from the growing tension in the reclining figure that a little TLC oil was going to have to be applied to the subject. She put down her brush and crossed the lush green lawn, knelt on the edge of the blanket. Pender, lying on his left side, his right arm suspended in a clean sling (a trapezoidal patch of white in the painting; another reason why she needed the whitish-pink of the scalp for balance), started to sit up. She touched his shoulder lightly. “Pen, please—this is important to me.” Pen was her own private nickname for him; somehow, he just didn’t feel like an
Ed
to her. “It’s been years since I last tried putting a human figure into one of my paintings.”

“The mask thing?”

She nodded. “The faces—I couldn’t finish a face and I couldn’t leave one blank.”

“Well, you picked a hell of a one to start with.”

“It’s only this big.” She held her thumb and forefinger about a quarter of an inch apart. “Please, Pen? I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

And after a brief, whispered lovers’ conference, during which they discussed just
how
she might make it up to him, Dorie returned triumphantly to her easel and Pender to his nap. When she’d finished, she packed up her gear, crossed the green again, slipped his beret over his scarred scalp, and lay down next to him.

“When do you have to be back in Washington?” Much as she treasured both her independence and her privacy, with Simon still on the loose Dorie wasn’t exactly looking forward to sleeping alone again.

“I have a meeting with my ghostwriter on Friday. I’m supposed to be taping my memoirs for him. Funny little guy named Bellcock—you’d like him. He says he’s cowritten so many books his friends think his first name is As Told To. He loaned me a Dictaphone, told me just start talking, tape is cheap, he’ll sort it out later. Then he said don’t censor myself, he’s heard it all. And I’m thinking, my friend, you have no idea.” Pender shook his head sharply, as if to clear it of a quarter century of serial killers—the rippers, ghouls, collectors, and necrophiles that comprised his
all.

“So Thursday?” asked Dorie, nestling close against him.

“At the latest. Abruzzi could probably use a helping hand, too.” He slipped his good arm under her head for a pillow, and they lay together listening to the raucous seagulls, the barking seals, the waves breaking gently against the rocks at the tip of the point. “I could sure get used to this, though,” he added after a few minutes.

Oh,
do,
thought Dorie.

“Say, you want to come with?” Pender asked her casually, as if the idea had just occurred to him. He’d been thinking about it for a while, though—with Childs still at large, he wasn’t real thrilled about the prospect of leaving Dorie alone.

“You mean, like, come home with you? To Washington?”

“Maryland, actually. Just for a little while—at least until Childs is behind bars.”

“You don’t think—”

Pender quickly backtracked. “No, no. Of course not—there’s no reason to think he’d be coming back for you. He’s not that stupid. I just thought you might enjoy a little vacation. I could show you around, you could do some painting.”

“No can do.” Dorie was tempted—but there was no sense getting all worked up over an impossibility.

“Why not?”

“Aviophobia.”

“What’s that?”

“Fear of flying.”

“Maybe it’s time to deal with it.”

Dorie sat up, annoyed. “What are you, my shrink now?”

“No,” replied Pender. “But I know enough about fear to know that it makes a useful servant and a lousy master.”

“Oh, swell,” muttered Dorie. “First he’s a shrink, now he’s Yoda.”

“Think it over, scout. Do me a favor, just think it over. I’ll be there holding your hand every inch of the way.”

“It’s not just the fear of flying,” Dorie temporized—phobics were good at temporizing. “I have too much work to do here—I have to get another half-dozen paintings done in time for my show.”

“Why, that’s perfect, then. The trees around Tinsman’s Lock are a knockout this time of year. Box elder, white ash, sugar maple, sycamore, hickory, elm—I bet you’d have to buy a whole new box of crayons.”

“Hey, Pender.”

“What?”

“Give it a break, would you?”

“You bet,” said Pender, making a mental note to pick up a ticket for Dorie when he called for reservations. He had a first-class ticket to turn in—it would more than cover two coach fares.

Scarlet fever, thought Ida, the moment she clapped eyes on Arthur Bellcock. You didn’t spend thirty years as a small-town GP’s wife without learning to recognize a scarlet fever victim.

“Mrs. Day?”

“Mr. Bellcock—come in.”

Bellcock had arrived around six, an hour earlier than scheduled. No problem, though: on Monday there was still plenty of meat left on the widow bird she had just taken out of the refrigerator (a
widow bird
was the local name for a chicken a single woman would roast on Sunday for a whole week’s worth of suppers), so she invited him for supper.

She wasn’t sure what to expect, having never met a ghostwriter before, but for some reason she’d been picturing a little guy with glasses and a tape recorder, and was therefore unprepared to find this tall, rather creepy looking, entirely hairless fellow with the arrogant slouch and the hypnotic eyes standing empty-handed on her doorstep.

But Ida Day was not one to judge a man by his appearance—Walt had been no Ronald Colman, either. And once he turned the charm on, Arthur Bellcock made it easy to forget his looks. He complimented her cooking, he flattered her about her appearance—if she’d been ten years younger or he’d been ten years older, she might even have suspected that he was making a pass at her.

After supper, though, when they retired to the parlor and the talk turned to Eddie, Bellcock was all business, jotting down her answers in a little spiral-bound pocket notebook. But again he surprised her—the questions weren’t at all what she’d been expecting. He seemed to be less interested in facts than in generalities. What was Eddie like as a boy? What were his interests, his likes and dislikes, his favorite and least favorite pastimes? He appeared to be leading up to something, but to save herself, Ida couldn’t figure out what.

“As I told you on the phone yesterday, Mr. Bellcock,” she explained, bending over the brick hearth to light the fire, “I left Cortland when Eddie was only ten, so I never got to know him as well as I’d have liked to.”

“When was the last time you spoke with your brother?” said Bellcock, leaning back, draping his long arms over the back of the sofa, his pose of studied casualness betrayed only by a nervous twitch in his left thigh that set his heel to tapping.

“A few weeks ago—when he called me about you.” Your motor’s running, Ida wanted to tell him—that’s what Walt always said to Stan, whose leg also used to vibrate annoyingly like that when he was anxious or excited.

Almost there, thought Simon. But before he asked the only question that really mattered, he had to find out for sure whether she knew anything about Pender’s recent exploits. If, say, she’d been following the case in the news, a direct question about fear would be bound to arouse her suspicions—he’d have to find a way to fit the question within that context. “I’ve been out of touch for a few weeks. Any idea what Ed’s working on lately?”

“Now that he’s retired, you mean? His golf game, I should imagine—he told me he and his friend Sid were going to be flying out to California. He was all excited about playing Pebble Beach, as I recall.”

“Right, right.” Retired! That’s why Pender never pulled a gun on me, thought Simon—because he didn’t have one. If Pender was retired, though, then what was he doing nosing around Carmel? And what had Dorie told him that sent him to Berkeley? And what, for that matter, did it say about Simon, that he had allowed his life (and Missy’s—don’t forget about Missy) to be destroyed by some retired old poop.

But never mind all that now, Simon told himself, tamping down his growing rage as best he could. Those were all peripheral issues; the time had come to get down to the meat of the matter. He flipped through the pages of his notebook, pretending to have lost his place.

“Let’s see now, where were we? Likes, dislikes, favorite sport, blah blah blah, first girlfriend…Oh, yes, here we are. Next question is: Did Eddie have any phobias when he was a boy?”

“Phobias?”

“Yes—was there anything in particular that he feared?”

“I know what the word means, Mr. Bellcock—I was trying to remember. There
was
an episode, when Eddie was…let’s see, I was in my senior year at Ithaca when our mom called and told me to come right home…so Eddie would have been around eight or nine. He and his friend were fooling around with firecrackers. They dropped one down our chimney to see what would happen—it blew up in Eddie’s face. It was touch and go for a couple of weeks whether he’d even regain his sight.”

“Firecrackers, then?” asked Simon, cutting to the chase. “He’s afraid of firecrackers?”

“No, no,” said Ida. “Blindness. Terrified of it. As a boy, you could never get him to play pin the tail on the donkey. And as an adult…Let’s see, it was Stanley’s birthday, Eddie had just graduated from FBI Academy, so it must have been 1972, we had a piñata, and Eddie absolutely refused to put on the blindfold, even after Stanley begged him. And Eddie adored Stanley—he’d have done anything for him.”

But although Arthur Bellcock was busily scribbling in his notebook, Simon Childs was no longer paying any attention.

Blindness, is it? he thought. That’s a good one, that’s a juicy one—we can make a game out of that, Eddie-boy; we can definitely make a game out of that one.

And with that out of the way, there was only one more question remaining to be asked: “Just out of curiosity, Mrs. Day, as long as we’re on the subject—is there anything in particular that
you’re
afraid of?”

“There was,” said Ida, putting the emphasis on the past tense. And then, probably because Mr. Bellcock was such an extraordinary listener, hanging on her every word, his lips parted and his strangely naked eyes aglow with the reflected light from the fire, Ida found herself telling him what it was—or rather, what it had been.