Act of Darkness(40)

Senator Fox sidled up to Gregor’s shoulder and smiled, too widely and too well. “Mr. Demarkian?” he said. “Mr. Demarkian! Hello! I’m Senator Stephen Whistler Fox!”

The man talked in exclamation points, and he shouted. He was also holding out his hand. Gregor held out his own and let it be shook.

“Well!” Senator Fox said. “Well! Here we are!”

“Oh, Stephen,” Patchen Rawls said.

Gregor could feel Clare Markey beside him, holding in a laugh that was threatening to become explosive, and he didn’t blame her. Patchen Rawls’s “Oh, Stephen” could have been part of the sound track from a soft-core video. Its flavor was evident even to Senator Fox, who struck Gregor as the sort of man who never noticed much of anything.

He also struck Gregor as a man who was only barely in control of himself, if that. From across the room, Gregor had thought he looked “carbonated.” Close up, Gregor thought the senator was more like one of those pictures drawn with a stylus on a child’s magic board. If you didn’t raise the sheet to erase what you had drawn, the sheet began to come undone anyway, on its own, in odd places, erasing half the wall of a house or a dog’s nose. Gregor looked for Janet again, half-thinking he might need help, and found that almost everyone had disappeared. Bennis was standing alone at the other end of the table, eating her way thoughtfully through a pile of red, white, and blue cupcakes. Other than that, only Gregor’s own little group was left. Clare Markey was doing her best to fade rapidly out of that.

Gregor thought momentarily of discretion—of the possibility that he should not say anything about the senator’s attacks in front of an outsider like Patchen Rawls—and realized it was silly. He didn’t know if Miss Rawls had witnessed any of the senator’s attacks. He did know she must have heard about them.

Gregor suddenly found it desperately important not only that he should ask the senator all the right questions, but that he should remember what the senator’s reactions to those questions turned out to be.

“I’ve been reading your medical reports,” he told the senator abruptly. “They were very interesting.”

Senator Stephen Whistler Fox went stone white, “interesting? How could they have been interesting? They didn’t say anything.”

“That’s not true, Senator. They said a great deal.”

“Well, they didn’t say anything that made sense.” The senator sounded fretful. “All the doctors said they’d never heard of anything like it in their lives.”

“That’s because they’re not coming from the right plane of reality,” Patchen said. “I told you about that.”

Gregor ignored her. “May I ask you something, Senator? When you get these attacks, when you begin to feel paralyzed, do you go rigid or do you go limp?”

Stephen Fox looked perplexed. “I don’t know. How am I supposed to know? I don’t feel anything at all.”

“Do you fall straight like a board, or do you crumble?”

“Oh, well. I fall forward, but I seem to sort of melt.”

“She thinks I put a hex on him,” Patchen Rawls said. “She ought to know better. If I was going to put a hex on someone, it would be her.”

“Do you mean Mrs. Fox?” Gregor asked her.

Patchen flapped her hands in irritation. “Of course I don’t mean Mrs. Fox. She’s just Janet, you know, and she’s a lump. She’s always trying to reason with you and make you act like a lady.”

“Patchen,” Stephen Fox said uneasily. “I don’t think—”

“It’s Victoria Harte I’m talking about.” Patchen bulldozed on. “She’s trying to destroy me. Literally.”

For once, Patchen Rawls sounded perfectly sincere. Gregor found that very interesting. “Do you mean she’s making trouble for you in your career?”

“Of course not.” Patchen did a good job of making herself look like she had never heard of the word career. “It’s my psychic balance she’s after. You should have seen the room she put me in—you should have seen it before I cleaned it up, anyway. Animal head trophies all over the walls. A moose skin for a bedspread. It took me hours to get all that stuff out of there, and I’m still living with the ghosts of all those poor murdered animals. I can hardly sleep.”

“Patchen—”

“Well, she does it on purpose, Stephen. You know she does. She gets Janet to invite me to things and then she ambushes me.”

“She does not get Janet to invite you to things,” Stephen said. “She wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t do it to Janet, for God’s sake.”