False Memory

Gripping Dusty’s right arm with both hands, Martie pulled him aside. Her expression, as ghastly as it was, could be no more horrified than his own face. She said, “When Susan was representing Ahriman’s house, before it was Ahriman’s house, she was the agent for the original owner, and she wanted me to see the place. Spectacular house, but very imposing, like a stage set for Gotterdammerung. Had to see it, she said. So I met her there. It was the day she first showed it to Ahriman, the day she met him. I arrived when she was finishing the tour with him. I met him that day, too. The three of us… talked a little.”

“Oh, Jesus. Can you remember?.

“I’m trying. But, I don’t know. Maybe the subject of his book came up. Seventy-eight weeks on the best-seller list now. So back then it would have been fairly new. Eighteen months ago. And if I realized what kind of book it was… maybe I mentioned Derek.”

Trying to pad the sharp points of the piercing conclusion toward which Martie was hurtling, Dusty said, “Miss M., stop right now. Stop what you’re thinking. Ahriman would’ve gone after Susan anyway. As beautiful as she was, he had her in his sights before you came into the picture.”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely.”

Lampton had turned away from the computer to listen. “You’ve actually met this pop-psych putz?”

Confronting Derek senior, fixing him with a glare that would have turned him to ice if there had been blood in his veins, Martie said, “We’re all dead because of you.”

Waiting to hear the punch line of what he assumed must be a joke, Lampton skinned his lips back from his nippy little teeth.

Martie said, “Dead because of your childish competitiveness.”

Like a radiant Valkyrie flying to the assistance of her wounded warrior, Claudette came to Lampton’s side. “There is nothing in the least childish about it. You don’t understand the academic world, Martine. You don’t understand intellectuals.”

“Don’t I?” Martie bristled.

Dusty heard so much loathing in Don’t I? that he was glad Martie was no longer in possession of the .45 Colt.

“Competition among men like Derek,” said Claudette, “isn’t about egos or self-interest. It’s about ideas. Ideas that shape society, the world, the future. For those ideas to be tested and tempered and readied for implementation, they have to survive challenges, debate of all types, in all arenas.”

“Like Amazon.com reader reviews,” Martie said scathingly.

Claudette was undaunted. “The battle of ideas is a very real war, not a childish competition, as you’re trying to paint it.”

Valet backed out of the room and stood watching from the hail.

Joining Dusty and Martie, though careful to stand behind them, Skeet found the courage to say, “Martie’s right.”

“When you’re off your medications,” Lampton told him, “your judgment isn’t good enough to make you a welcome ally, Holden.”

“I welcome him,” Dusty disagreed.

With her teeth into this issue, Claudette was more emotional than Dusty had ever seen her. “You think life is video games and movies and fashion and football and gardening, and whatever the hell else fills your days, but life is about ideas. People like Derek, people with ideas, shape the world. They shape government, religion, society, every tiniest aspect of our culture. Most people are drones by choice, spending their days in trivialities, absorbed with piffle, living their lives without ever realizing that Derek, people like Derek, have made this society and rule them by the power of ideas.”

Here, in this ugly confrontation with Claudette, which for Dusty and surely for Skeet, as well, was rapidly growing into a showdown of mythic proportions, Martie was their paladin, lance raised and eye to eye with the dragon. Skeet had moved directly behind her, putting his hands on her shoulders, and Dusty was half tempted to move behind Skeet for additional protection.

“Daring to be your own best friend,” Martie said, “and learning to love yourself — these are ideas that shape?”

“There’s no comparison between my book and Ahriman’s,” Lampton objected, but after his wife’s vigorous defense, he sounded as though he were pouting.

Moving half in front of Lampton, as if to physically defend her beleaguered man, but also to press her butt against him, Claudette insisted: “Derek writes vivid, solid, psychologically profound work. Rigorously composed ideas. Ahriman spews out pop-psych vomit.”