Jericho's Fall (14 page)

“I think I understand him better.” A pause. “I think I understand all of you better.”

And the odd part was, she really did. She saw Jericho for the first time not as a superstar but as a striver, determined to make his mark in the world in order to prove his mettle to a family that had all but disowned him. The children, all so very different, shared this quality, too: that hardheaded determination to move forward, lest the world think they were living off their family after all. Beck had seen Pamela glittering on television at the Academy Awards. Sean jetted around the world, much as his father had done, even if he was handing out grants to build green factories. And Audrey—well, Audrey was special, wasn’t she? But she, too, after a stint at following in her father’s footsteps, had quit the Agency, left the husband who wanted children, and divested herself of any connection to the family money, doing everything she could to be the opposite of the woman she had been—

Beck went very still. For a moment she almost had it. What Jericho had wanted her to know. Why Audrey left the family business. It was so close, near the surface of her mind, scratching to get through—

“Are you there?” said Pamela. She had put down the cue and was playing with her pearls. “Hello? Are you catatonic, or just remembering the good old days with my dad?”

“Sorry.” Fighting through the cobwebs. She had been so close. “I’m sorry, Pamela. For everything. I mean that.”

“Good for you.”

As Beck bit back a retort, her cell phone rang.

Pamela pointed. “What carrier is that? Verizon or something? I’d love to have a network that can reach up here. Mine isn’t even on.”

Rebecca did not take the phone off her belt. “There’s something wrong with it.”

“You’re not answering? How can you not answer? It might be important.” Truth dawned in the pale eyes. “You’re still hearing ghosts, aren’t you? You’re scared to answer the phone.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Pamela laughed, but awkwardly. “Well, maybe it’s not so bad to be scared.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Can’t you feel it?” She was hugging herself. “Something’s getting ready to happen.”

“Something like what?”

“I don’t know.” The golden eyes seared her. “But it’s nothing good. I’ll tell you that.”

(ii)

“My father’s not all there,” said Pamela. “Well, that’s obvious. He sits up in that room all day, plotting and plotting. I wish he’d get out of the house.” She looked at Beck. “Oh, he can. He’s ambulatory. The doctors think getting out a bit would be good for him. I’ve tried to take him to Bethel, or even Vail, but he won’t go. Maybe you can persuade him. He—likes you.” She nibbled her lip, wrestling with a fugitive emotion. “He likes you,” she said again.

More than me
. A child could have read the body language.

“I’ll try,” said Beck.

Pamela’s shoulders drooped. She shook her head, contriving to convey by these signs that she disapproved of what she was about to do. “Dad has made changes in the house since you…lived here. He worries a lot. You know that. Upstairs, there’s all kinds of security devices. You haven’t seen them all. Well, down here, we have more. This is where Dad always says we’re supposed to make our last stand—when the bad guys come. You know. When Jericho falls.”

Beck’s attention tautened. “Jericho falls?”

“It’s an expression he uses sometimes. You must have heard it. Anyway, that’s what this—this tour is all about. What to do when Jericho
falls. So. Look around, Rebecca. Other people build panic rooms. Dad builds traps. Seriously. That fits his personality, doesn’t it? He’s not a hider, he’s a counterpuncher. You come after him, he comes after you. The idea is, you get the bad guys to chase you down here, and then you spring these traps on them, and— Oh, shit, Rebecca, I can’t believe I’m telling you this. It’s all so silly.” Nevertheless, good soldier that she was, Pamela marched across the basement. “Here. Under the bar. You push these buttons—see?—all three at the same time. And—watch.”

Pamela pressed.

A gate came clattering out of the wall, splitting the basement in two. The pool table was on the far side of the new barrier. Beck felt a familiar itch around her shoulders, the same sensation that plagued her in elevators, for she suffered, ever so slightly, from claustrophobia.

“Aren’t we shutting ourselves in?”

“If you were in the kitchen, you’d see there’s another gate there. So the bad guys are trapped. If you get trapped by accident, there’s a set of buttons, just like this one, over by the television. You press them in order—three, four, nine, one—easy to remember, the year Dad was born, but in reverse—like that. And the gate opens again. Okay?”

She had known Jericho was mad; until this moment, she had not appreciated how mad. No wonder there was no money left. “Yes, Pamela, I get it, but don’t you think—”

“Good. Follow me.” Striding down the hall away from the playroom, into the section of basement obviously built since Beck’s residency. She pointed. “Utility room. Furnace, water heater, water-softening system, pump system for the well.” Another room. “Storage. Three rooms. They’re all full of boxes.” Opening each door in turn to show her. “But in this one”—the second one along—“there’s three more buttons. See? We press them all at once, and—”

And another gate clattered, this time down from the ceiling, sealing the hallway. Only this time the mesh was between Pamela and Beck.

The lecture continued. “Again, there’s another gate on the other side. If you turn around, you’ll see it. The idea is, if somebody chases you down here, you run into this storeroom and press the buttons, and the bad guys wind up caught in the hall.”

“Which button releases the poison gas?”

A wicked grin. “Nervous?”

“What?”

“You’re kind of caged in, aren’t you?”

Beck drew in a breath. “Let me out, Pamela.”

“Why?”

“Because this is silly.”

But Pamela seemed to think it was fun. She walked back and forth on her side of the bars. “Unnerving, isn’t it? Being caged up like that?” She laughed. “I should leave you here. Teach you a lesson.”

Beck said nothing. She twisted around, searching for another exit, saw none. Of course not. Jericho would be thorough in his madness.

“That’s your problem, Rebecca. You’re spoiled. You don’t have people setting limits on you. Well, I just set one.”

“You bitch—”

“Hey, don’t be like that. I’m just giving you a taste of your own medicine.”

“My own medicine? What did I ever do to you, Pamela?”

“Not to me. To Dad.” Waving a hand. “Look around, Rebecca. Look where he’s living. This was a great man. Presidents listened to him. Prime Ministers. Everybody. He ended civil wars. He caught terrorists. And look where he ended up. Look who he threw it all away for.”

Beck had her hands on the bars. To her annoyance, her palms were sweating. She hated confinement of any kind. If she was ever imprisoned, she thought she might last an hour before hanging herself. “Let me out of here, Pamela. Come on.”

“I wanted you to see what it’s like for him.” Her eyes were moist. “Living in prison, when the whole world was his playground.”

But she punched in the code anyway, and the gate rattled open.

“I think we need a boxing ring,” said Rebecca, much relieved.

“Follow me.” At first Beck thought Pamela meant to take this seriously. Instead, she led her to the back of the storeroom, and pointed to a metal door, with a digital combination lock. “Stairs.”

“Don’t you ever do that again.”

“Will you please pay attention? The stairs lead to the garage.”

“The garage that’s all sealed off with padlocks and so on.”

“That’s right. That’s the escape hatch, so to speak. You close the gates to stop the bad guys, and you run for the garage.”

“What do you do when you get there and the bad guys are waiting outside?”

Pamela pressed a series of numbers and then pulled the door open. “Let’s go.”

They did. The stairs were narrow, merely functional. They were also, like so much of Jericho’s world, unlighted and shadowy. At the top was another reinforced door. Pamela punched in the same combination.

Nothing happened. The door would not budge.

She tried again, with no better result.

“Dad must have changed the combination,” she said.

“We should ask him.”

“You ask him.” Pamela had already brushed past her, heading down to the basement again. “He likes you.”

“But what if we need to go up there?” Beck demanded, hurrying to catch up. “What if somebody breaks in?”

Pamela refused to dignify this with a response. “Last part of the tour.” They were back in the storeroom. She opened a metal cabinet. It was empty, but its purpose was obvious. “Jericho had guns in here, Rebecca. Lots of them. All kinds, with enough ammunition to fight a war.”

“What happened to them?”

“Audrey took them.”

“Audrey?”

Pamela seemed amused. Her sister, she explained, had collected all of Jericho’s guns, from all over the house, shortly after her arrival, and disposed of them in town. “She’s against all forms of violence. She says guns are immoral and un-Christian.”

Beck glanced at the gate across the hallway and marveled at the ease with which the mad old man’s cleverness had been subverted. “Well, let’s hope all forms of violence feel the same way.”

CHAPTER 13
The Request

(i)

This time, lunch was pasta, drenched with sauce and cheese. Colorado was the healthiest state in the Union, but Audrey seemed determined to fatten them up. Jacqueline, firmly unslim, was the same way, admonishing her daughter constantly that men preferred women with a little meat on their bones. At home, Beck fed Nina a steady diet of fish, chicken, tofu, and salad. Nina liked visiting Grandma because she got hot dogs. Or so she told her mother in a breathless summary of the morning’s trip to the beach.

“How did things go with the lawyers?” asked Beck.

Audrey’s mouth was full. “Great,” said Pamela, who was in the basement distracting Rebecca throughout the meeting. “It was really important to Dad that he finish getting the will rewritten.” Before he died, she meant. “Well, he did, and it’s on the way to Denver.”

“Great,” said Beck, still puzzled by Jericho’s weird deception.

“It’s good for Dad,” said Audrey. “Talking to people.” She swigged heavily at her Coca-Cola. “Until a week or so ago—two weeks, maybe—he was out walking every morning. And when he was getting all that crazy work done on the house? The roof, the alarm, the well, everything? He’d always be talking to the men, even if he had to trundle his oxygen cart around. It’s hard for him, being stuck in that room.”

“He came downstairs last night,” Beck pointed out.

“And look how it wore him out,” said Pamela, contradicting her
own earlier advice. She turned to her sister, in effect shutting Rebecca out. “I forgot to tell you. I talked to Sean again last night. No way he’s changing his decision. I don’t understand how his mind works.” Another Jericho-ism. “I really don’t. His own father lying on his deathbed, and he can’t be bothered.”

Audrey leaped to her brother’s defense. “He has to go to Guinea. They’re opening that demonstration project on clean bauxite mining—”

“There are fifty program officers at the foundation. One of them can go.”

“I don’t know what you’re so upset about. Aunt Maggie isn’t coming, either, and you’re not mad at her.”

“She was here last week.”

“For all of two hours.”

The sisters argued back and forth. Tuning them out, Beck wondered at Audrey’s story. Jericho, walking the grounds, talking to the men who came to fix the roof and the alarm and whatever else, and then, suddenly, taking this turn for the worse. Was Audrey exaggerating? Would her father really have spent the last measure of his strength on—

Well, on whatever it was he was doing when he had his house practically rebuilt over a period of three or four months. Was it just his paranoia manifesting itself in an inflexible certainty that there were bugs beneath the shingles, and that even the alarm company must be spying on him? Or was there, as so often, a secret subtlety to Jericho’s words and actions? She remembered the obsessive care with which he plotted her initial seduction fifteen years ago, right down to the caterer’s van parked craftily in the driveway, even though Beck turned out to be the only guest. His madness had not stripped away his ability to weave conspiracies. Audrey had told her when she arrived Sunday night that her father was plotting, and Rebecca believed it, especially after the business with the will. Phil Agadakos had told her last night exactly what Jericho was plotting, but the more she thought about Dak’s story, the more it seemed to her full of holes.

She perked up, and turned to Audrey. “What did you just say?”

“I said I found an overdue library book.” Swirling butter over her bread. “Dad was supposed to take it back months ago.”

“Why would he go to the library?” Beck wondered aloud.

Pamela’s voice was silkily derisive. “Maybe he likes to read. You might have noticed a book or two around the place.”

“That’s my point,” said Beck, quite undeflected. “Your Dad’s a millionaire. He can buy any book he wants and get it delivered tomorrow. Why go to the library?”

“Maybe he’s just frugal,” Pamela began, and then stopped, confusion on her face, because the man she had been describing down in the basement was anything but. “Maybe it was an excuse to get out,” she said, rallying. “Not everybody sits home all day long if they don’t have to.”

“I’ll take it back,” said Beck.

“You’ll what?”

“The library book. I’d love to see the town library. I’ll drive down after lunch and return it.”

“That’s great,” said Audrey. “I have to run over to the Wal-Mart on Route 24. I’ll drop you.”

While Beck tried to think of a way out of this trap, Pamela resumed her assault. “What are you up to, Rebecca?”

“Up to?”

“I told you. You have all the same mannerisms as Dad does. I can tell when he’s plotting something; I can tell when you are. The only question is if you’re plotting with him or against him.” She waggled a finger. “I don’t know what it is with you. You’re acting like Dad’s whole illness is some mystery you should be solving. You should be tiptoeing around and showing some respect. But you just keep running off and having secret meetings. There’s nothing going on, Rebecca. Dad’s just dying. Shit happens.”