“I’d never bet my cute ass on anything, unless of course I had a decellularized backup ass ready to replace it. What third kind of genius is this wizard?”
“He’s got a genius for friendship. If he likes you, he’ll do anything for you.”
“And he likes you?”
“What’s not to like?”
“You mean other than your death wish?”
“Ganesh will like you, too. Any friend of a friend is always Ganesh’s friend.”
As Kenny used the shoulder of the highway like an express lane to accelerate around a gasoline tanker truck, Leigh Ann said, “He sounds like quite a guy. I hope I live long enough to meet him.”
“Hey, I’ve never died in a car crash yet.”
51
The window faced northwest, where what might have been storm clouds were coagulating. Even as Joanna raised the pleated shade, the wind suddenly gained speed enough to shudder a pair of nearby pines, stripping from those boughs a sleet of dead needles that ticked against the glass.
“I told you to get out,” Jimmy Two Eyes said.
“But you really don’t want me to go.”
“Don’t pretend you know me. You stand there with your back to me, trying to show no fear, but the worm of fear eats at your heart. You aren’t sure what I might do, whether I might club you as your father clubbed your mother, whether I might stab you or leap on you and bite your throat. This wide mouth and these twisted teeth scare you now as they never did before. You’ve lost the capacity for trust you once had. Now you’re full of doubt, irresolution, suspicion.”
She thought, You won’t harm me.
He said, “You’ve no guarantee of that, and you know it. Get out while you can.”
She thought, You’re forbidden. You said as much.
“I executed your father for righteous cause,” he reminded her.
In my case, Joanna thought, you have no cause.
“You’re his daughter.”
Like father, like daughter? she thought. Is that cause enough to kill me, your friend who has come all this way to help you?
“I called out to my friend Jojo, the Jojo I knew. She was selfless, fearless, humble, innocent, a constant brightness. You aren’t her. You aren’t my friend. You can’t dispel the darkness gathering in me, my despair. You only worsen my despair. You’re corrupt, like all your kind, a pestilence, a plague on the Earth.”
His ability to precisely read her mind so creeped her out that she resorted to speech, though still she faced the world beyond the window. “If the years have corrupted me, they’ve also corrupted you. You say you’re forbidden to control people’s minds, and yet you stole from me all memories of our long-ago friendship.”
“I stole nothing,” Jimmy said. “I repressed your memories to protect myself, to conceal the truth of what I am. That much is allowed. That’s a fully righteous act. And now your memories have returned. If ever I had to strike you dead to conceal the truth of what I am, I would be right to do even that. Even that.”
She could hear him moving restlessly around the room, breathing hard, in evident distress. Never before in her life had she been so terrified as she was now. However, to surrender to the terror and flee would gain her nothing. Whatever this thing was that called itself Jimmy Alvarez, it had marked her for death. She was certain of that. If he didn’t kill her here, he would kill her later and elsewhere. Her only hope, if she had any hope, was to learn all she could about this man, this . . . thing.
Several crows abruptly flung themselves out of the wind-shaken pines in the backyard and ricocheted north toward the forest that offered more sheltered roosts.
With devious intent, Joanna forced into her mind’s eye an image of her mother in a casket, as Emelia looked in the Buckleton funeral home a quarter of a century earlier, used all the well-exercised power of her vivid imagination to paint the grim scene in such photographic detail that renewed grief swelled in her breast. She said, “If you could kill even me, then who else?”
The image of Emelia that Joanna conjured seemed to overwhelm him, and the question incensed him. A torrent of justification and denial poured forth. “I didn’t harm her. Your faithless father did it—as I told you!—her murder was a crime, my execution of Samuel was a righteous act, he deserved even worse than he got, I’m not—”
As she hoped, her accusation and the visual that went with it had distracted him, so that for a moment he was unable to read her mind completely, which allowed her to discompose him by interrupting with another and essential question. “You’re forbidden by whom?”