Firestarter(64)

"Please say she's all right, say she's all right, say she's all right!"

The room, the room was so hot, the air conditioning was off, that was all it was, but it was so hot, his head aching, the sweat rolling down his face, not cold sweat now but hot, like oil, hot-

"No," Charlie was saying, "No, no, no, no, no." She shook her head. Her pigtails flew back and forth, making him think absurdly of the first time he and Vicky had taken her to the amusement park, the carousel-

It wasn't the lack of air conditioning.

"Charlie!" He yelled. "Charlie, the bathtub! The water!"

She screamed. She turned her head toward the open bathroom door and there was a sudden blue flash in there like a lightbulb burning out. The showerhead fell off the wall and clattered into the tub, twisted and black. Several of the blue tiles shattered to fragments.

He barely caught her when she fell, sobbing.

"Daddy, I'm sorry, I'm sorry-"

"It's all right," he said shakily, and enfolded her. From the bathroom, thin smoke drifted out of the fused tub. All the porcelain surfaces had crack-glazed instantly. It was as if the entire bathroom had been run through some powerful but defective firing kiln. The towels were smoldering.

"It's all right," he said, holding her, rocking her. "Charlie, it's all right, it's gonna be all right, somehow it'll come right, I promise." "I want Mommy," she sobbed. He nodded. He wanted her, too. He held Charlie tightly to him and smelled ozone and porcelain and cooked Best Western towels. She had almost flash-fried them both.

"It's gonna be all right," he told her, and rocked her, not really believing it, but it was the litany, it was the Psalter, the voice of the adult calling down the black well of years into the miserable pit of terrorized childhood; it was what you said when things went wrong; it was the nightlight that could not banish the monster from the closet but perhaps only keep it at bay for a little while; it was the voice without power that must speak nevertheless.

"It's gonna be all right," he told her, not really believing it, knowing as every adult knows in his secret heart that nothing is really all right, ever. "It's gonna be all right." He was crying. He couldn't help it now. His tears came in a flood and he held her to his chest as tightly as he could. "Charlie, I swear to you, somehow, it's gonna be all right."

5

The one thing they had not been able to hang around his neck-as much as they might have liked to-was the murder of Vicky. Instead, they had elected to simply erase what had happened in the laundry room. Less trouble for them. Sometimes-not often-Andy wondered what their neighbors back in Lakeland might have speculated. Bill collectors? Marital problems? Maybe a drug habit or an incident of child abuse? They hadn't known anyone on Conifer Place well enough for it to have been any more than idle dinnertable chat, a nine days" wonder soon forgotten when the bank that held the mortgage released their house.

Sitting on the deck now and looking out into darkness, Andy thought he might have had more luck that day than he had known (or been able to appreciate). He had arrived too late to save Vicky, but he had left before the Removal People arrived.

There had never been a thing about it in the paper, not even a squib about how-funny thing! an English instructor named Andrew McGee and his family had just up and disappeared. Perhaps the Shop had got that quashed, too. Surely he had been reported missing; one or all of the guys he had been eating lunch with that day would have done that much. But it hadn't made the papers, and of course, bill collectors don't advertise.

"They would have hung it on me if they could," he said, unaware that he had spoken aloud.

But they couldn't have. The medical examiner could have fixed the time of death, and Andy, who had been in plain sight of some disinterested third party (and in the case of Eh-116, Style and the Short Story, from ten to eleven-thirty, twenty-five disinterested third parties) all that day, could not have been set up to take the fall. Even if he'd been unable to provide substantiation for his movements during the critical time, there was no motive.

So the two of them had killed Vicky and then gone haring off after Charlie-but not without notifying what Andy thought of as the Removal People (and in his mind's eye he even saw them that way, smooth-faced young men dressed in white coveralls). And sometime after he had gone haring off after Charlie, maybe as short a time as five minutes, but almost surely no longer than an hour, the Removal People would have rolled up to his door. While Conifer Place dozed the afternoon away, Vicky had been Removed.

They might even have reasoned-correctly-that a missing wife would have been more of a problem for Andy than a provably dead one. No body, no estimated time of death. No estimated time of death, no alibi. He would be watched, cosseted, politely tied down. Of course they would have put Charlie's description out on the wire-Vicky's too, for that matter-but Andy would not have been free to simply go tearing off on his own. So she had been Removed, and now he didn't even know where she was buried. Or maybe she had been cremated. Or-

Oh shit why are you doing this to yourself?

He stood up abruptly and poured the remainder of Granther's mule-kick over the deck railing. It was all in the past; none of it could be changed; it was time to stop thinking about it.

A neat trick if you could do it. He looked up at the dark shapes of the trees and squeezed the glass tightly in his right hand, and the thought crossed his mind again.,