Conspiracy Theory(98)

She paced around the living room, aimless. She stopped at the window again and looked out again and saw nothing again. She thought about getting out the prospectus for the foundation Annie was setting up to fund Adelphos House. It was only a draft prospectus. The banks and the lawyers were still haggling over the details. Once the provisions were in place, Adelphos House would have a constant stream of income that would pay the bills and pay the taxes and pay the salaries of herself and two other full-time people, complete with benefits. Lucinda didn’t understand why it was taking so long to put it all together. Couldn’t you just take your money out of the bank and do what you wanted with it? There was something else The Harridan Report got exactly right. The money the rich had was different from the money ordinary people had, and not only because there was more of it. She wondered how banks stored their money. Were there vaults with gold under the rubble of the World Trade Center? Were there secret passages in Switzerland full of silver and precious stones? Surely, at some point, money would have to stop being paper for somebody. It couldn’t all just be a matter of blips on a ticker tape or pulses on a computer screen or those green oblong things everybody carried in their wallets and nobody thought about. Lucinda had seen French paper money once. It was odd how obvious it was that “money” was just paper when you looked at foreign currency, which you weren’t used to considering real.

Marvelous, she thought. I’m not only losing my mind, I’m working overtime at it. She didn’t want to look at the draft prospectus. She didn’t understand it, except for that bit about Adelphos House finally being set up to run independently of Annie’s writing checks. Of course, it would still be a matter of Annie’s having written a check, but a big one, so that they wouldn’t have to go back to her for more checks two and three times a week. She didn’t want to think about The Harridan Report, either. It gave her a headache, and then it made her feel a little resentful for being what it was. On one level, she couldn’t help thinking it was a work of genius. Only somebody truly plugged in to the way people think could have produced it, and that meant plugged in to the way they all think, the Annies as well as the regular people. She didn’t want to think about Adelphos House, either, which this morning felt like an oppressive weight. Sometimes it was like that. The whole history of human misery was wrapped up inside it and given a new name every hour: Patsy Lennon; Amy Margerbrad; Susie Kell.

She went back out into the hallway and back down to the other end of the house and got her coat out of the closet there. It was a big, heavy, thick wool thing that she’d bought at Price Heaven after a long summer of saving up. Annie would have given her the money to buy a better one. She’d have called it an “advance on salary” and then forgotten all about it. Lucinda had had no intention of asking. It was the kind of thing Annie did where she meant well, but it only made people angry.

Lucinda went back down to the front of the house. She could hear the encounter group rollicking away upstairs. Sometimes they screamed and cried for the whole two hours, but today they were laughing. She let herself out onto the street and looked around. Before she’d come to this place, she’d never believed that a city street could be utterly and irrevocably deserted, as if no human beings existed anywhere anymore, anywhere on the planet. She tried the door to make sure it locked. She turned left and began to move up the block as quickly as she could manage it with her weight. The wind was coming down between the abandoned buildings like swiftly flowing water through a shunt. It whistled and rattled and moaned. What glass was left in the windows around her shimmered in the very faint sunlight that emerged once in a while from the blanket of clouds. Annie said that she could feel the vampires who were buried here. Annie may have thought she was exaggerating for effect, but Lucinda knew she was exactly right. This neighborhood was full of vampires, and werewolves, and the shape-shifters that lived where no living thing could—and it had been a mistake for them to put Adelphos House here. They should have bought a building on a better street, closer to the action. They could have been right around the corner from the strip. Being where they were meant they were miles away from everything, even their own work—miles away emotionally, if not physically. Most of the time when they wanted to go anywhere, they had to use a car. That meant they had to keep two, just to make sure there was always one available at the house when Annie wanted to do her photographing. The wind sounded like children crying. The cold felt like glass. Lucinda knew there was no danger of it getting dark. It was still only late in the morning. She picked up speed anyway. The last thing she wanted to do was to be caught on this street on foot after nightfall, when the vampires came out to feed and the werewolves began to wait in the shelter of the empty buildings that were just one small step from being shape-shifters themselves.