the bathroom floor with a bottle of Krazy Glue in one hand. He had used it to plug his nostrils and seal his mouth shut. His wasn’t the only obit coupled to Jacobs that Bree had found with her search engine, but it was the only one we felt sure was connected.
Until Cathy Morse, that was.
• • •
I was feeling sleepy again in spite of an infusion of black breakfast tea. I blamed it on the auto-scroll feature of Bree’s laptop. It was helpful, I said, but also hypnotic.
“Honey, if I may misquote Al Jolson, you ain’t seen nothing yet,” she said. “Next year Apple’s going to release a pad-style computer that’ll revolutionize—” There was a bing before she could finish, and the auto-scroll came to a halt. She peered at the screen, where a line was highlighted in red. “Uh-oh. That’s one of the names you gave me when we started.”
“What?” Meaning who. I’d only been able to give her a few back then, and one had been that of my brother Con. Jacobs had claimed that one was just a placebo, but—
“Hold your water and let me click the link.”
I leaned over to look. My first feeling was relief: not Con, of course not. My second was a species of dismal horror.
The obituary, from the Tulsa World, was for one Catherine Anne Morse, age thirty-eight. Died suddenly, the obit said. And this: Cathy’s grieving parents ask that in lieu of flowers, mourners send contributions to the Suicide Prevention Action Network. These contributions are tax deductible.
“Bree,” I said. “Go to last week’s—”
“I know what to do, so let me do it.” Then, taking a second look at my face: “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I said, but I didn’t know if I was or not. I kept remembering how Cathy Morse had looked mounting to the Portraits in Lightning stage all those years ago, a pretty little Sooner gal with tanned legs flashing beneath a denim skirt with a frayed hem. Every pretty girl carries her own positive charge, Jacobs had said, but somewhere along the way, Cathy’s charge had turned negative. No mention of a husband, although a girl that good-looking must not have lacked for suitors. No mention of children, either.
Maybe she liked girls, I thought, but that was pretty lame.
“Here you go, sugar,” Bree said. She turned the laptop so I could see it more easily. “Same newspaper.”
WOMAN IN DEATH JUMP FROM CYRUS AVERY MEMORIAL BRIDGE, the headline read. Cathy Morse had left no explanatory note behind, and her grieving parents were mystified. “I wonder if it wasn’t somebody pushed her,” Mrs. Morse said . . . but according to the article, foul play had been ruled out, although it didn’t say how.
Has he done it before, mister? Mr. Morse had asked me back in 1992. This after punching my old fifth business in the face and splitting his lip. Has he knocked other ones for a loop the way he knocked my Cathy?
Yes, sir, I thought now. Yes, sir, I believe he has.
“Jamie, you don’t know for sure,” Bree said, touching my shoulder. “Sixteen years is a long time. It could have been something else entirely. She might have found out she had a bad cancer, or some other fatal disease. Fatal and painful.”
“It was him,” I said. “I know it, and by now I think you do, too. Most of his subjects are fine afterwards, but some go away with time bombs in their heads. Cathy Morse did, and it went off. How many others are going to go off in the next ten or twenty years?”
I was thinking I could be one of them, and Bree surely knew that, too. She didn’t know about Hugh, because that wasn’t my story to tell. He hadn’t had a recurrence of his prismatics since the night at the tent revival—and that one was probably brought on by stress—but it could happen again, and although we didn’t talk about it, I’m sure he knew it as well as I did.
Time bombs.
“So now you’re going to find him.”
“You bet.” The obituary of Catherine Anne Morse was the last piece of evidence I needed, the one that made the decision final.
“And persuade him to stop.”
“If I can.”
“If he won’t?”
“Then I don’t know.”
“I’ll go with you, if you want.”
But she didn’t want. It was all over her face. She had started the assignment with an intelligent young woman’s zest for pure research, and there had been the lovemaking to add extra spice,