"You can't just go running off like this!" Dr. Palmer's voice crackled over the telephone line.
"Perhaps you'd like to tell me, then, just how it is I ought to run off," Winter shot back coolly, in a tone her former colleagues at Arkham Miskatonic King would have recognized and backed down from. "And I don't believe I need your permission. I'm notifying you as a courtesy, nothing more. How is Truth?" Winter added, ruthlessly changing the subject.
"She's . . . okay," Dr. Palmer admitted grudgingly. "But I hope you'll reconsider this, Winter. It's not as if you're alone in this . . . thing. You have friends, allies. ..."
"I appreciate your concern," Winter said, a shade more warmly. "But I think I need to do a little more research before accepting your offer." The sentence was a ghost out of her past and its resonance made her smile briefly. "I think I may know how to find out who this 'magician' is that you and Truth say is after me."
"You think it's Hunter Grey son?" Dr. Palmer asked shrewdly.
no! Some powerful instinct within her could not accept that Grey could be responsible for something that carried so much of hating and hurting with it. Aloud she said, "Grey's the only magician I ever knew, Dr. Palmer. Maybe he'll know where to start looking for yours." IF I CAN FIND HIM. . . .
But if Hunter Greyson remained maddeningly elusive, at least the rest of her school friends were not so hard to find. Winter had reached Rappa-hoag around noon, checked into the first large hotel she saw, and called the number Nina Fowler had found for Janelle Baker.
Only I have to remember she's Janelle Raymond now, Winter reminded herself as she pulled the car to a stop outside 167 Grammercy Park Road. Janelle was married, and, like the others, had gotten on with her life, but she'd been delighted to hear from Winter when Winter phoned her from the nearby Marriott.
Should she tell Janelle that she didn't really remember her? Winter fretted. She was hoping she wouldn't have to—she was counting on the sight and presence of the woman who had once been one of her closest friends to shake loose her repressed memories.
Repressed? What an odd idea. What on earth could there be to repress about four years of college?
"Winter!"
But the thought vanished at the sight of the plump redhead standing on the porch of the small tract house. Janelle stood on tiptoes, waving and wearing a kelly-green sweatsuit with a row of plaid heart appliques across the bosom, and a matching plaid bow holding back her wavy flame-red hair.
She looks like a Cabbage Patch doll with no fashion sense, Winter thought with automatic unkindness, before guiltily curbing the thought. But there was something about her friend's appearance that generated a faint impulse of alarm, though Janelle looked clean and healthy—and certainly well fed.
Oh, stop it! Winter told herself sternly as she got out of the car. She waved back at Janelle and started up the walk.
The inside of 167 Grammercy Park Road was as relentlessly ordinary as the outside; Janelle led her into a living room that looked to Winter as if it had been furnished with one of those "decorator room groupings" from a national chain department store. There was a gray velveteen La-Z-Boy with the Scotchgard label still on it in the corner and French Provincial end tables in white pickled polyurethane waterproof finish flanking the overstuffed couch upholstered in peach floral Herculon. The floor lamp coordinated with the two peach-colored ginger-jar lamps on the end tables. Wall-to-wall acrylic pile in a harmonizing shade of gray swept across the floor to vanish beneath the edge of the companion entertainment and media center. The open spaces on the shelves of the entertainment center were filled with untidy piles of the current popular videos and the sort of soulless decorative "accents" that came from the same place that everything else in the room had—creating a room that was both cluttered and impersonal.
Winter felt a faint sense of recoil, and didn't think the cause was anything as simple and unflattering as snobbery. It was true that the room looked like a page from a less-expensive catalog, but that wasn't what gave the room the ambiguously chilling sense of emptiness. Winter pushed the thought away, unwilling to follow it to its logical conclusion.
The only thing that didn't fit in with the rest of the room was the picture over the couch.
It was a landscape, painted with all the hot bright colors of a New England summer—a forest surrounding a mixed field of poppies and lupines, leading the eye inevitably to the flash of gleaming silver at the center; the pool in which the rising moon was reflected even at midday, and the unicorn that waited beside it.
"Do you still paint?" Winter burst out impulsively, cheered by remembering. Janelle had been an artist. She was sure the memory was a true one.
But ...
"Who has time?" Janelle said, shrugging. "If you only knew. . . . But here I am babbling on and you're hardly in the door. Give me your coat— um, Burberry, very nice—and you're going to stay for dinner, right? Of course you are—then you can meet Denny; I've told him so much about you that he's just dying to meet you. But let me hang up your coat; come on back to the guest room, it's in through here. Where are you staying?"
Following Janelle down the hall, Winter felt a traitorous pang of relief that she was already checked into the Marriott. The small suburban tract house was the very antithesis of Greyangels Farm, and Winter did not think she could have borne to accept Janelle's hospitality overnight.
"Oh, that's too bad," Janelle said when she answered. "We've got the cutest little guest room—you'll see—it used to be my studio—but no one ever uses it now except Denny's mother. I wish you'd called earlier— you could have stayed with us."
Oh no I couldn't have.
The guest room Janelle conducted her to was very much like the living room. All the furniture seemed to have been purchased by someone less concerned with their own taste than with satisfying some arbitrary external standard. There was a prim single bed and a chest of drawers, and a couple of tired-looking prints of flowers on the wall.
"I used to have my own stuff up, but Mama Raymond said it made her head hurt to look at it, and then she gave us these," Janelle said, talking over her shoulder as she opened the closet and hung Winter's coat inside.
"Just toss your bag anywhere—how do you ever manage that thing; it looks big enough to smuggle babies in!"
Winter smothered a laugh and felt a pang of wistful tenderness for her friend. Janelle had always been a clown, hiding her shyness behind a flurry of one-liners. Winter threw her briefbag on the bed.
"So how have you been, really?" Winter said awkwardly. "It's been a long time."
"You never call, you never write. . . ." Janelle teased impishly, "but then, I didn't ever get around to thanking you for the wedding present, and it's been—what?—eight years now?"
Winter wondered what she'd sent.
"And it's so great to see you again—you look really terrific." Janelle stood in front of the closet door, regarding Winter with frank envy.
"Thanks," Winter said, "so do you."
"Hah!" Janelle laughed dismissively. "We can't all keep our girlish figures. But come on; let me get you some coffee, and try to spoil yours."
The eat-in kitchen was decorated country style, in French blue and beige with pictures of geese everywhere. Janelle had always had a penchant for things the other members of the group considered unbearably corny, Winter thought, with a surmise that owed more to intuition than memory.
"Do you still collect teddy bears?" she asked.
Janelle beamed, her gray eyes disappearing into smile-crinkles. "Yeah. Sometimes. Remember the Lost Bears?"
"And you were Wendy," Winter said, only half-guessing now.
"And Tiger-Lily Bear, and Cub-tain Hook. I sure do miss them," Janelle sighed. "But sit down," she urged, changing the subject quickly. "I'll put up the coffee."
Janelle chattered on as she bustled around the kitchen, putting out cookies, pouring coffee, and filling in the story of the last several years without any need for Winter to ask any questions.
> "Would you believe it? I met Denny working at a computer store— we'd get two or three deliveries a day from shippers and he was the UPS guy. We ended up seeing a lot of each other, and, well . . ." Janelle shrugged again, and popped a cookie into her mouth.
Somehow this was not the sort of future Winter would have predicted for Janelle all those years ago. "Computer store?" she asked, sipping at her coffee. Janelle had put in the sugar and it was far too sweet for Winter's taste.
"Yeah, well," her friend said evasively. Despite Janelle's insistence that she wanted to have a conversation, she wouldn't sit down, fussing and hovering about the kitchen as if she both wanted to talk to Winter and wanted to avoid it.
"But what about your art career?" Sudden recollection made Winter blurt the question out tactlessly, but the image was crystal-clear: Janelle with her sketches, Janelle with her portfolio . . . "You sold some paintings to that gaming company, and—"
"It didn't really work out," Janelle interrupted hastily. "Besides, there isn't a living in book covers unless you're Michael Whelan or somebody. So what are you doing these days?"
Well, I just got out of a mental institution and I'm being followed around by some kind of invisible monster. . . .
"I guess I'm taking a much-needed vacation," Winter said diplomatically. "I almost feel guilty about just calling you up out of nowhere like this—"
"Oh, pooh—what are old friends for? Emphasis on the old," Janelle said, finally lowering herself into a chair with a sigh. "Don't mind me— I was up at five this morning, cleaning up the yard—again."
"What happened?" Winter asked idly. She glanced past Janelle to the window above the sink. The goose-printed cafe curtains shifted in the breeze, and Winter suddenly noticed that there was a long jagged crack across the glass beneath.
"Damned kids. Denny says its a Satanic cult, and I think he's joking. They go through the whole development dragging the trash cans out into the road and emptying them, mixing up the recyclables, that kind of thing. But what's really sick is the way they keep scooping up roadkill off Route Seventeen and leaving it around. It's gotten to where you have to look twice before you step out your front door in the morning." She made a face.
"Anything else?" Winter asked, mouth suddenly dry.
"Anything else what?" Janelle asked, frowning puzzledly.
"Anything else weird—like doors that won't stay shut, and unexplained storms. Trouble with your car. Things that break." She was too paranoid to believe in coincidence any more—and Janelle's description sounded all too much like Winter's own litany of complaints ... of her poltergeist, and of something darker.
Janelle laughed. "You don't need any other explanation for why things break when I'm around! Denny says we ought to buy our dishes by the carload! Honestly, Winter, do you think New Jersey's gone over to the dark side of the Force or something?"
"No." Yes, but how could I even begin to explain? "Of course I don't, Jan-nie. But do sit down. Have some coffee. Do you ever hear from any of the others?"
It was a clumsy way to change the subject, but Winter had the growing sense that their conversation was built around awkward silences, as if there were some great secret that they both shared but couldn't speak of. Only I don't know what it is ... do IP
No matter the cause, Janelle was grateful to follow Winter's lead.
"Oh, you know how it is—there isn't a lot of point in keeping up with everyone else, is there? Ramsey's the only one, really, and just Christmas cards, that sort of thing. I thought about going to our ten-year reunion, but Denny didn't want to stand around all day talking to people he didn't know, and it is a long way. ..."
But I drove it in a day! Winter protested silently, and Janelle, as if she could read her mind, answered, "Some places are different distances depending on who's going there."
By the time Dennis Raymond arrived home from work, Winter was already half-prepared to dislike him, and nothing she saw in the first five minutes after his arrival changed her mind.
Dennis Raymond was somewhere around forty, although his overall air of dissatisfaction made him look older. When he came in, he was wearing a cheap, unbecoming suit and carrying a large, overstuffed briefcase. Winter instantly pegged him as some sort of salesman, in the male equivalent of a woman's dead-end secretarial job. His hair was thinning and greasy; not so much slovenly as given up on. In fact, everything about Dennis Raymond said that he was a man who had given up; who was simply serving out his time and waiting until he could move on.
But this is your life; not a dress rehearsal, Winter thought against the sudden clutch of tension in her chest.
Dennis came into the kitchen, slinging his jacket and briefcase onto one of the kitchen chairs, and fixed Winter with a challenging stare from his small cold eyes that made her feel he was assessing the dollar value of everything she wore, from the casual Aigner pumps to the wheat-colored cashmere sweater and the diamond studs in her ears. Assessing . . . and resenting.
"So this is your old girlfriend, huh, Neenie?" he said. His voice was like the rest of him; aggressive and uncared-for; and Winter, whose entire working day had been spent shouting at the top of her lungs and then trying to repair the damage afterward, winced faintly in sympathy at the rough rawness of Dennis Raymond's voice.
"This is Winter; you remember I—"
"What's for dinner?" Denny said, cutting her off. He looked around the kitchen, sniffing exaggeratedly.
For the last few hours the fragrant scent of pot roast with red wine and onions had been slowly filling the kitchen. Janelle was a good cook but an anxious one, fussing and worrying over every ingredient.
"Pot roast; I thought—" Janelle began again.
"Well hurry up with it, would you? I'm starved. A man who has to work for a living—" he said, with a baleful glare at Winter "—has a right to expect a few things when he gets home, you know what I'm saying?"
Yes; but he hasn't got the right to make other people slave for him without a word of thanks. Winter had worked longer and harder days than Dennis Raymond ever had, she suspected, rising while it was still dark in order to get the news from Tokyo and the gold-fix from London; sipping her first coffee of the day staring at the big display over the Pit and waiting for Chicago to wake up so that the most frantic part of her working day could begin. She'd had people to shop for her, cook for her, clean for her—but she'd never assumed these things were hers by right. She'd paid for them, and been grateful she was in a position to be able to pay.
"Sure, honey." Janelle's tone was apprehensive, and she kept darting worried glances at Winter. Without being told, Janelle got a glass from the cupboard and filled it with ice, then retrieved a bottle from under the kitchen sink and poured a generous splash of bourbon into it.
"Would you like a drink, Winter?" Janelle said, trying to turn the moment into a social one.
"Women shouldn't drink," Denny said, taking the glass.
Winter repressed the urge to ask Janelle for a double bourbon and see if she could drink Denny under the table.
"And what is it, Mr. Raymond, that you think women should do?" Winter asked silkily. She crossed one leg over the other and leaned back in her chair, feeling a small sense of triumph as the gray flannel skirt slid up over the gleaming Evan Picone stockings and Denny's eyes followed the movement. Sex was a weapon, Jack had always told her, and she should use every weapon the good Lord had given her to get what she wanted.
God, she missed Jack. He'd been her mentor; she'd clerked for him when she'd first arrived on the Street, and been a good friend to him and Lorna both. When he'd died last year—
"I think they shouldn't try to be men," Denny said, knocking back the second half of his drink. His face was flushed now from the alcohol, and his mouth was set in a thin line.
Heart attack within the year, Winter prophesied automatically. She readied herself for another retort—she'd been annihilating assholes like this since she was twenty-five—but then she glanced sideways at Janelle.
Her friend's gray eyes were wells of pain, and she looked pleadingly at Winter.
Winter took a deep breath, only now realizing how disastrous the consequences of losing her hold on her temper could be. If the poltergeist should strike here . . . She took a deep breath, and visualized the muscles of her chest and stomach—where, according to the pamphlet from Inquire Within, anger energy accumulated—relaxing.
"I'm sure you're right," Winter said. "Jannie, shall I help you set the table?"
Although the bungalow had an eat-in kitchen, there was also a small dining room, dutifully furnished with an eight-piece early American dining suite from Sears. Denny Raymond—on his third bourbon by this time— bulldozed his way through pot roast and carrots in a silence broken only by monosyllabic demands for more food. Winter found herself sneaking surreptitious glances at her watch, counting the moments until dinner would be over and she could gracefully leave. But I have to ask Jannie about Grey.
It was true that Janelle hadn't mentioned him by name earlier when she'd been discussing how out of touch she was with the others, but even if she weren't in touch, she might at least have some idea of where Winter could begin looking for Hunter Greyson. Only Winter wasn't entirely sure of how to broach the subject, not with Dennis Raymond sitting across the table from her glaring at her as though she were his worst enemy.
Which of course I am: a woman he can neither bully nor defeat. In the fashion that Dennis measures success—money—I'm better than he'll ever be, and he just can't stand it.
She glanced out of the corner of her eye at Janelle, who, for all her chatter earlier, had been silent since she'd sat down, looking at neither of them. Considering Denny's manners—or lack of them—Winter wondered why Janelle had asked her to stay for dinner. Surely it would have been easier all around if Winter had merely left before Denny got home?
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