Nightmare Country (22 page)

Alice was gone. Tamara looked out the window and noticed the empty pen, realized she hadn't heard his bleating in the last few days. Adrian said that Jerusha simply wouldn't say.

Every time she looked out in the backyard now, Tamara felt as if she'd let down a friend. How she'd become so involved with a goat, she didn't know. But then, life had come to make less and less sense the longer she lived in Iron Mountain. Finally she stomped over to Jerusha's. Jerusha raised thin perfect eyebrows and Tamara felt instantly silly. Alice was, after all, the other woman's goat.

“I sold him.”

“Sold Alice? How could you? To whom? You never go anywhere.”

The vaporizer chugged steam into the room. The night-blooming cereus seemed to have grown more leaves to crowd the light from the windows. The sun had gone down behind Iron Mountain. Jerusha sat at the table under a hanging fixture with a metal shade that spread the light in a circular pool below. The apartment was overwarm.

“I will miss Alice too,” she said sadly. “But time is running out, isn't it, Tamara?”

“Running out for what? And if you miss Alice, why'd you sell him?”

Jerusha rose and began sponging off leaves on the cereus. She was tall enough that by standing on tiptoe and stretching she could reach the highest leaves. “My one experiment that did not fail,” she crooned.

“Jerusha, Alice wasn't an experiment too? One that did fail?”
And Miriam Kopecky? And your husband, Abner?

“Look, Tamara, see this?” Jerusha fondled a cone-shaped bud about two inches long with traces of white and pink at its end. “This will bloom one night soon. And so will this one, and this, all together. Just one night, and I will have a party and you will come, and Adrian. On the night the cereus blooms.” Jerusha turned, a flush on her cheeks that wasn't makeup, a swath of steam from the vaporizer swirling around her chest, disembodying her head.

“I'm sending Adrian back to Iowa City to live with my mother, Jerusha Fistler. I know you're up to something. I don't want my daughter around here. Around you.”

“I'm not going,” Adrian said. “I won't get in the car to be taken to the train, plane, or bus. What are you going to do? I'm bigger than you.”

“I'm your mother, legally responsible for you, and you'll do—”

“No. I lost Daddy. I'm not going to lose you and Jerusha too. You're all I got left.”

Tamara wasn't the first parent to have a child larger than herself. She couldn't force Adrian physically. If she couldn't maneuver her in some other way, what could she do? She could hardly call in the police. Nothing illegal in disobeying a parent. What did other parents do? If she could no longer control Adrian, she couldn't protect her.

“Honey, I'm worried that you're in danger here. You've always been my first concern, you know that.”

Adrian slammed her bedroom door in Tamara's face and turned up the volume on her bedside radio.

In Columbus, Ohio, Gilbert Whelan pulled his car into the narrow space left beside his wife's in the basement parking under their condo apartment. He was glad to see she was home from work, and hoped she'd started dinner. He had the day-end lag that only a martini and dinner could ease. Elsie's kids had better behave themselves tonight. He was too strung out to make even a pretense of patience.

The smell of something warm and meaty met him at the door. A brisk fire in the fireplace. Rain drove against the windows. Her kids in the den with the television on low. Gil Whelan hung up his coat and leafed through the mail. Thank God for women who could cope.

“Hey, I'm home.” He peered around the corner into the hallway-kitchen, where Elsie stood mixing his martini, the telephone cradled in her neck. Tall, thin … the flash of costume jewelry and nail polish as she worked. Wrinkles in her pantsuit from sitting at a receptionist's desk all day.

“Just a minute. Here he is now.” Elsie handed him the drink first and took the receiver in both hands, covering the mouthpiece. “Your ex,” she whispered, and cocked an eyebrow.

“X? Who …? Oh, ex.” He took a good gulp of gin before he took the phone. All the rapidly relaxing muscles along his spinal column tensed up again. “Hello … Tam? I've been meaning to write to Adrian about—”

“We heard about your remarriage. Never mind that. I need your help.” The memories that flooded over him at the sound of her voice—most tinged with guilt or anger or both. His stomach was knotting now.

“Look, we're both working and can barely make ends meet here. I'll send something when I can.”

“Gil, I want you to take Adrian for a few months. She won't go to her grandmother's, and I thought she might come to you if you were to ask.”

“Hey, she should be with her mother, you know that. You got custody. Besides, she'd be lonesome here. There's nobody around. Elsie's got two we have to send to nursery school while she works. I'm in real estate now and gone lots of evenings. Business is bad, Tam. And there's no room. She'd have to sleep on the couch. That's no life for a girl.”

“God, don't you care about anything? She's your child.”

“Don't start that shit again. Of course I care.”

There'd been an odd laid-back tone to her voice, but now desperation cut through. “I'm worried that Adrian's life is in danger here.”

“How could her life be in danger? She's only ten years old. Who'd—?”

“She's twelve now, Gil, going on thirteen. She's about five-feet-eight and at least forty pounds overweight.”

“Jesus, how'd you let that happen?”

“Gil, I'm trying very hard not to lose my temper, because I'm so desperate for Adrian—”

“Let's not start the goddamned martyr routine again.”

“There's a woman next door—we live in a tiny dump called Iron Mountain, Wyoming, now—and this woman named Jerusha is, I'm sure, responsible for a number of deaths around here.”

“Wyoming? I thought you were living with your mother.”

“She can't afford to keep us. I'm teaching here. This woman may be after Adrian too. She has an enormous influence over her, and I—”

“Go to the police, then.”

“I don't have any proof. But we can't take a chance with our daughter's life.”

We
and
our
. Couldn't she see those words would make him see red? “What's this woman do, put razor blades in their Halloween candy?”

“She … it's very hard to explain … but she does these experiments and people dream and sleepwalk and sometimes they just don't get up at all and they die. I've already caught Adrian sleepwalking out on the mountain, and then the dead people or … well, their essence or something comes back like a … ah … ghost. Oh, I know how unreal this must sound, but, Gil—”

“You can say that again. Look, Tam, I just got home from work. Bad day. Tired. Haven't had dinner yet. And frankly, I can't handle this right now. Tell you what, give me your number and I'll call you back tonight after I've had time to get my head straight. Okay?” When he had the number, he added, “Oh … and, Tam … Thanks for not crying.”

Gil hung up before she could start in again, and looked at his empty glass. He didn't remember drinking any of its contents. She could even take the joy out of a martini.

“Pretty tough on her, weren't you?” Elsie reached around him for some napkins.

“Just the sound of her voice and all this resentment comes up my throat. When am I ever going to get that woman out of my life?”

“This is the first time I've known her to contact you since we met. She doesn't hound you like Jeff does me.”

“She wants Adrian to come live with us.”

“No way. Not unless you hire some help. I've got too much to handle now.”

“I know. But it sounds like Tam's really botched things good this time. The kid's gotten all fat and they're living in Boondocks, Wyoming, someplace and seeing ghosts. Maybe she's not responsible enough to raise Adrian. What do I do, Elsie? She claims the kid's life is in danger.”

Brian and Donny came screeching through the kitchen on their way to the dining-room table. He wished he could take the two of them and Tamara and send them all to Mars.

“Maybe you'd better go out there and see for yourself, if you're going to worry.” Elsie followed the boys into the next room and left him staring at the refrigerator door.

“I haven't seen Adrian in two years,” he said to the refrigerator. Total panic gripped his midsection. “What would I say to her?”

Gil Whelan called his ex-wife back after dinner to reassure her that she was just being overimaginative and that if she would just relax, everything would be all right.

23

Thad Backra, he became in Tamara's fantasy. He wore a white turtleneck and dark blazer. Fluffy silver hair swept back off a tanned face, ash-gray eyes looking cold and unimpressed as she introduced him to Gil Whelan at a party. A possessive arm around her waist swept her away as soon as possibly polite. “How'd you ever come to marry a guy like that?” he said in that low raspy voice Gil wasn't meant to overhear but did.

“Mom, Larry took my pencil.”

“Careful, Johnson.” Mike Nygard snickered. “Adrian might fall on you.”

“That's enough.” Tamara saw she'd doodled in red pencil down the margin of Nate Baggette's spelling paper. Profiles of Backra, the pattern of the long leaf skeleton, even a fair representation of one of those thatched huts. She shredded it, threw it in the basket, and entered a perfect score for Nate in her grade book.

After Rene's private social-studies lesson, Tamara stood at the back of the room, hoping thus to keep herself awake and monitor Larry Johnson's shenanigans at the same time. She'd been too tired to run the last few days. Running would give her more energy if she'd get up when the alarm went off instead of rolling over for another hour's rest. And she hadn't been eating properly, merely munching on whatever was the least hassle instead of planning and preparing nutritious meals. All of this sapped her natural good health, energy, and will. She'd stop this erratic behavior.

The wooden flooring trembled almost imperceptibly beneath her feet. Outside the window at her elbow, grains of crushed limestone slithered down the huge pile behind the school and out of sight below, long after the vibration had ceased. Earth tremor?

Her students appeared to have noticed nothing. Tamara slipped across the hall to look out the windows of the unused classroom. She could see no change in the mountain or the settlement at its base.

Russ Burnham was on his way down the path to the lower level and headed for the crusher when he felt it too. At first he wasn't sure it wasn't just the surprise surfacing of his long-buried dread of a quake under that mountain, with men he knew and liked inside it. But Darrell Johnson came running out of the crusher building and then Russ knew. He was down the path and on the tracks in time to meet Darrell at the portal doors. They grabbed battery-operated lanterns stored at the mouth of the mine.

“Don't see any dust, leastways.”

“Slow and easy. Eyes open and no shouting,” Russ told him, and they started in, looking carefully for piles of rubble or signs of slippage. It wasn't long before they met Saul Baggette and another miner supporting a man between them.

“Winn. Just got knocked on the head,” Saul said. “Rest are coming.”

“Get him on out. Talk to you outside.” When Russ had counted the men passing him and assured himself the mine was empty, he joined the others at the portal doors. Winn Davidson sat with his head in his hands, elbows propped on his knees. Russ put him in the company pickup with Johnson and sent them off to Cheyenne and a doctor. He listened patiently to each man, then ordered them home for the day. Pulling the portal doors closed, he locked them and took Saul Baggette to his house.

He sat Saul down at the table and poured them each a whiskey. “Okay, now, I want the truth. Nothing else. Nothing you wouldn't have seen before Abner's widow started filling everybody's heads with her motherfuckin' stories. But I want everything you did see.”

Saul rubbed his forehead, and dirt balled up in the tracks of his fingers. “The damage isn't bad if nothing more comes down. Like I told you, the trouble's in that one wall we couldn't seem to drill. And, like the guys said, we finally got a bore hole through—all of a sudden, because it was hollow on the other side and the wall came down, part of it on Winn. And we barely got him out of the way before the whole damned shaft caved in at the end there.”

“Hollow on the other side …”

“We thought we'd gotten turned around somehow and bored through into one of our own tunnels.”

“And before the cave-in, you saw this thing too?”

“Yeah. It was kind of gray and chrome-looking and—”

“How is it you were all working the same tunnel?”

“We weren't, but Winn and Charlie came to get me when they got a hole through, and the men with me came too. You know the trouble we been having there, and then … well, we all been stickin' fairly close because of the noises.”

“Noises.”

“I tried to tell you the other day, but you wouldn't listen. And don't ask me to describe 'em, 'cause they're like nothing I ever heard.”

“Make a stab at it.”

“Something like machinery running, maybe. I couldn't tell you what kind if you paid me. Anyway, it was louder after we got the bore hole through. And it was a lot louder when the wall came down.”

“And you saw something gray.” Russ poured his underground manager another shot. “You personally.”

“Yeah. It had a shape embedded in it, and—”

“Shape of what?”

“Person maybe. Big rounded one. I don't know. But there was glass or plastic or something … a see-through film around it.”