Before she could make a decision, he came toward her and spoke. “Can I help you with your bags?”
He was short, and while she couldn’t judge his build under the coat, she thought she could take him if it came to that.
“Are you stalking my dad?” she said.
“Not at all. But I am looking for something. I think it might be in your father’s basement.”
“That’s it, I’m calling the police.”
“Please don’t, Evie.”
Her heart pounded. He wasn’t threatening her. He didn’t move any closer. He spoke kindly, with psychotic calm. The neighbors would say how nice and quiet he always seemed.
“Who are you?”
“Call me Alex.” He raised his hand, as if offering it to be shaken, but paused midmotion, hand outstretched, elbow bent, gaze studying her. Then he turned and walked away.
Civil defense posters decorated the outside of the supermarket. They were the same ones she saw everywhere in L.A.: the wickedly surreal poster of the bug-eyed face emerging from a cloud of gas demanding, DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR MASK IS? and the shadowed figure stalking behind a quaint family home, labeled REPORT STRANGERS! It seemed a little laughable finding them in Hopes Fort. Nothing ever happened here, no one knew the town existed, it surely wasn’t a target. But the schools still ran attack drills. Evie knew where her gas mask was: in its bag under the front seat of the car. In L.A., she carried it everywhere in her backpack, like everyone did. Here? It would be like locking her car doors in the driveway.
But as Johnny said, the rules were still in effect, even here.
She pulled onto Main Street and stopped at the police checkpoint. Johnny wasn’t there today. The deputy in charge was about twenty years older and surly.
She rolled down her window and offered her ID. “Where can I find Johnny Brewster?”
“Back at the station. Pop your trunk, please, ma’am.”
“You have the phone number?”
“Yeah.” The guy had to look in every single grocery bag.
“Can you give it to me?” she said after the pause made it clear he wasn’t going to answer.
He looked her up and down, then glanced at the California plates on the car.
“Look,” she said. “We went to high school together. I just have to ask him something.”
Finally, he gave her the number and let her through the checkpoint.
She dialed the number into her mobile phone. “Johnny? It’s Evie.”
“Hey, what’s up?”
“I just had a run-in with somebody, and I wondered if you knew him. He said his name was Alex.” She told him about the encounter and gave him the stranger’s description.
“That doesn’t ring any bells, but I’ll keep my eyes open.”
“Thanks.” Report Strangers! Damn straight.
Evie stayed up late that night, tucked half under the covers of the guest bed, laptop perched on her lap, amazingly enough, and delved into the adventures of the Eagle Eye Commandos.
Crammed in the back of the unit’s Blackhawk, Sarge and Matchlock were arguing about weapon caliber again. (“.60 all the way.” “Overkill, man. That’s so inelegant. You wanna do this pretty, don’t you?”) In the cockpit, Tracker and the pilot, Jeeves (as in “Home, Jeeves”), rolled their eyes. Talon—Captain Andrew Talon, hero of this outfit—reminded them that they were on a mission and asked them to be quiet. He ordered them, really, but with Talon, it never sounded like an order. It was like he was asking a favor, one gentleman to another, and you couldn’t help but want to comply.
The plan was for Jeeves to drop off the others near Moscow, retreat outside of Russian radar surveillance, then return to pick them up in six hours. Sarge and Matchlock were ex-Special Forces, with specialties in covert ops, sniping, demolitions, the whole nine yards. They covered the landing and their entry into the city perfectly. Talon brought up the rear.
Tracker, the intelligence expert, moved watchfully ahead of Talon. She kept her blond hair tucked under a black bandanna and smudged her cheeks with paint. Sexy, if you liked that sort of thing. Tracker was the embodiment of some of Evie’s more outlandish teenage daydreams.
They had just started on their route to the Kremlin when they heard a plane, the drone of an engine sailing overhead, Dopplering to a higher pitch as its altitude decreased, faster and faster. A moment later, a massive explosion rocked the world. A pillar of flame erupted from the aptly named Red Square; then the shock wave hit. The four soldiers dropped to the ground and covered their heads.
In a strange twist, the team helped with the rescue effort, which included digging out Talon’s counterpart in the Russian version of the Eagle Eyes, the Company of the Gray Bear. In gratitude, Agent Slovsky did more than give them the evidence about the missing spies—he told them the exact location in Siberia where they were being held. Moreover, the team promised to hand over any information they found regarding the terrorists who had perpetrated this act. An event of this magnitude could only bring the rival powers of the world closer together.
All the lessons of history to the contrary. Evie’s idealism astonished her sometimes.
She e-mailed that much of the reworked script to Bruce, who had probably chewed all his pencils to pieces with worrying. While she was online, she opened a Web browser and did a search on prostate cancer. In fairly short order, she learned that the standard treatment for advanced stage prostate cancer was a procedure called an orchiectomy. Medical castration. She didn’t get much further than that before shutting down her machine. She just didn’t want to know. She turned off the lamp on the bedstand and hoped for sleep.
A hard wind blew, rattling the windowpanes. The Eagle Eye storyline turned back and forth in her head—there was always so much more than she could get into a script: thoughts, expression, the little pieces of the characters’ backgrounds that might come into play at certain moments. She wrote novels in her head and grew frustrated that she hadn’t yet found the patience to put a novel to paper.
She couldn’t sleep.
She went to the kitchen to find some tea or a glass of water and passed the doorway to the basement.
When her grandparents lived in the house, the basement had been off-limits. She could play anywhere in the yard, read any of the books—fascinating fairy stories and ancient histories—on the dozens of shelves in the living room, but the basement was for grown-ups. When she was old enough to think about it, she assumed that meant power tools and cleaning solvents. By the time her father moved into the house, she was out of college and never spent more than a weekend at a time there and never took much interest in the basement.
Now she assumed that the prohibition no longer applied.
A bare bulb hanging from the ceiling lit the stairs. The basement was unfinished, framework and heating ducts exposed, a second room blocked off with bare drywall. At the foot of the stairs was a workroom with a rack of tools, a table saw, and a nebulous unfinished woodworking project propped against a set of metal shelves.
In the middle of the drywall at one end of the workroom was a closed door.
Stocking-footed, robe wrapped around her T-shirt and bare legs, she crept down the stairs to that door and opened it.
It was a storage room: shelves crammed with troves of objects, crates stacked as high as the ceiling, boxes piled to create the narrow walkways of a maze through a room whose edges were lost in darkness. The air smelled dusty, with a bite of cold seeping from the cracked concrete floor.
She looked for a light switch or a cord dangling from a ceiling bulb, but couldn’t find anything. Back in the workroom, she retrieved a flashlight, then entered the storage area, feeling like she was spelunking.
She couldn’t see much in the beam of light: the shadows and angles of boxes, tarps draped over a few corners, forming weird lurking shapes. She felt six years old again, on an adventure in her own house simply because she was sneaking around past midnight.
Passing the flashlight beam back and
forth, she identified some items: a thick hammer, like a sledgehammer, on a short handle, the wood shiny from use; an old-fashioned broom, brush stalks wrapped around a dark staff; a cup made of chipped clay; a sheepskin folded on a shelf. In the flashlight’s sickly glow, the fleece looked yellow, shiny almost. No dust dulled it, even though it must have lain there for years. She ran her hand over it. It felt soft, fresh, and sent a charge up her arm, a static shock.
All the objects looked archaic and out of place, but none of them looked old. On the next shelf over, she found a musical instrument, strings on a vertical frame. Not a harp, but a lyre. She plucked a string. It gave back a clear tone. She bet it was still in tune. The note seemed to echo. She shivered.
This was a museum. The stuff here must have been worth a fortune. Her grandparents might have gathered such a collection over the course of their lives. But why hadn’t anyone told Evie about it?
A stack of papers rested on the shelf by the door. Hoping it was some kind of inventory, something that might tell her what exactly all this was, she picked up the pages and leafed through them. The handwriting on them belonged to her mother, Emma. These were the loose-leaf pages she made her notes on. Emma Walker had been a travel writer, mostly articles for magazines. It was a hobby she’d maneuvered into a part-time career. Evie supposed she’d learned to write from her, though she’d taken the impulse in an entirely different direction.
Emma had been in Seattle doing research when she died.
The first page was a description of a garden. Evie couldn’t guess where or when; it didn’t have a label. It didn’t matter. The pages held her mother’s voice. Evie put them back on the shelf, where they looked out of place and lonely.
She left the room, closing the door softly, as if an infant slept inside. It was precious, wondrous. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end.
She made tea and sat at the kitchen table with a pen and sheet of paper to write longhand, which she hadn’t done in ages. It helped sometimes, making the words physical. Not much story happened. Mostly, she made lists, character sketches, snippets of description for if, when, she ever got around to writing the novel.
She was asleep with her head on the kitchen table when her father emerged for breakfast in the morning.
“Trouble sleeping?” he said, standing on the other side of the table, amused.
Stretching the kinks out of her back and neck, she rubbed her face. “Yeah. No. I don’t know, I just meant to get some tea.” She didn’t remember falling asleep; her body still felt like it was midnight.
“It was the wind blowing last night. Rattles the whole house. It kept me awake, too.” He didn’t act like it. He was already dressed for the day. He poured a glass of orange juice and drank it while he pulled his coat from the rack by the door.
She wanted to ask him about the storeroom, but realized he was getting ready to go out. “Where are you going?”
“I’ve got a Watch shift this morning.” He was on the local Citizens’ Watch, had been since her mother died. The local police didn’t have enough people to staff the checkpoints and continue their usual workload. Citizens’ Watch took up the slack.
“Are you sure—I mean, are you sure you should still be doing that? I didn’t think you’d still—”
“I’m not dead yet,” he said cheerfully.
“But what if something happens?”
“Nothing’s going to happen.”
“But—”
“Evie, I plan to keep things as normal as possible for as long as I can. I like the Watch. It gets me out. I’ve got everyone in town looking out for me. I’ll be fine.”
This was like when she was in high school, with her parents standing in the kitchen, listing all the reasons she shouldn’t go out after the game, with all the drunks on the road, and her insisting that she’d be fine.
He put the empty glass in the sink. He’d reached the door when he looked back and said, “You want to come along?”
“I should try to get some work done. I don’t want to leave Bruce hanging.”
“I’ll see you after lunch, then.”
“Dad?”
He hesitated, hand on the doorknob.
“I went downstairs last night.” She let that hang for a moment, waiting for him to offer a response, wondering what he would say without her prompting him.
“Oh?” was all he said.
She wet her lips and tried again. “The storeroom—has the stuff in there ever been cataloged? Do you have any idea what all is down there? What it’s worth? You could have your own antique show.”
A slow smile grew on his lips, and the look in his eye told her before he even spoke that he wasn’t going to answer her question.
“I’ll see you this afternoon,” he said, then was gone.
Figured. Though she wondered why a roomful of antiques demanded such deep dark secrecy. Had someone in their family’s history been a master thief? Run a pawnshop in the last century and never bothered to sell off the assets? Was a budding museum curator? At least he hadn’t gotten angry at her for invading the forbidden storeroom.
She set up her laptop in the living room, on the coffee table, and sat on the hardwood floor in her robe and stocking feet. She’d shower and change later. Who did she have to impress?
Curled up in the middle of the carpet, napping politely, Mab kept her company. When Evie got up for a glass of water or to stretch her muscles, Mab always looked at her, ears cocked, alert. When Evie relaxed, so did Mab. Evie worked up the courage to scratch the dog’s ears; Mab acknowledged the attention with a couple thumps of her tail. Her father must have kept the stray dog for company.
Bruce had already e-mailed her sketches of the new pages. He must have been up all night, too. Once colored, the Cessna explosion was going to be spectacular. He had it covering a two-page spread.
So, what to write next. They had a formula that demanded a certain number of shots fired each issue, and she was in danger of running short. She needed a battle scene.
The crew barreled across the tundra in a stolen Jeep, racing against an execution order sent out for one of the men they were supposed to rescue. The Blackhawk was out of commission for now—sabotage in the fuel tank. The Russians were supposed to be helping them, but someone on the inside didn’t want them to succeed. A three-way battle ensued, and no one was sure who was siding with whom.
Usually, Evie wrote things like “chase scene” and “fight,” and let Bruce’s capable imagination construct the details in four-color panels that splashed across entire pages.
But something about this battle tickled her story instincts. Throw out a clue, a hook that could carry the plot to the next issue. An enemy chopper ran them down. Matchlock managed to steer them into a gully and under cover, but not before Talon saw a face he swore he knew, a man he thought he had left behind to die in the arctic years before. Talon had had to make a decision—stay to save his platoon-mate, or leave and ensure the success of the mission. Talon had abandoned him. The memory still haunted him.
And there the issue ended, centered on the expression of stark disbelief on Talon’s face.
Next issue: He’ll want to follow the enemy chopper. He’ll want to learn what had happened to his friend, how he’d survived. Tracker argues with him. Her mind is on the spy imprisoned in Siberia. On the mission. She’ll go alone if she has to, she’ll defy him—
Someone knocked on the door.
Evie couldn’t see who it was out the kitchen window. Mab wasn’t barking. She opened the door.
An old woman stood on the porch, looking at Evie with a patient, expectant expression. Mab turned a circle and wagged her tail, as if asking for praise, or forgiveness, or any acknowledgment of her canine presence.
“Can I help you?” Evie felt awkward in her unwashed, half-dressed state, not worthy to appear before this kind old woman.
“Perhaps,” she said. “I’m looking for something, and I thought it might be here.”
Her skin
was wrinkled like old linen, and her hair was ash gray and tied in a bun at her neck. Her eyes were clear and green.
She might have been anyone, from anywhere. Someone from town, from down the street, from the next farm over, looking for a stick of butter, or wanting to borrow a hammer. But Evie’s blood rushed in her ears. She felt electrified, like when she’d touched the fleece in the storeroom.
Her words seemed to come from some other lips. “What are you looking for?”
“Shoes. A pair of slippers, like you might wear with a ball gown.”
Evie didn’t know where the words came from. She spoke on a hunch. “Glass slippers?”
The woman smiled, lighting her face. “Yes, exactly.”
“Come in.” Moving softly, Evie led her to the basement. She stopped the woman outside the storeroom. “Wait here.”
She didn’t even need the flashlight this time. She stepped around the stacks of crates and warrens of shelves. Dozens of boxes, a hundred objects wrapped in cloth and packed away, and Evie knew where to go. Only her second time in this room, and she knew. Against the side wall was a wardrobe made of oak with beveled edges and brass knobs. Inside hung gowns—rich, amazing gowns that seemed to sparkle with their own light, shimmering and changing color when Evie tilted her head. At the bottom of the wardrobe, shoes were stacked. Iron shoes that might be put in a fire until they were red hot. A tiny pair of boots that might have fit a cat. Sandals with leather wings stitched to them. Gold slippers, silk slippers. Glass slippers to fit a pair of small feet—blown glass, etched with ribbons and lines to make them look as if they’d been sewn. Flashing, they caught the scant light, which seemed to shine deep within the glass. Evie picked them up; they were light, fragile. She couldn’t imagine dancing in them.
Then, without her own volition—like a character in a story, she thought wildly—she was walking to the door. The glass slippers were drawn to the old woman. They led Evie back to her, and Evie let them guide her. She didn’t have a choice.