Fever Dream (21 page)

Die… Sleep = Death

Dream = Death

Death = I can’t tune it

Out

Pendergast flipped a few pages. The ravings continued until they seemed to dissolve into disjointed words and illegible scratchings.
More thoughtfully, he put the book back and drew out another, much earlier in the set, opening it in the middle. D’Agosta
saw lines of strong and even writing, evidently that of a girl, with doodles of flowers and funny faces in the margins and
i
’s that were dotted with cheerful circles.

Pendergast read off the date.

D’Agosta did a quick mental calculation. “That would be about six months before Helen’s visit,” he said.

“Yes. When the Doanes were still new to Sunflower.” Pendergast paged through the entries, scanning them swiftly, pausing at
one point to read out loud:

Mattie Lee razzed me again about Jimmy. He may be cute but I can’t stand the goth clothes and that thrash metal he’s into.
He slicks his hair back and smokes, holding
the cigarette up close to the burning ash. He thinks it makes him look cool. I
think it makes him look like a nerd trying to look cool. Even worse: it makes him look like a dweeb who looks like a nerd
who’s trying to be cool.

“Typical high-school girl,” said D’Agosta, frowning.

“Perhaps a bit more incisive than most.” The agent continued flipping forward through the volume. He stopped abruptly at an
entry made some three months later. “Ah!” he exclaimed, sudden interest in his voice, and began to read.

When I got home from school I saw Mom and Dad in the kitchen hovering over something on the counter. Guess what it was? A
parrot
! It was gray and fat, with a stumpy red tail and a big fat metal band around its leg with a number but no name. It was tame
and would perch right on your arm. It kept cocking its head at me and peering into my eyes, like it was checking me out. Dad
looked it up in the encyclopedia and said it was an African Grey. He said it had to be somebody’s pet, it was too tame for
anything else. It just showed up around noon, sitting in the peach tree next to the back door, making noise to announce its
presence. I begged Dad to let us keep it. He said we could until he found the real owner. He says we have to run an ad. I
told him to run it in the
Timbuctoo Times
and he thought that was pretty funny. I hope he never finds the real owner. We made a little nest for it in an old box. Dad
is going to the pet store in Slidell tomorrow to get him a real cage. While he was hopping around the counter he found one
of Mom’s muffins, gave a squawk, and started gorging on it, so I named him Muffin.

“A parrot,” D’Agosta muttered. “Now, what are the chances of that?”

Pendergast began flipping pages, more slowly now, until he reached the end of the book. He took down the next volume and began
methodically examining the dates of the entries—until he came to one. D’Agosta heard a small intake of breath.

“Vincent, here is the entry she wrote on February ninth—the day Helen paid them a visit.”

The worst day
of my life
!!!

After lunch a lady came and knocked on our front door. She was driving a red sports car and was all dressed up with fashionable
leather gloves. She said she’d heard we had a parrot and wanted to know if she could see it. Dad showed Muffin to her (still
inside her cage) and she asked how we got it. She asked a lot of questions about the bird, when we got it, where it came from,
if it was tame, if it let us handle it, who played with it the most. Stuff like that. She spent all sorts of time looking
at it and asking questions. The woman wanted to see the band up close but my father asked her first if she was the bird’s
owner. She said yes and wanted the parrot back. My dad was suspicious. He asked if she could name the number on the parrot’s
bracelet. She couldn’t. And she wasn’t able to show us any kind of proof that she owned it, either, but told us a story that
she was a scientist and it had escaped from her lab. Dad looked like he didn’t believe a word of it and said firmly that when
she brought back some proof he’d be glad to give up the bird, but until then Muffin would stay with us. The lady didn’t seem
too surprised and then she looked at me with a sad expression on her face. “Is Muffin your pet?” I said yes. She seemed to
think for a while. Then she asked if Dad could recommend a good hotel in town. He said there was only one, and that he’d get
her the number. He walked back into the kitchen for the phone book. No sooner had he gone than the woman grabbed Muffin’s
cage, stuffed it into a black garbage bag she took from her purse, ran out the door, threw the bag in her car, and took off
down the driveway! Muffin was screeching loudly the whole time. I ran outside screaming and Dad came running out and we got
in the car and chased her, but she was gone. Dad called the sheriff but he didn’t seem all that interested in finding a stolen
bird, especially since
it might have been her bird to begin with. Muffin was gone, just like that.

I went up to my room and I just couldn’t stop crying.

Pendergast closed the diary and slipped it into his jacket pocket. As he did so, a flash of lightning illuminated the black
trees beyond the window and a rumble of thunder shook the house.

“Unbelievable,” said D’Agosta. “Helen stole the parrot. Just like she stole those stuffed parrots of Audubon’s. What in the
world was she thinking?”

Pendergast said nothing.

“Did you ever see the parrot? Did she bring it back to Penumbra?”

Pendergast shook his head wordlessly.

“What about this scientific lab she talked about?”

“She had no lab, Vincent. She was employed by Doctors With Wings.”

“Do you have
any
idea what the hell she was doing?”

“For the first time in my life I am completely and utterly at a loss.”

The lightning flickered again, illuminating an expression on Pendergast’s face of pure shock and incomprehension.

New York City

C
APTAIN LAURA HAYWARD, NYPD HOMICIDE
, liked to keep the door of her office open to signal she hadn’t forgotten her roots as a lowly TA cop patrolling the subways.
She had risen far and fast in the department, and while she knew she was good and deserved the promotions, she was also uncomfortably
aware that being a woman hadn’t hurt at all, especially after the sex discrimination scandals of the previous decade.

But on this particular morning, when she arrived at six, she reluctantly shut the door even though no one else was in. The
investigation into a string of Russian mafia drug killings on Coney Island had been dragging its ass around the department,
generating huge amounts of paperwork and meetings. It had finally reached the point where someone—her—needed to sit down with
the files and go through them all so at least one person could get on top of the case and move it forward.

Toward noon, her brain almost fried from the senseless brutality of it all, she rose from her desk and decided to get some
air by taking a stroll in the small park next to One Police Plaza. She opened her door and exited the outer office, running
into a gaggle of cops hanging out in the hall.

They greeted her with a little more effusion than usual, with several sidelong, embarrassed glances.

Hayward returned the greetings and then paused. “All right, what is it?”

A telling silence.

“I’ve never seen a worse bunch of fakers,” she said lightly. “Honestly, if you sat down to a game of Texas Hold ’Em, you’d
all lose.”

The joke fell flat, and after a moment’s hesitation, a sergeant spoke up. “Captain, it’s sort of about that, ah, FBI agent.
Pendergast.”

Hayward froze. Her disdain for Pendergast was well known in the department, as was her relationship with his sometime partner
D’Agosta. Pendergast always managed to drag Vincent into deep shit, and she had a growing premonition that the present excursion
to Louisiana would end as disastrously as the earlier ones. In fact, maybe it just had… As these thoughts flashed through
her mind, Hayward tried to control her features, keep them neutral. “What about Special Agent Pendergast?” she asked coolly.

“It isn’t Pendergast exactly,” said the sergeant. “It’s a relative of his. Woman named Constance Greene. She’s down in central
booking, gave Pendergast as her next-of-kin. Apparently she’s his niece or something.”

Another awkward silence.

“And?” Hayward prompted.

“She’s been abroad. She booked passage on the
Queen Mary Two
from Southampton to New York, boarded with her baby.”

“Baby?”

“Right. A couple months old at most. Born abroad. Anyway, after the ship docked she was held at passport control because the
baby was missing. INS radioed NYPD and we’ve taken her into custody. They’re booking her for homicide.”

“Homicide?”

“That’s right. Seems she threw her baby off the ship somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”

Gulf of Mexico

T
HE DELTA 767 SEEMED ALMOST TO HOVER AT
thirty-four thousand feet, the sky serene and cloudless, the sea an unbroken expanse of blue far below, sparkling in the
afternoon light.

“May I get you another beer, sir?” the stewardess asked, bending over D’Agosta solicitously.

“Sure,” he replied.

The stewardess turned to D’Agosta’s seatmate. “And you, sir? Is everything all right?”

“No,” Pendergast said. He gestured dismissively toward the small dish of smoked salmon that sat on his seat-back tray. “I
find this to be room temperature. Would you mind bringing me a chilled serving, please?”

“Not at all.” The woman whisked the plate away with a professional gesture.

D’Agosta waited until she returned, then settled back in the wide, comfortable seat, stretching out his legs. The only times
he’d flown first-class were traveling with Pendergast, but it was something he could get used to.

A chime sounded over the PA system, and the captain announced
that the plane would be landing at Sarasota Bradenton International
Airport in twenty minutes.

D’Agosta took a sip of his beer. Sunflower, Louisiana, was already eighteen hours and hundreds of miles behind them, but the
strange Doane house—with that single, jewel-like room of wonders surrounded by a storm of decay and furious ruin—had never
been far from his mind. Pendergast, however, had seemed disinclined to discuss it, remaining thoughtful and silent.

D’Agosta tried once again. “I got a theory.”

The agent glanced toward him.

“I think the Doane family is a red herring.”

“Indeed?” Pendergast took a tentative bite of the salmon.

“Think about it. They went nuts many months after Helen’s visit. How could the visit have anything to do with what happened
later? Or a parrot?”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Pendergast, vaguely. “What puzzles me is this sudden flowering of creative brilliance before…
the end. For all of them.”

“It’s a well-known fact that madness runs in families—” D’Agosta thought better of concluding this observation. “Anyway, it’s
always the gifted ones that go crazy.”

“ ‘We poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.’ ”
Pendergast turned toward D’Agosta. “So you think their creativity led to madness?”

“It sure as hell happened to the Doane daughter.”

“I see. And Helen’s theft of the parrot had nothing to do with what happened to the family later, is that your hypothesis?”

“More or less. What do you think?” D’Agosta hoped to smoke out Pendergast’s opinion.

“I think that coincidences do not please me, Vincent.”

D’Agosta hesitated. “Look, another thing I’ve been wondering… was, or I mean did, Helen—sometimes act weird, or… odd?”

Pendergast’s expression seemed to tighten. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“It’s just these…” D’Agosta hesitated again. “These sudden trips to strange destinations. The secrets. This stealing of birds,
first two dead ones from a museum, then a live one from a family. Is it possible Helen was under some kind of strain, maybe—or
was, you know,
suffering from some nervous condition? Because back in Rockland I heard rumors that her family was not exactly
normal…”