Treasure Box (23 page)

"Chief of police in Mixinack now," said Quentin.

"I'm glad to hear it."

"Married and has several children."

Rowena nodded.

Ray Duncan was a bit nonplussed. "Who's this Mike Bolt guy? What are you talking about?"

"A childhood friend of mine," said Rowena.

"Oh, don't be so modest," said Quentin. "She enthralled him years ago. In the kitchen of her mother's house, as I heard the story."

"What do you want," Rowena whispered fiercely.

"Don't be coy," said Quentin. "I'm not here because of what
I
want. I'm not the one who's been playing games, Rowena. Quite the contrary. So drop the pretense and tell me what you want so we can decide what to do about it."

Rowena and Ray looked at each other. Whatever passed between them, it did not make them more cooperative.

"Sir," said Ray, "you seem to know more about us than we're comfortable with, but I assure you that we have no idea who you are."

He seemed so honest that for a moment Quentin wondered if perhaps he
had
been fooling himself. But Mike Bolt had seen the writing on the signs, and on the door back in the Laurent house. And Madeleine had disappeared, leaving no foot-prints. It was real, it had happened, Mrs. Tyler admitted it, and Rowena
was
a witch.

"I know more than you think," said Quentin. "I know that Rowena looked into her mother's mind many years ago and saw a memory of what seemed to be a terrible crime. And for all I know, it
was
a crime, a monstrous, indecent act. The murder of Rowena's brother, Paul, when he wasn't yet two years old."

Rowena covered her face with her hands.

"Ro, is this true?" Ray seemed genuinely appalled.

"Your wife, Mr. Duncan, is quite aware that her mother believed that it wasn't Paul she was killing, but rather something that she calls 'the beast.' It's Mrs. Tyler's belief that this creature took possession of her young son's body, and from then on her true son was already gone and could never be recovered. All that was left was for her to kill the beast. But not quite kill it. She kept it imprisoned somehow in a box that is kept in the parlor of the family mansion on the Hudson. Am I getting this right, Rowena?"

Her face still buried in her hands, Rowena nodded.

"But for some reason, Mr. Duncan, Rowena has decided she wants that box open."

Rowena looked up, startled. "Oh, no. Oh, please, no."

Ray was alarmed as well. "What is it, Ro?"

Rowena leapt to her feet and rushed to the foot of the stairs. Then, changing her mind, she hurried back to her chair and sat down, wringing the tail of her shirt. "It's none of your business," said Rowena. "Nor Mother's!"

"Oh, that would be my opinion, too, if you hadn't drawn me into it with that whole charade that's been ruining my life for the past year."

"Charade?" asked Ray.

"Why don't
you
tell him, Rowena? He might accept it better coming from you."

Rowena looked confused, but then apparently made up her mind. "You tell it, Mr. Fears. Tell us both."

"Madeleine," said Quentin. "My wife. The succubus that you created, Rowena. Are you honestly telling me that your husband has no idea that you're a witch?"

Ray rose to his feet and started for the kitchen. "I'm calling the police."

"Stop, Ray," said Rowena.

"The man's insane, Ro."

"No, we have to hear him out," she said. "We have to find out what's been going on."

Ray leaned against the wall, clearly furious at having been vetoed by his wife.

"You believe your wife Madeleine is a succubus created by a witch, Mr. Fears?" asked Rowena.

"She took me to the house you grew up in. I was made to believe that it was occupied. I met several of your dead relatives, and a couple not so dead. Your mother was there, in spirit if not in body. And your brother Paul, though of course Madeleine called him 'Uncle Paul.' Just as she called Mrs. Tyler 'Grandmother.' " And then Quentin stopped. Because, while his words clearly caused Rowena great pain, it was just as clear that she was hearing of all this for the first time. And now it finally dawned on Quentin that if Madeleine had been created by Rowena, why wouldn't Rowena have made her a woman of her own age? She was more or less the same age as Quentin. And Rowena could easily have supplied all the memories needed to make Madeleine completely convincing as a child of the sixties and seventies, like Quentin.

Instead Madeleine had been ignorant of many things she should have known. She covered it by pretending to have had a sheltered childhood, but in fact Madeleine could not have been the creation of a grown woman. Especially not in the parlor, where she had become a petulant, spoiled brat, acting like a child of... ten.

"Your daughter," Quentin said softly. "Of course she's also... one of you."

"A witch," said Rowena miserably. "Ray, go wake up Roz."

"Ro, you know how she hates us to waken her from a nap."

"What's she doing?" Quentin asked. "Flying around spying on people?"

"She doesn't understand how dangerous it all is," said Rowena.

Ray was at the foot of the stairs. "What are you talking about?"

"Please, Ray. Go get her."

Ray sighed and trotted on up the stairs.

Rowena faced Quentin and spoke earnestly. "My daughter is a remarkable girl, Mr. Fears. Very talented and... strong. Maybe if I had let my mother teach me, I could have controlled her the way my mother was able to control me during my child-hood. A child with such powers, such knowledge—it takes extraordinary care to keep them from running amok. But I couldn't trust my mother on anything, not after what she did to Paul."

"You never knew Paul."

"Yes I did," said Rowena. "He came to me every day as I was growing up."

Quentin knew the truth at once. "That wasn't Paul, Rowena. That was the beast."

She shook her head, then burst into tears. "I don't know," she said. "I just knew that I didn't want Mother to... if she was the kind of woman who killed disobedient children, then how could I bring my daughter under her care? I haven't been able to control Roz for years now. I'm afraid sometimes that she's controlling
me
. She studies things, figures them out, and... whole days disappear and I don't know what happened. I know she rules her father. He's completely enthralled. When I did that to Mike, I had no idea, I didn't know what I was doing. I've left him alone ever since—"

"Then who's been sending him to try to murder your mother?"

Rowena's hand flew to her mouth. "Oh, no. No, she couldn't."

"Yes I could, Mother," said a petulant child's voice from the stairs.

A young girl slowly came down the stairs, her hair looking a bit slept-in, but otherwise neat as a pin. Quentin could imagine how she had looked during her nap—arms at her sides in perfect symmetry, nothing moving, the way Mrs. Tyler lay while her spirit was off keeping watch or whatever it was she did with it. Rewriting traffic signs, for instance.

Then the girl's face became visible as she finally got to a low enough step, and Quentin realized why Mr. and Mrs. Duncan had looked so familiar. He had seen all three of them before. In the Giant food store on Elden Street, right before his first hallucination of Lizzy.

"That's right, Quentin," said Roz. "You didn't like me, as I recall."

"I thought you were an insufferable spoiled brat."

Roz gave her best cutey-pie grin. "Well, I showed
you
, didn't I?"

"Showed me I was right."

"Showed you what real power is!" Her smile turned vicious. "You had your treasure of a sister in your mind. Comparing her to
me
. So I made you see her. Drove you crazy with it."

Quentin glanced at Rowena, sitting in her chair, and Ray Duncan, who had followed his daughter down the stairs and was now sitting on the couch. How were they taking this?

They both sat staring off into space.

"I shut them down," said Roz. "There's no reason for them to know all this."

"You created Madeleine just to torture me for daring to think what's obvious to everyone who sees you?"

"No, stupid. I showed you your sister because of that. But then, when you were sitting there watching the vision I made for you, what should happen but she turns up!"

"Who?"

"Lizzy," said Roz. "Your dead sister. Her spirit. Well, I wasn't calling her. She didn't even notice me. It was you who called her. What a joke on me! You had some of the power! Who would have guessed it?"

"Nothing like what you can do."

"Yeah, well, I'm kind of remarkable. The way Uncle Paul was. Only Mother didn't kill me the way Grandmother killed her precious baby boy. That's a nice thing to find in the family closet."

"You only got your mother's memory of it, with all her misunderstandings."

"I would have gotten Grandmother's memories directly, but I knew how strong the old lady is. She and Mother were battling it out constantly. That's how I learned half of what I know, watching their struggles to keep each other from watching them. It was easy to take control of Mother—she was completely off her guard. And Father, of course, is just a human."

"And therefore not worth considering."

"I need him for a phone call now and then."

"You're telling me you just improvised all this?"

"Come on, why not?" said Roz. "You were stronger than most humans. I thought about that for a few minutes and I realized that maybe I could use you to open the treasure box for me."

"Is that what your mother calls it?"

"Mother has no idea what it really is or how to use it. Power beyond belief. Grandmother filled her with horror stories about it, but that's because neither of them has a spark of creativity. Me, I think of all kinds of things that no one has ever thought of before. Least of all the dragon. It can be killed, which only sets it free to possess somebody else. It can also be captured, which is what Grandmother did. But I've done research neither of them thought of doing. There
are
books, if you know how to sort the nonsense from the truth. I'm only eleven, but I'm—how to say it mildly?—the school system calls me 'gifted.' "

Quentin wanted to smack that smug little mouth.

"So much for your being a nonviolent kind of guy, right, Quentin?"

He also hated the way she called him by his first name.

"What would be better?" she asked. "Should I call you 'Tin'?"

In that instant, she stopped being a little girl. She was transformed into Madeleine. Quentin's heart leapt in spite of all he knew.

And then she was Madeleine naked, prancing around the room like a stripper in some cheap movie.

He had done it before; he could do it now. He forced himself to know that she wasn't real.

She didn't go away.

"It's harder to get rid of me," said Madeleine, sitting in Ray's lap and twirling his hair, "when there's a real person inside the shell."

Harder but not impossible. Quentin remembered the bratty little girl and after a shimmering moment there she was, sitting on her father's lap, twirling his hair.

"You're a terrible lover, you know, Quentin. Any woman who ever sleeps with you is going to have to fake every orgasm."

It was obscene hearing language like that from a child.

"Your fault, Quentin," she said. "I wasn't interested in any of that stuff till
you
started pawing at Madeleine that night in your living room. It was obvious I was blowing it, so I had to read up and spy on Mom and Dad and figure out what this sex crap was all about. I finally got it, though, didn't I? Made all your fantasies come true, didn't I?"

Quentin looked away from her in shame.

"Oh, come on, here you are, you wanted to face me, didn't you? So face me. Be a man. Buck up."

"You don't want me to be a man," said Quentin. "You want me to be a tool."

"But we
did
have fun, didn't we? Playing with politics like we did. We made a great pair, spending your money to change the face of American politics. Whoever rules America rules the world. If you'd had the stomach for it, I might have forgotten all about the treasure box and gone for the big game. Not the '96 elections, but by the year two thousand we would have been ready. Both candidates for president would have belonged to us. But you just couldn't do it. Couldn't follow through. I knew from then on that you'd be nothing but trouble. So... plan B."

"The treasure box."

"It was really plan A all along, I knew that," said Roz. "I knew you'd wimp out because that's the way you are, soft at the core, like Mother. You just don't have the heart to do anything powerful. Even keeping her like this—I couldn't do it if she had any spine at all. She's a witch! She could shuck off my control if she wanted to. If she even knew I was doing it. But she keeps thinking that she loves me, and that makes it easy to control her. The way I could control you as long as you loved Madeleine."

"But you couldn't get me to open the box."

"That was Grandmother. She didn't know it was me, of course, because I cover everything I do with Mother's spirit. Just some of it, to serve as my mask."

"So it's you controlling Mike Bolt. Through your mother. And you constantly blocking Mrs. Tyler from seeing what you're doing."

"Easy easy easy."

"But you can't do everything at once."

"I don't have to. I just follow the people who matter. The people who amount to anything."

"You're afraid, though," said Quentin. "Or you wouldn't be trying to kill your grandmother."

"Of course I'm afraid, bonehead. This is powerful stuff we're dealing with. This dragon, it's no joke! And Grandmother can interfere. I want her out of the way. She's overstayed her welcome by about a decade."

"By coincidence, your lifetime."

"She's a baby-killer, Quentin. She deserves to die." Roz giggled. "Come on, get in the spirit of this."

Quentin shook his head. "I came here thinking that maybe we could do business. Maybe we could work out a way for me to get you what you want and have done with it. But no, I don't think so."

"I'm not worthy?" she said with mock regret.