The Glory Hand (9 page)

Fallen angels were his father's, speciality. Todd brooded. Jedediah saw evil everywhere: on the radio, on television, in the movies and newspapers and magazines. Which was why he never left the isolation of Nantucket, and why he expected Todd to be a Nantucket 'lifer' too. His father had spent so many years seeking out evil, it was no surprise that he always found it. Before his father was through, even things that weren't evil, he
made
evil, Todd thought, with his hatred. Parson Stites had championed a God so vengeful and unforgiving that he had driven away his congregation, but the preacher hadn't seemed to mind - it had only proved to him that his worst vision of mankind was true.

Todd looked down at the church: his father had deliberately let it decay, as if to prove the power of the evil forces against him. The roof was pocked with broken shingles, the paint was peeling, and the once-gilded cross on the steeple had tarnished black.

The echo of a gunshot. Todd glimpsed the faint puff of smoke. Maybe it was because he had no more parishioners at which to level his wrath, that his father had taken up his shotgun, polishing and caring for it as lovingly as he used to pore over the doom prophecies of Jeremiah, or the mystical prayers of the Book of Revelation. The evil he had once hunted with his Bible he now stalked with his 12-gauge Browning.

A second echo. His father must have spotted a bird of prey. Each day he would search the skies for the ospreys with their six-foot wingspans and their hooked beaks, that hovered on the thermals, swooping down to seize fish in their talons. Both judge and executioner, his father had branded them evil, like so much else. As Todd wheeled in the air, a giant bird with red wings, he wondered if that was why he had chosen to soar like this - because he wanted to join the enemy, to become one of the wild, free ospreys that circled just out of firing range, taunting his father.

But today Todd hadn't come up here to escape. He had taken to the air to think, to decide whether or not what his father had told him last night was just another of his paranoid visions.

But what if it was true?

Parson Stites knew about evil, there was no denying that. And if there was even the slightest chance that he'd told Todd the truth . . .

How can you possibly believe him? Usually you laugh at his prophecies of doom. What made you listen so carefully last night?

Maybe, he thought, because last night his father hadn't launched into one of his usual tirades, but had spoken with calm certainty. Maybe because this time his father's eyes hadn't been wild with rage, but cool with reason, the way they were when they sighted down the barrel of his gun.

No, that wasn't why his father's words had troubled him so. It was because what his father had said had to do with Cassie Broyles.

In the sky, you didn't have to ponder even the toughest questions for long. The answers just came, as sure and swift as the wind. Already, Todd had decided what he had to do.

There was still enough time to hitch a ride up to Boston, where Cassie was meeting the bus for camp. At first, when she had written that she hoped he would see her off, he had sworn he wouldn't go - not after she had chosen to go to Casmaran instead of spending the summer on Nantucket with him. But after he had mentioned Casmaran to his father, and after his father's warning, he knew he had to go to Boston. To stop her.

A push forward on the control bar was all it took to descend towards the sand dunes behind the church where he had landed dozens of times before. But in his eagerness to get to Cassie, he was letting the dunes rush up towards him more rapidly than usual. (
Take it easy.)
He leaned back on the control bar to ease his descent.

And then ... it didn't make sense. Another wind was blowing at him, a tail wind, sweeping him towards the cliffs. The sudden fierce turbulence - it must be a sheer line, he thought, the clash of two weather fronts that could spawn a wind as fierce as a riptide.
Ride it out - You've got no choice.
He turned into the wind to reduce his speed, and looked for a safe landing place.

The winds on Nantucket - Todd thought he knew them all. But this one wasn't a sheer line, he realized now. This wasn't a wind he had sparred with before. This alien wind smelled different from the morning freshets that blew off the Sound, different from the chilly gusts that telegraphed a gale in the North Atlantic. The wind that howled in his ears blew hot, like the siroccos he had read about that came off the Sahara. He stared up at the sky: if the wind that was toying with him now was so strong, why weren't the clouds moving?

He leaned forward in the harness, pressed down on the control bar with all his weight, to force the glider into a steep dive towards the sand dunes. The air-speed gauge on the aluminium spar pushed 45 miles per hour, his maximum possible speed, but it wasn't enough to free him from the wind's grasp. The gale was sweeping him away, hurling him upwards into the air in a shift of altitude so painfully sudden that his nose started to bleed.

Then, with a sickening snap, the wings of the hang-glider crumpled, like a crushed umbrella. (
Impossible,
he told himself.
The aluminium spars were stress-tested to 6 g's.)

Todd wasn't soaring anymore. He was falling.

As he streaked to earth, the red wings streaming behind him like the tail of a meteor, he thought he could hear his father's voice resounding from the pulpit, echoing off the cobwebbed pews, speaking of his son as though he were already dead:
'The angels that fall are forever lost.'

In the dizzying acceleration downward, Todd could feel the droplets of blood oozing out of the tear ducts of his

c.h.-c
eyes, and yet he didn't black out. He could see he was hurtling towards the power station on Point Fear, racing towards a pylon, its girders upthrust like the stark fingers of a hand against the sky. Before he hit the black power cables that snaked to the tips of the steel fingers, a thought raced through him with its own electricity: had his father's vengeful wrath been wise and sane after all? Had he been right, all these years, that dark forces were gathering to dominate the earth?

And he feared for Cassie Broyles.

Then, all of a sudden, the warning that had been So terribly urgent for him to tell her seemed of no importance at all. The hang-glider rammed the high-tension lines, its aluminium spars glowing from the heat, igniting the fabric of the wings. Ten thousand volts of electricity jolted through Todd's body, jerking him like a marionette on a string, endowing his body with movements so lifelike that even the ospreys that wheeled nearby did not swoop in to tear at him with their hooked beaks. The hungry birds of prey would wait until the wind swept the smoldering corpse into the sea, before they devoured it.

Chapter 7

'Judging from the clientele,' Clay said as he scanned the group that had gathered at Gate 12 of the Boston Municipal Bus Terminal, 'Casmaran will probably have Gloria Van-derbilt sheets.'

Runt unloaded Cassie's new aluminium footlocker from the trunk of the limousine on the curb and heaved it beside a dozen others that were scuffed and dented, plastered with blue Casmaran decals, as if they had made the same trip for countless summers. Girls in blue shorts and white Casmaran T-shirts were helping each other throw their luggage into the hold of the bus, while others leaned out of the windows, shouting out to late arrivals.
They all know each other,
Cassie thought.
Old friends don't need to make new ones.
She zipped up her hooded sweatshirt to hide the fact that she was wearing a Joffrey Ballet T-shirt instead of the one they wore. She had been admitted to Casmaran too late to order a camp T-shirt of her own.

Clay read the anxiety on her face and put his arm around her. 'You'll meet some kids you like. I'm not worried about that. But the parents . . .' He frowned. 'That's another story.' He nodded towards the adults who stood in an uneasy line-up against a tile wall sprayed with graffiti. 'The president of Mobil . . .'He nodded towards a tall redhead with an expensive Nikon draped over her shoulder. 'And that used car salesman she's talking to is the Secretary of Defence . . .'

'Dad. . .'

'The blonde with the horn-rims . . . She's some kind of honcho in that think tank at MIT . . .'

'I get the general idea.' Cassie hadn't recognized all the faces of the campers' parents, but their uniform was familiar enough: the mothers in silk blouses and Cartier tank watches, the fathers in bright Lacoste shirts, Brooks Brothers slacks, and hand-sewn loafers. At least her father, in his faded Levi's and sweatshirt, hadn't knuckled under to their
'casual chic,'
she thought, even after ten years of wielding as much power as they had. 'Guess you'd better go over and shake a few hands,' she said.

He considered it for a moment, then turned his back on them. 'To hell with it.'

They walked across the main concourse where clusters of children in camp T-shirts
('Oiwassa,' 'Tegawitha,' 'Teela-Wooket')
were piling onto buses in a noisy exodus, as if it were a crime to be under sixteen and caught in Boston for the summer.

The humidity was stifling. Clay mopped his brow and led Cassie over to a bench where a sailor was asleep, a copy of
Hustler
over his face to shut out the glare of the fluorescent lights. 'Reminds me of the days when I used to take the ferry over from the island, then catch the bus up from the Cape. The 'Combat Zone' . . . that's what they
used
to call it in Boston . . . where the action was.' He glanced back at the Casmaran parents, who were chatting among themselves as if they were at a cocktail party, oblivious to their children. 'When do you think was the last time any of
them
set foot in a bus station?'

'When was the last time I did?'

'Where have I failed?'

'Face it. You raised me like a rich kid.'

'Correction. Your mother was the one with the money. When / went to camp they picked us up in an old army truck. Marine Basic would have been cushier. Talk about tacky. We had to sleep in tents that leaked when it rained and the cook never bothered to fish the maggots out of the stew.'

'PleaseV

'At twenty-five bucks a summer, the price was right.'

'Twenty-five dollars?' Cassie had seen the check he had mailed to Casmaran the week before, for fifteen hundred.

'My folks couldn't even afford that. Camp Cottonwood -we used to call it
Rottenv/ood
- let me in for free.'

'You almost sound like you wished I was going there.'

'No. That's not it, Cassie.' His direct blue eyes concealed nothing. 'I don't want you to go. Period.'
'Dad. . .'

i mean, it would be fine with me if you just decided to chuck it and come back to Washington. When I'm not busy we could take off, and . . .'

'You know you're always busy with the investigation.' Her answer was the same as it had been whenever he had broached the subject. 'I'm going. Mom would have wanted me to.'

He shook his head. 'One thing I
do
know - once a Cunningham woman's got her mind made up, it's better to just. . .'

'Stay down for the count.' She smiled a little sadly. It was what he had always said when he had yielded to her mother.

'Still,' he nodded in Runt's direction, 'I'd feel a hell of a lot better if you'd let me send him along.'

'No way! What do you think's going to happen to me?

Everyone up there is the kid of someone even richer and more
famous
than you are!'

He laughed. 'Thanks!'

'I'll blend in with the crowd. Really.'

'I suppose that could be a good thing.'

He walked over and slotted a quarter into a Coke machine. It took the coin, but denied him the bottle, and as if to express his anger at more than that petty theft, he banged the machine with his fist until finally the Coke clunked out.

He popped it open, and when Cassie refused his offer of a sip, he nursed it philosophically, staring at the campers and their parents. 'Christ, I can't believe I'm doing this. I mean, I would have put up with staying out on the island if that's what you had wanted. Now you get it into your head that you've got to be independent, and what does it mean? I won't see you all summer.' He downed the last of the Coke and made a face, as if it were cheap whiskey.

'Casmaran didn't do mother any harm.'

'No. She turned out pretty damn well.' He looked at the empty bottle before he threw it away, like the last of his objections. 'I won't argue with that. But Ann went there twenty-five years ago. If you get up there and find it's a slum . . .'

'You worry too much.' She was going to say,
You worry too much, like mother used to,
but stopped herself. The sadness she thought she had under control was starting to well up in her throat, and she didn't want to cry, not when she wanted him to think she had made the right decision.

The yellow school bus with a 'Casmaran' sign in the window began to rev up, and it hit Cassie with the engine's roar - she was leaving her father for a place where she wouldn't know a soul.