Tammy stayed glued to the wall, and in that state slid down to the bottom of the flight, to see if she could spot Jerry. Zeffer’s body had been shoved aside by the passage of the ghosts, and lay face down in the corner of the stairwell. Looking in the other direction she saw that the door to the Devil’s Country was throwing itself open and closed, slamming with such violence that its framework had cracked. So had the plaster overhead. The light had dropped out of its fixture, and was dangling, along with a clod of plaster, from a bare wire, describing a figure of eight in the air as it swung.
It wouldn’t have been Tammy’s first preference to venture any closer to the slamming door than she’d already come but as she’d left the responsibility of Todd with Maxine, she knew it fell to her to protect Jerry.
The ghosts wouldn’t hurt her, she hoped, as long as she didn’t get in their way. She’d done nothing to harm them. If anything, she should be their heroine. But in their present state of high frustration she wasn’t sure they knew the difference between those who were on their side and those who weren’t. They simply wanted to know where their long-awaited paradise had gone. Apparently some of them were certain it had been removed to some other part of the house to trick them: hence this crazy tearing up of the floor, and smashing of the walls. It was here somewhere, and they were going to tear up the fabric of the house until they found it.
Two of these berserkers emerged from the room, their faces smears of fury, and raced past her up the stairs. She waited until they’d disappeared and then she went to the door. With the light swinging giddily overhead the passageway pitched like a fun-house ride. She closed her eyes to snatch a much-needed moment of stillness, then opened them, and without waiting for the door to stop its lunatic slamming, she pushed it open and stepped into the space that had once been called the Devil’s Country.
Maxine had had occasion to lie to Todd many times over the course of their working life together, but she had never lied more profoundly than when she’d told him — that day she’d announced she was no longer working for him — that there were more like him available on every plane. The image of hordes of potential Todd Picketts just waiting to be picked out of the hopefuls who flew into LAX every hour had been cruel nonsense. Sure, there were always good-lookers in any bunch; sometimes beauties. And sometimes — though very rarely — a beauty had some innate talent. But very few who came to Tinseltown hoping to snatch the brass ring had what the young Todd had possessed: the kind of effortless charm that an entire generation, men and women both, could fall in love with. He’d been that rarest of things: a universal object of desire.
Of course it didn’t take much to taint such purity. But Todd had been lucky. Though in private he’d often been sour, envious and scornful, Maxine had successfully kept all that from the fans. Todd’s image had remained damn near perfect. His only enemy was time.
And even that, in the end, wouldn’t have mattered, if he’d allowed it to take its toll without shame. Look at Paul Newman, practically sainted at seventy. It would have been the same for Todd. People would have loved him as he grew old the way they loved certain songs: because he was part of who they were.
Maxine could have said all of this to him on the beach, if she’d been prepared to eat enough humble pie. Her words might have even persuaded him not to go into the water with Katya, and what a lot of grief that would have prevented.
But instead she’d been stupid and let the lie stand. And now they were here at the end of it all, and what had their petty warring earned them? Well, a lot of things she’d have preferred never to have experienced. Being out in the back yard with the ghosts, for one: that had been almost more than her sanity could endure. Seeing Sawyer torn apart that way was a horror she’d never be able to get out of her head. And then to make her way back through the undergrowth while some of his mutilators stalked her, sniffing after her as though they were dogs in heat and she the local bitch. There were no words for the horror of that.