Unless she’d somehow known that all their attempts on my life would fail. Could she have sabotaged the letter bomb? Could she, in some way, have been behind my premonition on the morning of the opened gas jets? And perhaps something else with each of the others? Still, it would seem a lot simpler to go to the source and remove the problem itself. I knew that she had no compunction about killing. She’d ordered the slaying of my final assailant in Death Alley.
What, then?
Two possibilities came to mind immediately. One was that she’d actually come to like Luke and that she’d simply found ways to neutralize him without destroying him. But then I thought of her as Martinez, and it fell apart. She’d actually been shooting that night in Santa Fe. Okay. Then there was the other possibility: Luke was not the real threat, and she’d liked him enough to let him go on living once he’d quit the April 30 games and she saw that we’d gotten friendly. Something happened in New Mexico that made her change her mind. As to what it was, I had no idea. She had followed me to New York, then, and been George Hansen and Meg Devlin in quick succession. Luke was, by that time, out of the t picture, following his disappearing act on the mountain. He no longer represented a threat, yet she was almost frantic in her efforts to get in touch with me. Was something else impending? The real threat?
I racked my brains, but I could not figure what that threat might have been. Was I following a completely false trail with this line of reasoning?
She certainly was not omniscient. Her reason for spiriting me to Arbor House was as much to pump me for information as it was to remove me from the scene of the attack. And some of the things she’d wanted to know were as interesting as some of the things she knew.
My mind did a backward flip. What was the first question she had asked me?
Landing adroitly on my mental feet, back at Bill Roth’s place, I heard the question several times. As George Hansen she had asked it casually and I had lied; as a voice on the telephone she had asked it and been denied; as Meg Devlin, in bed, she had finally gotten me to answer it honestly: What was your mother’s name?
When I’d told her that my mother was named Dara she had finally begun speaking freely. She had warned me against Luke. It seemed that she might have been willing to tell me more then, too, save that the arrival of the real Meg’s husband had cut short our conversation.
To what was this the key? It placed my origin in the Courts of Chaos, to which she had at no time referred. Yet it had to be important, somehow.
I had a feeling that I already had the answer but that I would be unable to realize it until I had formulated the proper question.
Enough. I could go no further. Knowing that she was aware of my connection with the Courts still told me nothing. She was also obviously aware of my connection with Amber, and I could not see how that figured in the pattern of events either.
So I would leave it at that point and come back to it later. I had plenty of other things to think about. At Least, I now had lots of new questions to ask her the next time we met, and I was certain that we would meet again.
Then something else occurred to me. If she’d done any real protecting of me at all, it had taken place offstage. She had given me a lot of information, which I thought was probably correct but which I had had no opportunity to verify, From her phoning and lurking back in New York to her killing of my one possible source of information in Death Alley, she had really been more a bother than a help. It was conceivable that she could actually show up and encumber me with aid again, at exactly the wrong moment.