No one knew how to act, really and truly, because this was a miracle, and miracles left you totally awestruck, gobsmacked. All they could do was hug and touch and be amazed. They knew what to say, but they couldn’t seem to find a way to say it, not at once. There weren’t just seven years to get caught up on; they needed to tell the stories of their lives to one another. Amity and her father maybe knew Michelle better than they knew anyone else in the world, and she maybe knew them better than she knew anyone, yet in a strange way she didn’t know them at all, and they didn’t know her. It was like freaking weird, but in a good way, a wonderful way. They knew what they felt, or at least knew most of what they felt, but the situation was without precedent, so they also had feelings they would need some time to understand.
Then there was death. Mother—this Michelle—had seen them dead, had overseen their burial, had grieved for them until her grief had eventually become a settled sorrow. Now here they were before her, alive again. Or alive still. If it was a miracle, then really and truly, from Mother’s perspective, it must have seemed a little spooky, too.
So while they were trying to figure out what to do and say, and how exactly to feel—other than happy and amazed—they set to work making breakfast, with Ed and Duke, which seemed kind of strange but felt entirely natural. Soon the five of them were sitting around the kitchen table, chowing down right in the middle of a miracle.
In the most secret room of Amity’s heart, of which not even Daddy knew the existence, she’d dwelt with the probability that the mother who walked out on them seven years earlier was dead. Long dead. If two private detectives hadn’t been able to find any trace of that Michelle, then something terrible must have happened to her; she never had a chance to follow her music and all, because soon after she set out on her new life, someone purely evil had taken her and done something horrible to her. Such grisly stories were in the news every week. Faces of the missing showed up on posters and true-crime TV programs. Later, bodies were found discarded like trash. This was that kind of world. In Mother’s case, no body was found. The lack of a body didn’t mean there might still be hope; it only meant that the killer buried the corpse well or was so seriously sick that he kept it in his basement as a memento. This was that kind of world, too, and even a girl of eleven knew about the dark side of human nature and all, so that such scenes evolved in her imagination, though Amity always forced herself not to dwell on them.
At first, as they ate, no one talked about what to do next or about the immediate threat, as if to do so would bring evil down on them the moment they spoke of it. The bad guys couldn’t know where they were. They were safe for now. They needed a breather, a short rest from all the craziness they had been through: just a typical breakfast in an ordinary kitchen, during one hour when life seemed normal. Maybe eating with people who were known to have died and now were alive would never seem entirely normal, but minute by minute, it seemed less bizarre.
78
When Phil Esterhaus returned from his dawn run on the beach, his wife, Ellen, was already off to their daughter’s house to help with the new grandbaby, Willy.
Now Esterhaus was in the shower, and John Falkirk relaxed in an armchair in the master bedroom, waiting for the opinionated chief of police to put in an appearance.
The draperies were drawn at the windows. One nightstand lamp with a pleated amber-silk shade provided minimal and restful light, and the prevalent shadows seemed to be a palliative purple instead of harsh black, as if the light and shadows conspired with the capsules of Vicodin to soothe a wounded man’s troubled mind.
The susurration of falling water was reminiscent of the sound the unborn hear in the womb, the rush of the mother’s blood, which lulls with a sweet promise of eternal safety and peace. A false promise. A damn lie. Not that Falkirk actually remembered what he had heard in the womb. The thought came to him as a consequence of having taken a double dose of the prescription painkiller on top of multiple caffeine tablets, as well as Zantac to deal with the acid produced by the excess of caffeine. He’d had some brandy as well, Esterhaus’s brandy, two shots that he’d mixed with part of a can of Coca-Cola, which he was drinking now as he sat in the wombchair, the armchair, waiting for good old Phil to appear with his hair wet and a towel around his waist and snarky quip on his tongue.
Anyway, Falkirk hated his mother, who died and left him to the mercy of a stepmother so greedy she probably ate money in secrecy. His real mother hadn’t dropped dead in every timeline, but what did that matter if she’d been thoughtless enough to die in this one? Somewhere there were John Falkirks who received their inheritances because there had been no stepmother to steal it from them. The existence of happy versions of himself did not please him. Indeed, he hated those other John Falkirks and would have liked to track them all down and kill them.
As the armchair cushioned him like an amniotic sac, as the shadowy bedroom snugged around him like a uterus, he felt no pain because even a quack of Dr. Nolan Burnside’s caliber could provide useful medication when you threatened to carve up his children.
Correction: He felt no physical pain, but he was in emotional pain for several reasons. The biggest reason was that he had been shot for the first time in his life, and it had been a close thing, and he could have died.
Maybe because of the painkiller and massive amounts of caffeine and the brandy, he was having thoughts he never had before, insights and realizations. Although, in his capacity as a federal agent, he had killed people—always for good reason, always because they were traitors or otherwise dangerous or annoyed him—he had not until now given any thought whatsoever to the possibility of his own death. On some level, he must have realized that he was mortal. However, he never proceeded with his life as if that were the case. Being shot in the thigh had changed everything.
Since childhood, he had known that no one could be trusted, not your mother who would die on you, not your father who would trade a son’s birthright for a hot bitch who would sex him to death, not the family lawyer who would strip you of your birthright for a piece of the fortune settled on your stepmother. Now he understood that he couldn’t even trust other versions of himself in other timelines, those who had received their inheritances when he had not, for if they knew of him and his bitter animosity, they would surely want to kill him before he could kill them. To be perfectly safe, to have a chance to use the key to everything to exploit the knowledge of the multiverse and make himself wealthier and more powerful than any emperor in history, he would have to secure this timeline as his base, rather than split for a better one, and then he would need to murder as many versions of himself as he could find on other worlds.
This prospect would have seemed daunting, exhausting, if not for the wonder of Dr. Burnside’s little pills and the effects of fine brandy. Freed from physical pain, clear of mind, he knew exactly what he must do.
Before storming Charles Pellafino’s house and seizing the key to everything, Falkirk needed to frame Jeffrey Coltrane for the murder of Chief Philip Esterhaus. That would justify the death of Coltrane when the SWAT team stormed the Pellafino residence.
Coltrane had to be killed for Falkirk to get his key. In fact, h
e had to die merely because he knew about the key.
Amity Coltrane had to die because she also knew about the key, because she would be witness to her father’s murder, and because she was a deceitful little smart-ass.
Charles Pellafino’s death could be justified because he had given shelter to Coltrane, who conspired with the traitor Harkenbach and because . . . well, maybe Pellafino also conspired with Harkenbach, and all of them had colluded with Russia on something. The details could be worked out after everyone who needed to die was dead.
After the assault on the Pellafino house, perhaps it would be possible to stage the scene so it appeared that Coltrane, cornered and desperate, had committed murder and then suicide, killing his daughter and then himself. Delicious.
Documents could be forged to prove that Coltrane—a pathetic loser, a struggling radio repairman—had given shelter to the vile traitor Edwin Harkenbach and helped him avoid arrest for selling national security secrets, and that he murdered Chief Esterhaus, who had tumbled to his scheme. At this very moment, Jason Frankfurt was falsifying the history of the weapon with which Phil Esterhaus would be murdered, so that it could be proved that Coltrane had purchased it two years earlier.
Without pain and medicated into a state of supreme confidence, Falkirk found his plan to be flawless, so clever that, contemplating it, he laughed softly and lit a cigarette. After all that he had been through, it felt good to be happy, especially considering that happiness was a feeling he rarely experienced.
When the cigarette was half smoked, he realized that he no longer heard the sound of falling water. He couldn’t be sure how long ago the shower in the adjacent bathroom had been cranked off.
That realization led to another of equal importance. If neither Ellen Esterhaus nor her husband was a smoker, firing up a cigarette had been a mistake.
A sudden sense of jeopardy made him wonder if he might not be as clearheaded as he believed, which was when Philip Esterhaus came out of the bathroom.
Falkirk had seen the chief before, more than once, but never when the man had been wearing so little. In only a pair of briefs, Esterhaus proved to be a more muscular and impressive specimen than he was in uniform, as if sculpted out of stone.
“You look like a demigod,” Falkirk said, surprised to have made such a statement, though his compliment was sincere.
The chief held a pistol.