LITMIR.BIZ

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but he moves quicker than the eye.”

      “Who?”

      “You listening to anything I’m saying? The ghost, that’s who.”

      “You spiking that coffee with something?”

      “He said he’s made from pieces of criminals.”

      “Slow down. You’re driving too fast.”

      Carson accelerated. “The hands of a strangler, one heart from a mad arsonist, one from a child molester. His life force from a thunderstorm.”

      “I don’t get it.”

      “Neither do I.”

      BY THE TIME Carson parked in front of Fullbright’s Funeral Home, she had told Michael everything that happened in Allwine’s apartment.

      His face revealed no skepticism, but his tone of voice was the equivalent of raised eyebrows: “You were tired, in a weird place—”

      “He took a gun away from me,” she said, which might have been the essence of her astonishment, the one thing about the experience that had seemed the most supernatural. “No one takes a gun away from me, Michael. You want to try?”

      “No. I enjoy having testicles. All I’m saying is that he was dressed in black, the apartment is black, so the disappearing trick was probably just a trick.”

      “So maybe he manipulated me, and I saw what he wanted me to see. Is that it?”

      “Doesn’t that make more sense?”

      “Sure damn does. But if it was a trick, he should be headlining a magic act in Vegas.”

      Looking at the funeral home, Michael said, “Why’re we here?”

      “Maybe he didn’t really move faster than the eye, and maybe he didn’t in fact vanish into thin air, but he was dead-on when he said Allwine was in despair, wanted to die…but couldn’t kill himself.”

      From a pocket she withdrew the four memorial booklets and handed them to Michael.

      “Bobby had like a hundred of these,” she continued, “in a drawer of his nightstand. All from different funerals at this place. Death appealed to him.”

      She got out of the car, slammed the driver’s door, and met Michael on the sidewalk.

      He said, “‘Life force from a thunderstorm.’ What the hell does that mean?”

      “Sometimes like a soft lightning throbs through his eyes.”

      Hurrying at her side, Michael said, “You’ve always been stone solid until now, like Joe Friday with no Y chromosome. Now you’re Nancy Drew on a sugar rush.”

      Like so many things in New Orleans, the mortuary seemed as much a dream place as a reality. It had once been a Gothic Revival mansion and no doubt still served as the mortician’s residence as well as his place of business. The weight of the lavish rococo millwork must have been only a few pounds shy of the critical load needed to buckle the eaves, implode the walls, and collapse the roof.

      Live oaks dating to the plantation era shaded the house, while camellias, gardenias, mimosa, and tea roses cast a scene-saturating perfume. Bees buzzed lazily from bloom to bloom, too fat and happy to sting, besotted by rich nectar.

      At the front door, Carson rang the bell. “Michael, don’t you sometimes sense there’s more to life than the grind—some amazing secret you can almost see from the corner of your eye?” Before he could reply, she plunged on: “Last night I saw something amazing…something I can’t put into words. It’s almost like UFOs exist.”

      “You and me—we’ve put guys in psych wards who talk like that.”

      A bearish, dour-looking man answered the door and acknowledged in the most somber tones that he was indeed Taylor Fullbright.

      Flashing her police ID, Carson said, “Sir, I’m sorry I didn’t call ahead, but we’re here on a rather urgent matter.”

      Brightening at the discovery that they were not a bereaved couple in need of counseling, Fullbright revealed his true convivial nature. “Come in, come in! I was just cremating a customer.”

       CHAPTER 41

      FOR A LONG TIME after the session in the spinning rack, Randal Six lies on his bed, not sleeping—for he seldom sleeps—facing the wall, his back to the room, shutting out the chaos, allowing his mind slowly, slowly to grow still.

      He does not know the purpose of the treatment, but he is certain that he cannot endure many more of those sessions. Sooner than later, he will suffer a massive stroke; the failure of an inner vessel will do what a bullet to his armored skull cannot as easily achieve.

      If a cerebral aneurysm does not finish him, he will surely trade the developmental disability called autism for genuine psychosis. He will seek in madness the peace that mere autism is not always able to ensure.

      In his darkest moments, Randal wonders whether the spinning rack is a treatment, as Father has repeatedly called it, or if it might be intended as torture.

      Not born of God and alienated from belief, this is the closest he can come to a blasphemous thought: that Father is a cruel rather than a caring maker, that Father himself is psychotic and his entire enterprise an insane endeavor.

      Whether Father is sincere or deceitful, whether his project is genius or dementia, Randal Six knows that he himself will never find happiness in the Hands of Mercy.

      Happiness lies streets away, a little less than three miles from here, at the home of one Carson O’Connor. In that house lies a secret to be taken if it isn’t freely offered: the cause of Arnie O’Connor’s smile, the reason for the moment of joy captured in the newspaper photo, no matter how brief it might have been.

      As soon as possible, he must get to the O’Connor boy, before the cerebral aneurysm that kills him, before the spinning rack whirls him into madness.

      Randal is not locked in his room. His autism, which is at times complicated by agoraphobia, keeps him this side of the threshold more securely than could locks or chains.

      Father often encourages him to explore from end to end of the building, even floors above and below this one. Adventurousness will be a first proof that his treatments are working.

      No matter where he goes in the building, he cannot leave, for the exterior doors are wired to a security system. He would be caught before he escaped the grounds…and might be punished with a very long session in the spinning rack.

      Anyway, when he occasionally leaves his room and wanders the halls, he never dares to go far, never a fraction as far as Father would like to see him travel. Sometimes even a distance of thirty feet presents him with an overload of sights and sounds that brings him trembling to his knees.

      In his self-isolation, he nonetheless sees. He hears. He learns. He knows of a way out of Mercy that will not trigger an alarm.

      He may not have sufficient fortitude to reach that special door, let alone to confront the busier world beyond. But his despondency has recently advanced to desperation, and the reckless action that is the whip of desperation may lash into him a kind of courage.

      He will leave this coming night, in little more than twelve hours.

       CHAPTER 42

      THE QUIET RECEIVING FOYER featured a baroque frieze instead of traditional crown moldings: deeply carved acanthus leaves punctuated every two feet and at the corners by the heads of angels alternating with gargoyles or perhaps mocking demons.

      Inlaid

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