Tuesday night.
Karl raised one hand in the split-finger greeting that Marty recognized
from Star Trek. “Live long and prosper,” he said, and left them.
Marty stood in the gravel driveway, watching the Rover until it reached
the county road, turned left, and dwindled out of sight.
That December and throughout the following year, when the head lines
screamed of the Network scandal, treason, political conspiracy,
assassination, and one world crisis after another, John and Ann Gault
didn’t pay as much attention to the newspapers and the television news
as they had expected they would. They had new lives to build, which was
not a simple undertaking.
Ann cut her blond hair short and dyed it brown. Before meeting any of
their neighbors living in the scattered cabins and ranches of that rural
area, John grew a beard, not to his surprise, it came in more than half
gray, and a lot of gray began to show up on his head, as well.
A simple tint changed Rebecca’s hair from blond to auburn, and Suzie
Lori was sufficiently transformed with a new and much shorter style.
Both girls were growing fast. Time would swiftly blur the resemblance
between them and whoever they once might have been.
Remembering to use new names was easy compared to creating and
committing to memory a simple but credible false past. They made a game
of it, rather like Look Who’s the Monkey Now.
The nightmares were persistent. Though the enemy they had known was as
comfortable in daylight as not, they irrationally viewed each nightfall
with an uneasiness that people had felt in ancient and more
superstitious times. And sudden noises made everybody jump.
Christmas Eve had been the first time that John dared to hope they would
really be able to imagine a new life and find happiness again.
It was then that Suzie Lori inquired about the popcorn.
“What popcorn?” John asked.
“Santa’s evil twin put ten pounds in the microwave,” she said, “even
though that much corn wouldn’t fit. But even if it would fit, what
happened when it started to pop?”
That night, story hour was held for the first time in more than three
weeks. Thereafter, it became routine.
In late January, they felt safe enough to register Rebecca and Suzie
Lori in the public school system.
By spring, there were new friends and a growing store of Gault family
memories that were not fabricated.
Because they had seventy thousand in cash and owned their humble house
outright, they were under little pressure to find work.
They also had four boxes full of the first editions of the early novels
of Martin Stillwater. The cover of Time magazine had asked a question
that would never be answered–Where is Martin Stillwater?–and first
editions that had once been worth a couple of hundred dollars each on
the collectors’ market had begun selling, by spring, for five times that
price, they would probably continue to appreciate faster than blue-chip
investments in the years to come. Sold one or two at a time, in far
cities, they would keep the family nest egg fat during lean years.
John presented himself to new neighbors and acquaintances as a former
insurance salesman from New York City. He claimed to have come into a
substantial though not enormous inheritance. He was indulging a
lifelong dream of living in a rural setting, struggling to be a poet.
“If I don’t start selling some poems in a few years, maybe I’ll write a
novel,” he sometimes said, “and if that doesn’t turn out right–then
I’ll start worrying.”
Ann was content to be seen as a housewife, however, freed from the
pressures of the past–troubled clients and freeway commuting–she
rediscovered a talent for drawing that she had not tapped since high
school. She began doing illustrations for the poems and stories in her
husband’s ring-bound notebook of original compositions, which he had
been writing for years, Stories for Rebecca and Suzie Lori.
They had lived in Wyoming five years when Santa’s Evil Twin by John
Gault with illustrations by Ann Gault became a smash Christmas
bestseller. They allowed no jacket photo of author and artist. They
politely declined offers of promotional tours and interviews, prefer