Programmed for Peril

sweetie? I mean beside our man here. You want to count them up? Maybe I can help you. You got Smith-Patton, that weirdo. He loves your jumpsuited ass. How about that baker been helping you out? I heard about him. Anybody else we don’t know about—”
    “Stop it!” Trish shrieked. “Stop it this second!” She cried harder. She wondered if, down at the core, there wasn’t something to the charge. What kind of woman was she— really? Did Carson in truth own her soul? She lost it about then, edging down toward hysteria.
    Sarkman hung on, trying insults and questions in random order. She only howled the louder.
    “Shut up, Pete!” Jerry shouted. “That’s enough!”
    Sarkman cursed and grabbed his briefcase. He rushed out. jerry tried to stay to offer consolation. She sent him on his way with a wet smile. “I’m better off alone right now.”
    “Sarkman is a pig.”
    “Call me... later sometime,” she blubbered.
    She got it together long enough to serve Melody dinner. A video movie and her daughter’s fatigue were all the allies needed to assure an early bedtime. She tootled on her instruments for only a few minutes before the silence that meant sleep.
    Trish cried herself to uneasy slumber. She woke suddenly to darkness. The bedside clock said 3:10. Great. Well, she wasn’t better, but she wasn’t weeping. She couldn’t fall back asleep.
    She refused to let her attention swing to Foster and her flown hopes. Instead she found herself thinking of... Carson. Not the controlled, brilliant man she had once known and admired, but a psychopath who strewed corpses coast to coast. For the first time she asked herself exactly what path his madness had taken. The cosmetic surgeon, the masks, the behaviors—taken together, what did they mean? The man who spawned inventions like a milkweed did silky parachutes was no more. Gone was that one who had possessed many women before her and had assumed others would follow. His all-pervasive arrogance and confrontational energy had fled in favor of sneaky warnings, threats made from at least one remove, obsession... Could she call it—timidity? Carson timid!
    She got up and walked to the window. A weak, warm breeze stirred her nightgown. A concept wriggled up from the moonlit yard. She had assumed her nemesis was the old Carson looming over her physically and intellectually. To be sure, he still flashed his old intelligence and originality. Yet... he was not the same person. She understood what had happened to him. In the years since her departure his personality had disintegrated under the pressure of madness, then reassembled itself following some unknown template. As it did, she wondered if he fully comprehended the metamorphosis.
    Did he truly know that he was now a different person?
     
    When Melody came back from an afternoon with neighbor children she told her that she wouldn’t be marrying Foster. Her daughter turned up her candid gray gaze. “Why not?”
    “Carson frightened him out of it.”
    Melody frowned. “I guess he could do that.”
    “Yeah. He could. How do you feel about it?”
    Melody thought a moment. “I’ll miss the mastiffs,” she said.
    She didn’t know that every one of them was dead.
     

24
     
    THE REST OF SUNDAY TRISH DEVOTED TO CANCELING the wedding arrangements. She went to her mother’s house to do it. Bad enough doing it in her company, worse doing it alone. She sniffled her way through a watered-down version of why it was necessary. She then patiently answered her mother’s questions. Yes, this Carson person’s “pranks” had been the difference after all. Marylou, a tough cookie, took the bad news nearly in stride. A trembling lower lip was the only sign that her hopes for her daughter’s future had been scuttled. She helped Trish make the calls. For the most part she had the presence of mind to hold her critical tongue.
    Toward the end of a tough afternoon Trish went to he down. On her back she studied the stenciled ceiling. She felt miserable, sure enough. In time she came to understand there was a single bright ray angling through the clouds.
    Whatever her emotional future, it would be one wholly of her own design.
    The weight of years would slow Marylou. Trish’s social life would be increasingly private. Any decisions made would be hers alone. Improved insight and personal growth assured her that she would no longer frustrate herself with worries about whether or not her actions originated from her own