the right direction again if I happened to slip off-course.
She thinks I imagined the rest. She doesn't come right out and say it, but I hear it in her voice every time we talk on the phone."
"I don't think you imagined it," Ralph said, "I saw you, remember?
And I was there when you begged me not to call the police."
He felt his thigh squeezed beneath the table and looked up, startled.
Gretchen Tillbury gave him a very slight nod and another squeeze-this one more emphatic, "Yes," Helen said. "You were there, weren't you?" She smiled a little, which was good, but what was happening to her aura was better-those tiny red flickers were fading, and the aura itself was spreading out again.
No, he thought. Not spreading out. Loosening. Relaxing.
Helen got up and came around the table.
"Nat's bailing out on you-better let me take her."
Ralph looked down and saw Nat looking across the room with heavy, fascinated eyes. He followed her gaze and saw the little vase standing on the windowsill beside the sink. He had filled it with fall flowers less than two hours ago and now a low green mist was sizzling off the stems and surrounding the blooms with a faint, misty glow.
I'm watching them breathe their last, Ralph thought. Oh my God, I'm never going to pick another flower in my life. I promise.
Helen took the baby gently from his arms. Nat went tractably enough, although her eyes never left the sizzling flowers as her mother went back around the table, sat down, and nestled her in the crook of her arm.
Gretchen tapped the face of her watch lightly. "If we're going to make that meeting at noon-"
"Yes, of course," Helen said, a little apologetically. "We're on the official Susan Day Welcoming Committee," she told Ralph, "and in this case that's not quite as junior League as it sounds. Our main job really isn't to welcome her but to help protect her."
"Is that going to be a problem, do you think?"
"It'll be tense, let's put it that way," Gretchen said. "She's got half a dozen of her own security people, and they've been sending us turn-around faxes of all the Derry-related threats she's received.
It's standard operating procedure with them-she's been in a lot of people's faces for a lot of years. They're keeping us in the picture, but they're also making sure we understand that, because we're the inviting group, her safety is WomanCare's responsibility as well as theirs." Ralph opened his mouth to ask if there had been many threats, but he supposed he already knew the answer to that question.
He'd lived in Derry for seventy years, off and on, and he knew it was a dangerous machine-there were a lot of sharp points and cutting edges just below the surface. That was true of a lot of cities, of course, but in Derry there had always seemed to be an extra dimension to the ugliness. Helen had called it home, and it was his home, tool butHe found himself remembering something which had happened almost ten years ago, shortly after the annual Canal Days Festival had ended.
Three boys had thrown an unassuming and inoffensive young gay man named Adrian Mellon into the Kenduskeag after repeatedly biting and stabbing him; it was rumored they had stood there on the bridge behind the Falcon Tavern and watched him die.
They'd told the police they hadn't liked the hat he was wearing.
That was also Derry, and only a fool would ignore the fact.
As if this memory had led him to it (perhaps it had), Ralph looked at the photo on the front page of today's paper again-Ham Davenport with his upraised fist, Dan Dalton with his bloody nose and dazed eyes, wearing Ham's sign on his head.
"How many threats?" he asked. "Over a dozen?"
"Ah(out thirty," Gretchen said. "Of those, her security people take half a dozen seriously. Two are threats to blow up the Civic Center if she doesn't cancel. Hey-this is a real honey-it's from someone who says he's got a Big Squirt water-gun filled with battery acid. 'If I make a direct hit, not even your dyke friends will be able to look at you without throwing up," that one says."
"Nice," Ralph said, 'It brings us to the point, anyway," Gretchen said. She rummaged in her bag, brought out a small can with a red top, and put it on the table. "A little present from all your grateful friends at WomanCare."