who lived off by herself, a hag everybody swore was a seer. They said that when she looked into the future, if she had a mind to, she could tinker with what she saw there. Emmy had one of her fits while she was with me. When she came out of it, she said ‘You won’t fall, Odie. He will but not you.’ I asked her about it later, but she didn’t remember. After we found Vincent DiMarco’s body in the quarry, I put two and two together and came up with a most remarkable possibility. If I’m right about her, she’s special, Odie. Am I right?” When I didn’t answer, she smiled in a way that made my skin crawl. “All she needs is the proper person to guide her, to make certain her gift isn’t squandered.”
“You’re not that person,” I cried.
“Oh, but I am. I had her once, Odie. I’ll have her again.”
“She was never yours.”
“Well then,” she said, as if bringing the discussion to a definitive close, “I guess we’ll just have to let the police sort that out.”
“You’re not going to the police,” Aunt Julia said.
“Who’s going to stop me? You?”
“Yes.”
“How exactly do you propose to do that?”
“I’ll kill you if I have to. Leave, Odysseus,” Aunt Julia said. “You know where to go.”
“I’m not leaving you,” I said. Then added, “Mother.”
She gazed at me, and in her eyes I found what it was I’d been searching for all along, searching for without understanding. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, heart of my heart.
“Mother?” Thelma Brickman said, then grinned like a rattler. “Well, no wonder you two look so much alike.” She drew a small, silver-plated handgun from her purse. “I’m taking your son, Julia.”
Clyde Brickman, who’d stood the whole time in cowardly silence, said, “For Christ’s sake, what do you think you’re doing, Thelma?”
“Shut up, Clyde. If you were half the man I’d hoped, I wouldn’t have to do this. Odie, if you don’t come with me, I’ll shoot Julia, mother or no.”
“And go to the electric chair,” I said.
“For defending myself against a woman who brutally attacked me? I don’t think so.”
“She didn’t attack you.”
“That’s not what Clyde will say. And you kidnapped a little girl, Odie. God only knows what despicable things you’ve done to her. Do you think anyone would believe a story told by a depraved boy whose mother was a whore?”
That’s when I went for her.
I don’t recall hearing the report from the gun, but I still remember the sting of the bullet in my right thigh and tumbling to the floor before I reached the Black Witch. In the chaos of that small room and the confusion of my mind as it processed the stunning realization that I’d been shot, I felt the air around me swirl as if a great storm were passing, and I was sure the Tornado God had descended.
But it wasn’t the Tornado God. It was my mother. She rushed past me and threw herself at the Black Witch. They struggled, reeling across the room. Then they were at the open window, writhing as one fiercely grappled with the other. And in the next instant, they were gone.
I tried to rise, but my wounded leg would bear no weight. Clyde Brickman ran to the window and stood looking dumbly down. I crawled across the floor, leaving a trail of blood, and grabbed the windowsill to pull myself up. Brickman, whose heart had never been as black as his wife’s, lifted me so that I could see what he saw. Together on the stone of the old patio three stories below, the two women lay unmoving, their bodies as entangled as their lives had been.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
THEY LET ME sit beside my mother’s hospital bed, my wounded leg bound thick with gauze. She hadn’t returned to consciousness. The doctors weren’t sure she ever would. Dollie was there with me, keeping vigil. The hospital wards were crowded, but because Aunt Julia had money and some influence, we were in a private room.
The Black Witch was well and truly dead, her head smashed like an egg against the patio stone. A fortunate circumstance had saved my mother from the same fate. She’d landed atop Thelma Brickman. In her departure from this world, the Black Witch had done something almost redeeming. She’d cushioned the impact of my mother’s fall. The doctor had called it a small miracle.
I’d been at her bedside for hours when