“Help? Is anyone there? Please help me m hurt.’
A woman’s voice. Ellen Carver’s voice? Christ, was it9 Although she had been in the company of David’s mother for only a short time, Mary was sure she was right almost as soon as the idea occurred to her. She got to her feet sparing another quick glance at poor Tom Billingsley s contorted face and staring eyes. Her legs had stiffened up on her and she staggered for balance.
“Please,” the voice outside moaned. It was in the alley which ran behind the theater.
“Ellen?” she asked, suddenly wishing she could throw her voice like a ventriloquist. It seemed she could trust nothing now, not even a hurt, scared woman. “Ellen, is that you?”
“Mary!” Closer now. “Yes, it’s me, Ellen. Is that Mary?”
Mary opened her mouth, then closed it again. That was Ellen Carver out there, she knew it, but…
“Is David all right?” the woman out there in the dark asked, then swallowed back a sob.
“Please say that he is.”
“So far as I know, yes.” Mary walked over to the broken window, skirting the pool of the cougar’s blood, and looked out. It was Ellen Carver out there, and she didn’t look good.
She was slumped over her left arm, which she was holding against her breasts with her right. What Mary could see of her face was chalky white. Blood was trickling from her lower lip and from one nostril. She looked up at Mary with eyes so dark and desperate they seemed hardly human.
“How did you get away from Entragian?” Mary asked.
“I didn’t. He just … died. Bled everywhere and died. He was driving me in his car, taking me up to the mine, I think-when it happened. The car went off the road and turned over.
One of the back doors popped open. Lucky for me or I’d still be inside, caught like a bug in a can. I… I walked back to town.”
“What happened to your arm?”
“It’s broken,” Ellen said, hunching over it further. There was something unattractive about the pose; Ellen Carver looked like a troll in a fairy story, hunched protectively over a bag of ill-gotten gold. “Can you help me in? I want to see my husband, and I want to see David.”
Apart of Mary cried out in alarm at the idea, told her that something here did not compute, but when Ellen held up her good arm and Mary saw the dirt and blood smeared on it, and the way it was trembling with exhaustion, her fundamentally kind heart overruled the wary lizard of instinct living far back in her brain. This woman had lost her young daughter to a madman, had been in a car-wreck on the way to what would have most likely been her own murder, had suffered a broken arm, and walked through a howling windstorm back to a town filled mostly with corpses. And the first person she meets suddenly succumbs to a bad case of the jimjams and refuses to let her in?
Uh-uh, Mary thought. No way. And, perhaps absurdly:
That’s not how I was raised.
“You can’t come in this window. There’s a lot of broken glass. Something … an animal jumped through it Go a little farther along the back of the theater. You 11 come to the ladies’ room. That’s better. There
are even some boxes to stand on. I’ll help you in. Okay?”
“Yes. Thank you, Mary. Thank God I found you.” Ellen gave her a horrible, grimacing smile-gratitude, shoe licking humility, and what might have been terror all mixed together-and then shuffled on, head down, back bent. Twelve hours ago she had been Mrs. Suburban Wifemom, on her way to a nice middle-class vacation inLake Tahoe , where she had probably planned to wear her new resort clothes from Talbot’s over her new under wear fromVictoria ’s Secret. Daytime sun with the kids nighttime sex with the comfy, known partner, postcards home to the friends-having a great time, the air is so clean, wish you were here. Now she looked and acted like a refugee, a no-age warhag fleeing some ugly desert bloodbath.
And Mary Jackson, that sweet little princess-votes Democratic, gives blood every two months, writes poetry-had actually considered leaving her out there to moan in the dark until she could consult with the men And what did that mean? That she had been in the same war, Mary supposed. This was how you thought, how you behaved, when it happened to you. Except she wouldn’t. Be damned if she would.
Mary crossed the hall, listening for any further shouts from the theater. There were none.
Then, just as she pushed open the ladies’-room door, three gunshots rang out. They were muffled by walls and distance, but there was no doubt about what they were. Shouts followed them. Mary froze in place, pulled in two different directions with equal force.
What decided her was the soft sound of weeping from beyond the unlatched ladies room window.
“Ellen? What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I’m stupid, that’s all, stupid! I bumped my bad arm putting up another crate to stand on!” The woman outside the window-she was just a blur of shadow on the frosted glass began sobbing harder.
“Hold on, you’ll be inside in a jiffy,” Mary said, and hurried across the room. She set aside the beer-bottles Billingsley had put up on the window ledge and was lifting the hinged window, trying to think how best to help Ellen into the room without hurting her further, when she remembered what Billingsley had said about the cop: that he was taller. Dear God, David’s father had said, a look of thunderstruck understanding on his face. She ‘s like Entragian? Like the cop?
Maybe she’s got a broken arm, Mary thought coldly, maybe she really does. On the other hand- On the other hand, hunching over like that was actually a very good way to disguise one’s true height, wasn’t it?
The lizard which usually kept its place on the back wall of her brain suddenly leaped forward, chirping in terror. Mary decided to pull back, take a moment or two and think things over … but before she could, her arm was seized by a strong hot hand. Another one banged open the window, and all of Mary’s strength ran out of her like water as she looked into the grinning face staring up at her. It was Ellen’s face, but the badge pinned below it (I see you’re an organ donor) belonged to Entragian.
It was Entragian. Collie Entragian somehow living in Ellen Carver’s body.
“No!” she screamed, yanking backward, heedless of the pain as Ellen’s fingernails punched into her arms and brought blood. “No, let go of me!”
“Not until I hear you sing ‘Leavin’ on a Jet Plane,’ you cunt,” the Ellen-thing said, and as it yanked Mary forward through the window it was still holding open, blood burst from both of Ellen’s nostrils in a gush.
More blood trickled from Ellen’s left eye like gummy tears. “Oh the dawn is breakin’, it’s early morn…
Mary had a confused sensation of flying toward the board fence on the other side of the lane.
“The taxi-driver is blowin’ his horn…”
She managed to get one blocking arm up, but not enough; she took most of the impact with her forehead and went to her knees, head ringing. She could feel warmth spreading over her lips and chin. Join the nose-bleed club, babe, she thought, and staggered to her feet “Already I’m so lonesome! could cryyyyy..
Mary took two large, lunging strides, and then the cop (she couldn’t stop thinking of it as the cop, only now wearing a wig and falsies) grabbed her by the shoulder, almost tearing one arm off her shirt as it whirled Mary around.
“Let g-” Mary began, and then the Ellen-thing clipped her on the point of the chin, a crisp and elementary blow that put out the lights. It caught Mary under the arms on her way down and pulled her close. When it felt Mary s breath on Ellen’s skin, the faint anxiety which had been on Ellen’s face cleared.
“Gosh, I love that song,” it said, and slung Mary over her shoulder like a sack of grain.
“It turns me all gooshy inside. Tak!”
She disappeared around the corner with her burden Five minutes later, Collie Entragian’s dusty Caprice was once more on its way out to the China Pit, headlights cut ting through the swirls of sand driven by the dying wind As it drove past Harvey’s Small Engine Repair and the bodega beyond it, a thin blue-white sickle of moon appeared in the sky overhead.
Even in the boozy, druggy days, Johnny Marinville’s recall had been pretty relentless. In 1986, while riding in the back seat of Sean Hutter’s so-called Party- mobile (Sean had been doing the Friday-night East Hampton rounds with Johnny and three others in the big old ‘65 Caddy), he had been involved in a fatal accident. Sean, who had been too drunk to walk, let alone drive, had rolled the Partymobile over twice, trying to make the turn fromEggamoggin Lane onto Route B without slowing down. The girl sitting next to Hutter had been killed. Sean’s spine had been pulverized. The only Party- mobile he ran these days was a motorized Cadding wheel-chair, the kind you steered with your chin.