“CHEMOTHERAPY?” Shock won out over chagrin, but chagrin was a very close second. “Made life simpler. I don’t even have to blow-dry this cut.”
I stayed silent.
“Leukemia, currently in remission,” he said with a bow, as if he had just finished singing a little song.
I stared for a moment, still not believing it. But as I looked at him, I gradually realized that I didn’t want to believe it. I had lost both of my parents to cancer. I liked Jack, and I didn’t want to hear that he had leukemia.
“I’d prefer,” he added quietly, “that you don’t let word of it get around. I told Frank and I’ve told you. But no one else.”
I agreed to keep his confidence, but I was still shaken.
“I’m sorry,” he said, watching me. “You don’t need bad news right now, do you?”
“I had it coming,” I said.
The subject was dropped for the moment. I stayed quiet, and allowed the two of them to distract me with their conversation as they cleared the table and washed the dishes. Frank built a fire and we adjourned to the living room. Cody, who had been staying close to me all day, opted for Jack’s lap.
As the evening progressed, I began to notice that Frank and Jack talked and laughed together with the ease of longtime chums. They looked to be about as unlikely a pair as could be imagined, but they obviously shared a growing friendship. I wondered about it as I listened to them. It wasn’t the only thing I was curious about.
“What’s wrong? Is your shoulder bothering you?” Frank asked. I became aware that my face had set into a frown.
“Not really. And nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to ask you about a few things.”
“Such as?”
“Such as, where was I when you found me? Where was that cabin?”
He shot Jack a look, but answered, “You were in the San Bernardino Mountains, near Pine Summit. They took you up to the rental cabins. Mrs. Fremont’s rental cabins.”
“Your cabins? Those bastards took me up to your cabins?”
He nodded.
“That makes me furious!”
“Me too,” he said quietly.
I looked over at Jack. I suddenly felt bad about bringing the topic up at all.
As if reading my thoughts, he said, “Keep asking those questions, Irene. You must have more than one or two.”
“How can you stand being around us, Jack? Don’t we just remind you of it all?”
“Do I ‘just remind you of it all?’”
“No,” I admitted.
“Well,” he said, “I guess you and Frank are just about the only people in Las Piernas I want to be around right now. You don’t pity me. What happened, happened to all of us. Differently for each of us, but – I don’t know – I guess I’m not making any sense.”
“You’re making perfect sense,” I said. “Other people – well, it’s easier to be with the two of you. You were there.”
“That’s it.”
I turned to Frank. “What happened while I was gone? How did you find me?”
“I was home. I was worried about you and was just about ready to call the hotel and ask if you had left yet. If you were still there, I was going to have you paged and meet you there.”
He didn’t say anything more for a while. For long minutes, the only sounds were Cody’s loud purrs and the crackling of the fire.
He sighed, then went on. “I got a call from the department, saying they had Brian Henderson’s son on the line, and that he insisted on talking to me, that you were in trouble. They patched the call through; it was Jacob, and he was frantic. I guess he had found one of my cards in your car. When he told me what had happened, I told him I’d meet him back at the field. I made a quick call back to the department, then left. Drove like a maniac. I got there not long after Jacob. He was a mess.
“He told me that although he hadn’t seen them drive up, as he was leaving he had seen a Blazer parked on the corner.”
I smiled. “Thank heaven he saw it. I thought he would be too rattled by what was going on to notice it. I think that kid really is going to be a reporter someday.”
He looked at me and shook his head. “God help him. Anyway, Jacob was a big help. And not just with the Blazer. But to go back to what was happening that night, we weren’t there for very long when the black and white units were pulling up, and we had Jacob take us to where the body was. We made him take us along a different path, so that we wouldn’t disturb footprints in the places where the weeds were matted down.
“To make a long story a little bit shorter, we found prints of three people walking toward where the Blazer had been parked. No sign of where you might have been taken from there. None of the neighbors had seen a thing.
“Somebody took Jacob home. He was really upset; blamed himself. To be truthful, I wasn’t holding together too well by then myself. It was after dawn when we finished in the field.
“Jacob had told me about the message at the hotel. Pete tracked down the guy who had been on the switchboard at the Lafayette that night and woke him up to ask him about the call. Fortunately, they don’t get many messages that late, and this one was unusual, so he remembered it. He said the caller seemed to be a young man. Of course, he didn’t question a young man being named “Sammy.” Found out the same message had been left at the Cliffside. There was no doubt that the girl was dead long before the calls were made. So you had obviously been set up.”
“It was her heart on my doorstep, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said.
I motioned for him to stop for a while. I felt tears welling up and tried to keep them from falling, but once again, my emotions refused to be reined in.
“I suppose there’s nothing that can be done about her father?” I said.
Frank shook his head.
I wiped my tears away and asked him to go on.
“Whoever made the call had to know about your connection to Sammy,” he said. “That pretty much had to be someone at the shelter or the newspaper. I tried the shelter first. The girl you had talked to at the funeral – Sarah – was missing. Paul said he was really worried about her and asked if we would let him know if we located her. I had gone back over the journal and made a list of initials from it. I was thinking of going over them with Paul, but then I remembered you telling me about Sarah’s dramatics, sneaking the journal to you when he came into the room. For some reason she hadn’t wanted Paul to know about the journal, and it made me decide to hold off.”
Jack looked away from us when Paul’s name came up. I felt damned awkward and I guess Frank did, too, because he hesitated.
“Maybe we could finish talking about this some other time,” he said.
“No,” Jack said tightly. “It doesn’t matter. It’s too late. He wasn’t who I thought he was, that’s all. Go on, Frank.”
Frank waited, then hearing Jack sigh with impatience, continued with his story. “I went home and tried to sleep. I couldn’t. Jacob called me, and asked if I wanted to get your car – in all the excitement, he had gone home with your car keys. I drove over to the Hendersons’ and picked him up. We went back to your car and he followed me home. I invited him to come in, and Jack stopped by while he was there.”
“I was being a nosy neighbor,” Jack said. “I had just moved into my mom’s place and saw somebody else pulling up in your car, Irene. I wondered what was up.”
“Well, I for one am damn glad you were curious,” Frank said. “I don’t know how much longer it would have taken if both of you hadn’t been there at the same time.” He looked at me. “As far as I could tell, there were only four things that had gone on at the shelter that could have made you a target for someone: you had talked to Sammy, you had talked to Sarah, you had taken Sammy’s journal, and you had asked around about members of the coven, particularly this ‘Goat.’
“So I started asking Jacob if he knew the names of the people whose initials had been in the journal. I left out the ones for Romeo and Juliet.”
Jack’s eyebrows went up at this, but he didn’t get anything for the effort.
“When I got to the initials DM and RA, Jacob said, ‘Devon Morris and Raney Adams.’ And suddenly Jack looked like someone had slapped him.”
“I asked Jacob to repeat the names,” Jack said. “They were Paul’s cousins. Remember I told you he had lived with Cindy’s sister for a while? Well, Devon and Raney were two of her five kids.”
“Devon told me he and Raney were half-brothers,” I said quietly.
“They’re all half-brothers. I just didn’t know Paul still had anything to do with them. I didn’t know they were hanging out at the shelter. I doubt they were ever around at the same time my mother was there. She couldn’t abide any of that bunch.”
“You’re right – at least, on the day I was there with your mother, Devon and Raney weren’t around.”
Frank went on. “Things started to look a little different once we knew they were related to Paul. You had seen Paul order them around; Sammy’s journal mentions a connection between them and the Goat. Pete tracked Sarah down; she had gone to stay with an aunt in the San Diego area. She said she left because Paul had threatened her about the journal. She told Paul it wasn’t in the shelter any longer and that he’d never find it. He grabbed on to her and she thought he was going to hit her, when Mrs. Riley walked in. He walked off and she packed up and left.
“We asked Mrs. Riley about it and she said Paul had kicked Devon and Raney out the day before the funeral. But she also said she was convinced that Paul had received a phone call from Raney very early Wednesday morning – she answered the phone, thought she recognized the voice – and Paul had taken off not long after he got the call. He hadn’t returned until late that afternoon.
“So we put a tail on Paul, hoping he’d lead us to wherever Devon and Raney were. I figured he had to be the Goat. He was connected to the shelter, to Sammy, to Devon and Raney, and to Mrs. Fremont. And he knew about Jack’s leukemia. So he stood to inherit. He probably picked the goat and Satanism because of Jack’s tattoo. Paul was hoping Jack would be suspected of murdering Mrs. Fremont. I guess Sammy found out what they were up to. She probably threatened him by telling him she had a journal.”
“She knew Paul was the Goat. She saw the scars on his arms,” I said. “I saw them when – I saw them,” I finished weakly, trying to not feel the memory in my shoulder and thumb.
Frank waited, probably wondering if I was going to burst into tears again, and went on when I didn’t.
“I checked vehicle registrations for Devon and Raney. Devon had a registration for a Blazer. So now it was a matter of waiting and praying to God that Paul got back in touch with them before – well, before it was too late. Jack knew them by sight and I didn’t; I only had a DMV photo. So he came with me to watch Paul and on Friday it paid off. We followed Paul to a place where he met Raney. Then we followed them up into the mountains. By then, we knew where they were headed.
“Sure enough, they took the Pine Summit turnoff. I didn’t know what the situation would be, and Jack and I weren’t really official-”
“You mean Carlson didn’t want you working on this,” I said.
“Well, actually, he let me work on it. I don’t know if he felt sorry for me or what. He told me I seemed to be personally connected to every murder in Las Piernas, so I could work on a missing persons case. He knew I’d look for you anyway. But he didn’t like the idea of Jack getting involved, and so we were sort of an unofficial back-up tail, you might say. Good thing, because Paul shook the official one.
“Anyway, like I said, I didn’t know exactly what the situation would be, but I knew there were at least three of them, and Paul had other cousins. So I stopped off at the sheriff’s station and told them what was going on. By the time we convinced the sheriff and his deputy to get up off their behinds and follow us up there, Raney had apparently started back down. We came across his truck – what was left of it. I was afraid… well, we stayed just long enough to determine there was only one body. The sheriff fooled around calling another unit but I couldn’t wait. Jack and I took off for the cabins. You know the rest.”
I know we all had our own mental pictures of what happened from there, and the silence that followed was an uneasy one.
“I don’t know how I could have been so wrong about Paul,” Jack said, just above a whisper. “I can understand why he hated me. I just never thought he was so bitter toward his grandmother.”
No one said anything for a long time. I felt myself wearing down and told them I was going to call it a night.
Jack stood up, gently putting Cody on the floor. “I’ll say good night, then. I’m glad we talked.”
“Stay if you want to,” I said. “I just don’t have any stamina. I wish-” I didn’t finish it.
“That you could go back to being your old self?” Jack asked.
“Yes.”
“Give up on that one, Irene. Just about everything changes.” And with that, he said good night again and left.
OVER THE NEXT WEEK or so, I tried to come to grips with the implications of just about everything changing. The first disappointment came with the unsettling realization that I was not going to heal overnight. I didn’t like being so dependent on others, but that was the simple fact of the matter. There was very little that I could do for myself, even when I started to be able to hobble around a little.
There was also the fact that I was still feeling scared. Afraid that if I was alone I would be kidnapped. What were the odds? A million to one still made me break out in a cold sweat.
Looking back on it, that week I did more feeling than thinking. It was as if everything I had tried to repress during my captivity came boiling up and over me. The terror of it demanded to be acknowledged.
Frank’s support was unwavering, but I doubt that we could have made it through that time alone. Fortunately, we didn’t have to try. Lydia, Guy, Rachel, and Pete came by and spent hours with me, talked to me, watched me sleep, woke me from nightmares. Took care of and cared about me.
When I protested to Rachel that she should find something more enjoyable to do with her vacation, she said, “What, I don’t look like I can make a decision? When I’m doing something I don’t want to be doing, you can put the story in that newspaper of yours. Basta.”
Okay, enough. I didn’t mention it again.
Two new friends were over fairly often: Jacob and Jack. Like my other friends, the first time Jacob came over, he was shaken by my appearance. But, like them, he recovered quickly. He was full of youthful energy and loaded with questions about working for newspapers. His father, I learned, had won the election. Julie’s parents had put her on restriction, so he hadn’t seen much of her. I imagined I would see less of him once she was paroled.
Jack seemed to need to be around us, and he came by several times each day. He brought groceries, helped Lydia and Rachel cook, talked hockey with Guy and Pete. He did errands that would have taken up Frank’s time, allowing Frank to spend it with me instead.
Jack was solicitous to me, and kept me company if none of my other baby-sitters could be there, but usually he allowed the others to pamper me.
I woke up and limped out of the bedroom on Tuesday morning, and found him sitting on the couch with Cody, reading a book.
“Rachel had to leave for a few minutes,” he said, looking up. “Need anything?”
I shook my head and slowly made my way over to a chair. “What are you reading?”
“Ovid,” he said, and laughed at my undisguised look of surprise.
“I never know what to make of you, Jack,” I said, then felt embarrassed at my own bluntness. As usual, he didn’t seem to mind.
“No, I guess not. And I suppose that extends beyond catching me reading the Metamorphoses.”
I nodded. Jack never ceased to puzzle me. Two days before, I had found him sitting on the couch, working with a notebook computer. When I asked why a biker needed a computer, he told me that the notebook had been his first indulgence after coming into his inheritance; he found he needed a computer to keep track of his mother’s complex estate. I noticed that he had yet to go on a big spending spree; like his mother, he seemed to prefer to live simply.
“Okay,” I said, “I give up. Why the Metamorphoses?”
“As for that, my mother read more Greek mythology than Mother Goose to me when I was a little sprout. So I guess I just wanted to remind myself of those days.”
“Oh.”
He closed the book and studied me. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell the truth.”
“It’s just a mood, Jack. Give me five minutes – or maybe less – and it will change.”
“So talk to me before the five minutes are up. I’d hate to miss the full impact of this one.”
“Just feeling frustrated.”
“About your injuries?”
“Not this time – not any more than usual. It’s just that I know there’s a fourth person involved in all of this. The department won’t let Frank work on the case. I’m in a funk because Frank can’t seem to get anyone to even take the idea seriously.”
“I guess they consider it a closed case.”
“But it’s not. This fourth man is still out there.”
“How did you learn about him?”’
I swallowed hard, pushing the suddenly sharp memory of the cabin away. “The second day I was up there. I heard Devon and Raney talking about him.”
“You’re sure? You were scared and in a lot of pain and-”
“I’m sure. There’s another man involved in this.”
“And you want him brought to justice.”
“It’s more selfish than that. I’m scared to death of him.”
He idly fingered the pages of the closed book, then said, “Maybe you should tell me what happened.”
Why I found it easier to tell that story to Jack Fremont, whom I had known only for a number of days, than to friends I had known for years, I can’t say. He listened calmly, which somehow kept me calm as I sketched out the basics of what had happened.
When I finished, Jack was quiet for a while, then said, “There’s no immediate help for feeling afraid, I suppose. You’ve obviously been through a lot, and it will take time before you feel safe again.”
“That’s why I was hoping that somehow we could find this ‘Pony Player.’”
“You suspect someone in particular?”
I hesitated. I had suspicions, but they were based on seeing a limo at a funeral and one brief conversation with Murray Plummer. I didn’t even know how Malcolm Gannet might have earned the nickname “Pony Player.” I hadn’t had a chance to determine who else might be the Pony Player; as soon as I was able to go back to work, I intended to do some digging, but until then, I couldn’t do much more than guess.
“It’s not the kind of thing I’d like to say about anyone,” I answered uneasily, “at least, not without more reason to do so. I’m just saying that I’ll feel less afraid when the fourth person is caught.”
“I think it would be a mistake to believe that would be enough,” he said.
“You think there are more people involved in this?”
“No, no, that’s not what I mean. It’s a possibility, but not my point. I’m just saying that you need to start getting out and around a little, to work on overcoming your fears on your own. Don’t let finding or not finding the Pony Player decide whether you do or don’t get on with your life.”
I was about to ask him what the hell he thought he knew about overcoming fear, when the word “leukemia” occurred to me.
“You’re right,” I admitted. “But I’d still feel better if I knew more about the Pony Player. I guess you don’t think there’s much hope of catching him.”
“Irene, I’m living proof that you ought to expect the unexpected. I’d never tell you to give up.”
I WON’T CLAIM that I jumped right up, shouted hallelujah, and started dancing a jig, but I did slowly start taking Jack’s advice. I began by seeing an orthopedist and a physical therapist, which forced me to get out for a while each day. I had to fight down panic every time I stepped out the front door, and clutched Frank’s hand throughout each brief car ride to the doctor’s office, but at least I wasn’t cowering in the house.
That’s how things were going until the day we went sailing. Like Jack said – expect the unexpected.