False Memory

of a living beast, as though in the night something hungry waited for Dusty to open the trailer door.
    “If the weather forecasts can be believed, the rest of the week is going to be a mess,” he told Fig. “Don’t even try to go out to the Sorenson job. Just look after Skeet and Valet for me.”
    “Till when?” Fig asked.
    “I don’t know. Depends on what we find out there. Probably be back the day after tomorrow, Friday. But maybe Saturday.”
    “We’ll keep ourselves entertained,” Fig promised.
    “We’ll play some cards,” Skeet said.
    “And monitor shortwave frequencies for alien code bursts,” Fig said, in what was for him the equivalent of an oration.
    “Listen to talk radio, I bet,” Skeet predicted.
    “Hey,” Fig said to Skeet, “you want to blow up a courthouse?”
    Martie said, “Whoa.”
    “Joke,” said Fig, with an owlish wink.
    “Bad one,” she advised.
    Outside, as Dusty and Martie descended the steps and crossed the small porch, the wind tore at them, and all the way to the car, large dead-brown magnolia leaves scuttled like rats at their feet.
    Behind them, out of the open door of the trailer came a piercing and pathetic whine from Valet, as though canine precognition told him that he would never see them again.
     
     
    The indicator window on the answering machine showed two waiting messages. Dr. Ahriman decided to listen to these before reviewing the cassette labeled SUSAN.
    The first call was from Martie’s mother. She sounded frantic to find out what was wrong, to learn why her previous calls had not been returned.
    The second voice on the tape was that of a woman who identified herself as an airline ticket agent. “Mr Rhodes, I neglected to ask for the expiration date on your credit card. If you get this message, would you please call me back with the information? She provided an 800 number. “But if I don’t hear from you, your two tickets to Santa Fe will still be waiting for you in the morning.”
    Dr. Ahriman marveled at their having focused so quickly on the central importance of his New Mexico days. Martie and Dusty seemed to be supernatural adversaries... until he realized that the Santa Fe connection must have been made for them by Saint Clostennan.
    Nevertheless, the doctor’s slow and steady pulse, which even during the commission of murder was seldom elevated by more than ten beats per minute, accelerated upon the receipt of this news regarding the Rhodeses’ travel plans.
    With an athlete’s intimate awareness of his body, ever sensitive to the maintenance of good health, the doctor sat down again, took several deep breaths, and then consulted his wristwatch to time his pulse. Usually, when he was seated, his rate ranged between sixty and sixty-two beats per minute, because he was in exceptional condition. Now, he counted seventy, a full eight-point elevation, and with no dead woman handy to credit for it.

     
     
    In the car, as Dusty went in search of a hotel near the airport, Martie at last phoned her mother.
    Sabrina was distraught and in full fluster. For minutes, she refused to believe that Martie was not injured or maimed, that she was not the victim of a traffic accident, a drive-by shooting, fire, lightning, a disgruntled postal employee, or that horrid flesh-eating bacteria that was in the news again.
    As she listened to this rant, Martie was filled with a special tenderness that only her mother could evoke.
    Sabrina loved her sole child with a crazy intensity that would have made Martie a hopeless neurotic by the age of eleven, if she had not been so determinedly independent almost from the day that she took her first steps. But this world harbored worse things than crazy love. Crazy hate. Oh, lots of that. And just plain crazy, in abundance.
    Sabrina loved Smilin’ Bob no less than she loved her daughter. The loss of him, when he was only fifty-three, had made her more protective of Martie than ever. The probability of her husband and her daughter both dying young, of separate causes, might be as low as the chances of the earth being destroyed by an asteroid impact before morning, but cold statistics and insurance-company actuarial tables offered no consolation to a wounded and wary heart.
    Martie, therefore, wasn’t going to say a word to her mother about mind control, haiku, the Leaf Man, the priest with the spike through his head, severed ears, or the trip to Santa Fe. Given this overload of weird news, Sabrina’s anxiety would explode into hysteria.
    She wasn’t going to