The Servants of Twilight

Joey came back with a can of pineapple rings." Can I have these, Mom?"

"Sure," she said, putting the can in the cart. If it would have brought a smile to his small glum face, she'd have allowed him to get a whole package of Almond Joys or some other item he was usually not permitted to have.

Joey went off to scout the rest of the aisle ahead.

To Charlie, Christine said, "You mentioned that something else happened last night. It

He hesitated. He put two jars of applesauce in the cart. Then, with a look of sympathy and concern, he said, "Your house was also torched."

Instantly, without conscious intent, she began to catalogue what she had lost, the sentimental as well as the truly valuable things that this act of arson had stolen from her: all Joey's baby pictures; the fifteen-thousand-dollar oriental carpet in the living room, which was the first expensive thing she'd owned, her first gesture of self-indulgence after the years of self-denial her mother had demanded of her; photographs of Tony, her long-dead brother; her collection of Lalique crystal.

For an awful moment she almost burst into tears, but then Joey returned to say that the dairy case was at the end of this aisle and that he would like some cottage cheese to go with the pineapple rings. And Christine realized that losing the oriental carpets, the paintings, and even the old photographs was of little importance as long as she still had Joey. He was the only thing in her life that was irreplaceable. No longer on the verge of tears, she told him to get the cottage cheese.

When Joey moved away again, Charlie said, "My house, too."

For a moment she wasn't sure she understood." Burned?"

"To the ground," he said.

"Oh my God."

It was too much. Christine felt like a plague-carrier. She had brought disaster to everyone who was trying to help her.

"Grace is desperate, you see," Charlie said excitedly." She doesn't know where we've gone, and she really thinks that Joey is the Antichrist, and she's afraid she's failed in her God-given mission.

She's furious and frightened, and she's striking out blindly. The very fact that she's done these things means we're safe here. Better than that, it means she's rapidly destroying herself. She's gone too far.

She's stepped way, way over the line.

The cops can't help but connect those three torchings with the murders at your place last night and with the bomb at Miriam Rankin's house in Laguna. This is now the biggest story in Orange County, maybe the biggest story in the whole state. She can't go around blowing up houses, burning them down. She's brought war to Orange County, for Christ's sake, and no one's going to tolerate that. The cops are going to come down hard on her now. They're going to be grilling her and everyone in her church. They'll go over her affairs with a microscope. She'll have made a mistake last night; she'll have left incriminating evidence. Somewhere. Somehow. One little mistake is all the cops need. They'll seize on it and pull her alibi apart.

She's done for. It's only a matter of time. All we've got to do is lie low here for a few days, stay in the motel, and wait for the Church of the Twilight to fall apart."

" hope you're right," she said, but she wasn't going to get her hopes up. Not again.

Joey returned with the cottage cheese and stayed close to them for a while, until they entered an aisle that contained a small toy section, where he drifted away to look at the plastic guns.

Charlie said, "We'll finish shopping, get a bunch of magazines, a deck of cards, a few games, whatever we need to keep us occupied for the rest of the week. After we've taken everything back to the room, I'll get rid of the car-"

"But I thought it wouldn't turn up on any hot sheets for a few days yet.

That's what you said."

He was trying not to look grim, but he couldn't keep the worry out of either his face or his voice. He took a package of Oreos from the cookie section and put them in the cart." Yeah, well, according to Henry, the cops have already found the yellow Cadillac we abandoned in Ventura, and they've already linked it with the stolen LTD and the missing plates. They lifted fingerprints from the Caddy, and because my prints are on file with my PI license application, they made a quick connection."

"But from what you said, I didn't think they ever worked that fast."

"Ordinarily, no. But we had a piece of bad luck."

"Another one?"

"That Cadillac belongs to a state senator. The police didn't treat this like they would an ordinary stolen car report."

"Are we jinxed or what?"

"Just a bit of bad luck," he said, but he was clearly unnerved by this development.

Across the aisle from the cookies were potato chips, corn chips, and other snack foods, just the stuff she tried to keep Joey away from. But now she put potato chips, cheese puffs, and Fritos in the cart. She did it partly because she wanted to cheer Joey up-but also because it seemed foolish to deny themselves anything when the time left to them might be very short.