Becca and Theresa sat across from each other at the kitchen table, each nursing a cup of cold coffee. They said nothing. Theresa didn’t look good. Though her skin was so dark it was hard to tell, Becca could see the old woman’s face had a gray pallor. The doctor’d said she was to come to his office in Lancaster at the slightest sign of an infection and maybe…
But first, they had to bury Biscuit.
Becca had gotten a spade from the garage and begun to dig a hole in the shade of the pink dogwood tree by the fence as soon as there was enough light in the morning sky to see. Though there was frost on the grass, the ground was not frozen. But it was so full of roots she abandoned that spot and tried one nearer the house, next to the rose trellis beside the gate. She found digging easier there, but still the ground was hard and she was neither big nor strong. By the time she had a hole dug two feet deep and three feet across, she was exhausted. If it wasn’t deep enough…
Well, it would have to do anyway.
Theresa scooted her chair back slowly and got to her feet.
“We best get to it, child,” she said. “I’ll go get Biscuit.”
“He’s too big for you to be lifting.” Theresa’s back had been giving her trouble off and on ever since the day she’d come to Bradford’s Ridge with Jeff to find Becca. She wasn’t wearing her cookie-sheet corset now and she might really hurt herself. “I’ll get him.”
Theresa put her hand on Becca’s arm. “Let me carry him this one last time.”
Theresa moved slowly toward the garage, where they had laid the animal on the floor, wrapped in a blanket. When she returned carrying him, Becca could see that he’d already gotten stiff. Theresa held the blanket-covered dog tenderly against her breast—stiff as he was—and the two women went together out into the backyard.
It was chilly. Neither she nor Theresa had stopped to put on a jacket, but they didn’t care about the cold.
Becca dropped to her knees beside the grave and Theresa handed her the dog to lower into the shallow hole. That was when Becca saw it. The bandage on one of the rat bites on Theresa’s calf had come loose, and Becca could see that the area around it was puffy and thick yellow liquid oozed out.
“Lord, I don’t know about dogs and going to heaven and such,” Theresa said as Becca got to her feet, dusted the dirt off her knees and stood beside her. “The Bible don’t say one way or the other, so I guess we’s free to speculate. I never give it much thought before Biscuit. Now, I think…I choose to believe that at this very moment Biscuit is running around chasing butterflies in heaven.” She sucked in a shuddering breath but didn’t break down. “He was a good dog. You look after him for me ’til I get there.”
Theresa said nothing as Becca shoveled back into the hole the dirt she had dug out of it, then tamped it down in a mound on top. There was no cross. Maybe someday when they had time to…maybe someday.
“You need to get dressed now,” Becca said and Theresa looked at her quizzically. “I’m calling the doctor and taking you in to see him. One of the bites on your leg is infected.”
Theresa didn’t argue, merely turned away from the grave and walked ponderously toward the house.
Theresa felt her age as she stood on the sidewalk—had to stand, wasn’t nowhere to sit—while Becca circled the block, looking for a parking space near Lancaster North, one of four big buildings that formed Lancaster Plaza, where Dr. Paul Richardson’s office was located. Becca had took to driving again like a pig to mud. Actually seemed to enjoy it. She didn’t have her license yet, but Theresa wasn’t up to driving today, so she give her the wheel anyway.
Theresa felt more than old—old and sick, too. She felt beat down. The ever-present evil was sucking the life out of her. But she was too tired even to protest. God knew how old she was. He was sending her down into a dark hole in the ground to fight a monster, so must be he knew she could handle it—or planned to take her on home during the fight, which was fine with her, too.
The weight of what she, Daniel, Jack and Becca was gone have to do when they found the efreet was painted on the backdrop of Andi’s vision. God give visions for a reason. As a warning, so people could get ready for somethin’. Or so they could stop some bad thing from happenin’. Theresa suddenly smiled as Isaac’s face burst full blown into her mind.
They’d been standing in the back of the church right after services and he’d tugged on her sleeve and drawn himself up serious like—and him not even nine years old. “Why didn’t God tell Joseph what he wanted him to know? Why’d God make him figure it out on his own?”
“I don’t rightly know,” she’d said, and he’d crossed his arms over his little chest and said all self-righteous, “If I was God, I’d say things flat out and clear. Or I’d write them on the sky with a red Magic Marker.” Then he’d pantomimed the act of writing. “‘Dear Joseph. There is going to be a famine, so you need to save up food. Sincerely, your friend, God.’”
She chuckled at the memory, but the mirth drained away as Andi’s latest description of the Big Bad Thing filled her head. Andi had said last night that it was getting bigger, closer. A roaring boom, smoke, fire, people screaming, pieces of bodies flying through the air. A bomb, of course, but that didn’t narrow it down much. An explosion like them ones at that mall in Minnesota and the restaurant in Arizona—innocent people ripped apart. Theresa shuddered, a full body shake that made her so weak she was afraid she was gonna have to sit down right there on the sidewalk if Becca didn’t get here pretty soon.
“There’s a…leg, only a leg, not the whole person, like it’d been torn off at the knee, and blood’s coming out of it,” Andi’d said. “On the foot—the shoe it’s wearing is funny-looking. The toe’s all curled up.”
She’d said there were bodies of “dead people, white and pasty and all bandaged up.” Which didn’t make no sense at all ’cause how could they have been bandaged already if they’d just got injured? “And this big gold Frisbee flies through the air and hits a man wearing a cowboy hat and a vest like Woody’s and almost cuts him in half.”
Theresa didn’t know who Woody might be. But did the hat mean the Big Bad Thing was going to happen in Texas, maybe? Big place to search for a bomb, Texas was. “And he falls down on top of the Frisbee, bleeding on the letters.”
OSW7.
Theresa and all the others had racked their brains, trying to figure out what that could mean but had come up with nothing. Jack had Googled it. It was the abbreviation of the scientific name for some protein. It was the number on a race car. It was a kind of fishhook with little brass beads on it. It was the username for some guy on Instagram in Ecuador, the brand of a lady’s watch, and of accessories to put on trucks, and other random, meaningless things. They’d checked them all out, every one, but none of them had anything to do with golden Frisbees or with folks getting blown up and dying.
Theresa and Becca spent more than two hours at the doctor’s office—most of that time waiting to see him, of course. On account of it being Halloween, one of the receptionists was dressed up like Princess Leia—looked like she had cinnamon rolls stuck to both ears—and the other was all green, likely supposed to be Yoda. Or Kermit the Frog. Or the Incredible Hulk. Maybe a head of lettuce.
While Becca read a five-month-old magazine full of stuff about the royal wedding that’d done come and gone, Theresa thumbed through the morning newspaper. Course, there was Chapman Whitworth’s picture smack on the front page—not by his lonesome, though, but alongside the other candidates for the nomination. They’d be guests at the Better Day Society ball tonight at the Rivergate’s Balloon Ballroom on the waterfront.
Theresa’d worked as a hotel maid in lots of places, but the Rivergate had been one of her all-time favorites. She liked to stand in that top-floor ballroom at night, look up at the stars and watch the balloon shows. The roof was retractable like the roof of Lucas Stadium in Indianapolis, where she and Bishop had gone that time to see the Drum Corps International Championships.
The Balloon Ballroom often filled the night sky over Cincinnati with balloons. Red and green ones at Christmastime, orange and black at Halloween, green ones on Saint Patrick’s Day, red-white-and-blue ones on the Fourth of July—and random multicolored ones for other occasions, both public and private, throughout the year.
The pillars in the huge ballroom were shaped like tree trunks, and hundreds of helium-filled balloons tied with strings to tiny hooks on the limbs formed the leaves. They could all be released at once by retracting the hooks, or guests could remove the balloons from the trees and hold them by the strings until some signal to set them free.
Sometimes, the balloons fell down instead of floating up. The newspaper story said that was what was planned for the ball tonight. Mesh netting filled with thousands of tiny balloons no bigger than a fist—somebody told her once they was more’n ten thousand of ’em—would be stretched across the opening in the roof and ceiling. She’d been there when they released balloons like that, watched the air fill solid with ’em as they fell to the floor.
When the doctor finally took a look at Theresa’s leg, he ordered the nurse to clean it all out and put a fresh bandage on it, and to give her a shot that hurt worse than them bites ever did—right in her backside! She got another prescription, too, and instructions to put hydrogen peroxide on all them bites twice a day. That was gone feel swell.
Becca left Theresa on the sidewalk where she’d waited before and went down the street for the car. By the time Becca pulled up in front of the building, Theresa had stood so long her legs was all trembly-like. When she stepped out into the street to get in the car, she come real close to face-planting on the asphalt, stubbing her toe on a manhole cover that was sticking up just enough to—
Theresa stopped and stood totally still, looking down at the street. Then she walked slowly around in a circle. Becca leaned across the front seat, rolled down the passenger side window and called out to her, “Get in. This is a no parking zone.”
“You need to git out and come over here and look at this.”
Becca got out of the car, put it in park right there in the street, and came to stand beside Theresa.
“What is it you want me to see?”
Theresa pointed at the storm drain cover she’d stumbled over. “What’s that mean?”
“It’s initials, stands for Lancaster Metropolitan Sewer District,” Becca said.
Theresa walked slowly around to the other side of the manhole cover. “Now, come look at it from over here.”
Becca followed her, looked down, and when she saw it, she gasped.
LMSD read upside down became O—with one side smashed flat just like Andi’d said—SW7.
“That Frisbee flying through the air was turning over and over, so Andi seen it upside down!”
“OSW7 is a manhole cover?” Becca was incredulous.
Theresa felt her throat tighten so she could barely talk. “That newspaper story about the Better Day Society said they give a community service award every year to some business for being a ‘good corporate neighbor.’ The award is a gold-plated manhole cover.”
Becca looked up, her eyes huge. “It’s here, then,” she said, her voice a whisper of awe and dread. “Right here in Lancaster. Somebody’s going to blow up that ball tonight.”
Then all the pieces fell into place and everything Andi’d seen made sense. The Better Day Society’s ball was a costume ball! People would be dressed up like witches with curled-toe shoes, white-faced zombies in bandages or cowboys.
“But isn’t Chapman Whitworth supposed to be there?” Becca asked.
“Uh-huh. And so is every one of the other candidates that’s runnin’ against him! All of them together in one spot. I’d say Mr. Whitworth’s likely to be a no-show. Or he’ll get an urgent call of nature so he just happens to be out of the room when the fun starts.”
“We have to stop this!” Becca said.
“Course we do.”
“How?”
“We got to tell somebody…warn…”
But even as she said the words, Theresa knew how futile that would be:
Somebody’s going to blow up the Better Day Society’s ball tonight!!
And you know that because…?
Because a little girl saw it in a vision.
Riiiight.
It was like when Andi’d been kidnapped and Daniel couldn’t call the FBI. He knew details about where she was being held that he couldn’t tell the police because they’d never have believed Andi’s vision meant anything.
So Jack’d had to go find her his own self.
Jack!
“We got to call Jack,” Theresa said, snatching her cell phone out of her purse. “He’s gone have to…do something.” The call went directly to voicemail. Jack’s phone was turned off. She tried Crock’s. His rang, but he didn’t answer.
Theresa didn’t even realize she was trembling until Becca took her by the elbow and directed her to the car.
“Come on,” Becca said. “I’m taking you home. We’ll keep trying Jack on the way.”
Time raced ahead, stopped, looked over its shoulder and waited for Jeff to catch up. Then off it went again. Had he always breathed this slow? Or was it fast? Was he panting?
He jumped at every imagined sound—and they had to be imagined, didn’t they? What was there in a cave to make noise? Blind cave fish weren’t a particularly rambunctious lot as fish go, at least not as far as he knew. Now, blind cave crickets were another thing altogether. Crickets would—
What was that?
Was it footsteps? Was Billy Ray coming to chop off their heads?
Coming to chop off their heads—you die!
Lions and tigers and bears—oh my!
He waited, breathless, heart pounding.
Nothing.
But the mad hammering of his heart took a long time to subside. Or did it? Who knew? The absolute darkness erased the borders, the fences both real and psychological that fit the essential you snug on one side and everything else on the other. He didn’t know anymore where he stopped and forever-dark started. He felt himself leaking away into it little by little, a small steady stream, and when there was light again, if there ever was light again, part of him would be missing. Some essential element of his Jeff-ness was being gobbled up by the Black Nothing.
He concentrated on his throbbing nose and on the pain that stabbed all the way up his arm whenever he moved his finger. That helped to keep him tethered in reality. Not that reality was exactly a tour bus destination right now. In the place called “reality,” Jefferson Monroe Kendrick was about to die—a singularly grizzly death.
The Jeff Kendrick who’d cheated to pass the bar examination, using an elaborate scheme that surely required more time and energy than studying for the exam would have taken. And certainly much more ingenuity, initiative and resourcefulness.
The Jeff Kendrick who had shirts to pick up at the laundry, who’d just paid a five-hundred-dollar annual fee on a gym membership, and who now would never climb Mount Everest, go skinny-dipping in the Mediterranean with some dark-eyed Italian beauty or hang glide over a volcano in Hawaii—or any of the other things on his bucket list. Shoot, he’d never even get to see the final Batman movie! He was going to die! Today. In how many minutes—who knew?—he was going to cease to exist on this planet.
Was that it? You just ceased to exist?
He genuinely did not know, but he suspected Daniel did. No, he was certain Daniel did. Daniel Burke was…
Was what?
Everything Jeff Kendrick should have been, could have been, but wasn’t.