False Memory

he pulls shut the door and starts the engine, six coyotes— eight, ten—appear out of the brush and gather on the grave/ed lane in front of the car, their eyes fiery with reflections of the headlights. As Ahriman drives forward, loose stones crunching together under the tires, the pack divides and moves ahead along both shoulders of the narrow lane, as though they are the outrunners of a Praetorian guard, escorting the Jaguar A hundred yards later, when the car turns west, where the high city rises in the distance, the slouching beasts break away from it and continue toward the ranch house, still in the game, as is the doctor
    As is the doctor.
    Although Susan Jagger’s soft quaverous cries of grief and shame were a tonic, and though the memories of the Pastore family that her tortured voice had resurrected were refreshing, Dr. Ahriman was not a young man now, as he’d been in his New Mexico days, and he needed to get at least a few hours of sound sleep. The day ahead would require vigor and an especially clear mind, because Martine and Dustin Rhodes would become far bigger players in this complex game than they had been thus far. Consequently, he ordered Susan to overcome her emotions and finish getting dressed.
    When she was in her panties and T-shirt once more, he said, “Get to your feet.”
    She rose.
    “You are a vision, daughter. I wish I could’ve gotten you on video tonight instead of next time. Those sweet tears. Why, Daddy? Why? That was particularly poignant. I won’t ever forget that. You’ve given me another albino-bats moment.”
    Her attention had shifted from him.
    He followed her gaze to the ming tree in the bronze pot atop the Biedermeier pedestal.
    “Horticulture,” he said approvingly, “is a therapeutic pastime for an agoraphobic. Ornamental plants allow you to remain in touch with the natural world beyond these walls. But when I’m talking to you, I expect your attention to remain on me.”
    She looked at him again. She was no longer weeping. The last of her tears were drying on her face.
    An oddness about her, subtle and indefinable, nagged at the doctor. The levelness of her stare. The way her lips were pressed together, mouth pinched at the corners. Here was a tension unrelated to her humiliation and shame.
    “Spider mites,” he said.
    He thought he saw worry crawling through her eyes.
    “They’re hell on a ming tree, spider mites.”
    Unmistakably, what spun across her face was a web of worry, but surely not about the health of her houseplants.
    Sensing trouble, Ahriman made an effort to clear the postcoital haze from his mind and concentrate on Susan. “What are you worried about?”
    “What am I worried about?” she asked.
    He rephrased the question as a command: “Tell me what you’re worried about.”
    When she hesitated, he repeated the command, and she said, “The video.”

    35
    Valet’s hackles smoothed. He stopped growling. He became his familiar, tail-wagging, affectionate self, insisted upon a cuddle, and then returned to his bed, where he dozed off as though he had never been bothered.
    Bound hand and foot at her insistence, even more profoundly subdued by three sleeping pills, Martie was unnervingly still and silent. A few times, Dusty raised his head from the pillow and leaned close to her, worried until he heard her faint respiration.
    Although he expected to lie awake all night, and therefore left his nightstand lamp aglow, eventually he slept.
    A dream stirred his sleep, blending dread and absurdity into a strange narrative that was disturbing yet nonsensical.
    He is lying in bed, atop the covers, fully dressed except for his shoes. Valet is not present. Across the room, Martie sits in the lotus position on the dog's big sheepskin pillow, utterly still, eyes closed, fingers laced in her lap, as though lost in meditation.
    He and Martie are alone in the room, and yet he is talking to someone else. He can feel his lips and tongue moving, and although he can hear his own voice reverberating—deep, hollow, fuzzy—in the bones of his skull, he cannot quite make out a single word of what he is saying. The pauses in his speech indicate that be is engaged in a conversation, not a monologue, but he can hear no other voice, not a murmur, not a whisper.
    Beyond the window, the night is slashed by lightning, but no thunder protests the wound, and no rain drizzles on the roof The only sound arises when a large bird flies past the window, so close that one of its wings brushes the glass, and it