Death Qualified Part 52

"Okay, answer from there. I don't give a d.a.m.n, just tell me what I need to know. Is it over with you two?"

Doc nodded.

"Since when?"

"Late summer, early fall. I don't know."

"Did Jessie ever indicate to you that she knew?"

"Never. Not until she testified. I never guessed."

Abruptly he swung around and returned to the table. He put both hands on it and leaned forward.

"She knew. G.o.d knows how long, but she knew. It was her idea for Nell to start going out with Clive. She said it was unnatural for such a pretty young woman not to date; the police would find that suspicious. And everyone around here knew she never gave him the time of day until after Lucas was dead; no scandal could possibly be attached to that pairing. I believed her. G.o.d help me, I believed her, that she wanted to help Nell. But she was taunting me all the time, and she was afraid after Lucas died, afraid I might.... I don't know, do what I'm doing now, I guess."

"Oh, Moses in a basket," Frank muttered.

"But she wouldn't admit it for a million dollars," Doc said fiercely.

"She's too arrogant to admit a younger woman came along, that her husband might have played around, that she wasn't the only star in his universe. She won't admit that." He smiled crookedly, amirthless grimace.

"It would hurt her more than me, and she knows it. I've reached the point where I don't give a s.h.i.+t who knows what, and she knows that, too."

Frank did not bother to tell him that many people undergoing a filthy divorce would step gladly into the pit if they knew the recently beloved would end up there, also.

Instead, he sighed.

"Okay, give me a call when you get back in town. And think about it hard before you start that little talk with her, will you?"

Doc shrugged.

"I told her I was coming over to give you our key, so you can have a look around now and then.

Here it is. No lies. Thank G.o.d, no more lies after this rotten weekend is over." He snapped a key off his chain and put it on the table.

He left soon after that, as jumpy as he had been on arriving, but with a new determination that made all his motions seem more directed, not simply the aimless, blind restlessness of a desperately unhappy man.

Frank opened the living room door to see Barbara kneeling at the side of the couch, holding Mike's hand.

Shaking her head, she placed the hand back under the cover and stood up.

"I thought he was coming awake. He was moving, but that's all, just moving. It moves, it breathes, it's alive!"

"You need a drink. And I can use a drink. Come on, let's see to that, and I'll fill you in on Doc's new backbone.

Interesting Filipino doctor got hold of him and inserted it without drawing a drop of blood, far as I could see."

When he told her what Doc's plans were, she cursed.

At his questioning look, she said darkly, "Nothing. Just another little thread snipped off, that's all. If Jessie leaves without telling anyone if and what she might know about Lucas's death, we'll never find out. I'm with Doc in that.

She probably won't come back here. Too proud."

"Honey, she wouldn't lift her little pinkie to help Nell, no matter what. You know that as well as I do."

After dinner, Frank dozed in his chair; Barbara tried to concentrate on the book she had been trying to concentrate on all day. She tried rephrasing what she had read: The normal human heartbeat is not regular. There is a random irregularity that is now recognized as healthy. Good. She nodded at the book. When the heartbeat becomes very regular, a heart attack might follow. When it becomes chaotic to an extreme, fibrillation can cause death in minutes.

Then the author had gone on to discuss the brain and its waves, also randomly irregular. The flicker effect can synchronize the brain waves in a regular pattern in some people, and the result can be a sudden swing into turbulence, a chaotic electrical activity: a seizure. Good, she told herself again.

All G.o.d's children got irregularities, she thought. Irregularity, the bane of Western civilization.

Abruptly she was remembering one of the articles Ruth Brandywine had written, one not dealing with adolescent learning patterns. This had dealt with channels. Synapses.

All open at birth, receptive, and then one after another.

closing, to become inaccessible, out of reach forever. Unless someone like Emil Frobisher found a way to open them again, Barbara thought then.

Physiological changes occur, Brandywine had claimed, irreversible changes that also affect the chromosomes. Mutagenic changes. Drugs can cause mutagenic changes, ionizing radiation can, and synaptic realignments of the brain.

Barbara closed her eyes hard, trying to visualize again the accompanying diagrams and pictures of brain tissue and chromosomal studies from children who had died before and after the acquisition of language, before and after walking, before and after reading skills were mastered.

Brandywine's critics had said she was talking about the process of maturation, nothing more than that. She had claimed that infants could focus their eyes at birth--an incontestable statement--but that most of them rarely did, not until there had been sufficient reinforcement. After they learned to focus them in approved ways, they could no longer perceive whatever it was they had been seeing before that. What caused infants to have night terrors? she had asked, and answered: a turbulent brain system receiving too much data, all contradictory and overwhelming.

The brain was sent into a state of turbulence that was the proximate cause of night terrors that persisted until reinforcement of some synapses made connections that overrode other connections that were then severed, not to be joined again. Throughout childhood the channels continued to close, although not at the same rate as the two-year period of turbulence. Children with eidetic memories lost that ability when they learned to read. Children who had a telepathic rapport with (heir parents--most children, she had claimed--lost that ability when they became socialized.

And each change, she had written, was accompanied by a distinctive physiological change and an alteration in the chromosomes.

Barbara slipped without transition into a dream. She was ice-skating on the river, which had frozen solid from bank to bank. The ice was incredibly clear, to the point of invisibility; below, she could see the fish peering up at her with eyes like b.u.t.tons, never blinking. She sped over the clear ice, exhilarated by the freedom, by the swiftness and ease of motion. She was flying, she thought joyously. Although she knew that ahead, beyond the next curve, or the next, the river churned and boiled, she skated with the abandon, the happiness of a child who has no future, only the immediate now. She laughed.

Her dream laughter woke her. She jerked upright in her chair; the book slid off her lap, and when she reached down to retrieve it, she glanced at the couch and cried out.

Mike was sitting up, looking straight ahead with a preoccupied expression.

"Are you all right?" she asked uncertainly. She was immobilized by fear, her voice hoa.r.s.e, strained.

"I think so," he said after a hesitation. He brought his gaze in from where it had been and looked at her.

"I think so," he said again.

Frank was sitting rigidly on the edge of his chair. Mike glanced at him and shook his head.

"I don't think I'm dangerous," he said.

Frank grinned, but it was a faked expression that did not reach his eyes.

"You must be hungry," he said without relaxing a single muscle.

"Yes, I suppose I am."

Still no one moved. Then Mike said, "I had a friend in college who had epilepsy. After a seizure he would sleep for hours; when he woke up he always said he felt peaceful, but very tired. That's how I feel, very peaceful, and very tired. I suppose I must be hungry. What time is it?"

"After nine," Frank said. He glanced at Barbara.

"Why don't you go make him some scrambled eggs and toast.

Something light and quick."

She caught in her breath with the realization that her father was afraid to leave her with Mike, who had that strange, preoccupied expression again, looking off into the distance, as if he had forgotten they were there. Wordlessly she got up and walked out to the kitchen.

When the eggs were ready, Mike ate a bite or two, then put down his fork.

"Guess I was wrong." Abruptly he stood up and looked around the kitchen as if seeing it for the first time; he rubbed his eyes and sank into the chair again.

"I have to go home," he said.

"We can't let you go off alone," Barbara said.

"My G.o.d, what happened to you? How are you? How do you feel?" Her voice rose with anger suddenly, and she slammed down a cup of coffee; most of it splashed out, a mini-tidal wave racing over the table. She ignored it.

"Answer me! You were asleep all day. They burned the disks. Do you even care? Say something!"

He regarded her almost thoughtfully.

"They had to burn the disks," he said.

"I understand why Emil Frobisher killed that laughing boy. Not because the kid was able to use the process, make it work, but because Emil Frobisher couldn't, and he knew he couldn't. It must have been like giving the thumb to a fellow ape, knowing you could not have a thumb, that you were going to stay in the trees the rest of your life while he learned to make fire, make tools, write books. Evolution doesn't ask if you want it or not, it happens or it doesn't. Frobisher made it happen, and then made it un happen and then killed himself. He must have known he was a blind man with the power to create a one-eyed king."

She shook her head, aghast.

"What happened to you?"

"I got glimpses," he said slowly.

"Another world. Like going from the dun-colored Kansas plains into the Technicolor of Oz. There's another world within reach, here, there, all around us. We've always known it was there, but there was something in us lacking; the ability to attain it failed. Most who kept trying went mad, some reached out and felt a wall as cold and forbidding as steel, and they rebounded in denial, in anger. People tried to reach that other world with meditation, prayer, fasting, drugs.. ..

Frobisher learned how to retrain the brain, to free a latent ability; he learned how to open the gate, but he couldn't go through. He must have got glimpses, enough to know what he couldn't have. You talked once about the veil of ignorance, but this is the opposite. The veils are gone. In that other world there aren't any more veils." His voice broke and he turned away; awkwardly he got up and left the table to stand with his back to Barbara and Frank. "I have to go home. I really have to be alone."

"I'll drive you to town," Barbara said.

"I'll sleep on your couch tonight."

He shook his head. When he spoke, his voice was m.u.f.fled and thick.

"I don't want anyone near me for a while.

I'll drive in. I'll call you in a day or two."

Barbara looked at the table, where she had made a mess with her coffee. It had run all the way across. She saw the key to Doc's house in the puddle, and she said, "Not home. You could go to Doc's house, house sit for him a day or two. Will you do that? Please, Mike, you'll be alone. They won't be back until Sunday. You can't drive by yourself now. Not tonight."

"Good idea," Frank said, and stood up.

"I think there's an extra poncho in the hall closet. You get them and I'll go find a flashlight and walk over with Mike, show him the guest room over there, make sure there's coffee, little things like that."

When Mike did not protest immediately, Barbara hurried out to get the ponchos. She returned with two of them.

Mike was very distant, very calm. His eyes were reddened Briskly she began to clean up the coffee on the table. Frank came back with the flashlight, and in another minute he and Mike left. No one spoke again.

She stood in the silent house, her arms wrapped about her, s.h.i.+vering. She had never been so cold.

Frank was making dinner for three, Barbara realized the next afternoon. She had a headache and felt as if she might be catching a cold, or the flu, or something, and even when she thought this, she knew she was simply exhausted.

Bad night? Frank had asked that morning, and she had glowered at him, had continued to glare throughout the morning, and early afternoon; now her glare was even fiercer as she watched him preparing three game hens.

"What's the use? He wants to be alone. Remember?"

"I intend to haul his a.s.s over here for dinner," Prank said cheerfully.

"Now, let's see, sweet potatoes. Did I get sweet potatoes?" He wandered off to the pantry.

She paced the house, too restless to sit still, too tired not to feel every step she took as painful. At the sliding door she gazed at the river, silver today under a sky that couldn't decide if the clouds should lift altogether or not.

Although the sun came through, vanished, appeared again, the river remained silver, not at all reflective of the abrupt changes in the heavens. The new storm front had evaporated.

How could anyone see it any differently? she wondered, as she had over and over that day. This was the way the world was, clouds, trees, river, people, bridges, garbage dumps.. .. Suddenly, looking at the silver river, she remembered what Nell had said about her dread at the idea of that girl's body being dragged over rocks in the river.

It was as if she had caught an echo of the actual event when Janet Moseley had been dragged over the lava, Barbara thought then. She tried to shake away the thought, but it persisted.

What would it be like, she wondered, to be the one-eyed person in the world of the blind? Would you scorn them, pity them, ignore them, use them? Use them, she thought darkly. If the way people used people now was any indication, if anyone had that kind of edge, life would be h.e.l.lish, at least until everyone had one eye, when it would all even out again. Would the blind hunt down and try to kill off the one-eyed? She nodded. They would have to. Self-preservation would demand it. The power of numbers against the power of superhuman abilities. It would be b.l.o.o.d.y.

Why, then, her thoughts continued, did Schumaker and company permit Lucas to stay alive? She sat at the table thinking and was only vaguely aware when Frank began doing things in the kitchen again, then not at all aware of him until he touched her arm.

"Wine," he said.

"You drink wine. Me cook. You wake up and drink wine."

She blinked at him.

"Dad, Lucas must have appeared absolutely normal until the night Emil Frobisher was killed and they began drugging him. He said he was hallucinating, remember? In the tape, he said he was seeing things, hearing voices and the laughing boy. He knew where the boy hid the disks. They were communicating somehow.

But it started that day, not before. Why?"

Frank had come tcr a stop halfway back to the cooking area. He swung around to look at her.

"Go on."

"He knew Frobisher killed the boy. Afterward they drugged and hypnotized him, and after that he was always controlled until he ran away. But he appeared normal after he ran away, he was able to shop, drive, do whatever he had to do. I can't believe those girls would have got in his car if he had seemed insane. The people in the cafe in Sisters would have stopped it, or at least they would have remembered if he had been acting crazy in any way. No one mentioned anything like that. His father said he was afraid of being followed, but that wasn't crazy. It was very real."

Frank was watching her closely. "What are you getting at?"