Gwendy’s Final Task

25

GWENDY GAVE UP TRYING to believe there was nothing wrong with her on a spring day in 2024, about four months after her meeting with Charlotte Morgan. It was a piddling 700-word essay that did it. The kind of thing she should have been able to bang out in an hour, nothing but fluff and puff, but it brought down her wall of denial as surely as the magic box’s red button had brought down the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The Washington Post ran an occasional feature called My Five, in which various famous people wrote about five great (or simply overlooked) things in their home states. John Cusack wrote about stuff in his native Illinois. The mystery writer Laura Lippman wrote about Miss Shirley’s Café in Baltimore and the swimming hole at Kilgore Falls. Gwendy, of course, was asked to write a My Five about Maine. She was actually looking forward to the assignment when she sat down in the small office of her Washington D.C. townhouse. Going back to her home state was always a pleasure, even if the trip was only mental.

She wrote about Thunder Hole in Bar Harbor, the Maine Discovery Museum in Bangor, the lighthouse on Pemaquid Point, and the Farnsworth Art Museum. She paused then, thinking she wanted to finish with something that was just plain fun. She sat tapping her nose with the eraser of a pencil from her jar—a habit that went back to childhood—until it came to her. Simones’, of course.

She tossed the pencil back in its jar and typed: My fifth choice is in Lewiston, about 20 miles up the road from my hometown of Castle Rock. Turn right off Lisbon Street onto Chestnut, find a parking space (good luck!), and step into Simones.’ It’s just a little storefront restaurant, but the smell is heaven. The specialty of the house is crankshafts

Here she stopped, staring at the screen. Crankshafts? In a restaurant? What was she thinking?

I wasn’t thinking. I was on autopilot and had a senior moment, that’s all.

Only it wasn’t a senior moment, it was a Brain Freeze, and she’d been having a lot of them lately—walking around looking for her car keys while she had them in her hand, deciding to throw a frozen dinner in the microwave for lunch and finding herself looking for the fridge in the living room, more than once getting up from a nap when she didn’t remember lying down. And after missing a couple of committee meetings and one roll-call vote (not important, thank God), she was depending more and more on her assistant, Annmarie Briggs, to keep her apprised of her schedule, a thing she had always taken care of herself. Forget a roll-call? the old Gwendy would have said. Never in this life!

And now this, staring back at her from the screen of her Mac: The specialty of the house is crankshafts.

She deleted the sentence and wrote, You’ll never have a better burgomeister.

Gwendy looked at this and put a hand to her forehead. She felt hot to herself. Hot and strange. A month ago, back home in Castle Rock for the weekend, she had gotten into the car with some specific destination in mind and had found herself at the Rumford Rock ’N Bowl instead, with no idea of what she had set out to do. She’d told herself what the hell, a beautiful day for a drive, and laughed it off.

She wasn’t laughing now.

What was the specialty of the house at Simones’? A frightening spiral of words cascaded through her mind: catgut, dollface, candlewax, mortarboard.

Mortarboard, that’s it! She typed it, but it didn’t look quite right.

Annmarie poked her head in. “Going to Starbucks, Senator—want anything?”

“No, but I’m stuck here. What are those things you eat?”

Annmarie frowned. “Have to be a bit more specific, boss.”

“They come in bread thingies.” Gwendy gestured with her hands. “Red and tasty. You eat them with mutchup at picnics and such. I can’t think of the word.”

The corners of Annmarie’s mouth turned up, forming dimples. The expression of someone waiting for the punchline of a joke. “Uh … hotdogs?”

“Hotdogs!” Gwendy exclaimed, and actually pumped a fist in the air. “Right, right, of cross it is, of cross!”

Annmarie’s incipient smile was gone. “Boss? Gwendy? Are you feeling okay?”

“Yes,” Gwendy said, but she wasn’t. “I meant of cross, not of cross. Bring me a regular black, will you?”

“Sure,” Annmarie said, and left … but not before giving Gwendy a final puzzled glance over her shoulder.

Alone again, Gwendy stared at the screen. The word Annmarie had given her was gone, sliding through her fingers like a small slippery fish. She no longer wanted to write the goddamn essay. And she hadn’t meant to say of cross but of course.

“Of cross, of course, of course, of cross,” she murmured. She began to cry. “Dear God, what’s wrong with me?”

Only she knew, of cross she did. She even knew when it had started: after pushing the red button to give Charlotte Morgan a demonstration of how dangerous the button box was, and how important it was for the two of them to keep it a dead secret between them until it could be disposed of in the ultimate dumping ground.

But Charlotte couldn’t know about this.

No one could.