“Let’s see that paper again,” Terry said. Rayfield handed it over.
“We can narrow down the list of suspects,” Joy said, “because we know this person is Slavic in origin.”
“Don’t you think, maybe, he means he’s a slave?” Rayfield said gently.
Melcher smiled. “Yeah, Joy, I think Rayfield might be right. It sounds as if he didn’t want to break into the office, like he was forced to do it against his will. You really don’t have to play that record every time I come over.”
Quiet music was playing in the background as they talked. It was a record Terry had produced for the Byrds, which Joy quite liked. Terry seemed to have a different opinion of it, however. “It’s a nice album,” said Joy.
“The reviewers call it Melcher’s Folly,” Terry grumbled, tugging irritably at his mustache.
“Then don’t read the reviews,” Joy said brightly. “I bet Candice would have liked it. Do you still talk to Candice?”
“Every now and then,” said Terry. He didn’t seem eager to talk about her.
“Well, she’s a Taurus, isn’t she? It would never have worked out. So why would somebody break in if he didn’t want to do it?” Buns looked hungry, so she fed him a piece of cheese from the cheese plate on the coffee table. He gobbled it up and kissed her face to say thank you.
Terry scratched his head as he thought about her question. “A slave. You know, my mother used to tell me about people she knew in show business. Mom has always been strong, but she’s known a lot of people in the biz, especially women, who were almost like robots. Controlled by their managers or agents, kind of like slaves. I’ve always wondered how a person can fall under someone’s influence like that.”
“Mind control,” Joy said, half to herself.
“I was thinking more of emotional manipulation, like the way Judy Garland had her life controlled by movie executives. They told her she was fat until she started taking diet pills, and it was pills that killed her.”
Joy was starting to make sense of the strange conversation she’d had with the two men in the parking lot. “I’ve seen mind control before. With radio waves. This might be something like that.”
“I don’t think radio waves can―”
“Or maybe it’s like the way Nathaniel took control of Ed’s body. Some kind of possession.”
“Mmm,” said Melcher. He still didn’t quite believe everything they had told him about that day.
Rayfield was leaning over Joy’s shoulder to peer at the writing on the paper. “The way it cuts off there, it looks like he had to stop writing quick. Like he had to hide the paper from whoever was doing the controlling.”
Joy fed Buns another piece of cheese. Buns ate it eagerly and then smiled at her with tiny white teeth. “The one guy was pretty scared when I talked to them in the parking lot. The Cuban one. His friend kept giving him mean looks, like he was going to really let him have it later.”
“What about that name you mentioned?” Rayfield asked. “From the folder on the desk?”
“I did some research after you called,” said Melcher. “Have you heard of the Pentagon Papers? Daniel Ellsberg is the name of the guy who leaked them to the press.”
Joy gasped so loudly that she startled Buns, who hopped down off of her lap and ran to his bed in the far corner of the room. He looked a little resentful at being disturbed. But something important had popped into Joy’s mind, and she had to follow the thought to its conclusion. “The Pentagon Papers!” she said. “I knew I’d heard his name before. I think he may be the same Daniel who used to come to our office.”
Rayfield seemed to be coming to the same conclusion. “Somebody’s got it in for that guy,” he said. “And they wanted to dig up some dirt on him.”
“That’s it,” Joy said, lowering her voice almost to a whisper. “The burglars were sent by Richard Nixon!”
Melcher was shaking his head. “Joy, I love your spirit. I really do. But you’re nuts.” Rayfield gave him a dark look, but Terry stood his ground. “Come on, Rayfield. It’s just a regular old break-in.”
“She isn’t crazy,” Rayfield said, frowning at Terry. “Did you call the Guru crazy, too?”
Melcher laughed nervously. “Well…” He paused for a moment to weigh his words. “I liked the Guru a lot. But his head wasn’t totally screwed on straight. All that talk about Orc and Urizen…”
“His head was on straight,” said Rayfield. “You never would’ve said that when he was alive. You were as scared of Arthur as any of the rest of us, don’t tell me otherwise.”
Melcher looked embarrassed. “Yeah, I guess I was.”
Joy had always listened with great interest to Rayfield’s stories about the Guru, and wished she could have met the man herself. “The Guru believed in Urizen,” she said. “What if this break-in is all part of Urizen’s plan? That would explain why the police were called off. Nixon’s people made them stop the investigation.”
She could see the muscles in Terry’s jaw tense as he forced himself to hold his tongue.
“We’d better find those two dudes, then,” said Rayfield.
“They’re long gone by now,” said Melcher.
“Maybe. But at least we should go to that hotel and see if they’re still there.”
Joy tilted her head and looked at him quizzically. “What hotel?”
“The one on the back of that paper.” He flipped over the note that had been addressed to her and pointed at the torn edge at the top of the page. She had failed to notice that it was printed with a hotel’s stationery letterhead. Part of it had been torn away, but she could clearly see half of a Howard Johnson logo.
“Rayfield!” Joy said. “You’re brilliant!”
* * *
Her high opinion of Rayfield’s intellect remained unshaken, even after they had visited three different Howard Johnsons and found no trace of the men. Joy had drawn a hasty pencil sketch of the two characters, which they showed to the staff at each hotel they visited. Three times, the pictures had elicited no response or recognition at all.
The fourth hotel on their list was over in Pasadena. It was mid-afternoon by the time they got there. The day had turned quite warm, and they drove with the windows down so Joy could hear the stickers fluttering in the wind. Rayfield parked the Volkswagen and led the way in through the front door, ducking his head to avoid brushing his magnificent afro against the top of the doorframe.
The woman behind the front desk looked at Joy, then up at Rayfield, then back at Joy. Her gaze ended up on the BLAKE PEACE button, which she didn’t seem to like very much. “We’re all booked up,” she said with a sour twist to her mouth. Her skin was deeply tanned and wrinkled like old leather, and she wore an appalling amount of makeup.
Joy shook her head. “But―”
“All booked,” the woman said again. The glare she gave Rayfield was unmistakably hostile. “No more rooms.” She had a smoker’s voice that was almost as deep as Rayfield’s.
“We’re not looking for a room.” Joy narrowed her eyes and put a little ice into her tone as she read the woman’s nametag. “Phyllis.”
Phyllis had started turning away, but stopped mid-turn and swung her head around to look sideways at Joy. “Good. We’re all booked up. What’re you looking for, then?”
I bet you wouldn’t be all booked up if I had showed up with a white guy, Joy thought. “I’m looking for two men.”
The hotel lady took another good look at Rayfield, who gave her a broad, friendly grin. She did not return his smile. “Isn’t this one enough for you?” she said to Joy.
Joy rolled her eyes and slapped her sketch down on the countertop. “He’s quite enough for me, thanks.” She ignored Rayfield’s suggestive smirk. “These are the men I’m looking for.”
Phyllis examined the sketch for a moment, turned it around so she could see it right-side-up, and looked at it some more. “I’ve seen those two. They were here.”
Joy’s eyes widened in excitement. “Whe
n did they leave?”
“They weren’t too nice,” Phyllis said. “The taller one was pretty rude to me. The other one, he wasn’t so bad, but I didn’t like the look of him anyway. Mexican or something.” She took a long drag from her cigarette and blew the smoke up toward the ceiling.
“Do you know when they left?”
“The Mexican one kept twitching, like he kept getting shocked by electricity. He was real sweaty, too.”
Joy leaned in closer to try to get the woman’s attention. “Phyllis. When was the last time you saw them?”
“And they had terrible breath. What? Oh, they checked out maybe two, three hours ago. They checked out late and I charged ’em for a second day. I usually don’t, but they weren’t too nice to me, so I charged ’em.”
As the woman was talking, Joy was digging in her purse for something to write with. Rayfield kept tapping her on the shoulder, and she kept shrugging him off.
“Over there,” he said finally, pointing at a cup on the counter that was full of ball-point pens.
“Oh! Thanks, sweetie.” She took a pen, flipped over her sketch paper, and said, “Can you remember their names?”
“No,” said Phyllis.
Joy’s heart sank.
“But I can look them up.” She stared at Joy for a long moment. “Do you want me to look them up?”
“I would love it if you would look them up,” Joy said sweetly.
It took some time to decipher the signatures the men had provided when they’d checked in. Stephen Stevens, she assumed, was the American one. The other name was harder to make out; José Garcia, or possibly Jorge.
“Those names won’t do you any good,” said Phyllis. “They’re fake.”
“Of course they’re fake!” Joy replied. “But fake names are better than no names at all. Do you have any idea where they went?”
Phyllis finished her cigarette and lit another. “I’m usually quite nice to people, you know. But when they rub me the wrong way…” She shrugged.
Joy sighed. “After they left, do you know where―”
“I heard you the first time. No, I don’t know where they went.”
“Oh.” Joy’s excitement dissipated rapidly. “None at all?”
“Nope.” She took in another lungful of smoke. “Well, the taller one with the Groucho Marx mustache was talking about being late for a flight. He was in a real rush to get out of here. You’re welcome!” The last part came out as a yell, because Joy and Rayfield were already on their way out the door.
29
Tummy Trouble
“You look like hell,” said Perla.
Sarah laughed, but the laugh turned to a groan. “Your sympathy means so much to me,” she managed to say.
They were sitting at the kitchen table in Perla’s apartment. Sarah had just arrived in Denver on a flight from Los Angeles, where she had been meeting with the president of a chain of clothing boutiques called Cosmic Jeans. The president of the company was frizzy-haired young woman named Pearl, who acted so goofy that Sarah wondered how the woman managed to run a business. But Lester Myles had insisted that Pearl was a highly competent businesswoman whose approval was essential to Nightfinger’s new line of business, so Sarah had hopped on a plane to L.A. and stayed there until she had a signed contract in her hands.
Her return flight had included a stop at Stapleton Airport in Denver. On arrival at Stapleton, she had begun feeling so sick to her stomach that she’d found herself unable to contemplate boarding her connecting flight. It had been pure luck that she’d remembered that Perla lived in Denver; she had found Perla’s number in the phone book and called her up.
“More Alka-Seltzer?” Perla said. “Is it helping?”
Sarah shook her head. She felt dirty and smelly from her travels, but was feeling so nauseated that she didn’t think she could possibly make it as far as the shower. “Nothing helps. Must be something I ate.”
“Or maybe you’ve been poisoned.” Perla said this with a smile, but she didn’t sound like she was joking. “You’ve been traveling a lot, haven’t you? That’s what Joy said.”
“All the time,” Sarah muttered.
“Do you like the job?”
Sarah poked at a stray crumb on the table with her fingernail. “I don’t think I have a job anymore.”
Perla frowned. “How can you not be sure?”
“It was getting… strange. I never met my boss; I only talked to him by phone. He sent me all over the country to do things for him, but the more I learned about what the company was doing, the stranger it all got. I’m supposed to be on my way back to the office in New York. But I don’t want to go there. I don’t want the job anymore.”
“Plenty of other jobs out there,” Perla said. Then, more delicately: “Been in touch with Ed lately?”
Hearing his name made her stomach quiver unpleasantly. “No.”
Perla looked her steadily in the eye; she was about to share something that she felt Sarah needed to know, and there could be no shying away from it. “Nobody’s heard from Ed in months. Joy and Rayfield are worried about him.”
She had never gotten to know Perla well. In many ways, she was quite the opposite of Joy: taciturn, sometimes a bit dour. But her blunt manner concealed a soft spot that hadn’t been obvious to Sarah until she’d spent some time around her. At first, Sarah had thought that Perla and Joy might have been an item. Joy’s relationship with Rayfield had appeared to rule out that possibility, but one could never be sure.
“Ed loves you,” Perla said.
Sarah blinked several times. “I know.”
“And you love him too.”
“It was too much,” Sarah said. “I met him, and then suddenly we were living together, and we were supposed to save the world, and I never really had a chance to think about any of it.”
Perla sat quietly, waiting for her to say more. Sarah didn’t know why she felt comfortable opening up to her, but she did.
“He was the first real, grown-up relationship I ever had. Before him, there was just—well, I never really dated anybody. When I was living in the Guru’s house, I never met anybody except the men who lived there, and I would never have thought of them that way. Most of them were old. Then I met Ed, and he was really… you know. He was really something. But Ed had already been married, he’s experienced a lot more than me, and he was still trying to get over what happened to his wife, and I… I…”
“You were feeling overwhelmed,” Perla said softly.
That was exactly the right word for it. “Yeah.”
“There’s nothing wrong with feeling that way. How old are you?”
“Almost twenty.”
Perla smiled and squeezed her shoulder. “You’re still a kid. Of course you felt overwhelmed. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
Sarah smiled and said, “I’m going to go throw up now.”
* * *
After half an hour in the bathroom, Sarah felt a little better. Perla had put clean sheets on her bed and volunteered to sleep on the couch. Sarah protested, but only a little, before sliding gratefully under the covers. Perla put a glass of water on the table next to the bed.
“I’ll call Joy in the morning,” Perla said. “She’d want to know you’re here.”
“Okay,” Sarah said sleepily. The person she really wanted to talk to was Ed.
“I’ll be on the couch if you need anything.” With that, Perla went out to the living room to sleep.
Sarah had tried, since breaking up with Ed, to avoid thinking about him at all costs. Now that she had allowed herself to think about him, it was impossible to stop. Then, in spite of her best efforts, a bad idea crept into her thoughts. She knew it was not wise, but as soon as it came to her, she couldn’t think of anything else. She wanted to talk to him, or if she couldn’t talk to him, she wanted to visit his mind and make sure he was still out there somewhere. So, late that night, she closed her eyes and ventured out into space to find him.
She could
tell that something was wrong as soon as she came close to the blue-green sphere that was his mind. It was shrouded in gray clouds, as if a great storm was raging down below. She pushed her way through the thick clouds—there was a resistance as she passed through, like a thick fluid—and down to the surface, looking for the huge tree where they had always met. The tree looked the same as always, but the colors of the forest were muted. Overhead, the overcast sky let in no light from the stars—just a constant, drab grayness.
A man was hunched over the largest of the long, dark gashes that Ed had opened up in the ground. Those holes looked the same as they had that day: inside they were black, as dark as anything Sarah had ever seen. The man who was looking down into them was middle-aged, with thinning red hair around the sides of his bald head. She had to think for a moment to remember his name: Jonathan. Behind him stood a younger man with a red knit hat on his head. Sarah recognized him as one of the people who had camped outside their apartment.
Jonathan looked up at the sound of her approach. “I thought you had left him,” he called. “Why are you back?” The younger man watched her with curiosity, but didn’t say anything.
She walked closer so she wouldn’t have to shout. “I just wanted to see if he’s okay. No one’s heard from him in months.”
Jonathan looked up at the sky. “You can’t stay here. Urizen is fighting for control. It’s all I can do to hold him back.”
“If I could just―”
He looked from the sky back to her. “Young lady, listen. You don’t know how dangerous this place is. I don’t know what happened between you and Ed, but I know he wouldn’t want you to get hurt. You have to get out of here!”
“Can you tell him I came to see him? I’m staying with Perla. I… want to see him. Will you give him that message?”
The Music of the Machine (The Book of Terwilliger 2) Page 41
