White Rabbit by David Daniel

Author:David Daniel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

18

“They buried it!” Seth cried, tossing the Chronicle onto the kitchen table, upsetting an ashtray and spilling roaches. “Buried on page ten, and what does it say? Faulty wiring suspected as the cause. One mention of the Rag! Nothing about my statement to the fire department.” He hammered the table with a fist.

“At least Moon didn’t give them that ridiculous lie that you started the fire,” Amy said.

Seth had told her the full story, but it was as if seeing it in print, in a version other than his own, had fanned the flames all over again. He seemed ready to riot. He paced the kitchen, making the linoleum floor creak. From the wall, the lions and lambs in Tess’s unfinished jungle Eden mural watched. “Should we call the fire marshal?” Amy asked. “Demand an investigation?” But she already knew the answer. A request for a formal inquiry would go nowhere. A ramshackle building in a rundown district, nobody hurt? Worse, a place where an underground newspaper was produced? It would be dismissed as a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Seth shook his head. “I have to find new office space.”

“I can do that. Why don’t you forget about it for now,” she said.

“We’re not going to miss a single issue! I won’t give the bastards the satisfaction.”

With stuck-record insistence, Amy said that she would take care of locating a new home for the Rag and arrange for replacing equipment burned up in the fire, and gradually Seth’s agitation calmed. But at another level, she understood with a dawning awareness, that something in him had shifted, some more reasonable part of him had been burned up, too. She was about to urge that he drive up and visit Terry Gordon at his farm for a few days when a scream made them jump. They exchanged a wide-eyed look. Jester.

A spill of daylight seeped around the edges of the drawn shade to reveal him huddled in a corner of his tiny room, atwist in the bedclothes, staring wildly at the mattress as though it were crawling with bugs.

“It’s all right,” Amy said calmingly, settling on the edge of the mattress, putting an arm around him. He had the ill-kempt appearance of someone strung out on heroin. “You were dreaming.” He’d been asleep for more than twelve hours.

Seth watched from the doorway a moment, then said he’d go make some tea. “It’s okay,” Amy reassured Jester again. “Nothing can hurt you.”

When she rejoined Seth in the kitchen, he glanced up questioningly from pouring boiling water. “He’s asleep again,” she said. “He’s been crashed all day. I want to take him to the Free Clinic, but he won’t move.”

“You think he just tripped out?”

“Something freaked him, but I don’t believe it was drugs.”

Seth brought over teacups and sat. “What then?”

“You said he acted strangely when you saw him last night watching the fire.”

“If I saw him. I can’t swear to it.” Seth frowned. “But why wouldn’t he have come right over? He’d have known what was going down the minute he saw Moon.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.