The grease-spotted takeout bags drop from his hands. Brady doesn’t even notice.

No, he thinks. It can’t be.

It is, though. He throws open the kitchen refrigerator and there, on the top shelf, is the Baggie of poisoned meat. Only now half of it is gone.

He stares at it stupidly, thinking, She never checks the mini-fridge in the garage. Never. That’s mine.

This is followed by another thought: How do you know what she checks when you’re not here? For all you know she’s been through all your drawers and looked under your mattress.

That gurgling cry comes again. Brady runs for the living room, kicking one of the Long John Silver’s bags under the kitchen table and leaving the refrigerator door open. His mother is sitting bolt upright on the couch. She’s in her blue silk lounging pajamas. The shirt is covered with a bib of blood-streaked vomit. Her belly protrudes, straining the buttons; it’s the belly of a woman who is seven months pregnant. Her hair stands out from her parchment-pale face in a mad spray. Her nostrils are clotted with blood. Her eyes bulge. She’s not seeing him, or so he thinks at first, but then she holds out her hands.

‘Mom! Mom!’

His initial idea is to thump her on the back, but he looks at the mostly eaten hamburger on the coffee table next to the remains of what must have been a perfectly enormous screwdriver, and knows back-thumps will do no good. The stuff’s not lodged in her throat. If only it were.

The drumming sound he heard when he came in recommences as her feet begin to piston up and down. It’s as if she’s marching in place. Her back arches. Her arms fly straight up. Now she’s simultaneously marching and signaling that the field goal is good. One foot shoots out and kicks the coffee table. Her screwdriver glass falls over.

‘Mom!’

She throws herself back against the sofa cushions, then forward. Her agonized eyes stare at him. She gurgles a muffled something that might or might not be his name.

What do you do for poisoning victims? Was it raw eggs? Or Coca-Cola? No, Coke’s for upset stomachs, and she’s gone far beyond that.

Have to stick my fingers down her throat, he thinks. Make her gag it up.

But then her teeth begin doing their own march and he pulls his tentatively extended hand back, pressing the palm over his mouth instead. He sees that she has already bitten her lower lip almost to tatters; that’s where the blood on her shirt has come from. Some of it, anyway.

‘Brayvie!’ She draws in a hitching breath. What follows is guttural but understandable. ‘Caw … nie … wha … whan!’

Call 911.

He goes to the phone and picks it up before realizing he really can’t do that. Think of the unanswerable questions that would ensue. He puts it back down and whirls to her.

‘Why did you go snooping out there, Mom? Why?’

‘Brayvie! Nie-wha-whan!’

‘When did you eat it? How long has it been?’

Instead of answering, she begins to march again. Her head snaps up and her bulging eyes regard the ceiling for a second or two before her head snaps forward again. Her back doesn’t move at all; it’s as if her head is mounted on bearings. The gurgling sounds return – the sound of water trying to go down a partially clogged drain. Her mouth yawns and she belches vomit. It lands in her lap with a wet splat, and oh God, it’s half blood.

He thinks of all the times he’s wished her dead. But I never wanted it to be like this, he thinks. Never like this.

An idea lights up his mind like a single bright flare over a stormy ocean. He can find out how to treat her online. Everything’s online.

‘I’m going to take care of it,’ he says, ‘but I have to go downstairs for a few minutes. You just … you hang in there, Mom. Try …’

He almost says Try to relax.

He runs into the kitchen, toward the door that leads to his control room. Down there he’ll find out how to save her. And even if he can’t, he won’t have to watch her die.

28

The word to turn on the lights is control, but although he speaks it three times, the basement remains in darkness. Brady realizes the voice-recognition program isn’t working because he doesn’t sound like himself, and is it any wonder? Any fucking wonder at all?

He uses the switch instead and goes down, first shutting the door – and the beastly sounds coming from the living room – behind him.

He doesn’t even try to voice-ac his bank of computers, just turns on his Number Three with the button behind the monitor. The countdown to Total Erasure appears and he stops it by typing in his password. But he doesn’t seek out poison antidotes; it’s far too late for that, and now that he’s sitting here in his safe place, he allows himself to know it.

He also knows how this happened. She was good yesterday, staying sober long enough to make a nice supper for them, so she rewarded herself today. Got schnockered, then decided she’d better eat a little something to soak up the booze before her honeyboy got home. Didn’t find anything in the pantry or the refrigerator that tickled her fancy. Oh but say, what about the mini-fridge in the garage? Soft drinks wouldn’t interest her, but perhaps there were snacks. Only what she found was even better, a Baggie filled with nice fresh hamburger.

It makes Brady think of an old saying – whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Is that the Peter Principle? He goes online to find out. After some investigation he discovers it’s not the Peter Principle but Murphy’s Law. Named after a man named Edward Murphy. The guy made aircraft parts. Who knew?

He surfs a few other sites – actually quite a few – and plays a few hands of solitaire. When there’s a particularly loud thump from upstairs, he decides to listen to a few tunes on his iPod. Something cheery. The Staple Singers, maybe.

And as ‘Respect Yourself’ plays in the middle of his head, he goes on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella to see if there’s a message from the fat ex-cop.

29

When he can put it off no longer, Brady creeps upstairs. Twilight has come. The smell of seared hamburger is almost gone, but the smell of puke is still strong. He goes into the living room. His mother is on the floor next to the coffee table, which is now overturned. Her eyes glare up at the ceiling. Her lips are pulled back in a great big grin. Her hands are claws. She’s dead.

Brady thinks, Why did you have to go out in the garage when you got hungry? Oh Mom, Mommy, what in God’s name possessed you?

Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, he thinks, and then, looking at the mess she’s made, he wonders if they have any carpet cleaner.

This is Hodges’s fault. It all leads back to him.

He’ll deal with the old Det-Ret, and soon. Right now, though, he has a more pressing problem. He sits down to consider it, taking the chair he uses on the occasions when he watches TV with her. He realizes she’ll never watch another reality show. It’s sad … but it does have its funny side. He imagines Jeff Probst sending flowers with a card reading From all your Survivor pals, and he just has to chuckle.

What is he to do with her? The neighbors won’t miss her because she never had anything to do with them, called them stuck-up. She has no friends, either, not even of the barfly type, because she did all her drinking at home. Once, in a rare moment of self-appraisal, she told him she didn’t go out to the bars because they were full of drunks just like her.

‘That’s why you didn’t taste that shit and stop, isn’t it?’ he asks the corpse. ‘You were too fucking loaded.’

He wishes they had a freezer case. If they did, he’d cram her body into it. He saw that in a movie once. He doesn’t dare put her in the garage; that seems a little too public, somehow. He supposes he could wrap her in a rug and take her down to the basement, she’d certainly fit under the stairs, but how would he get any work done, knowing she was there? Knowing that, even inside a roll of rug, her eyes were glaring?