by Jane Haddam
The truth of it was that she was more than a little excited at the thought of becoming a martyr. It made her happier than she had ever been, and the thought of herself being interviewed on 60 Minutes by a somber-faced Ed Bradley made her feel as if her body were expanding endlessly, ballooning into space. There was always the possibility that the Illuminati would get wind of what she was doing and shoot her instead of taking her alive. There was an even better possibility that they would make sure she died in prison, and early, in one of those prison murders the authorities always claimed it was impossible to solve. She would have to be careful about both those things.
At the moment, she had to be careful to be as normal as she always was, a middle-aged woman who worked at Price Heaven and wasn’t even a supervisor, although women half her age who had been working at Price Heaven far less long had advanced that far. She had checked and rechecked the guns and the explosives. They were safely in place in the hollows between the walls, under the floor in the basement, disguised by wads of yellowed newsprint in the old woodstove nobody had used for as long as Kathi could remember. It was not the arms she was worried about. Nobody could claim she was about to shoot anybody any time sooner. It would take a good half hour to unearth anything useful. She wasn’t worried that the arms would be confiscated, either, because of course this was not the only house where they kept weapons and explosives. There were houses all around the city, and only Michael knew where they all were. Everything was ready. Everything had been carefully planned. If the need arose, America on Alert—or at least the core of it— could be out of sight and undetectable in an instant. What worried her was the police, slithering as they were in bushes and bathrooms, staying out of sight. Something was about to happen. She could feel it. She didn’t know what it was. It was one thing to wait in expectation for martyrdom. It was another to just wait, not knowing what would happen next, not being sure what you were supposed to do.
It was seven o’clock in the morning. Her shift started at ten. She had taken her shower, and eaten her breakfast, and gotten dressed in plain black slacks and a white blouse. Later, at the store, she would put on the green apron she was required to keep there and be in full uniform. The uniform bothered her to no end. For one thing, she had had to buy it, or rather the slacks and blouse, from Price Heaven itself. She had been told she was being given an “employee discount,” but there was no way to prove that. Price Heaven didn’t sell its uniform pieces to the general public. The pieces weren’t out on the floor with price tags on them so that she could check to see if she was getting any discount at all. For another thing, there was the simple fact that it was a uniform. That was what the Illuminati liked to do to people. They liked to turn them into cogs in a machine, ciphers without individuality. Ending individuality was one of the things they cared about most.
She did not have a television set. She’d thrown out the one she had at the end of her first month in America on Alert. She’d finally understood how that set was destroying her, because it was sending out the signals that brainwashed her into passivity while she thought she was just watching Golden Girls. She didn’t get the newspaper, either, because she didn’t want the newspaper delivery man coming to her door. Everybody knew that newspapers were one of the greatest bastions of evil in America. Even people who would say that America on Alert was full of kooks knew that. Kathi didn’t want to give the newspaper a chance to plant a bug on the premises. As it was, Michael came in once a month while she was at work and swept the place for bugs and did whatever else had to be done to make sure that any bugs he didn’t catch wouldn’t work. She knew he’d been there because he always left a little box of four Russell Stover chocolates on the dining room table for her to find. She was restless and a little upset. She could read The Harridan Report, but she’d read all the issues of it she had. She could look through the longer literature America on Alert put out for the public, but she’d read all that too. She could recite some of it by heart. This was how she knew television was an addiction. It had been years, but the simple fact that the set wasn’t in the house for her to turn on to pass the time made her the next best thing to panicked.
The phone rang. She had call-waiting—Michael paid for that; she couldn’t have afforded it herself, since Price Heaven paid not much better than minimum wage and never gave anybody enough hours to be “full-time”—and she raced across the dining room into the living room to look at the numbers on the little screen. Sometimes she just turned the ringers off on all the phones and left the machines on. If it was somebody from America on Alert, they would said “bloody wrong number” into the machine and then hang up. She would turn the ringer on on one of the phones and then wait until it rang. Nobody from America on Alert would leave a real message on an answering machine, of course. It was virtually impossible to erase an answering machine tape, at least in any practically useful way. That was the kind of thing that showed up in evidence at trials and, worse, got used to track down the members of an organization when one of their number was captured but would not talk. She wished she had kept just one of the guns out for herself to use. She understood why Michael got upset at the very idea of that—if she had a gun on her, they could shoot her dead and claim she had shot first. They could claim that even if the gun was in her purse and her purse was lying on the ground next to her—but she would have felt safer if she had been armed. She found it hard to sleep knowing that there was no longer a loaded Luger on her nightstand next to the glass-based table lamp with its sky blue polyester shade.
The phone number on the screen was not one she knew. She stood still and waited. The answering machine kicked in. A moment later, she heard Michael’s voice say, “bloody wrong number.” The bloody was a work of genius. It didn’t mean anything. It was some swear word people used in England. It wasn’t the kind of thing anybody in America would use. Unless, of course, the Illuminati got wind of what was going on. Then they could use it to try to trick her into betraying herself, or Michael. In this case, though, Michael’s voice had been clear and unmistakable. She turned the ringer on and waited.
The phone rang. The bell was harsh and overloud. The call-waiting screen flickered. Kathi picked up.
“Yes?”
“Have you seen the news today?” Michael asked.
“No.” Kathi bit her lip. She didn’t want to defend herself. It made her feel small. Michael should know by now that she never saw the news before she went out in the morning, and then she only saw it, or heard about it, secondhand.
“Go out and buy yourself a paper,” Michael said. “Don’t read just the front page.”
“What I’m looking for isn’t on the front page?”
“Some of it is. Read the business section too. The really important thing is in the business section.”
“Is there something in particular in the business section?” Kathi hated this part. She hated the business section. It always seemed written in code.
“Don’t worry,” Michael said. “You’ll see what it is as soon as you lay eyes on it. And you’ll see the other thing too. On the front page. The small thing they’re going to pretend is the big story. Go now. I’ll call you back at eight and we can go over what our response should be. Can you get hold of Susan?”
“Yes.” Kathi didn’t want to.
“Good. Get hold of her and have her at your place at eight. Turn on the speaker on the speakerphone. We’ll have a conference call. Now I’ve got to go.”
“But—” Kathi said.
The phone had gone to dial tone in her ear. She hated that sound. She hung up. Her coat was lying across the couch that wasn’t really a couch. It was too small. A “love seat,” people called them. She made a face at it and at the worn spots in what had once been fake velvet but now looked like matted mush. She put her coat on and took her wool hat out of the left-hand pocket. Her gloves—wool gloves, not leather ones—were inside the hat. She hated going out before she had to. Being outside was different from being at home. You were
much more exposed. Somebody could shoot you and take all your identification, and even your best friends wouldn’t know for weeks that you were dead.
She went out and locked the door behind her. She had triple locks on all the doors, although she wasn’t in the least worried about ordinary, garden-variety burglars and rapists. She went down the front steps and up the block. This was not a good neighborhood, although it was not one of the worst, either. Here, the houses were interspersed with dry cleaning stores and candy stores and hardware stores. None of the big chains had bothered to venture here except for McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts. To go to the bookstore, to go to Starbucks or Radio Shack, you either had to go to better neighborhoods or to the Main Line to the malls.
There was a candy store at the corner that served as a newsstand. The newspapers were out front in a wire rack. There were lots and lots of copies of the Philadelphia Inquirer and a few of both the New York Times and the Washington Post. The headlines in the Times and the Post were about something President Bush was doing that involved Attorney General John Ashcroft. The headline on the Inquirer said:
WIFE OF SLAIN FINANCIER MURDERED
Kathi picked up a copy, found some change in her pocket, and went into the store. The picture of Charlotte Deacon Ross was a posed one that had been taken in a studio. She was shown only from the shoulders up, looking as if she were wearing nothing but pearls.
The newsstand owner took her money and grunted. Kathi ignored him. She thought he might be a spy, but Michael didn’t agree with her. In the long run, it probably didn’t matter. She had tried to give him some of America on Alert’s pamphlets, and he had called her a lot of unpleasant names.
Out on the street again, she stopped and began to page through the newspaper, looking for the financial section. She was not very interested in the death of Charlotte Deacon Ross. It might mean that the police would have to back off on America on Alert, since there was no reason at all why patriots would want to harm a silly Society woman who spent her life planning parties, but the police could always find some way to justify doing what they wanted to do. Besides, she was prepared for everything and anything to come of the murder of Tony Ross, which had been carried out in the way it was carried out precisely because that would make it possible for the authorities to “do something” about the threat that America on Alert posed for them. Nothing was an accident. Nothing was a coincidence. Everything was planned.
She got to the financial section and saw, immediately, what Michael had been talking about. The headline reached across most of the page, something she’d noticed that newspapers tended not to do on any page except the very front one.
price heaven files for chapter eleven
reorganization calls for closing of 300 stores
Suddenly, her throat felt very scratchy. Her stomach felt raw. There was a bench in a little shelter where the bus stopped. She went to that and sat down, the paper still open in front of her face. She wasn’t reading the story. She knew what it would say. Michael always pointed out that this was the Il-luminati’s most treasured tactic. They wanted the people to be prosperous, but not sure of their prosperity. If people began to feel that there was nothing to worry about, they’d always be able to find work and enough to eat and enough to have the things they wanted, they would stop being docile. That was what happened in the sixties, when everything began to go completely out of control. Now they were more careful. They made sure there were always downturns and layoffs. They threw some of their least important companies into bankruptcy. They cut jobs right before Christmas and placed the news very prominently in the newspapers and on the television news—but never on the front page, and never as the lead story. The trick was to let people know at the same time you had them distracted by trivialities. That way they’d become uneasy and afraid, but not be able to figure out who was the cause of either, or what to do about it. The wind around her legs was very cold. She hadn’t noticed it before. A bus had stopped, and people were getting out. She didn’t notice them, either, and when the driver finally pulled the door shut in disgust, she didn’t realize he had been waiting for her.
If she hadn’t been taught to understand the plan, if she hadn’t learned all about why things like this happened and what they were used for, she would have broken down right on this bench and cried for an hour.
2
Anne Ross Wyler had been depressed and jumpy all morning, long before she heard the news about her sister-in-law. Morning was not the best time in this neighborhood. Even in the half-light of a grey and overcast day, it was too easy to see the buildings around Adelphos House as what they really were: abandoned, or worse; haunted the way houses can only be haunted if their ghosts are still made of flesh and blood. Besides, Anne thought, getting herself coffee in the Adelphos House kitchen while she pretended not to look at Ryall Wyn-dham’s column left lying faceup on the kitchen table, there was nobody around. The whores and the junkies were all night people. So were the pimps and dealers. Even the pawnshop didn’t bother to open until noon. Annie had gone in there once to see what it was like. She’d ended up disappointed. She’d expected sin and sexuality, some kind of apocalyptic vision. She’d always secretly suspected that the people who lived on the streets lived more exciting lives than the one she had been brought up to live. They had adventures, and passions, and pasts. The truth was a thin layer of grime on the glass of display cases and mundane articles—class rings, ancient typewriters, gloves with the fingertips worn almost to nothing—waiting for buyers who would never materialize. Except, Annie had realized, that they would have to materialize. Somebody had to buy these things, or the pawnbroker would make no money.
She poured coffee into the first mug she could find in the first cabinet she opened. She never noticed what she ate and drank from, any more than she noticed what she wore. She put the mug on the table and sat down in front of Ryall Wyndham’s column. It was illustrated by three small pictures, all murky, of women in evening dress. Mrs. Carter Lindford at The Philadelphia Opera Gala, one of them said. She remembered Mrs. Carter Lindford as a girl named Abigail Hull Drake, who used to spell out her whole name like that on English essays when they were both at Madeira. People went on doing the same things over and over again, without thinking about why they were doing them. They went to school where they were expected to go. They went to college where they were expected to go. They went into law or banking or university teaching because that was the kind of thing the people they knew did. They thought they believed in God, but except for the one or two of them who converted to Catholicism or got born again and caught up in Bible study, most of them really didn’t.
The first story in Ryall Wyndham’s column was a progress report on the investigation into Tony Ross’s murder. It said less than similar stories that had appeared in print and on television in the last few days, but it said it with an air of insinuating archness that was meant to indicate that its author knew much more than he was telling. All of Ryall Wyndham’s writing sounded like that. It was what he sold to the people who read him, the illusion that they were on the inside of a world they were sure was barred to them forever, secret, out of sight.
The second story in Ryall Wyndham’s column was about a dinner party at the house of somebody Annie had never heard of. If Wyndham had to stick to real Philadelphia Society for his columns, he’d make it into print about once a month. She looked at the picture of Ryall Wyndham himself up at the top near the headline and the byline. The picture was almost vanishingly small, and even more murky than the others, and she could get no impression of the man beyond what her memory served her. She tried to imagine what he had looked like in the back of a car being sucked off by Patsy Lennon, and couldn’t do it. She couldn’t imagine any man like that, and she had seen a few in the act.
The coffee was terrible. She didn’t care. She had long ago learned to live with it. She was hungry, but it was too much trouble to go looking through the refrigerator to see if there was anything she wanted t
o eat. There might be, or there might be just the raw vegetables Lucinda liked to stock up on for making chicken soup. She wondered why she couldn’t make herself sleep later. There was nothing to be done this early in the day, and by the time she got to the point where there was something to do, she was exhausted. She fiddled with her Freedom FROM Religion button. There was a part of her that was terrified that she would one day accidentally wear it upside down. Then she turned to the paper’s front page.
It was a bad picture of Charlotte, one of those posed portraits women had taken when they were chairwomen of charity committees. The pearls were fake—Annie knew the difference between Charlotte’s fake pearls and her real ones, but she would have suspected even if she hadn’t—and Charlotte’s skin looked sallow, as if she had recently been ill. It was not the picture Charlotte would have chosen if she had known she would appear on the front page of a newspaper, but Charlotte would never have wanted to appear on the front page of a newspaper. Seeing that picture, somebody who didn’t know her would assume that Charlotte was a grade-A bitch. They would be right.
The problem, Annie thought, was that she felt a little too sick to her stomach. She was sure that if she’d had something inside her to throw up, she would have done it. Instead, she licked her lips, and then bit them. Something had happened to the nerve endings under her skin. She had no nerve endings under her skin. Her head hurt. Her body ached. She couldn’t read the words on the page. Everything was blurry.
Outside, it started to rain. Annie could hear the drops hitting the panes of the kitchen windows, harder in that section of the wall where the gutter had collapsed and not yet been replaced. She got up and took her coffee with her. The house felt too quiet around her, just as the street felt too quiet around the house. Sometimes they had one or more of the girls staying over, waiting for a ticket home or to go to a treatment program, but this was not one of those times. Later on there would be scheduled activities and events: an encounter group; a self-assertiveness class; a class on how to use a computer. Annie wanted noise, distraction, company. Even the gunfire of a gang war in the street would have been better than this silence.
