Michael Prescott - Mortal Faults

“I earned a degree in that field. Never got licensed, though.”

“Apparently you don’t believe in licenses.”

“I’m a free spirit.”

“Yes, I think you are. I sensed that about you when we met. It made me envy you. I may have been a free spirit once. I can’t recall. It was so long ago.” She looked away. “It’s a lie, anyhow-what you said.”

“What’s a lie?”

“That by remembering, I can move past it. I can never move past it. Remembering only etches the pain deeper. It doesn’t resolve anything. It doesn’t bring closure.” Her tone was hollow. “There can never be closure.”

“How about forgiveness?”

“Never that, either.”

Abby touched Andrea’s arm, a light touch, the outreach of one human being to another. “People do things in a state of psychosis that have nothing to do with their moral values or their character.”

Andrea didn’t withdraw from the touch, but neither did she seem comforted by it. “So I shouldn’t blame myself? But I took out the gun. I loaded it. I pulled the trigger. So who gets the blame? The demon who possessed me-that’s what I’d like to think. But that demon was part of me, was in me.” Now she pulled free of Abby’s hand. “And somewhere it still is.”

“The doctors must have felt otherwise, or they wouldn’t have released you.”

Her shoulders lifted listlessly. “They said I was no longer a danger to myself or others. They let me go. I spent six months in a halfway house. Then I was on my own. I didn’t want to be anywhere near California. So I moved to Florida. It was about as far away as I could get. I rented a cheap place, and did some entry-level jobs. It was all right. I was almost happy at times. I would walk on the beach in the evening and feel… almost whole.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t stay there.”

Andrea looked at her. “So am I, really. I don’t understand it, myself. But last year I started to feel… started to feel I had to come back. Had to be in California again. I don’t know why. There’s nothing for me here. Nothing but memories… bad memories…”

“So here you are.”

“Yes. Here I am. My parents died years ago. They left enough money for me to buy this house and pay my bills without working anymore, as long as I didn’t indulge in any extravagances. Of course, I had no desire to indulge myself. I only wanted to be left alone. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

“And have you been? Left alone, I mean.”

“Not at first. When I was in the halfway house, they would still come after me-the newspaper people, the magazine people, the TV people. They wouldn’t let me be. Most of the public had forgotten by then, but those people would never forget. To them I was an open sore, and all they could do was scratch and make me bleed.”

“That’s why you changed your name.”

Andrea smiled a little, in acknowledgment of this small victory, this successful deception. “Yes. I found a way. It was illegal, but

… well, I suppose you know all about that kind of thing. The name you gave me was an alias. You probably have documents to back it up, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So do I. By the time I moved to Florida, I was Andrea Lowry. No one tracked me down. No one recognized me. It was… wonderful.”

“One more reason to stay in the Sunshine State.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But something drew me back. Still, I've kept a low profile. No one has intruded on me or questioned my past. I did worry that the absence of any credit history would prevent me from buying this house, but I was paying cash out of the inheritance, so the seller didn't care.”

“They wouldn't have cared, anyway,” Abby said. “A blank credit history simply means you have no record of defaults. There are no red flags. That's all they ever look for.”

“I knew you'd be an expert on it. How many identities do you have?”

Abby had actually lost count. “I’ve used a few,” she answered vaguely.

“Do you enjoy it?”

“Excuse me?”

“Changing your identity. Becoming someone else.”

“I guess I do.” Oddly, she’d never thought about it before.

Andrea seemed unsurprised. “I thought I would enjoy it. I thought-this is how naive I was-I thought it would make me free. Of course it didn't.”

“But the reporters couldn't find you.”

“True, I was free of them. But that wasn’t freedom. I was still the same person, only with a different name. I had the same memories, the same bad dreams-and the same good dreams, which were worse than nightmares, because they would never last, and I would wake up, and the children wouldn’t be there after all, and it wasn’t their hair I was smelling, only my pillow…”

Abby almost reached out again, but stopped herself, knowing the gesture would be rejected. “You may not believe me,” she said, “but I think you’ve suffered enough. There’s a statute of limitations on any kind of pain, any kind of guilt.”

Andrea’s eyes were empty. “Not this kind.”

Scaling the old lady’s fence was no problem. There was no dog in the backyard and no indication of a security system protecting the property.

Dylan tracked down the junction box on the rear wall of the house. The phone cable, dropping down from a utility pole in the alley, was heavy and tough to cut, which was why normally he would pry open the box to work on the wiring inside. In this case he didn’t have to. A pair of red and green telco wires extended out of the bottom of the box and snaked through the siding on the wall. Sloppy, leaving them exposed like that. Some phone company drone had been in a hurry when he did the installation.

Dylan unsheathed his knife and sliced the wires. Now the house had no phone service, unless the woman had a cell phone.

He pointed at Bran, wordlessly instructing him to take up a position in the yard where he could cover their avenue of escape. One thing Dylan had learned was to always keep your exit lane open.

Bran crouched beside a leafy eucalyptus and signaled that he was ready. Dylan led Tupelo to the back door. It was locked. Not a spring latch, either. Goddamned pain-in-the-ass dead bolt. But there was a glass pane in the door, which would make things easier.

“Wish I’d brought a glass cutter and some tape,” Dylan whispered through his mask.

“Fuck that,” Tupelo said, and with the butt of his H amp; K he cracked the pane into a starburst pattern.

The impact made no more noise than the snap of a twig. Still, Dylan was pissed.

“I tell you to do that?” he breathed. “You wait for my goddamned order.”

Tupelo looked away, his eyes twitching in the ski mask’s slits. “Just wanna get it done,” he mumbled.

Dylan inspected the damage. The glass was holding together, but one stiff breeze would blow it apart. Again he wished he had some sticky tape. Could have taped over the fragments and pulled them away without a sound. As it was, he would have to push in the panel and hope the old lady wasn’t listening.

“You haven’t told me,” Abby said, “how Reynolds fits into all this.”

“No, I haven’t, have I?” Andrea hesitated, then made a flick of the wrist, as if dismissing some unheard counsel of caution. “I suppose I can tell you. I-”

“Wait.” Abby held up a hand.

From the rear of the house there was a tinkle of breaking glass.

The shards fell away with a touch of Dylan’s gloved hand. They hit the floor with a soft metallic clatter like the jingling of bells. He stuck his arm through the hole and groped for the dead-bolt release. In a second the door was unlocked. He pushed it open and was dismayed to hear the low, prolonged squeal of unoiled hinges.

The old lady might have heard that, even if she’d missed the noise of the falling glass. They would have to move fast before she hightailed it out the front door.