I shake my head, trying to sort out the confusing issues. If they are using the Jersey lab, VaporStrike would not travel three hours to his former jurisdiction simply to get rid of a deadly, telling steel drum. Unless, of course, he can't find weekend trash collection in New Jersey but he can in New York. Still, New York is huge, and VaporStrike would be stupid to return to a place where police and USIC agents have photos of him and would recognize him instantly. I do not feel unsafe, despite Omar's encouragement to have us found. I feel more concerned about what else—or who else—might wind up suffering some hideous death before USIC can catch the lot of them.
FIFTEEN
SCOTT EBERMAN
SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002
12:10 P.M.
PARLOR
I FELT LIKE A VAMPIRE who'd had his first red meal. If intelligence were blood, I would have grown fangs after my eavesdropping session in the basement. I parked myself on the parlor couch facing the hallway, waiting for Mike and Alan to either sneak off to their third-floor hangout and talk some more or take a cell phone call, of which I could hear one end. Jersey cities with convention centers right across from amusement piers. I played eenie-meenie-minie-moe with Wildwood, Asbury Park, and Griffith's Landing. My problem was that, like most New Jersey natives, I could name the barrier islands in order from north to south, but I couldn't tell you what cities on the mainland were behind each one. I had no idea which barrier isles lay in front of me, but Omar's main lab is somewhere within driving distance of the strike. I didn't know whether to laugh or be stunned.
I pretended to read, though it was like pretending to sleep when burglars are in the house. Finally, Mike Tiger left in his car, heading back to Manhattan for some meeting, and the goodbye comments let me know he'd either be spending the night with his family in North Jersey or he wouldn't be back until late tonight. Alan went to the kitchen to talk to Marg. I could hear his car keys rattling in his hand, which meant he was leaving, too. Damn.
Cora and Rain came back from a walk outside, huffing and looking not thrilled about something. Rain went for the sound of her dad's voice, and Cora came in to me, finding her smile.
"You're still up," she said.
I was working on my second slushy and was starting to feel okay to talk.
"You're winded," I noted.
She didn't answer, though I knew well the way her eyes darted when she got nervous about something.
"You meet up with the Jersey Devil out there?" I swallowed a gulp of slushy orange. "You shouldn't be running. Not on all these blood thinners."
She rolled her eyes. "I wish I could say I was running to get this winded. We were walking quickly. It's ... Jersey Devilish. I really don't think you want to hear."
I moved my feet to make room for her, and she sat on the couch, but not like she usually sits when I'm around—like she's ready to jump up again. She sank down on the cushions, laid her head on the backrest, and shut her eyes with a huge exhale.
I watched her from between my knees, not sure I was up for the usual Cora games—i.e., trying to drag information out of her. I went back to my pretend reading, my ears ready to hear Alan's cell phone ring. He was responding to something Rain must have been whispering. I couldn't hear a damn word of it.
Time to play the game. I toed Cora in the leg. "What happened?"
"Nothing."
"Right." I toed her in the ribs, in a tickle spot, which made her squirm sideways and almost smile. Then I crossed my ankles on top of her so she couldn't get away until she confessed. I had pinned her down like this once at St. Ann's, just to torture her, when I was reading on the couch in the lounge. I'd actually spent very little time with the three of them at the hospital. I knew everyone in the place and did everything from answer phones in the ER to clean the break room when I felt good. That day, I hadn't been feeling good, and misery loves company. She got so jumpy from being held down that the game was over in about thirty seconds.
I figured I could squirt an answer out of her by trying it again. She merely dropped a hand onto my sweat sock and lay there with her eyes shut.
Alan's voice rose so slightly that I figured only my tuned-in ears would catch it. "Cora shouldn't be afraid of that—"
"Don't talk to her now," Rain whispered. "Not while..." and I could hear no more.
Cora was sitting under Mrs. Kellerton's portrait—the one that looked at you no matter where in the room you were. She opened her eyes and kinked her neck so that for a moment she was looking at the portrait upside down. I was four feet to the left and five feet under the woman, and I still felt those eyes were watching me. I always wondered how painters did that.
Cora dropped her head again and started talking in the calmest of monotones. "I had the best time with Henry. You have to get to know him. He's an excellent photographer. He's going to give me copies of his prints so that I can try to get the same shot, same lighting ... He reminded me of everything I forgot about developing old-fashioned film."
Obviously there was some big secret going on, and Henry Calloway was the diversionary topic. Whatever. A part of me wanted to leap up and hear what Rain and Alan were whispering about, but Cora was absently picking lint off my sock, and it kept me grounded. She rarely touched me. I had touched her a lot—a swat on the head on my way past, a nudge with my foot in therapy sessions, which could get her to spill some secret if she halfway decided she was going to anyway. I'm a touchy-feely guy. She's a kind, sensitive, sympathetic ice cube.
"Tell me about him."
"Okay ... He helped Mrs. Starn and the historical society write the grant to convert this place. He knows a lot about grants from being a professor. His department only gave him a five-hundred-dollar budget for research last year because it was his first year, and he drew another ten thousand in government grant money. He wants to exhume one of the bodies of the Kellerton children to prove they had diabetes."
She turned to me at that point, knowing that exhuming bodies would be of interest to me. She glanced up at the portrait again, but this time with a slight grin that looked excited.
"Because Mrs. Kellerton kept such accurate records of all their symptoms, he says he can publish a report on an herb called pitasara that she sent for from India, which seemed to help. Mrs. Kellerton wrote that she felt it kept her youngest two children alive for an extra two years."
"So ... this pitasara could be helpful to diabetic patients with an intolerance to synthetic insulin."
"Correct. If he can prove it was diabetes."
Interesting. Totally. I wondered if Henry would let me read his research to pass some time, maybe help him out a bit. I almost said as much, but something stirred up my gut instincts—maybe stirred them up for the second time, and the first time I had been too distracted by Owen and by the memory of the speaking tube down in the basement.
"Be careful," I said instead.
"Of what?"
"Of Mr. Almost Professor. For one, you're contagious."
I pulled my feet off of her and put my eyes back on the page.
"And what else?" she asked. She put her hand on my knee and leaned closer, sounding deeply concerned. Something had spooked her outside.
"He's hot for you," I said, lest she think it was something worse.
She froze and then laughed. "What on earth would make you think a thing like that?"
I read a few lines before thinking of how my gut instincts could be explained. Maybe they couldn't. "He's a guy ... you're not."
"I've had teachers younger than he is," she argued.
"So?" I didn't look up, so I could keep my straight face. I felt it was important.
"So, that's absurd!"
Not unless he's gay. Cora never had any big brothers to give her the lines on how guys think. She was a beautiful young girl. He was—
"He's a physicist." She giggled. "And on the board of this place. Surely he understands the situation with our health."
"Cora. Guys on death row get swooning girls in droves. And have
you checked out Owen's fan mail? I think half of our fifteen thousand cards were from teenage girls who told him he was hot and offered their phone numbers. It doesn't matter, okay? A guy is a guy, and he's one."
"Well, you and Owen don't think of us like that," she argued.
"Well, we're extraordinary," I lied.
I kept reading, though the words weren't going in. I was suddenly aware of her warm hand on my knee. She opened her mouth to raise some other worthless argument, but my knee and I bolted away from her and her hand before I could hit the phase of thinking about where girls' hands had been known to travel. I felt her watching my back, her incomplete sentence dangling in the air. Lesson: I can touch you, but you can't touch me. I wasn't looking to be fair—only to get by.
Alan now mumbled to Rain in the dining room. I moved toward the door, yawning and stretching, my instincts telling me not to look too interested when I got in their line of vision.
They were coming out into the foyer together, and Alan was saying, "They're allowed to stare. It's a free country. They're just not allowed to shoot photos."
"You're sure it was a journalist?" Rain asked him.
"I'll go take a look around, but if it wasn't, it was some local. Rain, you have been in every magazine and newspaper in the country. I think it's perfectly normal that some locals are going to get overly curious ... to want to see you without exactly wanting to meet you."
"But you're sure?" she asked again.
He took her by the hands and cast me a wary glance. He decided to continue. "What members of ShadowStrike remain at large have zero interest in the four of you. They simply don't think in the terms you're suggesting. It's nothing personal and never was, though I know that's hard for you to comprehend."
We saw terrorists in our sleep after Cora was attacked in the ICU. Nobody at St. Ann's gave us pills, tried to inject us, or fooled with an IV bag unless I'd known them personally for at least two years. Alan watched Rain, and I sensed his anxiety over what she would most surely ask next. Certain things he could never answer well.
"What about what happened in the ICU to..." Rain stopped short of Cora's name. Mr. Steckerman took Rain by the hand and led her out to the porch, and I followed.
He came up with his usual answer. "That was the weirdest move in the halls of terror that American Intelligence has ever seen. You have to think of this in the same terms as a bombing in an Israeli marketplace. Terrorists don't typically enter hospitals to finish off victims that they only managed to maim. It's not about that."
He had answered like this over and over, each time with equal patience, as if he'd never answered the question before. Dr. Hollis had told him something about the value of repetition in curing trauma. Problem: Rain could be equally repetitive.
"So, why did they do it this time?" she asked again.
"Because they were still close by. Because they thought it would be easy. But we were right there. It wasn't easy, was it? The guy who made the attempt on Cora's life is in jail forever, and they won't try it again."
"So ... where are they now?"
Yesterday, his answer might have been "Barcelona or somewhere. Don't worry about it." Today I knew that would be a lie. I studied the tops of the trees, waiting with interest to hear how he would answer. Alan's generally not a liar, in spite of the secrecy of his job.
"Can I just say that we know where they are?"
Her eyes flew to him. Mine, too.
"They're the ones being watched. Not you."
Great answer. Still, he shifted the subject just a little more to drive her farther from that fear. "But I would appreciate it if you didn't wander around the woods by yourself for a while, just until we're sure that all the journalists are following our requests. You don't want to see a picture of yourself on the cover of some supermarket rag, of a private moment with your friends, right?"
She laughed finally. It wasn't loud. "If I find somebody, can I kick some butt?"
"No, you may not."
He hadn't laughed yet, but she threw her arms around him anyway. "I just get turned around sometimes. Like when I'm with Cora. She's still a little jumpy. Daddy, when can I have my car out here?"
"Soon, I hope," he said evasively, but I knew he was afraid of her taking off, coming back late, and missing a dose of something while she was with friends from Trinity. I was afraid of her driving while getting into a crying jag and deciding it would be best to drive off a bridge or smack a tree. "As for Cora, give her time in the fresh air. For both of you, I assume you'll go to sleep from here on in without me sitting between your beds and reading the newspaper."
She had to think about it for a minute, and didn't bother unwrapping herself from him. "That behavior was for St. Ann's. Out here, we're good."
He unlaced her arms to look at her. "That's good, too. Because you know the deal. I can come out here every day. I'm still a dad. But I can't live out here. I can't even be out here more than I'm home. I am a target, which doesn't put my life in any more danger than it ever has. But that's one of the reasons I agreed to send you out here. It's not good for you to be around me all the time. Not this spring or summer."
Rain had been hearing her dad was a target since she was a little girl, so that part didn't hit her terribly hard. She looked over at the trees and back at her feet.
"I think I'll go look at the bay until lunch is ready. Mrs. Starn said that by noon the mist is usually burned off and you can see the islands. And besides. There aren't as many trees over there." Her laugh was driven by some courage. "Wanna come, Cora?"
Cora had silently come up behind me, and when I turned, she was watching the woods. It seemed her biggest problem was going to be fear of spooks—that and how she followed me around like a puppy dog when I let it happen.
I took her by the arm and urged her toward Rain. "Go," I said.
But she stiffened. "I'd like to, but I've got this blog, and it's getting all these hits, and I should post something for people to read."
She turned back inside, and if I didn't know her well, I would have said that it wasn't an excuse. Rain followed her but reappeared a moment later with a pair of field glasses I'd seen on one of the shelves in the parlor. She took off toward the beach.
"I'll go check the woods," Alan said.
"Can I come? See how USIC guys search a property?" I asked with a plastic smile.
"Believe me, it's about as boring as watching paint dry," he said. "Welcome to real life, which is not the world of Law and Order. Besides, I wish you'd keep an eye on Rain. She's restless. I don't want her to get an idea that a swim in May would solve everything."
Rain was an excuse, too. He didn't want me anywhere near his job. Between him and Cora, I felt abused by endless bullshit, and I went to find Rain just because Owen was still coming out of his Headache from Hell, and if I had to hear him imply one more time that the next life would be cooler than this one, I'd get a headache myself.
When I reached her, Rain was already sitting on the sandy beach, looking through a pair of ancient field glasses that I'd seen on one of the shelves in the parlor.
"Those things really work?" I asked.
"Perfectly," she mumbled, "if you don't jerk them around too quickly."
She studied the mist, and I doubt she could see through it with the field glasses, because she finally dropped them with a sigh.
"It feels good to face into the sun," she said as I sat down beside her, bored out of my tree. My mind diverted to medical intrigue.
"Sun produces vitamin D, which we desperately need. S'probably why it feels good."
"Maybe I'll come to this side of the house more often," she said. "The woods are creepy."
"We shouldn't come out here without sunblock," I told her, and she grabbed my hand and dragged it into her lap absently.
"Your mind just won't stop working, will it? You can't get out of medic mode."
"If there were some other mode, like counterintelligence mode, I would get into that."
She had no response other than the one she'd always given, so she changed the subject, raising the glasses again. "Islands are still misty. What's on the other side?"
She was asking which barrier island lay directly across the bay. You could now see the houses, whitewashed in sun. It was a warm day, one of the July-come-early days my mom always had loved. We get a few in May. Rain and I both had on T-shirts, and we weren't cold. I'd have felt fine in shorts. The bay was a strip of blue, but it was deceiving, we'd been told last night. The houses we were looking at were about six miles across the bay, though they looked like two.
"Brigantine?" I guessed.
"Nah. We're farther north than that. It's bigger. There's a city over there."
"How do you know?" I asked, as the visibility was only about two blocks in, and all that lined the horizon were houses.
"Because Daddy said that's one reason why he's afraid to let me have my car keys out here. He said 'the city' on the other side would be too tempting, and I'd end up on road trips when I should be resting up. God, I can't wait to get my real life back."
She watched through the breeze while I beat one fist on the sand, indenting a small, smooth hole to ward off feelings of panic, of missing the bustle of St. Ann's, and remembering something my mother had once said about retirement funds. She'd never had one, and I used to harp on her about that.
"I don't ever want to retire," Mom had said. "I've seen too many people look forward to it, and with six months of nothing to do, they drop dead. I call it death by inertia. That's not the way I want to go."
She had gone the way she wanted to—the way I wanted to, but in another seventy years at least. I wasn't sure Alan—or the nurses and doctors at St. Ann's—really understood the concept of death by inertia. Americans are so into leisure time. They bank their lives on getting twenty years of it, and come retirement, a lot of them do drop dead. I could drop dead this summer...
Rain spoke up. And if there are ever times when I believe in Owen's God, it's at a moment like this, when I could panic or get depressed, and some great distraction appears out of the blue.