Spondollar winced. “That’s even lower. I wouldn’t expect that of someone like you.”
“I apologize, but I don’t regret having said it. I am growing impatient, Mr. Spondollar.” He pushed the sheaf of papers and the pen across the table. “Sign where they’re marked with the yellow tags.”
Spondollar picked up the pen but hesitated. “It’s just that I have this thing about authority.”
“I am aware. I have taken no personal offense.”
After signing one of five documents, Spondollar paused. “Okay, there’ve gotta be a few people who want me dead, not just one.”
“No doubt,” said the stranger.
“But what the hell was done to my house, and who in the name of God has the power to do what was done?”
“I am not at liberty to say.”
“So . . . you don’t know who it is, do you?”
“We know how it was done, with what technology. All you need to know is that this power is extraordinary—and who seized control of it is ruthless. Sign the papers, come with me, or be obliterated.”
As Spondollar signed the remaining documents, the stranger opened a large white envelope and withdrew an eight-by-ten photo. “I’m sure I know the answer, but I must ask if you know this man.”
If he had spent hours guessing the identity of the person in the photograph before it was revealed to him, Spondollar might never have gotten around to the right name. “Him? Asher Optime? He’s a useless feeb. I could break his neck with one hand.”
“He didn’t wreck your house. But he must know who did. We need to find him. It’s people like you, his enemies, being targeted.”
“I haven’t seen that sick sonofabitch in years. I wouldn’t know where the hell he is.”
“I thought as much.”
Because it seemed he had no choice, Spondollar signed the documents without reading them. When he noticed Blue Sky Partners listed as the “grantor,” however, he frowned and read the first two words aloud and said, “What’s this?”
“The entity buying a house for you and paying a stipend.”
“My mother’s name was Skye. She was born in Arizona, where you’re sending me. My ex-wife’s maiden name was Blue.”
“Synchronicity. A Jungian coincidence,” the stranger said.
“A what coincidence?”
“Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist. He theorized that meaningful coincidences reveal that our collective consciousness creates reality at least to some degree. Together we make reality, and effect can come before cause—that kind of thing.”
“Sounds like a load of horseshit,” Spondollar said.
“Yes, doesn’t it? Here’s an example I like. Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story about a shipwreck, in which starving sailors killed and ate a cabin boy named Richard Parker. Fifty years later, there was a shipwreck uncannily like that in the story in every detail—and the starving sailors killed and ate a cabin boy named Richard Parker. Hundreds of thousands of people read that story over those fifty years and were horrified by it. Is it somehow possible that unconsciously they dreamed the story into the fabric of reality?”
Spondollar scowled. “How the hell could that happen?”
“Beats me. I’ve no idea of the mechanism. I’m just wondering.”
“You’re a weird sonofabitch.”
“Yes. That’s been said before.”
As the stranger put away the photograph and gathered up the signed documents, songbirds began to celebrate the colorful peaches-and-cream clouds.
The birdsong saddened Spondollar, because it brought home to him that nothing in his life would ever again be as it had been. On certain other mornings, he had sat on this patio with his air rifle, picking off birds on their perches and even sometimes in flight. His guns had been destroyed along with the house and everything in it. He could buy another air rifle, and there would be birds in Arizona, but it would just never be quite the same.
5
Every night for three weeks, Joanna Chase dreamed of Rustling Willows, both the ranch itself and the groves of trees for which it had been named long ago. Although none of these fabrications of her slumbering mind descended into a nightmare, they were ominous and filled her with a foreboding that lingered after she woke. The dreams were set in the fullness of night or at twilight, or in the purple daytime shade of the forest that broke like an evergreen sea on the north and east shores of the grassy prairie that constituted much of the property.