have missed it for the world.” Julie took a long swallow of the
bourbon. It tasted sour and stung her throat. She didn’t care. She
needed it.
“I’d become a doctor because the pay was good,” Fogarty said.
“Later, when I gravitated toward illegal abortions, the pay was better,
and it became my main business. Not much danger, either, because I knew
what I was doing, and I could buy off an authority now and then if I had
to. When you’re getting those fat fees, you don’t have to schedule many
office visits, you can have a lot of free time, money and leisure, the
best of both worlds. But having settled for a career like that, what I
never figured was that I’d encounter anything as medically interesting,
as fascinating, as entertaining as this Pollard mess.” The only
consideration that caused Julie to refrain from going across the room
and kicking the crap out of the old man was not his age but the fact
that he would leave the story unfinished and some vital piece of
information unrevealed.
“But the birth of Roselle’s first child wasn’t the event I’d thought it
would be,” Fogarty said.
“In spite of the odds, the baby she produced was healthy and, from all
indications, perfectly normal. That was 1960, and the baby was Frank.”
In the wingback chair, Frank whimpered softly but remained in his
semicomatose condition.
STILL LISTENING to Doc Fogarty through Darkle, Violet sat up and swung
her bare legs over the edge of the bed, dispossessing some of the cats
from their resting places, and eliciting a murmur of protest from
Verbina, who was seldom content to share just a mental link with her
sister and needed the reassurance of physical contact. With cats
swarming at her feet, seeing through their eyes as well as her own and
therefore not blinded by the darkness, Violet started toward the open
door to the lightless upstairs hall.
Then she remembered that she was nude, and she went back for panties and
a T-shirt.
She wasn’t afraid of Candy’s disapproval or of Candy himself. In fact,
she would welcome his violent attentions, for it would be the ultimate
game of hunter and prey, hawk mouse, brother and sister. Candy was the
only wild creature into whose mind she couldn’t intrude; though wild, he
was human and beyond the reach of her powers. If he tore out Verbina’s
throat, then her blood would get into him, and into her throat, and she
would become a part of him in the only manner she ever could. Likewise,
that was the only way he could get into her: by biting his way in, by
chewing into her, the only way.
On any other night, she would have called to him and let him see her
nude, with the hope that her shamelessness would at last provoke him to
violence. But she could not pursue her fondest desire right now, not
when Frank was nearby and unpunished for what he had done to their poor
puss, mantha When she had dressed, she returned to the hall, moved all
through it in the gloom-still in complete touch with Darkle and Zi and
the wild world-and stopped before the door to mother’s room, into which
Candy had moved upon her death. A thing line of light showed along the
sill.
“Candy,” she said.
“Candy, are you there?”
LIKE A MEMORY from wars past or a presentiment of a war to come, a
searing flash of lightning and a shattering crash of thunder shook the
night. The window in the study vibrated. It was the first thunder
Bobby had heard since the faint and distant peal when they had come out
of the motel, nearly an hour and a half ago. In spite of the thunder in
the sky, rain was not yet falling. But though the storm was
slow-moving, it was almost upon them. The pyrotech of a storm was an
ideal backdrop to Fogarty’s tale.
“I was disappointed in Frank,” Fogarty said, taking an old bottle of
bourbon from his capacious desk drawer and filling his glass.
“No fun at all. So normal. But two years later she was pregnant again!