Firestarter (24 page)

Except the chair was overturned. Except the salt was spilled.

There was no spit in his mouth, none at all. His mouth was as dry and slick as chrome on a summer day.

Andy went upstairs, looked through Charlie's room, their room, the guest room. Nothing. He went back through the kitchen, flicked on the stairway light, and went downstairs. Their Maytag washer gaped open. The dryer fixed him with one glassy porthole eye. Between them, on the wall, hung a sampler Vicky had bought somewhere; it read
HONEY, WE'RE ALL WASHED UP
. He went into the family room and fumbled for the light switch, fingers brushing at the wall, crazily sure that at any moment unknown cold fingers would close over his and guide them to the switch. Then he found the plate at last, and the fluorescent bars set into the Armstrong ceiling glowed alive.

This was a good room. He had spent a lot of time down here, fixing things up, smiling at himself all the time because, in the end, he had become all those things that as undergraduates they had sworn they would not become. All three of them had spent a lot of time down here. There was a TV built into the wall, a Ping-Pong table, an oversized backgammon board. More board games were cased against one wall, there were some coffee-table-sized books ranged along a low table that Vicky had made from barnboard. One wall had bees dressed in paperbacks. Hung on the walls were several framed and matted afghan squares that Vicky had knitted; she joked that she was great at individual squares but simply didn't have the stamina to knit a whole damn blanket. There were Charlie's books in a special kid-sized bookcase, all of them carefully arranged in alphabetical order, which Andy had taught her one boring snowy night two winters before and which still fascinated her.

A good room.

An empty room.

He tried to feel relief. The premonition, hunch, whatever you wanted to call it, had been wrong. She just wasn't here. He snapped off the light and went back into the laundry room.

The washing machine, a front-loader they had picked up at a yard sale for sixty bucks, still gaped open. He shut it without thinking, much as he had tossed a pinch of spilled salt over his shoulder. There was blood on the washer's glass window. Not much. Only three or four drops. But it was blood.

Andy stood staring at it. It was cooler down here, too cool, it was like a morgue down here. He looked at the floor. There was more blood on the floor. It wasn't even dry. A little sound, a soft, squealing whisper, came to his throat.

He began to walk around the laundry room, which was nothing but a small alcove with white plaster walls. He opened the clothes hamper. It was empty but for one sock. He looked in the cubbyhole under the sink. Nothing but Lestoil and Tide and Biz and Spic 'n Span. He looked under the stairs. Nothing there but cobwebs and the plastic leg of one of Charlie's older dolls—that dismembered limb lying patiently down here and waiting for rediscovery for God knew how long.

He opened the door between the washer and the dryer and the ironing board whistled down with a ratchet and a crash and there beneath it, her legs tied up so that her knees were just below her chin, her eyes open and glazed and dead, was Vicky Tomlinson McGee with a cleaning rag stuffed in her mouth. There was a thick and sickening smell of Pledge furniture polish in the air.

He made a low gagging noise and stumbled backward. His hands flailed, as if to drive this terrible vision away, and one of them struck the control panel of the dryer and it whirred into life. Clothes began to tumble and click inside. Andy screamed. And then he ran. He ran up the stairs and stumbled going around the corner into the kitchen and sprawled flat and bumped his forehead on the linoleum. He sat up, breathing hard.

It came back. It came back in slow motion, like a football instant replay where you see the quarterback sacked or the winning pass caught. It haunted his dreams in the days that came later. The door swinging open, the ironing board falling down to the horizontal with a ratcheting sound, reminding him somehow of a guillotine, his wife crammed into the space beneath and in her mouth a rag that had been used to polish the furniture. It came back in a kind of total recall and he knew he was going to scream again and so he slammed his forearm into his mouth and he bit it and the sound that came out was a fuzzy, blocked howl. He did that twice, and something came out of him and he was calm. It was the false calm of shock, but it could be used. The amorphous fear and the unfocused terror fell away. The throbbing in his right hand was gone. And the thought that stole into his mind now was as cold as the calmness that had settled
over him, as cold as the shock, and that thought was
CHARLIE.

He got up, started for the telephone, and then turned back to the stairs. He stood at the top for a moment, biting at his lips, steeling himself, and then he went back down. The dryer turned and turned. There was nothing in there but a pair of his jeans, and it was the big brass button at the waist that made that clicking, clinking sound as they turned and fell, turned and fell. Andy shut the dryer off and looked into the ironing-board closet.

“Vicky,” he said softly.

She stared at him with her dead eyes, his wife. He had walked with her, held her hand, entered her body in the dark of night. He found himself remembering the night she had drunk too much at a faculty party and he had held her head while she threw up. And that memory became the day he had been washing the station wagon and he had gone into the garage for a moment to get the can of Turtle Wax and she had picked up the hose and had run up behind him and stuffed the hose down the back of his pants. He remembered getting married and kissing her in front of everyone, relishing that kiss, her mouth, her ripe, soft mouth.

“Vicky,” he said again, and uttered a long, trembling sigh.

He pulled her out and worked the rag from her mouth. Her head lolled limp on her shoulders. He saw that the blood had come from her right hand, where some of her fingernails had been pulled. There was a small trickle of blood from one of her nostrils, but none anywhere else. Her neck had been broken by a single hard blow.

“Vicky,” he whispered.

Charlie,
his mind whispered back.

In the still calm that now filled his head, he understood that Charlie had become the important thing, the only important thing. Recriminations were for the future.

He went back into the family room, not bothering to turn on the light this time. Across the room, by the Ping-Pong table, was a couch with a drop cloth over it. He took the drop cloth and went back into the laundry room and covered Vicky with it. Somehow, the immobile shape of her under the sofa's drop cloth was worse. It held him nearly hypnotized. Would she never move again? Could that be?

He uncovered her face and kissed her lips. They were cold.

They pulled her nails,
his mind marveled.
Jesus Christ, they pulled her nails
.

And he knew why. They wanted to know where Charlie was. Somehow they had lost track of her when she went to Terri Dugan's house instead of coming home after daycamp. They had panicked, and now the watching phase was over. Vicky was dead—either on purpose or because some Shop operative had got overzealous. He knelt beside Vicky and thought it was possible that, prodded by her fear, she had done something rather more spectacular than shutting the fridge door from across the room. She might have shoved one of them away or knocked the feet out from beneath one of them. Too bad she hadn't had enough to throw them into the wall at about fifty miles an hour, he thought.

It could have been that they knew just enough to make them nervous, he supposed. Maybe they had even been given specific orders:
The woman may be extremely dangerous. If she does something—anything—to jeopardize the operation, get rid of her. Quick.

Or maybe they just didn't like leaving witnesses. Something more than their share of the taxpayer's dollar was at stake, after all.

But the blood. He should be thinking about the blood, which hadn't even been dry when he discovered it, only tacky. They hadn't been gone long when he arrived.

More insistently his mind said:
Charlie!

He kissed his wife again and said, “Vicky, I'll be back.”

But he had never seen Vicky again, either.

He had gone upstairs to the telephone and looked up the Dugans' number in Vicky's Phone-Mate. He dialed the number and Joan Dugan answered.

“Hi, Joan,” he said, and now the shock was aiding him: his voice was perfectly calm, an everyday voice. “Could I speak to Charlie for a second?”

“Charlie?” Mrs. Dugan sounded doubtful. “Well, she went with those two friends of yours. Those teachers. Is … wasn't that all right?”

Something inside of him went skyrocketing up and then came plunging down. His heart, maybe. But it would do no good to panic this nice woman whom he had only met socially four or five times. It wouldn't help him, and it wouldn't help Charlie.

“Damn,” he said. “I was hoping to catch her still there. When did they go?”

Mrs. Dugan's voice faded a little. “Terri, when did Charlie go?”

A child's voice piped something. He couldn't tell what. There was sweat between his knuckles.

“She says about fifteen minutes ago.” She was apologetic. “I was doing the laundry and I don't have a watch. One of them came down and spoke to me. It was all right, wasn't it, Mr. McGee? He looked all right …”

A lunatic impulse came to him, to just laugh lightly and say
Doing the laundry, were you? So was my wife. I found her crammed in under the ironing board. You got off lucky today, Joan.

He said, “That's fine. Were they coming right here, I wonder?”

The question was relayed to Terri, who said she didn't know. Wonderful, Andy thought. My daughter's life is in the hands of another six-year-old girl.

He grasped at a straw.

“I have to go down to the market on the corner,” he said to Mrs. Dugan. “Will you ask Terri if they had the car or the van? In case I see them.”

This time he heard Terri. “It was the van. They went away in a gray van, like the one David Pasioco's father has.”

“Thanks,” he said. Mrs. Dugan said not to mention it. The impulse came again, this time just to scream
My wife is dead!
down the line at her.
My wife is dead and why were you doing your laundry while my daughter was getting into a gray van with a couple of strange men?

Instead of screaming that or anything, he hung up and went outside. The heat whacked him over the head and he staggered a little. Had it been this hot when he came? It seemed much hotter now. The mailman had come. There was a Woolco advertising circular sticking out of the mailbox that hadn't been there before. The mailman had come while he was downstairs cradling his dead wife in his arms. His poor dead Vicky: they had pulled out her nails, and it was funny—much funnier than the way the keys had of accumulating, really—how the fact of death kept coming at you from different sides and different angles. You tried to jig and jog, you tried to protect yourself on one side, and the truth of it bored right in on another side. Death is a football player, he thought, one big mother. Death is Franco Harris or Sam Cunningham or Mean Joe Green. And it keeps throwing you down on your ass right there at the line of scrimmage.

Get your feet moving, he thought. Fifteen minutes' lead time—that's not so much. It's not a cold trail yet. Not unless
Terri Dugan doesn't know fifteen minutes from half an hour to two hours. Never mind that, anyway. Get going.

He got going. He went back to the station wagon, which was parked half on and half off the sidewalk. He opened the driver's-side door and then spared a glance back at his neat suburban house on which the mortgage was half paid. The bank let you take a “payment vacation” two months a year if you needed it. Andy had never needed it. He looked at the house dozing in the sun, and again his shocked eyes were caught by the red flare of the Woolco circular sticking out of the mailbox, and
whap!
death hit him again, making his eyes blur and his teeth clamp down.

He got in the car and drove away toward Terri Dugan's street, not going on any real, logical belief that he could pick up their trail but only on blind hope. He had not seen his house on Conifer Place in Lakeland since then.

His driving was better now. Now that he knew the worst, his driving was a lot better. He turned on the radio and there was Bob Seger singing “Still the Same.”

He drove across Lakeland, moving as fast as he dared. For one terrible moment he came up blank on the name of the street, and then it came to him. The Dugans lived on Blassmore Place. He and Vicky had joked about that: Blassmore Place, with houses designed by Bill Blass. He started to smile a little at the memory, and
whap!
the fact of her death hit him again, rocking him.

He was there in ten minutes. Blassmore Place was a short dead end. No way out for a gray van at the far end, just a cyclone fence that marked the edge of the John Glenn Junior High School.

Andy parked the wagon at the intersection of Blassmore Place and Ridge Street. There was a green-over-white house on the corner. A lawn sprinkler twirled. Out front were two kids, a girl and a boy of about ten. They were taking turns on a skateboard. The girl was wearing shorts, and she had a good set of scabs on each knee.

He got out of the wagon and walked toward them. They looked him up and down carefully.

“Hi,” he said. “I'm looking for my daughter. She passed by here about half an hour ago in a gray van. She was with … well, some friends of mine. Did you see a gray van go by?”

The boy shrugged vaguely.

The girl said, “You worried about her, mister?”

“You saw the van, didn't you?” Andy asked pleasantly,
and gave her a very slight push. Too much would be counterproductive. She would see the van going in any direction he wanted, including skyward.