Grist 01 - The Four Last Things (25 page)

When Sally recognized Merryman for whatever or whoever he really was, she’d run to kindly old Hubert Wilburforce, who had promptly sold her to Brooks for $100,000 and the dismissal of a suit the Church had pending against the Congregation. Brooks, I would have thought, would have put her in a safe-deposit box as a piece of highly negotiable currency if she really knew something heinous about the good doctor. Instead, she’d been killed.

I was very anxious to have another talk with Brooks.

Eleanor’s place seemed secure. The door was locked, none of the windows had been broken, and when I got inside, things were in their usual obsessive state of Eleanor neatness. It took me maybe forty-five minutes to pack everything she’d listed. I threw in a few things she’d forgotten, too. Shoes, for example. Eleanor belonged to the Bernie school of packing.

When I left, it was barely noon. Jessica Fram lived in the Valley, so I took the Santa Monica freeway to the 405 and pointed my awful, rattling little Camaro due north. It was a depressing shade of battleship gray that laughed at dirt. That’s probably why they paint battleships that color. All that swabbing for nothing.

Jessica’s house was in Reseda. It sat in the center of a flat little tract block that managed to stay brown even after all that rain. What lawns there were seemed to be made largely of mud. Dogs of indeterminate breed sprouted from it.

The only difference between the Fram house and the ones flanking it was an eight-foot-high chain-link fence with an extra foot of barbed wire on top. One of those boxes with a button and a microphone sat perched on a pole next to the driveway, looking like a forlorn transplant from Bel Air.

For about fifteen minutes I sat in the Camaro at the end of the block and studied the house. Nothing moved. The curtains were drawn against the day’s new sunlight, and two cars, washed by the rain, sparkled in the driveway on the other side of the fence. They were the only sign that anyone was home.

At twenty minutes to one the front door of the house opened and a middle-aged woman with short steel-gray hair came briskly out. The gate slid open. The woman gave the neighborhood a practiced once-over, pausing only for an instant at my car, and then hopped into a butch black Land Rover and backed out into the street. She ignored me completely as she passed. Maybe there
was
something to be said for the Camaro’s color.

I pulled the Camaro up to the black speaker box and pressed the button. After what seemed like weeks a woman’s voice bellowed, “Hermia?”

“No, it’s not Hermia,” I said. “I’m here to see Jessica.”

There was a pause you could have driven a motor home through.

“For what?” the woman said. “She’s in bed.”

I looked at my watch again. Twelve-forty-five. Jessica certainly led a difficult life. I mentally flipped another coin.

“Dick sent me,” I said.

After a long moment the gate rolled crankily open. I drove in.

Chapter 22

H
er hair was long and straight and bleached and deader than the Dead Sea Scrolls. She lay on the living-room couch under a handmade quilt with her arms stretched out on top of it, palms up, like an ascetic nun waiting to receive the stigmata. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen.

A vague, frayed lady who had to be Mrs. Fram had ushered me into a tiny Formica dining room and asked me to wait. Unwatered house plants languished despondently in a window box. Mrs. Fram was either the most laid-back woman I’d ever met or the most heavily sedated.

“Sit,” she’d said blearily. “There’s four chairs.” There were six. On the wall was an absolutely enormous color photograph of her and Jessica. It might have been taken before World War I for all the resemblance it bore to Mrs. Fram.

“Pretty picture,” I said conversationally.

“Uh,” she said, looking at it as though she’d never seen it before.

“Spontaneous generation,” I suggested. “Pictures are always appearing on my walls too.”

She watched my mouth as I talked, looking like a lip-reader trying to follow a silent movie. Then she took a woozy look at the picture.

“Me and Baby,” she said. “Sit. You just missed Hermia. She’ll be back.”

Since I was already sitting, there wasn’t much for me to do. “I’m not here to see Hermia,” I reminded her.

“Dick sent you,” she said with an effort. She might have been pretty once—the picture certainly suggested that she had—but now the flesh hung slack and heavy on her face, and deep circles had worn themselves darkly and permanently into the pouchy area beneath her eyes. The creases around her eyes and mouth, even the creases in her forehead, all pulled downward. It was a face created by erosion. “Dick,” she said again in a harsh tone. “He was here. Just a couple days, I think.”

“Well,” I said brightly, “he’s sent me this time. I think you said Jessica was in bed.” I wiggled my eyebrows encouragingly. It was like talking to someone a hundred yards away; I found myself using body language to get the point across.

And a lot of good it did, too. She looked at me as I talked, and then, when I finished, she went on looking at me. I had a feeling she’d forgotten what I’d said. Then she said, “Tuesday. It was Tuesday.” Satisfied with her feat of memory, she scratched her forearm absently for a moment. Then she told me to sit down again, pivoted uncertainly, and left the room. She dragged her feet when she walked, and her shoes slapped against the floor. “Baby?” I heard her call. “Baby. Time to get up.”

I spent the next ten minutes or so watering plants and snooping through the mail on the dining-room table. Quite a lot of it was from the Church: invitations to Revealings, an announcement of a retreat to be held up in Ojai, a strong suggestion that members consider establishing a system of annual tithing, a sort of pre-Christmas sale on certain advanced levels of Listening. Most of it was bulk stuff; ex-Speaker or not, Jessica didn’t seem to be on any special mailing list.

At the bottom of the pile was a color photo of Angel and Mary Claire, the new one with the kitten in it. At first glance it looked like the kind of thing a junior-high-school kid might do—blacking out front teeth or drawing in a mustache. But it was more spiteful than that.

Holes had been poked through Mary Claire’s eyes. A bullet-entrance wound had been painstakingly drawn into the center of her forehead, and vivid red ink poured from it. Her bosom had been slashed raggedly with a razor blade.

Nothing had been done to Angel.

The picture was an unsettling combination of immature malice and adult hatred. It looked like the kind of thing the cops found hanging in David Berkowitz’s bedroom when they finally nailed him as the Son of Sam. The person who’d done it wasn’t all there, but she had her hatred down cold. And, of course, it had to be Mrs. Fram.

I heard her shoes slapping against the hallway floor and shoved the picture back under the pile of mail. She pushed the door leading to the hallway closed from the other side before she passed by it. Apparently I wasn’t to see Baby until Baby was ready. ‘There, Baby,” she said from the living room. “Right there. Right there.”

There was some muffled moving around. “Cover up, now,” Mrs. Fram said in her slurred, mannish voice. ” ‘Tsa man, you know. A man from Dick.”

“Dick,” said a small voice. “Dick’s not coming?”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Fram said curtly. “Scoot up a little.”

“But I need him to come. He has to come.” The voice was thin and querulous, like that of a young actress trying to play an old woman.

“Hush. You hush. How do we know why this man’s here?”

I stepped back from the door just as Mrs. Fram came through it. “Okay now,” she said, concentrating her gaze in my general direction. “Baby’s in there.” She waved a hand behind her, in toward the living room. She went to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat heavily. She looked without interest at the pile of mail. I went into the living room.

“Hello, Jessica,” I said.

She’d been rouged and lipsticked crudely for the occasion, but the patches of color only heightened the pallor of her skin. The dead hair had been brushed straight down and then lifted and held in place with a black bow. She looked like a teenage Miss Havisham.

“Is Dick coming?” she asked.

“Not right now,” I said. “Maybe later, though.”

She clenched both her thin fists and tightened her mouth childishly. “He likes to make me wait,” she said. “He enjoys it.”

“Wait for what?”

“The little yellow ones.”

Mrs. Fram coughed in a tubercular fashion in the next room while I evaluated this. “Don’t you have enough left for today?”

“Of course I do,” she said impatiently. “Enough for tomorrow too. But he knows I get nervous when I get low. He likes it. I know he does.”

“No, he doesn’t,” I said. “He just doesn’t want you to have too many of them. He’s just being careful.”

“That’s what
he
says. That’s what Aunt Hermia says too.”

“Well, and they both care about you, don’t they?”

“I guess so,” she said reluctantly.

“What does your mother say about it?”

“Her,” Jessica said. “What does she know?”

“Is Aunt Hermia really your aunt?”

“No.” Jessica gave a spiteful little smile. “She’s the dragon at the door,” she said, “and I’m the fair maiden. We should have a house with a tower so I could sleep in the very top room, and we could chain Aunt Hermia to an iron post next to the front door.”

“And where would your mother sleep?”

“On the floor if she wanted to. She does about half the time anyway. Sometimes she sleeps standing up, like horses are supposed to.”

“Jessica,” I said, “You never Speak anymore, do you?”

“No,” she said, looking directly at me for the first time. “That’s finished. It ended when I got sick.”

“And what’s wrong with you?”

“I’ve got a Wasting Disease,” she said with a certain amount of pleasure. “I can’t pronounce it, but Dick says it’s getting better.”

“Have you tried to Speak?”

“You can’t try. Don’t you know anything? It’s either there or it isn’t.”

“What is?”

“The Voice, silly. What else?”

“And where does the Voice come from?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember hearing it. I just know that I heard the tapes later, and it was my voice saying all those things, except not my voice exactly.”

“When was the first time you Spoke?”

“I was twelve.”

“Where were you?”

“In Dick’s office. His office then, not his office now.”

“And what happened?”

“He was examining me.”

“For what?”

“To see if I could be the Speaker,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Anna was dead.”

“Was he examining other little girls too?”

“Sure. Lots. He even examined Angel, and she was only seven then.” She smirked unpleasantly. “Imagine a seven-year-old Speaker.”

“What kind of an examination was it?”

“Dick and Mr. Brooks were looking for a Speaker,” she said as though that explained everything. “Everybody wanted to be the Speaker. Every little girl in the Church. You got to wear all those pretty clothes and have your picture taken and be famous. Who wouldn’t want it?”

“I’m sure they all wanted it. But you were the one who got it, weren’t you?”

A glow of pride suffused her face. “I was the only one who heard the Voice,” she said. “I was the only one it wanted to talk to.”

“And how did Dick examine you?”

She started to say something, glanced up at me, and then closed her mouth. After a moment she rearranged the quilt and crossed her hands demurely on top of it. “If Dick sent you,” she said, looking at the top of the quilt, “how come you have to ask all these questions?”

“We’re going to write a book,” I lied. “Dick and I. A book about you.”

“What are you going to call it?”

“
Jessica Speaks
. ”

“Will it have my picture in it?” There was real pleasure in her face. It almost made her look young.

“On the cover.”

“One of my good pictures, one of my then pictures. It’ll be one of those, won’t it?”

“The prettiest we can find.”

She took a sidelong peek at the dining-room door. “Not her,” she said softly.

“No. Just you.”

“Fine,” she said.

“So you see, I need to get as much information as I can in your own words.”

She nodded gravely and regarded her hands. “Okay.”

“Tell me about the examination.”

“Just a regular exam. You know, my pulse and my blood pressure. My eyes and ears and stuff.”

There was no way to avoid the question. “Did you have to get undressed?”

Real color appeared beneath the rouge. “Sure,” she said.

“And was your mother in the room?”

“Not then,” she said. “She came in while I was Speaking. She says she saw me sitting on the table and Speaking. She was real happy about it. She liked Dick then. I don’t remember her until after.”

“After what?”

“After I’d finished Speaking.”

“Your mother liked Dick then?”

“Oh, sure. She was crazy about him.”

“And later?”

She looked me straight in the eye. “Dick didn’t tell you to ask me that,” she said. “He’d have never told you to ask me anything about that.”

It was the kind of moment that always made me wish I still smoked. It would have been very nice to have something to do for a few seconds.

“You’re right,” I said. “He didn’t. We won’t talk about any of that. Tell me, what did it feel like to Speak?”

She tilted her chin up and gave me an evaluative gaze. Her eyes were long, widely spaced, and slate gray.

“Like I said,” she began, “I don’t remember the Voice. I just remember that it always felt like someone was holding me in his arms. Somebody a lot bigger than I was. Somebody warm, who loved me.”

“And then what happened?”

“When?”

“After the first time you Spoke.”

She looked as though she didn’t understand the question. “We went home,” she said.

“When did you Speak again?”

“For Mr. Brooks. It was a few days later. It was the same, except longer. Then the third time was a Revealing.”

“And then you did it how often?”

“Every week, usually. Sometimes the Voice didn’t come, though.”

“How often did that happen?”

“Once in a while. I just sat there with everybody looking at me. It was terrible.”

“When the voice did come, what happened?”

“We went out onto the stage, you know, after the welcome and the music, and maybe sometimes there was a guest star who got up and talked about what Listening had done for him. Then she”—she indicated the door to the dining room—“and I went onto the stage and sat down. I always sat on the right, because
she
was supposed to say something into the microphone before anything happened. Usually, while she was talking I would hear a kind of whisper in my ear. It would say my name a few times. Then it was like I was being filled slowly with warm water, and I would go away. When I came back, it was over.”

I needed a moment to think, and I got up and pulled open the curtains covering the living-room window. Sunlight poured into the room. Jessica squinted and stretched a hand out in front of her to block the light. “Don’t,” she said. “It hurts my eyes.” I pulled the curtains closed again, and she settled back onto the couch.

“Did you understand the things you said when you were Speaking? Afterward, I mean, when you heard the tapes.”

“No. Not most of it.”

“And did Dick go on examining you?”

The color returned to her cheeks and she looked away.

“Sure, always. That’s what the Speaker’s doctor is for.” She sounded defensive. “Before Dick it was that fat man. He was Anna’s doctor.”

“Jessica. Did either Dick or Mr. Brooks give you anything to read? Did they ask you to learn anything?”

“Like what?” she said blankly.

“Yeah, like what?” said a deep voice behind me.

I turned to see the steely-haired lady who’d left in the Land Rover. She was clutching three bags that said Taco Tiki, and she was regarding me very narrowly indeed. “And how’d you get in here?”

“You’re Hermia,” I said happily. “I just missed you.”

“What’s going on?” she said. Mrs. Fram lurched into the dining-room doorway and stood there with her jaw slack. She looked at Hermia’s bags. “Taco Tiki,” she said.

“I can’t leave for a minute,” Hermia said. “What are you, some kind of spy?”

“Dick sent him,” Jessica said. “They’re going to write a book about me and make me famous again. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Is that so?” Hermia said softly, looking at me. “A book. All about little Jessica. Now, isn’t that interesting?”

“We have high hopes for it,” I said, wondering if Hermia were armed.

“You and Dick,” she said.

It sounded thin even to my ears. “His name goes first,” I said.

“Merryman and what?”

“Aren’t you going to put those bags down? Your food will get cold.”