Possession (40 page)

Her mother was there, sitting beside her bed everytime she woke. So strong. Just like the nurses. Solid, thick women with strong heavy legs in white stockings. All of them seemed so large, and she felt so small and weak, as if she were an infant resting in a huge bed. The policeman was big too, with a great belly. When he pulled up a chair and sat close to her, the smell of pipe tobacco that clung to him made her nauseous. She did not want to have him near her, but she wanted to tell him what had happened. She owed that much to the man who was dead, to the man who had loved her so much that he had died for her. Rex Moutscher blamed himself. He had misjudged just how crazy Clinton was. It had never occurred to him that the damn fool was going to go back uplake and take matters into his own hands. He should have seen how obsessed Clinton was with the woman. She was a pretty little thing but nobody to drive a man around the bend. But then you couldn't figure sex. He'd seen men go crazy over women too many times; they stalked and waited and eventually managed to strangle or shoot or burn up women who didn't want them anymore. Or didn't want them in the first place. Clinton had had a thing for Lindstrom's wife—but he'd sure managed to cover it up.

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He asked her again, "Clinton bothered you before, Mrs. Lindstrom?"

"Sam?" She picked at the spread over her and looked out the window.

"Yes. Yes. All the time. I was afraid to be alone with him."

"He knew you were going up to Stehekin?"

"It was his idea. My husband didn't want to go."

"Had you ever seen Duane Demich before?"

"Who?"

Moutscher waited a long time for her to answer.

"He said—that. . . No, I don't think so. He was just there, and he saved my life and he was kind to me and he said that nothing bad would happen to me because he wouldn't allow it to happen to me and he was going to take me out to a safe place that morning but he was sick."

She spoke with no expression and Moutscher figured it had to be the tranquilizers they gave her.

"Sam killed him, you know. Just came up there and shot him and threw him over the edge and I tried to get to him and he was dead way way down below."

She started to sob, and Moutscher had to wait for her. The nurse, Lenore Skabo, made a sound of disapproval. He'd forgotten she was there, witnessing. He hoped she would keep her mouth shut. Some of these nurses worked faster than Western Union with gossip.

"Now, tell me again, Mrs. Lindstrom. When did you first see Sam Clinton?

Where was it?"

"Up there. In the meadow. In the trees. Coming at us with a gun."

"Which meadow? The one where the helicopter found you?"

"Yes."

"Or the one when you camped with your husband?"

"Yes."

"Your husband was already . .. dead when Sam went up there, wasn't he?"

"I'm sorry. Of course. I didn't understand your question. It was in that last meadow, the one with the big cliff. I'm very tired, Mr. Moutscher. Could we—"

3OO

"Of course. You get some rest."

It occurred to Moutscher as he rode down in the elevator that Clinton might have killed Lindstrom too. Wanted the wife. Sent them up there. He called down to FewelFs office, but Fewell said that Clinton had been on duty in Natchitat the whole weekend, seen by good witnesses day and night. Trust Walker to think of checking. It was a long shot anyway.

Ling had no record of violence. The guys in the Natchitat office were sure that he and Clinton hadn't buddied up before. The wife said that too, after Moutscher got a finger-talker to ask her. Ling was just a patsy who ended up dead.

He fed the info on Demich into the NCIC computer, going through WASIC

first, and waited for the dull green screen to come alive.

Demich, Duane Elvis ... D.O.B. 5-23-57

832 Larrabee, L.A., Cal. DL8X30P2-EXP5 23 83

WMA [White Male Adult] Rd-Gr, 6-5, 220.

That was him, all right. He waited and another paragraph appeared, a warrant number: WASP-D00012-789633, 6-13-82.

He checked Seattle P.D.—Illegal use of bank card machine. No more information. No contact with suspect.

The FBI rap sheet was on his desk, and he tore open the yellow envelope from the Bureau.

PD, Denver, Demich, 1-19-81 Fraud Dism.

Colo. Duane E. #27081

SO, Alameda Davis, Darryl E. 3-11-81 Bunco 6 mo. Co., Cal. AKA Demich, C.J.

D. E. #11143 dism.

pD, Salem, Demich, Ore-Darin E.

#62191

9-2-81 Vag. Disch. Narc. GL 1st

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Demich was no angel, a con man with a lot of luck—until now. But all of it was Mickey Mouse stuff, and no convictions. No morals arrests, nothing in the crimes-against-persons area. A traveling man and slippery, but not violent. Seeing the woman, how helpless she was, Moutscher could understand why Demich would have wanted to help her off the mountain, and knowing Stehekin, he could see why they'd gotten lost.

Given a choice between Clinton's story and Joanne Lindstrom's version, it was no contest. Clinton was lying in his teeth.

Moutscher slipped the rap sheet back in its envelope, punched three holes in it, and slipped it into the case file. He was a little nervous, remembering that he'd let Clinton take away physical evidence from the Lindstrom scene. If that came out, he would look bad. But the stuff was basically only shit that Clinton had picked up himself and had no intrinsic value. He still had the autopsy report and Blais and McKay's follow-ups. If push came to shove, he would go on record that Clinton had taken the stuff without his permission or knowledge. Hastings would back him up because Clinton had made the old man look like a fool and the doc hadn't appreciated it.

Put Joanne Lindstrom and Rex Moutscher up against an alcoholic cop and ask anybody who a jury would believe.

Joanne lay in her bedroom at home, the shades pulled down so tightly that they made a dim twilight of the afternoon. She was awake after sleeping a long time, but if she needed to sleep again, she had only to cry out and they would bring her the little bottle of smooth blue pills, talking to her all the time in hushed voices. Her mother was somewhere in the house and so was Sonia. Who was taking care of Sonia's children? Everyone was so kind. Everyone took care of her. They brought her trays of food with fresh flowers in little vases, and begged her to eat. Yesterday— was it yesterday?—Sonia had bathed her face with cool water and helped her change into a clean gown. Sonia was so subdued and quiet now; before she had always been

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boisterous and sure of everything. Sonia careful in choosing her words—it frightened Joanne.

She knew that a great deal of time had passed since she had last lain in this room, but she was not sure how much and she was afraid to ask. What month was it? The light seemed weaker, but that might be the shades. She was surprised to find that the songs on the radio in the kitchen were the same songs that she had liked in August.

A certain instinct told her she must not talk to any of them about the things that mattered. They spoke to her, but very cautiously, about Danny and of what "Danny would have wanted." That confused her. Danny had been dead for such a long time that she thought they should not mention him so much. They barely mentioned him, David—no, Duane—at all. When she thought about him, she sobbed quietly into her pillow, so muffling her tears that the women who waited in the kitchen could not hear her.

She remembered the time at the cemetery strangely. Color. Blue and red lights flashing on top of a line of cars. A whole sea of red that turned out to be the tunics on the mounties who came down from Vancouver. Why?

Black stripes across silver badges. White faces and flushed faces and gray faces bending down to speak to her. She had no idea which of her lovers had been hidden inside the coffin. No one had told her and she had not asked. She thought it was probably Duane. Of course, it was Duane. But then why had there been so many policemen? Duane hadn't liked policemen, but he'd had good reason; policemen had made most of his life miserable. Maybe the police escort had been for her—because she'd been married to Danny once. She had wanted to throw herself into the grave with Duane.

Sometimes she could close her eyes and smell the way his skin was when the sun had baked it all day. Sometimes she could see him above her, and the way his mouth changed— softened—when he was just about to make love to her. She tried to hold onto that image and always found it swept away by the terrible image on the mountain. She saw Duane truggling to save her from Sam, the odd slowness of movement as he moved behind Sam—as if his arms and

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legs could not move smoothly together—and then Sam's; face looking around when Duane hit him with the rifle. She; had tried to scream a warning to Duane and been completely voiceless. Duane had floated off the mountain; he hadn't even called out a farewell to her. Maybe he had been voiceless too.

One thing she could not forgive herself. That she had not gone over with him. It should have been so easy, but she couldn't do it. She had been unable to follow him down through the air between the rocks, even though she willed her body to go over. Just as her voice wouldn't work, her body had failed to obey her mind's commands. She had only reached out to him as if she could summon him back up from the pale rocks that glistened red with his blood, as if she could lift and touch him and make him whole.

He had been so strong—so powerful that she still could not really believe that he was finally and utterly dead. Sometimes in the night when the wind made the forsythia's branches scratch against the bedroom windows, she thought it was Duane. She believed—if only for a little while—that he had come back for her, that she could slip away with him through her window before her mother or Sonia could stop her.

Without him there was no point in eating, or sleeping, or getting well. If he was dead, she did not exist. He had told her that so many times.

"Separated, we no longer live . .. Entwined. Flesh together. Blood together. Bone together. Throughout eternity . . ." If he did not come back for her, she would evaporate. They would come to wake her one morning and find no one.

The food did her no good. It only exacerbated the nausea that seemed to grow in intensity with each day. It was worse in the mornings, coming piggyback on the anxiety that shook her awake. She vomited then until she had nothing more to bring up, her retching sounds masked because she always had the cunning to turn on the shower before she bent over the stool. The workings of her body, its refusal to exist without Duane, without Duane's body to make it live,

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were no business of her mother's or of Sonia's. Now that she was away from the hospital, no one could force her to live. She welcomed the nausea; she took it for a sign that she would not live. No matter how much nourishment they coaxed her to ingest, she could get rid of it and they would never know until it was too late.

She didn't blame her mother and Sonia. It was more that she was on a plane that they could not imagine. They were part of her old life, part of the time when she had lived with Danny. They had never known the absolute, final, and convincing joy that she had known with Duane. Since they could not conceive of that rapture, they could not understand. She had loved them once, and she still did, but in a far-off way, in a time that was gone.

When she slept, she dreamed continually. She dreamed on different levels, and her dreams bewildered her. The top layer of dreaming was about Duane. He was there beside her again and he made love to her. His touch was so insistent and real that she came close to orgasm but never actually climaxed. She woke too soon, and she wept because she had not. Deep, deep in the soundness of her drugged sleep, she dreamed of Danny. Those were not dreams but nightmares. She heard a man scream—so loudly and terribly that she thought the whole house would wake. She woke drenched in sweat, her heart beating chaotically, and knew only that something in the dark had terrorized her and she could not name it. Joanne came to dread the moon. When she was a child, she had believed that the moon belonged to her alone. Because it followed her everywhere, she thought it was her moon—that all children had their own moons. When she was very small, warm in the back seat of Doss's old car, she had watched the moon through the little triangle window next to her. No matter how far they drove, even over to Seattle, the moon—her moon—had tagged along. It was friendly then, protective, its man-face smiling down at her.

That moon had died. The one that had emerged to take 305

its place was evil, staring down at her while she slept. Her mother or Sonia—one of them—crept into her bedroom while she slept and raised the shades, opened the window to let in air, and exposed her to the flat, dead-white moon with its craters and mountains forming a malevolent presence. She had no idea why it watched her.

The night air was cold. It smelled of no season. The wind came at night too, whipping the sunflower heads so that they thumped and woke her. The soft breeze before had come, somehow, from him. The shaking vicious wind— cold as if it had whistled down through ice tunnels—was something else. Someone else—trying to make her remember what she would not.

At first, she had taken more pills when she woke in the night, but then they must have counted them and found her out. Her mother took the pills into the kitchen and now she had to ask for them.

So in the dying hours of the morning, long before daylight, Joanne lay awake and shook with an unremem-bered fear. She always fell asleep before dawn to wake to new terror. She could not tell them about it. She did not know why. They told her she was being very brave, for Danny, and they left her alone.

Joanne wanted only one thing before she died. She wanted to see Sam Clinton punished. She had told the fat detective in Wenatchee exactly what had happened, told him how Sam murdered Duane, let him tape her words, write down her words, and she had signed the paper. No matter what happened to her, that paper existed.