drone of approaching bombers.
When Marty turned southwest on the Crown Valley Parkway, toward Laguna
Niguel, Charlotte at last broke her silence. “Daddy?”
Paige saw him glance at the rearview mirror and knew by his worried eyes
that he, too, had been troubled by the girl’s unusual spell of
introversion.
He said, “Yes, baby?”
“What was that thing?” Charlotte asked.
“What thing, honey?”
“The thing that looked like you.”
“That’s the million-dollar question. But whoever he is, he’s just a
man, not a thing. He’s just a man who looks an awful lot like me.”
Paige thought about all the blood in the upstairs hall, about how
quickly the look-alike had recovered from two chest wounds to make a
quick escape and to return, a short time later, strong enough to renew
the assault. He didn’t seem human. And Marty’s statements to the
contrary were, she knew, nothing but the obligatory reassurances of a
father who knew that children sometimes needed to believe in the
omniscience and unshakable equanimity of adults.
After further silence, Charlotte said, “No, it wasn’t a man. It was a
thing. Mean. Ugly inside. A cold thing.” A shudder wracked her,
causing her next words to issue tremolo, “I kissed it and said
“I love
you’ to it, but it was just a thing.”
The upscale garden-apartment complex encompasses a score or more of
large buildings housing ten or twelve apartments each. It sprawls over
park-like grounds shaded by a small forest of trees.
The streets within the complex are serpentine. Residents are provided
with community carports, redwood structures with only a back wall and
roof, eight or ten stalls in each. Bougainvillea climbs the columns
that support each roof, lending a note of grace, although at night the
vivid blossoms are bleached of most of their color by the detergent-blue
light of mercury-vapor security lamps.
Throughout the development are uncovered parking areas where the white
curbs are stenciled with black letters, VISITOR PARKING ONLY.
In a deep cul-de-sac, he finds a visitors’ zone that provides him with a
perfect place to spend the night. None of the six spaces is occupied,
and the last is flanked on one side by a five-foot-high oleander hedge.
When he backs the car into the slot, tight against the hedge, the
oleander conceals the damage along the driver’s side.
An acacia tree has been allowed to encroach upon the nearest street
lamp. Its leafy limbs block most of the light. The Buick stands
largely in darkness.
The police are not likely to cruise the complex more than once or twice
between now and dawn. And when they do, they will not be checking
license plates but scanning the grounds for indications of burglary or
other crimes in progress.
He switches off the headlights and the engine, gathers up what remains
of his store of candy, and gets out of the car, shaking off the bits of
gummy, tempered glass that cling to him.
Rain is no longer falling.
The air is cool and clean.
The night keeps its own counsel, silent but for the tick and plop of
still-dripping trees.
He gets into the back seat and softly closes the door. It is not a
comfortable bed. But he has known worse. He settles into the fetal
position, curled around candy bars instead of an umbilicus, blanketed
only by the roomy raincoat.
As he waits for sleep to overtake him, he thinks again of his daughters
and their betrayal.
Inevitably, he wonders if they prefer their other father to him, the
false to the real. This is a dreadful possibility to be forced to
explore.
If it is true, it means that those he loves the most are not victims, as
he is, but are active participants in the Byzantine plot against him.
Their false father is probably lenient with them. Allows them to eat
what they want. Lets them go to bed as late as they please.
All children are anarchists by nature. They need rules and standards of
behavior, or they grow up to be wild and antisocial.
When he kills the hateful false father and retakes control of his
family, he will establish rules for everything and will strictly enforce