Voices in the Wardrobe (29 page)

She nodded. It's horrible to have to make choices between those you love.

The first in line had just entered the broom closet when the light went out behind them. They were stumbling, reaching for each other as they moved around the janitors' cart and straggled out into the hall, making more noise than they wanted to as they knocked various items off onto the floor on the way.

Charlie blinked sticky contacts around, trying to focus on the dimmer shadow that was the front glass doors to outside and the parking lot somewhere at the end of the rainbow when she realized she'd lost touch with whoever was in front of her and reached back for whoever was behind. Something slid around her waist and yanked her out of the line, a hand clapped so tight over her mouth that it jerked her head back so she lost what little sight she'd had of her companions and she was lifted back into deeper shadow, unable to call out or even to swallow.

She barely felt the prick in her arm before a spreading weakness enveloped her.

Thirty-Eight

It was like sirens, humming a beautiful beckoning melody, lured Charlie from a sleep so deep it left her euphoric. Every cell of her body not only felt no pain but flowed, refreshed, to consciousness—almost like an orgasm and vaguely similar, but not as exhausting. Each intake of breath felt marvelous, renewing.

“Need help with depression? We all do sometimes. Why be miserable or just plain down when you don't have to?” a male voice, smooth as good scotch and as comforting, enticed over the sirens' background purring. “Studies show that Euphoria Four, just out of testing and soon to hit pharmacy shelves near you, makes all other mood medication pale in comparison.” The sirens sighed in three-part harmony and in minor key, made you want to stretch like a cat. Charlie sighed too, too content and cozy to open her eyes.

“Tell your doctor about this amazing relief for the sadness-afflicted. Tell your doctor it might be right for you. Not suitable for children, pregnant or nursing women, adults with addictions or mental illness, anyone under treatment for cancer or diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, or people over eighty-five. Can cause loss of bladder control, heart palpitations, certain sexual side effects and dry mouth.”

Then an unmistakable sound forced Charlie to open her eyes and her adrenalin to surge—Margaret Mildred Stutzman's giggle, unmistakable, an epiphany that brought on headache, dizziness, pounding heartbeat, a real urge to pee, and dry mouth.

“Maggie!” She sat up in a deep, dizzy darkness, a reeling world she couldn't see, a cramping nausea. “Maggie, help me.”

A rough hand pushed her back onto a soft surface that warped and buckled and tried to buck her off. There was nothing in her stomach but it tried to come up anyway.

“How do you like being on the other end of the power struggle this time and in a big way, big-deal Hollywood agent?” Jerry Parks said.

“Where's Maggie?”

“You'll be with her soon enough. First I just thought you'd like to know you murdered Dr. Grant Howard, Charlie. Know how? You backed up that no-talent Brodie Caulfield's pitch, that's how. I didn't believe it until you said it was true. I asked Howard and he said he didn't read the submissions but brought people like me and hotshots like you together. Well, you see where that got him. It got him dead. And you were nice enough to bring your friend Maggie to the Islandia and good old Dashiell was good enough to bring a bag of drugs with her name on them and then bring her back here. We'd decided to pin everything on Dashiell, but your friend Maggie offered herself up for sacrifice. You both have been a great help from the beginning.”

“I heard Maggie. She's here.”

“You smartass types like to dump on little people's dreams. Well, you don't have that right. This time, this little guy's gonna bring to an end all of your dreams.” He pulled at Charlie's clothes. “All I wanted was time and money enough to write screenplays and be a father to my kid. But no, I wasn't good enough for big-deal Dr. Judy, creepy old hag. She had so much money, she couldn't have spent it all in a hundred years. But then she didn't get the chance, did she?”

“Caroline? Caroline, where are you? You need help, darling. Let me help you,” Warren VanZant's soothing voice crooned like the sirens, hummed.

Charlie mustered the strength to knee Parks as he pulled at her underwear, but apparently didn't get him in the right socket.

“Your agent, Ridgeway, thought she had the goods on me, all the evidence that I had no rights to my daughter's money. Well, I got the goods on Dr. Judith Judd and her estate and double dealings and I'm going to write an exposé that will topple her empire and expose the pharmaceutical industry and the IRS and who knows what all? Got it all stashed somewhere safe. Going to make your Kenneth Cooper look like an amateur.”

“Charlie.” Mitch's voice. “We're here, do you have your cell? Let us know where you are.”

“You don't have your cell, Charlie, I do. Just relax and enjoy the last chance you'll have to enjoy anything. You're soon going to join your friends but first I'm going to make you happier than you'll ever be again. What difference does it make if you're dead?”

An explosion. No, a gunshot. This one very close. Then silence. Then the lights. Charlie couldn't see Maggie anywhere. But she could see Jerry Parks. He was the one who was dead. She was half off the bed, he was on the floor next to it. She threw up spit and stomach juices on his face or what was left of it.

“Well, here we are full circle,” Caroline VanZant's voice came, toneless, flat.

Charlie didn't know if the woman was on the PA or in the room. She did know the bereaved mother was dangerous. “Caroline, help me find Maggie and Keegan. We have to get out of here. The whole place is going to blow up and burn.”

“Get off that bed and put on your clothes. You're disgusting.”

Charlie rolled over to find herself in the Victorian room with the dippy chandelier. Caroline VanZant stood swaying in the warped doorway, her rifle leveled at Charlie. How could she level it when she was swaying? Charlie tried to grab a bed post and pull herself up. “No, really. It's a meth lab and they do that—blow up, I mean. We gotta hurry and find Maggie and Keegan.”

The crazed part of Charlie's mind saw the whole room tilt as she fell off the bed again, this time trying to crawl past Jerry Parks' ruined head to get to the stool in the bathroom, fighting the excruciating cramping in her body's uncentered center. The partially sane side hoped Caroline wouldn't shoot her and tried to figure out how many bullets were in that rifle and if there was a refill. The next thing she knew, she was on the floor of the shower, water beating over her and lavender shower gel suds everywhere.

Then skewered images of the tile and shower door and the long mirror in its frame with the trunnions and then the voice in the wardrobe and Jerry Parks' blood and tissue and yuck all over the floor. He didn't say anything but the wardrobe said, “Euphoria Four, on your druggist's shelves this month. Don't wait for a busy doctor to discover it. You be the first to tell the doctor about it and he or she will be the first to thank you.” Caroline took her out into the hall. It tilted.

“Charlie, where are you? Answer me.” Mitch on the PA.

“I'm here. Wherever here is.”

“Caroline, please,” Warren VanZant's voice next over the eerie-sounding sound system.

Charlie's hair dripped onto the lush terrycloth robe and the soft slip-ons were too big for her feet again. She smelled like lavender shower gel. She felt a little better.

“Don't listen to the voices.” Caroline pulled Charlie along by the elbow. “I'm taking you to your Maggie. She's back where she started.”

Maggie floated in the second eddy pool from the left, wrapped again in seaweed. But Caroline yanked Charlie on by and into the foliage behind it, through a door in the wall and into the space inside it. “I was going to use her to entice you out of hiding but now I don't have to. You must be very quiet. I have one bullet left. It is for the one who killed my son and tried to kill your Maggie and Luella too. Don't make me waste it on you or your friends, Charlie Greene. You wouldn't want that, would you?”

Charlie didn't have time to answer—her brain worked way slow and the door that opened in front of her way fast. Here was the back door to the control room she'd known must exist. Mitch pleaded into a microphone for Charlie to answer him, Kenny and Sue Rippon tried to do CPR on Ruth Ann Singer, no longer very snappy, and Warren VanZant turned to face his wife. His skin turned too, turned as gray as his eyebrows and hair fringe.

Everyone froze but Kenny who rose slowly to his feet.

“Back on your knees, Mr. Cooper, or your agent is a dead woman. Everyone be very very very still. I want only the one man left who killed my son. The other is dead already.”

“Caroline, listen to me, please. I can explain about Dashiell.”

“Miss Ridgeway already has.”

Charlie felt like an accordion deflating as she waffled to the floor to join Ruth Ann and Caroline VanZant used her last bullet.

“Maggie's in the eddy pool,” Charlie insisted as Kenny tried to make her lie still on the floor of the auditorium while Caroline slouched exhausted in a front row seat and Mitch tried to contact the outside world on his cell. Sue Rippon cuddled Ruth Ann and rocked her in her arms.

“The medics say they've been ordered not to come in. They're waiting for word from higher up. Can we get the wounded to the gate?” Mitch said. “Looks like we should gather up the living and make a run for it.”

Dr. Judy still entranced silently on the screen.

“Eddy pool,” Charlie insisted and struggled out from under Kenny Cowper. “Must get Maggie too. Can't leave her. Whole place's gonna blow up in an earthquake.”

“Christ, Cowper, can't you do anything right,” Mitch said behind her and she left the clumsy slippers in the auditorium for Kenny to trip over and ran barefoot into the blood-spattered control room while Kenny informed Mitch where he could go and the sooner the better.

Charlie was in the dark space inside the walls before he caught up with her and then he snagged the robe instead. She ran out of it. It was dark in here and he had a little trouble finding her and she had a lot of it finding the door out to the deck with the pools. He pleaded with her the whole time, swearing even. He insisted there was no door and they had no time to look for it if there was.

Charlie found it anyway and kicked it open, struggling against him and slipping out of his grasp because too much shower gel had left her slimy and because he was, when all was said and done, a gentleman by nature, and maybe because she was his agent. Agents aren't nearly as powerful as writers think, but the delusion is necessary for much-battered egos.

Hey, welcome back to some sanity, babe, her inner voice kicked in. I thought you were a goner there.

“Charlie, you are sick, trust me. I don't want to hurt you but I can't let you run around demented—everything will be okay.”

Maggie was no longer stretched out in the second eddy pool on the left. She sort of sat and sort of leaned on its edge trying to unwrap stiff seaweed.

Thirty-Nine

Kenny couldn't believe Maggie was alive. He slid the terrycloth robe over Charlie's nakedness and they both helped Maggie out of the seaweed and still ended up with a naked woman. So Charlie put the robe around her best friend and Kenny took off his shirt to put it over Charlie. It came to her knees. “Isn't it weird how we worry about relative incidentals at times like these?”

Charlie was hugging Maggie and crying when Kenny's cell beckoned.

“Hilsten says to sneak out to the front gate fast. Medics in the parking lot say there's an imminent invasion and they've been ordered off the site. Charlie, you know the layout better than I do. He says don't go back to the auditorium. He and Sue have the remaining survivors almost to the gate. How do we get there from here fast?”

Maggie was still not herself so they had their hands full. Finally, Kenny picked her up and carried her.

“What about Keegan?” Charlie yelled over Maggie's protests and led the way outside and around the building to the service road. The drone of approaching helicopters was not far enough away when the girl named Roy came running toward them, grabbed Charlie, and raced her to the back of an already crowded ambulance. Then she yelled for everyone to duck and she and Kenny passed Maggie on to reaching arms of medics at the back. They were stuffed inside at a totally illegal number and burned rubber whizzing out of the lot and down over the ridge into obscurity before turning on lights but still without sirens.

“Was Libby's Jeep gone? What if she and Brodie waited for us in the parking lot?” Charlie was fast approaching hysteria and knew it.

“The Wrangler wasn't in the lot, Charlie,” Mitch said from somewhere in the standing-room-only space.

“I can't get the door shut,” a medic shouted. “Everyone stand as still as possible. I need a couple of volunteers to get off when we get to a safe place to stop. We won't have room to care for the sick.”

“Let me off here,” Kenny shouted. “Charlie, give me your keys, I'll get your truck. What hospital you guys headed for?”

“I'll go with him,” Mitch shouted too and the medic at the door that wouldn't close nearly fell out when everyone jostled around to move out of Mitch's path as he made his way to the back.

“Me too,” Charlie said.

“You have to go with us,” Roy ordered. “You've been heavily drugged.”

“Yeah,” Mitch added as he and Kenny jumped out the back. “And you have to admit Maggie to the emergency room. She doesn't have any ID or insurance card.”

“Somebody move it, I got a real sick lady—think I'm losing her,” a male nurse yelled.