Part 9 (2/2)
She said, ”We might encounter the girl and her parents on the road into town.”
Neil did not remind her that the Navigator had been traveling in the opposite direction when abandoned. He knew that she recognized this as clearly as he did.
She said, ”It'll be nice to have the doll to give her. I'm sure she didn't intend to leave it behind.”
Intellectually, she knew that the war of the worlds, if indeed it had begun, would not spare children.
Emotionally, however, she refused to acknowledge that no degree of innocence could guarantee immunity in a plague of genocide.
On one rainy afternoon long ago, Molly had saved some children and been unable to save others. But if the fine grain of hope in her heart were to be the foundation of a pearl, she must believe that no child would ever again suffer in her presence and that those who came under her care would be safe, protected, until she herself died defending them.
As the Explorer rolled forward and they resumed their journey into town, Neil said, ”It's a beautiful doll. She'll be happy to see it again.”
Molly loved him for always understanding precisely what words she needed to hear. He knew what motivated her at all times and in all circ.u.mstances, even in these.
16.
THEY HAD NOT DRIVEN FAR FROM THE ABANDONED Navigator when Molly realized belatedly that the rain had been imbued with less scent than at any time since she'd stepped onto the porch among the coyotes. The underlying s.e.m.e.nlike odor had faded altogether, and the melange of other fragrances had been only a fraction as intense as they were at the Corrigan house.
Neil confirmed her observation. ”Yeah. And it's also not quite as radiant.”
The goblin night still appeared to stream with Christmas tinsel; however, the rain was a few lumens dimmer than it had been earlier, though it fell in undiminished volume.
Perhaps these changing conditions should have given Molly heart. Instead they troubled her. Evidently the first phase of this strange war was drawing to an end. The second would soon begin.
”I half remember,” Neil said, ”your Mr. Eliot wrote something famous about doomsday.”
”Yeah. He said we've become hollow men, stuffed men, heads filled with straw, no convictions or higher purpose...and for hollow men, the world will end not with a bang but a whimper.”
Leaning forward in his seat, squinting up toward the drowned sky, Neil said, ”I don't know about you, but I'm expecting the bang.”
”Me too.”
Just a minute later, how the world would end, with what noise and degree of violence, suddenly concerned Molly less than she would have imagined possible. The sight of a hiker, walking at a brisk pace in the northbound lane, turned her thoughts away from planetary catastrophe to the more intimate cataclysm that had changed her life at the age of eight and had shaped it every day thereafter.
You couldn't accurately call him a mere pedestrian. There were no sidewalks along the county road, no encouragement whatsoever for anyone to travel the ridge line on foot. Besides, he walked with a determined stride, with the purpose of an enthusiast.
Molly first thought he must be one of those who calculated that if he walked often enough and far enough, and never dared to eat a spoon of ice cream, he would live forever-barring, of course, the threats that self-denial could not affect, such as runaway trucks, cras.h.i.+ng airplanes, and alien invasions.
In utter disregard of the weather, he wore no rain gear. His pale-gray slacks and matching s.h.i.+rt, suggestive of a uniform, were soaked.
He must have been miserable, but he soldiered on, his pace hardly if at all affected by sodden clothes and other discomforts. Indeed, because poor visibility and caution and a fear of what she might find in town caused Molly to hold the Explorer to little more than coasting speed, the hiker seemed to be walking north almost as fast as the Explorer cruised south.
His thick dark hair was plastered to his skull. He kept his head down, the better to net each wet breath from the vertical ocean.
As the Explorer closed on him, the hiker looked up, across the two-lane blacktop.
Even through the blur of the storm, his features were bold and clean. He would have seemed movie-star handsome to Molly if she hadn't known that the mind behind that charming face was monstrous, corrupt, and cunning.
The hiker was Michael Render. Her father. The murderer.
She hadn't seen him face-to-face in almost twenty years.
At once she looked away from him, less because she worried that he would know her than because, even at this distance, she feared the power of his eyes, the magnetism of his gaze, the vortex of his personality.
”What the h.e.l.l?” Neil said, shocked, turning around in his seat to look out the tailgate window as Molly accelerated. ”He's supposed to be locked up.”
Her husband's instant confirmation of the man's ident.i.ty prevented Molly from taking refuge in the hope that her imagination had run away with her and that the hiker was in fact a stranger with only a vague resemblance to Render.
Usually, she thought of him not as her father but only by his surname, which as a girl she had dropped in favor of her mother's maiden name. When occasionally he appeared in her dreams, he had no name, but the skull was visible beneath his skin, and his hands were scythes, and in his broad grin, his teeth were broken tombstones.
She worried, ”Did he...”
”What? Recognize you?”
”You think he did?”
”I don't know.”
”We recognized him.”
”Because of the headlights. Harder for him to see you.”
”Has he changed directions, is he coming behind us now?”
”He's just standing there, I think. I can't really tell. He's almost out of sight.”
”s.h.i.+t.”
”It's all right.”
”The h.e.l.l it is,” she said sharply. ”You know where he was going.”
”Maybe.”
”What else would he be doing out here?” she asked. ”He was going to our place. He was coming for me.”
”He doesn't know where you live.”
”Somehow he found out.”
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