Act of Darkness(78)

Bennis bit her lip. The tension in the room was bobbing higher and higher, like a hollow ball bouncing across ever-increasing waves.

“What I have in my room,” Patchen was saying to Victoria, her voice tight, “are the ghosts of a lot of dead animals. And you put them there.”

Victoria smiled. “What you have in your room,” she said, “is a jar of belladonna and another jar of foxglove. And we all know what foxglove is.”

The sharp intake of breath was Dan’s. The gasp was Janet’s. Clare Markey was on her feet. Bennis looked in panic from one to the other of them and said, “But foxglove couldn’t have caused what happened to—”

They weren’t listening to her. They were moving in on Patchen Rawls, crowding her, circling her, going in for the kill.

Dan Chester started it. “Foxglove is digitalis,” he said. “For God’s sake. I never thought—”

Victoria was across the room, right in front of Patchen Rawls. “She’s got poisons in her room,” she said, “lots and lots of them. She thinks nobody notices because all they pay attention to is her nonsense, her spells and her crystals, as if anybody really thinks she takes it seriously. She murdered her own mother and now she’s murdered Stephen, too—”

Bennis had to give it one more shot. She had to. “Please,” she said. “Listen to me.”

“Shut up,” Victoria said.

There was nothing else Bennis could do. There was nothing she could say. Victoria had taken Patchen’s shoulders in her hands. Now Patchen wrenched free of them and stumbled backward. The flat, polished plastic soles of her sandals slipped against the hardwood of the floor. The hard overleanness of her body seemed first to dissolve and then to ripple.

“Don’t touch me,” she screamed at Victoria. “Don’t touch me at all. You eat meat.”

Then she bolted from the room.





[2]


It was like one of those dreams where you feel as if you were walking through water, but you’re not; as if everything were conspiring to keep you from moving, but there isn’t anything there. That was very incoherent, but Patchen Rawls didn’t notice. She never noticed when she was being incoherent. If she had, she would not have had the life she did. It was enough for her that she understood herself, and this time she surely did. All she wanted in the world was to get away from these people, out of their sight, and it should have been easy. Into the foyer and up the stairs. The run wasn’t very long at all. It was taking forever anyway. Maybe it was just that, for the first time, she was aware of how exposed she was. The stairs from the foyer to the second-floor guest wing were open to the living room space. They could see her the entire time she was going up. The balcony was open to the foyer. Even if they couldn’t see her, they could hear her, her sandals were snapping. All they had to do was move half a dozen steps and they would be able to see her again. She had a friend back in California who owned a cave. He went there at least once a month to live under the earth and out of sight of the sun. She had always thought he was crazy—the sun was a benevolent god; the human body was a solar battery—but now she understood. If she had known of such a place within walking distance of this house, she would have gone to ground in it.

When she got to the top of the stairs, she was surprised to find the balcony guarded by a huge policeman, fresh faced and grim, who had no intention of letting her pass. Beyond him, the balcony and all the rooms off it, including her own, were full of policemen. That surprised her, too. They had searched her room yesterday. Why would they do it again today?

Her hair had fallen into her face. It did that all the time, even when she was relaxed, because of the way it was cut. With all the excitement, it had tumbled into her eyes and made them sting. She brushed it away and tried to get some control of her breathing. Her heart was pounding and her lungs felt half the size they normally were. If she could have done her yoga, she would have been all right, but there was no place to do yoga, and she wasn’t sure she remembered how. She sucked in a great bubble of air and counted to ten, like any unenlightened tadpole jerk.

The big policeman was watching her steadily but not moving. He was not going to give way unless she made him go.

She swallowed another great bubble of air and wrapped her arms around her chest to stop it from aching. It didn’t work. “Listen,” she said. “Listen. I want to talk to that man. That Demarkian man.”

“You want to talk to Mr. Demarkian?” the policeman said.

“It’s important.”

The policeman looked her up and down, dubious, and for a second Patchen thought he was going to tell her to go away. Then he turned his head in the direction of her own room and shouted, “Jack? Hey, Jack. Come on over here. There’s a lady wants to talk to Mr. Demarkian.”