The Bad Place (57 page)

“Used to be. Been retired quite a while.”

Shortly after ten o’clock, Bobby parked at the curb in front of Lawrence Fogarty’s house. It was a quaint Spanish two-story with the style of French windows that had been featured in the study to which Bobby and Frank had twice traveled, and lights were on throughout the first floor. The glass in the many panes was beveled, at least on the front of the house, and the lamplight inside was warmly refracted by those cut edges. When Bobby and Julie got out of the car, he smelled wood-smoke, and saw a homey white curl rising from a chimney into the still, cool, humid pre-storm air. In the odd and vaguely purple, crepuscular glow of a nearby streetlamp, a few pink flowers were visible on the azaleas, but the bushes were not as laden with early blooms as those farther south in Orange County. An ancient tree with a multiple trunk and enormous branches loomed over more than half the house, so it seemed like a wonderfully cozy and sheltered haven in some Spanish version of a Hobbity fantasy world.

As they followed the front walkway, something dashed between two low Malibu lights, crossed their path, and startled Julie. It stopped on the lawn after passing them, and studied them with radiant green eyes.

“Just a cat,” Bobby said.

Usually he liked cats, but when he saw this one, he shivered.

It moved again, vanishing into shadows and shrubs at the side of the house.

What spooked him was not this particular creature, but the memory of the feline horde at the Pollard house, which had raced to attack him and Frank, in eerie silence initially but then with the shrill single-voiced squeal of a banshee regiment, and with a most uncatlike unanimity of purpose. On the prowl alone, swift and curious, this cat was quite ordinary, possessed only of the mystery and haughtiness common to every member of his species.

At the end of the walk, three front steps led up to an archway, through which they entered a small veranda.

Julie rang the bell, which was soft and musical, and when no one answered after half a minute, she rang it again.

As the second set of chimes faded, the stillness was disturbed by the rustle of feathered wings, as some night bird settled onto the veranda roof above them.

When Julie was about to reach for the bell push again, the porch light came on, and Bobby sensed they were being scrutinized through the security lens. After a moment the door opened, and Dr. Fogarty stood before them in an outfall of light from the hall behind him.

He looked the same as Bobby remembered him, and he recognized Bobby as well. “Come in,” he said, stepping aside to admit them. “I half expected you. Come in—not that any of you is welcome.”

“IN THE library,” Fogarty said, leading them back through the hall to a room on the left.

The library, where Frank had taken him during their travels, was the place Bobby had referred to as the study when he had described it to Julie. As the exterior of the house had a Hobbity-fantasy coziness in spite of its Spanish style, so this room seemed exactly the sort of place where one imagined that Tolkien, on many a long Oxford evening, had taken pen to paper to create the adventures of Frodo. That warm and welcoming space was gently illuminated by a brass floorlamp and a stained-glass table lamp that was either a genuine Tiffany or an excellent imitation. Books lined the walls under a deeply coffered ceiling, and a thick Chinese carpet—dark green and beige around the border, mostly pale green in the middle—graced a dark tongue-and-groove oak floor. The water-clear finish on the large mahogany desk had a deep luster; on the green felt blotter, the elements of a gold-plated, bone-handled desk set—including a letter opener, magnifying glass, and scissors—were lined up neatly behind a gold fountain pen in a square marble holder. The Queen Anne sofa was upholstered in a tapestry that perfectly complemented the carpet, and when Bobby turned to look at the wing-backed chair where he’d first seen Fogarty earlier in the day—he twitched with astonishment at the sight of Frank.

“Something’s happened to him,” Fogarty said, pointing to Frank. He was unaware of Bobby’s and Julie’s surprise, apparently operating under the assumption that they had come to his house specifically because they had known they would find Frank there.

Frank’s physical appearance had deteriorated since Bobby had last seen him at 5:26 that afternoon, in the office in Newport Beach. If his eyes had been sunken then, they were as deep as pits now; the dark rings around them had widened, too, and some of the blackness seemed to have leeched out of those bruises to impart a deathly gray tint to the rest of his face. His previous pallor had looked healthy by comparison.

The worst thing about him, however, was the blank expression with which he regarded them. No recognition lit his eyes; he seemed to be staring through them. His facial muscles were slack. His mouth hung open about an inch, as if he had started to speak a long time ago but had not yet managed to remember the first word of what he had wanted to say. At Cielo Vista Care Home, Bobby had seen only a few patients with faces as empty as this, but they had been among the most severely retarded, several steps down the ladder from Thomas.

“How long has he been here?” Bobby asked, moving toward Frank.

Julie seized his arm and held him back. “Don’t!”

“He arrived shortly before seven o’clock,” Fogarty said.

So Frank had traveled for nearly another hour and a half after he had returned Bobby to the office.

Fogarty said, “He’s been here over three hours, and I don’t know what the blazing hell I’m supposed to do with him. Now and then he comes around a little bit, looks at you when you talk to him, even responds more or less to what you say. Then sometimes he’s positively garrulous, runs on and on, won’t answer your questions but sure wants to talk
at
a person, you couldn’t shut him up with a two-by-four. He’s told me a lot about you, for instance, more than I care to know.” He frowned and shook his head. “You two may be crazy enough to get involved in this nightmare, but I’m not, and I resent being
dragged
into it.”

At first glance, the impression that Dr. Lawrence Fogarty made was that of a kindly grandfather who, in his day, had been the type of devoted and selfless physician who became revered by his community, known and beloved by one and all. He was still wearing the slippers, gray slacks, white shirt, and blue cardigan in which Bobby had first seen him earlier, and the image was completed by a pair of half-lens reading glasses, over which he regarded them. With his thick white hair, blue eyes, and gentle rounded features, he would have made a perfect Santa Claus if he had been fifty or sixty pounds heavier.

But on a second and closer look, his blue eyes were steely, not warm. His rounded features were too soft, and revealed not gentility so much as lack of character, as though they had been acquired through a lifetime of self-indulgence. His wide mouth would have given kindly old Doc Fogarty a winning smile, but its generous dimension served equally well to lend the look of a predator to the real Doc Fogarty.

“So Frank’s told you about us,” Bobby said. “But we don’t know anything about you, and I think we need to.”

Fogarty scowled. “Better that you don’t know about me. Better by far for
me.
Just get him out of here, take him away.”

“You want us to take Frank off your hands,” Julie said coldly, “then you’ve got to tell us who you are, how you fit into this, what you know about it.”

Meeting Julie’s gaze, then Bobby’s, the old man said, “He’s not been here in five years. Today, when he came with you, Dakota, I was shocked, I’d thought I was finished with him forever. And when he came back tonight ...”

Frank’s eyes had not focused, but he had cocked his head to one side. His mouth was still ajar like the door to a room from which the resident had fled in haste.

Regarding Frank sourly, Fogarty said, “I’ve never seen him like this, either. I wouldn’t want him on my hands if he was his old self, let alone when he’s half a vegetable. All right, all right, we’ll talk. But once we’ve talked, he’s your responsibility.”

Fogarty went behind the mahogany desk and sat in a chair that was upholstered in the same dark maroon leather as was the wingback in which Frank slumped.

Although their host had not offered them a seat, Bobby went to the sofa. Julie followed and slipped past him at the last moment, sitting on the end of the sofa closest to Frank. She favored Bobby with a look that essentially said,
You’re too impulsive, if he groans or sighs or blows a spit bubble, you’ll put a hand on him to comfort him, and then you’ll be gone in a wink to Hoboken or Hell, so keep your distance.

Removing his tortoiseshell reading glasses and putting them on the blotter, Fogarty squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, as if to banish a headache with an effort of will or collect his thoughts or both. Then he opened his eyes, blinked at them across the desk, and said, “I’m the doctor who delivered Roselle Pollard when she was born forty-six years ago, February of 1946. I’m also the doctor who delivered each of her kids—Frank, the twins, and James ... or Candy as he now prefers. Over the years I treated Frank for the usual childhood-adolescent illnesses, and I guess that’s why he thinks he can come to me now, when he’s in trouble. Well, he’s wrong. I’m no goddamned TV doctor who wants to be everybody’s confidant and Dutch uncle. I treated them, they paid me, and that should be the end of it. Fact is ... I only ever really treated Frank and his mother, because the girls and James never got sick, unless we’re talking mental illness, in which case they were sick at birth and never got well.”

Because Frank’s head was tilted, a thin, silver stream of drool slipped out of the right corner of his mouth and along his chin.

Julie said, “You evidently know about the powers her children have—”

“I didn’t know, really, until seven years ago, the day that Frank killed her. I was retired by then, but he came to me, told me more than I ever wanted to know, dragged me into this nightmare, wanted me to help. How could I help? How can anyone help? It’s none of my business anyway.”

“But why do they have these powers?” Julie said. “Do you have any clue, any theories?”

Fogarty laughed. It was a hard, sour laugh that would have dispelled any illusions Bobby had about him if those illusions had not already been dispelled two minutes after he’d met the man. “Oh, yes, I have theories, lots of information to support the theories too, some of it stuff you’ll wish you never heard. I’m not going to get myself involved in the mess, not me, but I can’t help now and then thinking about it. Who could? It’s a sick and twisted and
fascinating
mess. My theory is that it starts with Roselle’s father. Supposedly her father was some itinerant who knocked up her mother, but I always knew that was a lie. Her father was Yarnell Pollard, her mother’s brother. Roselle was a child of rape and incest.”

A look of distress must have crossed Bobby’s face or Julie’s, for Fogarty let out another bark of cold laughter, clearly amused by their sympathetic response.

The old physician said, “Oh, that’s nothing. That’s the least of it.”

THE TAILLESS MANX- Zitha by name—took up sentry duty in the concealment of an azalea shrub near the front door.

The old Spanish house had exterior window ledges, and the second cat—as black as midnight, and named Darkle—sprang to another one in search of the room to which the old man had taken the younger man and woman. Darkle put his nose to the glass. A set of interior shutters inhibited snooping, but the wide louvres were only half closed, and Darkle was able to see several cross-sections of the room by raising or lowering his head.

Hearing Frank’s name spoken, the cat stiffened, because Violet had stiffened in her bed high on Pacific Hill.

The old man was there, among the books, and the couple as well. When everyone sat down, Darkle had to lower his head to peer between another pair of tilted louvres. Then he saw that Frank was not only one of the subjects of their conversation but actually present in a high-backed chair that stood at just enough of an angle to the window to reveal part of his face, and one hand lying limply on the wide, maroon-leather arm.