NOS4A2(125)

The phone rang and rang, and Vic thought if it kicked her to voice mail, she would not be able to leave a message, would not be able to force a sound up through her constricting throat. On the fourth ring, when she had decided that Maggie wasn’t going to answer, Maggie answered.

“V-V-V-Vic!” Maggie said, before Vic could manage a word. Maggie’s caller ID had to be telling her she’d just received a call from Carmody’s Car Carma—she couldn’t know it was Vic on the line, but she did know, and Vic was not surprised. “I wanted to call as suh-s-ss-ssss-soon as I heard, but I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. How are you? It ss-suh-says on the news you were assaulted.”

“Forget that. I need to know if Wayne is all right. I know you can find out.”

“I already know. He hasn’t been hurt.”

Vic’s legs began trembling, and she had to put a hand on the counter to steady herself.

“Vic? V-V-Vic?”

She could not answer immediately. It took all her concentration to keep from crying.

“Yes,” Vic said finally. “I’m here. How much time do I have? How much time does Wayne have?”

“I don’t know how that p-p-puh-part of it works. I just don’t know. What have you told the p-p-p-puh-puh-police?”

“What I had to. Nothing about you. I did my best to make it sound believable, but I don’t think they’re buying it.”

“Vic. Puh-p-please. I want to help. Tell me how I can help.”

“You just did,” Vic said, and hung up.

Not dead. And there was still time. She thought it over again, a kind of chant, a song of praise: Not dead, not dead, not dead.

She wanted to go back into the bedroom and shake Lou awake and tell him the bike had to run, he had to fix it, but she doubted he’d been sleeping for more than a few hours, and she didn’t like his gray pallor. Tugging at the back of her mind was an awareness that he had not been entirely straight with anyone about what had dropped him in Logan Airport.

Maybe she would look at the bike herself. She didn’t understand what could be so wrong with it that he couldn’t fix it. It had run only yesterday.

She stepped out of the bathroom and tossed the phone at the bed. It slid across the bedspread and fell with a clatter and crack to the floor. Lou’s shoulders twitched at the sound, and Vic caught her breath, but he didn’t wake.

She opened the bedroom door and twitched in surprise herself. Tabitha Hutter was on the other side of it. Vic had caught her in the act of raising one fist, about to knock.

The two women stared at each other, and Vic thought, Something is wrong. Her second thought was, of course, that they had found Wayne—in a ditch somewhere, drained of blood, throat slit ear to ear.

But Maggie said he was alive, and Maggie knew, so that wasn’t it. It was something else.

Vic looked past Hutter, down the hall, and saw Detective Daltry and a state trooper waiting a few yards back.

“Victoria,” Tabitha said, in a neutral tone. “We need to talk.”

Vic stepped into the hall and eased the bedroom door shut behind her.

“What’s up?”

“Is there a place we can have a private conversation?”

Vic looked again at Daltry and the uniformed cop. The cop was six feet tall and sunburned, and his neck was as thick as his head. Daltry’s arms were crossed, hands stuck under his armpits, his mouth a thin white line. He had a can of something in one big leathery hand—pepper spray, probably.

Vic nodded at the door to Wayne’s bedroom. “We won’t bother anyone in here.”

She followed the small woman into the little room that had been Wayne’s for only a few weeks before he was taken away. His bedsheets—they had Treasure Island scenes printed on them—were folded back as if waiting for him to slip into them. Vic sat on the edge of the mattress.

Come back, she said to Wayne, with all her heart. She wanted to ball his sheets up in her hands and smell them, fill her nose with the scent of her boy. Come back to me, Wayne.

Hutter leaned against the dresser, and her coat fell open to show the Glock under her arm. Vic looked up and saw that the younger woman had on a pair of earrings this afternoon: gold pentagons with the Superman insignia enameled on them.

“Don’t let Lou see you in those earrings,” Vic said. “He might be overcome with an uncontrollable desire to hug you. Geeks are his kryptonite.”

“You have to come clean with me,” Hutter said.

Vic bent forward, reached under the bed, found the plush monkey, pulled it out. It had gray fur and gangly arms and wore a leather jacket and a motorcycle helmet. GREASE MONKEY, said the patch on its left breast. Vic had no memory of buying the thing.

“About what?” she asked, not looking at Hutter. She laid the monkey on the bed, head on the pillow, where Wayne belonged.

“You haven’t been straight with me. Not once. I don’t know why. Maybe there are things you’re scared to talk about. Possibly there are things you’re ashamed to talk about, in front of a roomful of men. Or it could be you think you’re protecting your son in some way. Maybe you’re protecting someone else. I don’t know what it is, but here’s where you tell me.”

“I haven’t lied to you about anything.”

“Stop f*cking with me,” Tabitha Hutter said in her quiet, passionless voice. “Who is Margaret Leigh? What is her relationship to you? How does she know that your son hasn’t been hurt?”