Gerald's Game(99)

Jessie shrugged and said nothing. She could have said things, but it seemed safer not to. She had badly needed a friend in the weeks following her escape from the summer house, and Brandon had filled the bill admirably. She didn't want to distance him or drive him away entirely with a lot of crazy talk. So she didn't tell him what he was certainly smart enough to have figured out for himself-the pearl earring could have disappeared into someone's pocket, and a single muddy footprint by the bureau could have been overlooked. The bedroom had, after all, been treated as the scene of an accident, not a murder.

And there was something else, too, something simple and direct: maybe Brandon was right. Maybe her visitor had just been a soupcon of moonlight, after all.

Little by little she had been able to persuade herself, at least in her waking hours, that this was the truth of it. Her space cowboy had been a kind of Rorschach pattern, one made not of ink and paper but of wind-driven shadows and imagination. She didn't blame herself for any of this, however; quite the opposite. If not for her imagination, she never would have seen how she might be able to get the water-glass... and even if she had gotten it, she never would have thought of using a magazine blow-in card as a straw. No, she thought her imagination had more than earned its right to a few hallucinatory megrims, but it remained important for her to remember she'd been alone that night. If recovery began anywhere, she had believed, it began with the ability to separate reality from fantasy. She told Brandon some of this. He had smiled, hugged her, kissed her temple, and told her she was getting better in all sorts of ways.

Then, last Friday, her eye had happened on the lead story of the Press-Herald's County News section. All her assumptions began to change then, and they had gone right on changing as the story of Raymond Andrew Joubert began its steady march from filler between the Community Calendar and the County Police Beat to banner headlines on the front page. Then, yesterday... seven days after Joubert's name had first appeared on the County page...

There was a tap at the door, and Jessie's first feeling, as always, was an instinctive cringe of fear. It was there and gone almost before she realized it. Almost... but not quite.

"Meggie? That you?"

"None other, ma'am."

"Come on in."

Megan Landis, the housekeeper Jessie had hired in December (that was when her first fat insurance check had arrived via registered mail), came in with a glass of milk on a tray. A small pill, gray and pink, sat beside the glass. At the sight of the glass, Jessie's right wrist began to itch madly. This didn't always happen, but it wasn't exactly an unfamiliar reaction, either. At least the twitches and that weird my-skin-is-crawling-right-off-the-bones sensation had pretty much stopped. There had been awhile there, before Christmas, when Jessie had really believed she was going to spend the rest of her life drinking out of a plastic cup.

"How's yet paw today?" Meggie asked, as if she had picked up Jessie's itch by some kind of sensory telepathy. Nor did Jessie think this a ridiculous idea. She sometimes found Meggie's questions-and the intuitions which prompted them-a little creepy, but never ridiculous.

The hand in question, now lying in the sunbeam which had startled her away from what she had been writing on the Mac, was dressed in a black glove lined with some frictionless space-age polymer. Jessie supposed the burn-glove-for that was what it was-had been perfected in one dirty little war or another. Not that she would ever have refused to wear it on that account, and not that she wasn't grateful. She was very grateful indeed. After the third skin-graft, you learned that an attitude of gratitude was one of life's few reliable hedges against insanity.

"Not too bad, Meggie."

Meggie's left eyebrow lifted, stopping just short of I-don't-believe-you height. "No? If you've been running that keyboard for the whole three hours you've been in here, I bet it's singing "Ave Maria.""

"Have I really been here for-?" She glanced at her watch and saw that she had been. She glanced at the copy-minder on top of the VDT screen and saw she was on the fifth page of the document she had opened just after breakfast. Now it was almost lunch, and the most surprising thing was she hadn't strayed as far from the truth as Meggie's lifted brow suggested: her hand really wasn't that bad. She could have waited another hour for the pill if she'd had to.

She took it nevertheless, washing it down with the milk. As she was drinking the last of it, her eyes wandered back to the VDT and read the words on the current screen:

No one found me that night; I woke up on my own just after dawn the next day. The engine had finally stalled, but the car was still warm. I could hear birds singing in the woods, and through the trees I could see the lake, flat as a mirror, with little ribbons of steam rising off it. It looked very beautiful, and at the same time I hated the sight of it, as I have hated the very thought of it ever since. Can you understand that, Ruth? I'll be damned if I can.

My hand was hurting like hell-whatever help I'd gotten from the aspirin was long gone-but what I felt in spite of the pain was the most incredible sense of peace and well-being. Something was gnawing at it, though. Something I'd forgotten. At first I couldn't remember what it was. I don't think my brain wanted me to remember what it was. Then, all at once, it came to me. He'd been in the back seat, and he'd leaned forward to whisper the names of all my voices in my ear.

I looked into the mirror and saw the back seat was empty. That eased my mind a little bit but then I