The Captive (29 page)

"Question: Did Mr. Golden ask you if you had spoken with the police?

Answer: Yes, sir.

Question: Now, Benny, did you ever receive money from Mr. Golden in connection with his talking about the police?

Answer: Yes, sir, he gave me a quarter and some more money, some dimes, and he said I should tell the police, I should have, I mean, I should tell the police that there was a big black car at his house when he was gone, so I took the money.

Question: Was there really a vehicle at the Golden house on Friday, aside from the car Mr. Golden usually drives?

Answer: Yes, sir, like he told me, I mean like he said I should tell you.

Question: I mean really, Benny, was there really a car there?

Answer: The man told me not to tell, first, and then when Mr. Golden gave me more money, I told it."

The detective leaned back, slipping the typescript back in the folder. "You see what it looked like to us?"

"I'm afraid I don't, Mr. Frake. Little Benny Ochoa will do anything for money and probably would steal Fort Knox if he got the chance, and I don't see how you could take the word of a child to send the police after my husband and drive him to such, such frantic actions. Barry is not a violent man," she said finally.

"I'd hate to deal with him if he
was
what you'd call  violent, Mrs. Golden." The detective pulled another form from the file.

"Officers Pendleton and Rudolph apprehended suspect approximately five miles south of U.S. 66 on State Route 10 at six-fifteen P.M., and the following occurred: upon being apprehended, suspect was searched for weapons, and none were found. He was handcuffed, hands behind, and placed in the back seat of cruiser 29 with Officer Pendleton who had covered suspect with a shotgun while he was apprehended. At that point, Officer Rudolph opened the back door of the car again and asked Pendleton for the car keys. In some unknown way, suspect had broken the handcuffs" and at this point the detective looked up at Renee with his eyebrows raised, "broken the handcuffs and with great strength hit the officers' heads together rendering them unconscious. The officers regained consciousness some time later to find their vehicle had been disabled and their weapons, which they found beside the road, destroyed by having their barrels bent."

He looked at Renee again, closing the folder. "If that's not violent, Mrs. Golden, I'm in the wrong business."

"I wonder if you can be sued for false arrest," Renee said, her mouth in a tight line.

Mr. Frake stopped smiling at that. "Your husband has his rights as a citizen, but he must submit to the lawful duty of the public protectors in apprehending him as a suspect for questioning."

"Oh it's not the police I'm talking about, Mr. Frake," said Renee, "it's your drawing conclusions upon nothing but your own suspicious nature that I'm talking about." She got to her feet. "May I go home now, or am I suspected of some foul crime too?"

"It is your duty, Mrs. Golden," the detective said, standing at his desk, "to report the whereabouts of Mr. Golden when they become known."

"I will call you when he gets home. Is that what you mean?"

"Yes, ma'am." He nodded toward the door. "You are free to go."

"Thank you so much."

Judy Rossi had been waiting in the long, bare anteroom to drive Renee home. Now she got up and walked over while Renee checked her possessions back from the desk sergeant. She noticed the flushed and exasperated look and did not ask until they were outside and walking toward the car.

"No help, huh?" Judy said.

"Help?" Renee said tightly. "They thought Barry had murdered us and buried our bodies somewhere." She shook her fist as she said it, unable to contain her rage.

"For heaven's sake," Judy said. "They couldn't be serious."

"They sent a State Police car out after him when he was searching for us, and the poor man went crazy, I suppose, and knocked out the officers, and in the words of our public protector in there, disabled their vehicle."

"I'm amazed," Judy said, shaking her head. "Imagine Barry doing a thing like that. Why he must have really been frantic."

They got into the Rossis' car and drove back through Old Town and out Rio Grande. "Has your ex-husband come out of the coma yet, do you know?"

"I don't know. The doctor said his skull is fractured, and there's a compound break in his right arm." She stopped, her face twisted. "I don't know. I just don't ever want to see him again. I'm sorry he's so badly hurt, but I've been sorry for him for so long." Judy did not ask again.

They pulled up in front of the house just as a battered old pickup truck pulled away and drove off up the street. Renee caught a glimpse of two Indians, a young man and woman with impassive faces, and then they were gone. She hesitated a second and ran for the side door, wanting to scream his name but afraid. And then he came through the door, pushing it open with one crutch, his left leg in a cast reaching above his knee.

"Barry," she whispered fiercely as they embraced and his crutches fell one on each side. They held each other a long time, saying nothing, feeling only the closeness.

"You're going to wear out his good leg that way," Judy Rossi said, laughing and handing Barry back his crutches.

When they had gone inside and everyone had talked about the adventure, Mina supplying stories about the Big Pussy Cat, Renee telling about the absurd Nazis, and Barry about the police and his detective work with Vaire, when it was dying down and the familiarity of the house came stealing over them again and Judy said she had better get home, then Barry and Renee felt almost shy with each other, looking with half-hidden glances at each other and then laughing, tears in their eyes, Mina laughing at them and hugging each in turn, and Judy calling them ridiculously in love, then it was time to begin their lives again. And they felt almost unable to start until the joy had died down, as if their fullness with each other would not allow such things as suppers and bedtimes, but only the long looks and the very serious hand holding and the sudden tearful embraces that left them all breathless.

But there were certain realities that had to be taken care of, and when they had agreed to call the police tomorrow, to have what Judy had brought over for supper, and to think about very little else, there was still something in Renee's mind that would not stop, something that itched, irritated like an insect bite, like a pebble in the shoe, a mote in the eye.

"Your leg," she began, as they sat at the table drinking coffee after supper."

"An unlucky shot," Barry said, grinning. "Not so bad, though, when you remember those idiots shooting up the place like that." His smile faded as he saw her frown, a very slight tightening of her brows.

She wouldn't ask it, couldn't think it really, but she did. "That big animal, it was shot too, in the same leg." When she found she had said it, making a connection by mere juxtaposition in time, by the mere ordering of utterances, she felt her face go cold and saw by the expression on her husband's face that a thing had been said, a connection made that should not have been. She felt a sudden terror inside, as if she wanted to go back twenty seconds, go back and not say it, run the film backwards just this once, not say what she had said. Not even those two words.

Barry sat very still, holding his coffee cup and looking at his wife, his eyes fixed on one spot, as if he had petrifled. She had said it, opened the door for all the unwanted memories to come crowding in, all the coincidences involving the strange beast that had plagued her family, the beast in the cage, the green eyes that reminded her of someone, and she looked with horror at her husband's deep green eyes as he stared back at her. She pulled her gaze away and turned slowly, as if she were under water, seeing things dimly, to look at her daughter who sat in her chair with the same  half-frightened, petrified expression she saw on Barry's face.
I won't believe this
, she thought.
I will ask a direct question, and seem insane to them, anything to put the world back where it was, to keep from thinking these crazy things.
But she couldn't speak for a moment, feeling the eyes of her daughter and her husband resting on her like weights, the silence in the room suffocating her. Finally, taking a strangled breath, she lifted her head.

"You both know something I don't," she said, feeling lightheaded and with her mind floating uneasily above nothingness.

"Yes," Barry said, very low, "but it's hard to believe, and I wanted to never have to tell you."

"Tell me now," Renee said, leaning back, her arms hanging stiaight down as if she were asleep in her chair.

"The Beast and I," Barry said very softly, "we are in the same space, we occupy the same space, the same body."

She did not move, not even when her daughter came over to her chair and picked up her hand and held it.

"I was hoping," Barry said, his hands clasped as if praying, the knuckles white with pressure, "hoping I could find a way to never have it come out, maybe with an amulet, maybe some other way, but I don't think there is a way." He raised his shoulders helplessly. "I'm part of the thing, maybe not a real person at all."

When there was no response from his wife, Barry went on, letting it come out, the truth at last, not knowing if she was taking this in, believing it, thinking him crazy, what.

"I had some hope when I picked up memories of an earlier time than one year ago when I became the Third Person the Beast has created. I remembered sometimes things that happened earlier in my life, just as if I were a real person -  places, people. But they are probably fakes, imitation memories that come with the creation of the Person. I don't know about that, I was only hoping." He looked up at Renee with his eyes wide.

"I'm a human being, I'm as human as you are. But when it needs to, or when I let it, the Beast replaces me and goes about its own business."

Renee lifted her eyes slowly, looked remarkably sane and direct as he said the last words. "And it was Little Robert too, wasn't it? And that was the beast in the cage we saw last year, wasn't it?"

"Yes."

"But they're really not the same," Mina said suddenly. "The Big Pussy Cat isn't like Barry. He's my new Daddy, and the -"

Renee shushed her daughter by raising her hand quickly. She looked across at Barry's hopeless face, the pain of her expected horror already present in the slight flinching around the eyes, the tight-held lips. "It saved our lives," Renee said, reaching over to take her husband's hand. "You saved our lives."

"The Beast loves Mina, I think," Barry said, thinking back. "We, I mean the creature and I, don't really share all experiences, at least I don't think - hell, I don't know what it knows about me and how I think, but yes, we both saved you."

"Can't you ever get away from it?" Renee said, her eyes narrowing now as she began to think about a problem that had just minutes before been unthinkable.

"The Second Person, Charles, found an amulet, and your mother had one too, that kept the Beast from appearing as long as the person wore it or had it in his home. But both of them were lost. That's the only way I know of keeping my own body and mind."

"But you said you had memories," Renee said.

"They could be false. It's like I have a complete past, I think, but I don't know what part of it is made up for the occasion and what part might be real."

"But if somebody else verifled that you had been a real person," Renee said, her voice rising in excitement. "If somebody else remembered Barry Golden from more than a year ago, then you'd know that at least."

"Sure, but I haven't found anybody," Barry said. "And I don't know if I was a writer living in the Southwest, if I had a brother named Leonard, if any of that story is really true. I haven't met anybody ..."

"Frank Rossi knew you," Renee said, her face steady and unsmiling as she thought back, trying to pin down the memory of what Frank had said. That night the Rossis had been at the house, months ago now, when she and Frank were in the kitchen making drinks and he had dropped the ice tray, and then she remembered.

"He said you must have forgotten that you wrote an editorial in college that he picked up for the
Journal
, and that was more than seven years ago!"

Barry looked stunned. "You sure he said it was me?"

"That's why he hired you, silly," Renee said. "He knew your work from somewhere else too, it seems like."

"Well hell, why didn't he say something," Barry said, setting his cast up on a chair and massaging the leg above the plaster.

"Who would know a person had amnesia unless the person said so?" Renee said. "And that's what you've got, amnesia. Whatever this thing is that has taken you over, it blocks out your memory and makes you think you're part of it."

"Maybe we can find out," Barry said quietly. "There are files of newspapers from those years, maybe other writing I did." He began to feel the hopelessness again. "But it can't help unless I can get away from this thing, whatever it is, supposing I'm not just a fake person it uses. And I can't get away because we occupy the same space and time. I talked to it one time, and it said we were in the same time and space and couldn't be separated, that it would be like trying to separate the front and back of a page, the two sides of a coin."

Renee jumped up from her chair so it skidded across the polished floor. "That's not true!" she almost shouted, kneeling down at Barry's side and hugging him, kissing his face and neck. "Oh, Barry, it lied to you, I know it lied."

He caressed the gleaming black hair and inhaled the scent of her, wondering if she would ever be able to face it when he couldn't face it himself. "No, it's true."

"No, it isn't! Up there on the mountain, don't you remember?"

"After the shootout at the car, I only shifted out once, when Lowden grabbed you. I couldn't stand by and see him dragging you around like that."

"That's it," Renee said, shaking his face between her hands. "Don't you remember?" She looked at her daughter, who was standing by Barry's other side. "Sweetheart, you remember, don't you, when the Big Pussy Cat rescued you from that man who grabbed you away in the dark, when those lights went on?"