She couldn’t believe what he was suggesting. “Bait? You’re going to use yourself as bait? What if he doesn’t miss, Robert? You’ll be dead, and I’ll be rolling around on the ground when your energy breaks, and then I’ll be dead a second later!”
“What do you want to do? Go back to the church and lead him right to Wade and Rose?”
She stared at him.
“I won’t let my guard down, and I’ll make sure he misses,” Robert said softly. “You get a hold of him, hit him with anything you can until he freezes, and I’ll take his head. We won’t be free until he’s gone.”
“What if he’s not waiting for us?” she asked. “What if he doesn’t attack yet?”
“I don’t know. But I do know we can’t lead him to your church, and I can’t do this by myself.”
She ran his scenario over and over in her mind, seeing various outcomes, and she was frightened. What if she failed? What if she couldn’t make Julian freeze again? She didn’t want to get Robert killed, and what would Philip do if she didn’t come home?
But in the end, what choice did they have?
“We’ll get off in Salem,” she said. “But if he’s there waiting, you better make sure he misses.”
“Good.” He leaned back against the couch, and he seemed to relax now that they’d come to a decision. His shoulder had stopped bleeding, but his coat was torn and stained.
“Let me try to wash that out,” she said, climbing to her feet, “or people will look at you when we get off.”
He nodded, slipped out of his coat, and handed it to her. Beneath, his shirt looked worse, but they could cover it once the coat was clean.
“We’ll get you some new clothes in Portland,” she said, determined to speak of the future as if it would happen.
He opened his mouth and closed it again. She wondered what he was worried about now.
“What?” she asked, turning on the faucet.
“You’ve said a few times that you’re going to buy this church. How are you going to pay for it?”
“With money.”
He frowned at her. “You know what I mean. Where are you getting the money? You and Philip both seem to have an endless supply. That coat he’s wearing must have cost two thousand dollars.”
“At least.” Embarrassed, she focused on washing out the blood-stains. “I don’t know where Philip gets his money.”
Come to think of it, that was a good question. He must have inherited his family’s wealth, but he had always made fun of her stockbroker, and she’d never seen him contact a bank.
The irony of her own wealth brought more discomfort, considering what she and Robert were about to do. “Julian always . . . He sent money so I could take care of William . . . a lot of money. We lived with Edward Claymore in New York for years, and back then he handled everything for me. But I wanted control of my own affairs, so I took William, and we moved to Portland. I started investing around 1954, and later, I just learned what to look for, and I made some lucky choices at a ground floor buy-in . . . Coca-Cola, Apple, Microsoft, Starbucks, Exxon.”
She paused her scrubbing and glanced at him. He still looked troubled, but he also seemed interested in what she was saying.
“I don’t have any money,” he said. “I’ve been living night to night for a long time, just taking a few dollars from people I fed on, and I used almost everything I had left to buy my plane ticket from Russia.”
“Why were you living in Russia?”
He shrugged. “It was just a place. I didn’t care where I lived . . . but Jessenia and I never traveled there, and I couldn’t stay anyplace where we’d been.” He paused. “But I always pay my own way, so I’ll start contributing as soon as I can pick up a few jobs. I just haven’t cared enough to work for a while.”
“Jobs?”
He’d been working? Doing what?
“I ran a small business in Moscow for a while where I found lost objects, stolen objects, for people,” he explained. “More than half the time, one of their friends or relatives took it, and I just had to read the right mind.”
He’d used his telepathy to earn a living? That was clever. She’d never thought of doing anything like that—but then she’d never had to.