Undead and Undermined - By MaryJanice Davidson Page 0,67

the mansion. He had taken the smallest bedroom for himself, not for the size, but the view . . . when the leaves were gone, you could see the Mississippi from his window.

I rapped on his closed door. He wasn’t blasting the Eurythmics, so he was probably awake. He said nothing soothed him to sleep faster than Annie Lennox’s throaty, raspy, penetrating voice. It takes all kinds of people to make a world, or so my mother says.

“Marc?” I rapped harder. “I come bearing smoothies and gossip.”

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

And I started to get a bad feeling. It wasn’t any one thing, it was all of them. Marc, spending who-knew-how-long with the Marc Thing. Not coming to the kitchen, but going up into his room, alone. No music blasting . . . but no one answering when he knocked. Any one of these things would be slightly odd. Add them together and . . . there it was! My bad feeling.

I tried the knob, already knowing it would be locked. And it was, of course. I’d seen this movie, too. And it was no problem for me; I raised my foot and slammed my heel into the wood just below the lock. The old, thin door didn’t have a chance. It didn’t have a chance because who worried about locked bedroom doors? Not us! That was who! No, we just worried about big, heavy, securely bolted doors in the basement, doors behind which we thought Marc was interrogating the Marc Thing. Doors behind which we thought the Marc Thing would tell us important things to fear in the future.

I was betting that was exactly what he had done.

I shoved the rest of the door open with a twist of my hip as I shot inside. The room was small, like I mentioned, and I immediately saw what he had done.

I saw what he had snuck off to do when no one would come looking for him, when no one would notice he was missing, when no one would stop telling stories about how great she was, when no one would call 911, when no one would stop him from killing himself, when no one would drown out the Marc Thing’s voice urging, commanding, informing, ordering.

No one. Not even me? How about, especially not me.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

The Artist Formerly Known as Nick had taken care of everything. He had been incredible. Commanding and calm, he made the right calls and talked to the right people. He and Sinclair had a private conversation. Then he talked to us in a comforting way and we were glad he was there to help us, we were glad he was our friend, he did everything right, he made it all easier.

He did everything except bring Marc back to life, and if he could have done that, he would have.

I had held Jessica while she wept. Pulled her away from his doorway (my screams, I’m sorry to say, brought everyone on the run) so she wouldn’t hear him being zipped into the body bag, so she wouldn’t see him get loaded into the ambulance like a sack of grain.

When she was cried out, I tucked her in the way her own mother never had. I calmly waited until she fell asleep. I left her room.

Nick had left with the ambulance. Laura had left also . . . I didn’t notice when. That was a problem. Her rapid comings and goings, her scary-fast grasp of teleportation . . . I would have to deal with that, and soon.

Not right now, though. Right now I had something else to deal with.

Sinclair and Tina were in the kitchen speaking in low voices. They stopped when they saw me.

“Are you—” Sinclair cut himself off when he saw my expression. “Very stupid question, I apologize. Nick went to the hospital.”

“I know.”

“Jessica is asleep?”

“Yeah.”

“Laura?”

“Gone. I don’t know when.” And I didn’t know where. The future? The past? The Mall of America? No idea. “I’ll worry about that later.”

I picked up a kitchen chair and set it upside down on the table we all shared, except Marc because Marc was dead; Marc killed himself and he’d never share this table again, except he would.

Yes.

I snapped off one of the chair legs. Turned. Marched toward the basement. Went into the basement. Walked the length of the basement until I came to the securely bolted door. Marc, after he’d been programmed or mojo’d into killing himself, had still thought of our safety. Had locked everything nice and