Dust of Eden (13 page)

Done!

The slithering viper was unbound from its pit now. As good as if Ariel had eaten the apple. Because what was an Eden without a serpent?

D
enny Bryce's thoughts were drifting with the ball scores, and the whole thing happened so fast that he could have been mistaken. One minute he was tooling serenely along the empty road in his
Tercel
, and the next his heart was flopping around his chest as he fought for control of the wheel. The car fishtailed just before he hit the creature, just before he thought he hit the creature, and so he wasn't sure whether the jarring was an actual collision or maybe—
sweet Jesus, let it have gotten away, whatever it was
—the suspension system tying up in some way.

He slid onto the shoulder with the wheels locked and made a washboard stop just shy of the ditch. A glance in the mirror showed empty road behind him. Out of the car, around to the front, onto his knees he went, inspecting for damage. The left side of the bumper was smeared with viscera and a swatch of fur—red fur. Very red. What the hell was it? He peered back up the road.
 
It was smoothly capped. He hadn't seen an animal flying off to the side after the collision, so it still must have been moving on its own. But, Lord Almighty, it appeared to be already injured
before
it ran across the road: bloodied and misshapen and . . . and—he thought, and this was really crazy—it had only three legs.

Long, skinny stick legs.

But then how could you tell much about something that was running? It had to have been wounded before it loped out into the road like that, though. Maybe it had been in a fight with another animal. Only, it was big enough where you wouldn't think it would fare so badly. Unless the fight was with another dog. That was it. Chewed up by another dog. Or hit by a truck. And the red fur, that was just blood.

He pulled the few hairs off the bumper and saw that they were dry and smooth. Not bloodstained, just red. Redder than a red fox. Of course, you couldn't be sure with such a small sample. But that was one horribly mutilated pooch. And yet "mutilation" wasn't the right word either. Because it was smooth, almost featureless. Denny had seen the eye, the sharply pointed ears, and one more thing he was obviously mistaken about.

He could have sworn it didn't have a mouth.

There in the sunshine of a pastoral midday, Denny Bryce sensed an unseen actor just offstage and twisted around suddenly. He scrutinized the underbrush beside the shoulder of the road. Then the trees. No squirrels, no tattletale jays, no grasshoppers or butterflies. In fact it was very still.
 
He wanted to go back and look for whatever it was he had hit, but something was warning him:
Get back in the car!

No way for a rationalist to act, he told himself.

He stared hard at the embankment, but the feeling persisted that the stillness meant just the opposite—an invisible turmoil. It was like one of those puzzle pictures where you searched for hidden animals. Was he picking up bits of some nearly discernible form in the underbrush, hearing a faint patter?
Nyet
. Nein
. Nonsense. Turning in a complete circle, he crossed the road and stood on the edge of the ditch.

Some kind of gossamer-like vine was entwined through the embankment, he could see now. Up close he could detect that its green, heart-shaped leaves were faintly trembling like the skeins of a vast spider web. He looked toward the spot where the creature had crossed in front of his car. Dead still. The leaves stretched like ivy, unbroken as far as he could see. And then he saw a ridge appear in the glossy green bank and begin to ripple toward him. Exactly like an ocean swell it came, lifting and accelerating with a rush. It was the acceleration that finally got to him. He jumped, turned and skipped to the car.

When he dove into the front seat, he slammed and locked the door. Then he felt silly. The wave or the shadow, whatever it was, did not pass him. He craned around to look and saw the same even green ground cover as before. A breeze, that was all. He had let himself be mocked by a breeze.

It was only another half mile to KNEAL, and when he arrived he was surprised that the stagnancy he had sensed on the road seemed to reach this far. He got out of the car and stood beneath the willow, rubbernecking the branches of all the trees he could see and the roof of the farmhouse and the window where yesterday he thought he had seen the face like his dead sister's before the fire had scarred Tiffany for life. It felt like aftermath. Whatever had happened up the road seemed to have happened here as well. It was like hunting season where the first shot recoils through the woods and everything freezes and you know that the next shot will bring pandemonium.

"So, did you bring my cigarettes?"

He looked up just as the screen door banged the jamb. It was the brightly dressed erg of a woman who had warned him not to have his picture taken—Beverly Swanson, her name was. She smiled
effortfully
and for once neither of her eyeteeth was smudged with lipstick.

"Sorry," he said, reaching into his shirt pocked as he strolled to the porch. "But I think I've got your glasses."

She slid off the blue pearled pair of spectacles she wore and, with a jeweled finger, pressed the bridge of the glitter frames he handed her to seat the stems over her ears. "So it was you. I'd pegged your old man."

"I found them lying around."

"You don't look like a kleptomaniac."

"What does a kleptomaniac look like?"

"Like your old man. Martin collects things as if civilization is on the verge of collapse."

This time Denny didn't deny it.

"Quite a ladies man," she added.

"Dad, a ladies man?"

"Lets you know how he feels, that's for sure."

"Uh-oh. What's he done now?"

"Nothing James Cagney wouldn't have done."

"I don't get you."

"Well, they'll tell you inside, if it's worth telling. I'm not a gossip. I came out here for cigarettes, and you don't have any."

She
was
a gossip, but she had learned how to control the flow of information to disguise that fact. "What kind do you smoke?" he asked about the cigarettes.

"Anything but chocolate or peppermint. Do I look fussy?"

"You look elegant. Like you might use a cigarette holder."

"Aren't you the sweetheart, telling a wart of a woman things like that. I'm not surprised, seeing as how you're the son of a ladies man. If you want to humor me, get something without filters and enough nicotine so that I don't bust an artery sucking the damn things."

"I'll do that."

"And don't worry about your old man. Everyone's upset about last night, and I guess your dad sensed that. It made him edgy. He's lost, poor guy."

"What
are
you talking about?
 
Upset about what?"

"Cat burglars. Or maybe just cats. Last night something yowled on the roof and fell off.
Ruta
swears it was a red scarecrow trying to climb down the lightning rod. But that woman thinks she's gang-raped once a week by horny aliens, so who knows what she saw."

Denny exhaled a laugh. You had to like this woman.

"Mr. Bryce?" Someone calling from the shadow of the screen door.

"I won't forget the cigarettes," he said and passed into the house.

Molly faced him with the assurance of an accuser.

"Did Beverly tell you?"

"Tell me what?"

"Your father hit one of the women."

"What?"

"With his fist."

"You mean an actual punch?" She looked at him condescendingly, and he added, "I mean was he pushing or swinging?"

"It wasn't ambiguous; he looked like a boxer. Your father doesn't like to sit for photographs, does he?"

"No, but—"

"The photograph was when he started to get testy. Then when Dana tried to get him to take a shower, he hit her."

"Is she all right?"

"He left a mark."

The big woman looked at him with her cartoon-perfect button nose and large brown eyes, and Denny got the mandate. "All right," he said. "I understand. What was the woman's name—Dana? Let me apologize to her, and then I'll go talk to my dad."

"She's doing laundry in the cellars. Second door past the kitchen. Watch the steps."

Cellars? With a plural? He shouldn't be surprised, he thought – a farmhouse as old as this.

The narrow steps were cupped and worn to velvet, and the side walls leading down were damp stone mottled with runes of mildew and mold. No handrail. Hauling baskets of laundry up and down would be a feat for a British charwoman, and Denny pictured a stalwart female with a yellow brick for a face and a right cross that could have dislocated his father's jaw. The light in the cellars banked from the left at the bottom, and he found himself on the hard dirt floor of a storage room lit by the splintered glare from a single naked bulb. It was dusty and oily and dank, and the temperature was at least twenty degrees cooler than that of the level above. The opposite end of the storage room funneled into darkness that emitted a steady churning. This must be the washer, of course, though in the context of the bowels of the house it sounded gastric and digestive.

A half dozen steps across the dirt floor and he was groping through the vague illumination of the passageway.
 
Curiously, it had a kink – right, right, left, left – around some hidden substructure in the house before it guided him into the moist chamber that held the washing machine and three slate set tubs. The ogress of ablutions had her back to him as she worked in the middle tub with a stick, but she had ankles and calves more like a Swedish Cinderella than the Brit charwoman of his expectations. And the way she jumped when he spoke suggested a certain frailty of nerves.

"My apologies," he said and stuck out his hand. "Denny. Denny Bryce."

The fingers that had flown to her breast came forward in a limp grasp. "Dana
Novicki
."

They had to raise their voices above the noise of the washer, but the exaggerated conversation seemed to give them time to size each other up. Her slate blue eyes did not look angry, he decided; the boyish set of his middle-aged face was not defensive about his father, she thought. They moved away from the washer, and he took note of her sandy blond hair, tiny ears and ample lips.
 
Her cheeks had that ephemeral ruddiness of women who blush easily and always look a little surprised. She could have been either side of fifty, though age seemed irrelevant to her quick and graceful movements. But the inescapably damning thing about her face, he saw now, was the faint mouse developing above her right eye.

"I can't believe my father did that,” he said. “What can I say, except I'm profoundly sorry?”

She waggled slender fingers dismissively.

"He's never mistreated a woman before," he added with earnest assurance.

"He's probably never had a woman try to get him to take a shower before either."

"That's no excuse."

"Maybe it's a little bit of one when you're getting older and some strange woman tries to help you off with your shirt."

“It's very gracious of you to say so."

"Not at all."

They looked at each other helplessly, because they were still shouting and the relentless chug of the washer was going to defeat any delicate conversation.

"Look," he said as he reached for his wallet, "I hope you take this the right way. I'm not trying to buy you off or anything, but I'd like to give you the price of a good dinner, if you'll permit me."

She shook her head. "That's not necessary, really."

"You have a thankless job. I don't know what they pay you, but it isn't enough for what my father put you through."

"Oh"– the ample lips parted in a rosy smile – "I don't work here."

"But . . ."

"I live here."

His pale lashes blinked. Ariel had said they all pitched in. So now he had just insulted this woman by offering her money. "Okay," he tried to say in a nuanced way above the racket while nonchalantly sliding his wallet back into his pocket, "let me make it up to you some other way. Let me . . . take you to lunch."

"Really, I can't."

Just then the washer kicked into a new cycle best described as lift-off at Cape Canaveral.

He pointed upstairs. "We'll talk."

She nodded and he A-framed his hands in a gesture of indebtedness before starting toward the wrong end of the room to make his exit. There were two tunnels in that direction, he saw after two
steps.You
could lose a minotaur down here. At least she was laughing at his wrong turn, he noted, though he could only hear the rockets of the spin cycle reach full burn.

His father didn't remember the incident. Didn't know who Dana
Novicki
was. Sometimes he faked forgetting, but Denny didn't think he was faking this morning. "So, I hear you got your mug shot taken, old man," he said, and the vague way Martin Bryce went along with the statement made Denny sure he didn't remember that either. He stayed with him for an hour, then spent another ten or fifteen minutes trying to relocate Dana. No one had seen her. No one had any idea where she might be.