Fire Will Fall

  "Burned by what?" Rain asked, her face screwed up into a total confusion fest.

  "I don't know," he said. "What hurt you?"

  The question hovered unanswered. Finally Rain said to me, "Bubba, do you remember that we smelled something kind of scorchy? I totally forgot about that. It smelled like an electrical fire ... something around there did."

  I remembered but was distracted by other notable facts. "I couldn't find the spot again when I took Mr. Tiger out there. I swore I had the right spot. Mr. Tiger took a soil sample, just to be Mr. Polite-as-Always, because it looked like it had been dug out recently. But I couldn't smell anything at that point. Look..." I scratched my itchy head with impatience. "What happened to us was confusing enough. I'm sure it had nothing to do with whatever the hell is going on in Griffith's Landing. Let's find a more pleasing subject. You guys did not smell it. It was sickening."

  "What's up, Cora?" Dempsey finally couldn't resist grabbing her foot, and he rocked it back and forth. I honestly don't think she noticed. She was staring wide-eyed at her screen. She didn't answer right away, but I'd warned all our friends about long pauses between when you ask Cora a question and when you might get your answer. They just watched her patiently.

  "Um ... excuse me." She finally got up and walked into the corridor—almost floated, more like she was in a trance than that she had to go to the bathroom. I followed, concerned. Marg had just come up the stairs, and she and Cora met at my brother's closed door. I recognized what Marg had under her other arm by the red plastic casing. It was a morphine drip. At St. Ann's word filtered down to us that morphine drips were a last resort for the four of us, and it meant things were really bad. I stood numbly, watching her listen on her cell phone with the other hand.

  "You can't go in there right now," Marg said to Cora, lifting the cell phone away from her mouth. Cora's face turned bright red and, faster than Marg, she stood between her and the door. "Cora, let me in there. He needs me."

  "Then ... I want to go in with you."

  Marg sighed. "How, oh how, can I redeem myself? Mike Tiger was here, I've got my security clearance papers from USIC down in my bedroom, if you want to see them. Now move out of the way. I've got Dr. Godfrey on the phone, who just sent this drip up from St. Ann's at my request. Want to talk to him? Here."

  She shoved the cell phone out to Cora, who listened for a few minutes. I pulled Rain's bedroom door shut to keep this bad news from spreading as I watched Marg enter my brother's room. She left the door open a crack.

  "I'm sorry, I'm sorry..." Cora said kind of quietly into the cell phone. "I ... just came into the corridor because I had to ask Scott a question, and the nurse is saying I can't see him and she's about to hook him up to something ... I, yes, I believe you about her. I just ... Why can't I see him?"

  I tiptoed past her and actually stuck my head into my brother's room. I could hear him talking to Marg, which meant he was alert. But his whispers gunned, stop-start, stop-start, like he was in excruciating pain. He didn't sound angry with her anymore, which was one good thing.

  Cora came in, handed the cell phone back to Marg, brushed my hand, and ended up gripping my finger so tight I thought she was going to break it. "Hey," I whispered right in her ear, "remember our motto. Don't panic. He's been in a coma. We've seen him worse."

  I took her back out in the corridor, but as we waited for Marg, I tried everything possible to hook into a distracting thought.

  "You were upset when you came out here. What's wrong with you?" I asked, but she only muttered, "I needed to talk to him." She looked a little nuts, so I didn't bug her.

  Marg finally came out, pulling off latex gloves and dropping them into her apron pocket. "It's just a lot of pain, that's all we know. The shot of morphine Dr. Godfrey gave him didn't help for long. I finally won the morphine war with him tonight. He might be the emerging infectious disease specialist, but I'm the hospice specialist, and there's no reason under the sun for your brother to have to endure that kind of pain. Now he'll sleep."

  The nurse was growing on me, though Cora's grip on my finger told otherwise in her case. I allowed for more paranoia from her because she was the one who was attacked at St. Ann's. She was back to breaking my finger again, her eyes moving back and forth from Scott's door to Marg in some sort of anxious confusion. I used my breaking finger like a leash to lure Cora back toward Rain's room.

  "What's up with you? Spill," I said, extracting my hand and shaking her by the shoulders a little. Sometimes that got her mouth working in group therapy.

  But she just pushed past me, went back into the room, picked up her laptop, and stared at it. Her nervous energy sort of filled up the room, and conversations that had been going on kind of pizzled down until everyone was staring at her.

  She finally let fly. "I, um, I need advice."

  Dempsey moved over beside her, lay his chin back on her shoulder, and looked at the screen in confusion.

  "Cora Holman asks for advice," he said. "Sounds like the Twilight Zone."

  "I do need help. I'll have to explain some things. And if you wouldn't mind not touching me, please, that would make it easier." Her fingers trembled as she rubbed her forehead nervously. Dempsey returned to the bed. Nobody laughed.

  "I've been helping Scott with something. But he can't tell me what to do next. Tonight, I got an e-mail from the Kid. And a friend he apparently lives with. We did a lot of joking back and forth at first—"

  "The Kid? The intelligence Kid?" Rain said, rising off her pillows. I went around behind Cora so I could see her screen. Tannis and Dobbins followed.

  "I'm sure they didn't wish for me to show this to anyone. But the last e-mails were not so funny, and without Scott, I—I'm at a loss. I don't know what to do with them."

  She showed us a couple of e-mails from a guy named Tyler who sounded sharp and funny. He was discouraging my brother from getting a USIC job.

  "Here's the one from the Kid that started upsetting me." She opened a longer e-mail and pointed to some lines in the middle and read them out loud. "I must be honest in saying that USIC has left us in an unsafe and compromised situation, and our trust in them is severely breached. We would not be the best advisors on whom you should trust."

  "Trust with what?" Rain asked.

  "Some ... some pictures Scott and I took today in Griffith's Landing." Cora sat with her elbow beside her keypad, twisting a piece of hair. Her fingers still shook.

  "You guys were in Griffith's Landing?" Rain asked.

  Cora didn't answer directly. "It's complicated. Scott had me, um, doing something for him. I wasn't sure why I was doing it or what it all meant. And I don't want to say. I think it's for Scott to say."

  "I'm not confused," Dempsey joked, and nobody laughed this time either.

  She brought up another e-mail that looked like just a bunch of jumbled letters that went on and on for pages. Except at the very top was a note in English: "Get this to Hodji quickly! No one else!"

  "Hodji is the agent from New York City who was in to visit us a couple of times in the very beginning," Rain said. I remembered him. He didn't stay around as long as the other agents. Roger O'Hare had said that Hodji's job in Pakistan had become almost exclusively to serve as bodyguard to the Kid. Now the Kid had been moved elsewhere. We were figuring South Africa or somewhere. Nobody had mentioned whether Hodji followed.

  "Anyway..." Cora held out both hands, helplessly. "Do we have any idea how I can get this to Hodji Montu without telling anyone else in USIC?"

  I didn't understand why that would be necessary. "Why would they send something to you and tell you to get it to Hodji?"

  "You're asking why they couldn't give it to Hodji themselves," she said for me. She flipped back to the first e-mail and put her finger to an earlier line. "Miss Cora, I do not have much time to talk as I am detained by pressing issues at my terminal."

  "I think, maybe, they were in some sort of trouble," Cora said. "I mean ... they were funny. They were goofing aroun
d, and yet so together. I'd imagine they have nerves of steel from all they do and could goof around in tense situations—"

  "Cora, you gotta give this to my dad," Rain said.

  Cora shook her head back and forth.

  "He can get it to Hodji easily, wherever he is."

  When Cora didn't stop shaking her head, Rain said, "'Trust no one' does not mean don't trust the guys in USIC."

  "I must be honest in saying that USIC has left us in an unsafe and compromised situation, and our trust in them is severely breached," Cora quoted them again, and when Rain opened her mouth to argue, she started shaking her head harder. "I knew this could start an argument. That's why I've been sitting here for ten minutes trying to decide—I would probably trust USIC anyway, except for Scott. Their policies are so etched in stone that they can watch him go on a morphine drip and say it's not their department. He doesn't just want a job. He needs a job. It would make him better ... At any rate, I'm looking to do this the way the Kid asked..."

  "You could call the New York office and ask to have Hodji call you back. He probably would get the message," Rain said, but I could sense the tension in her voice, sense her blood starting to boil. She had a very tight relationship with her dad, probably from losing her mom at age three. Other friends in our crowd griped about their parents chronically, but she never went there. I understood it from having been raised with only a mom. If the tables were turned, and Cora were telling me she didn't trust my mother, my blood would boil, too.

  Cora sat pretty rigid while typing, probably surfing for the USIC homepage. But with her being so hypersensitive to other people's moods, I doubt she missed that Rain was seething.

  Rain didn't bother holding on to it. "Cora, maybe my dad knows something that Scott doesn't, okay? Like how stressful it is chasing down dangerous men who'd like to kill you. How can that be good for a sick person?"

  Kind of acridly, Cora said, "I don't know."

  "And you and I talked about this yesterday. You were the one all scared he could attract a Richard Awali to this place, remember? Do you want to wake up in the night and find one standing over your bed with revenge on his mind? Whatever it is the guy tried to inject you with, it's probably a lot more potent now, what with the two more months they've had to play with it—"

  "Rain." I knocked her arm to shut her up. She had a point, but Cora wasn't up for it. Her jaw chattered, and I doubted it was all chills.

  "Your dad told you, told us all, quite frankly that terrorists would have no further reason to bother us," Cora said. "Do you really believe that? Are you certain that what you saw out in the woods today is unrelated to what's going on in Griffith's Landing?"

  "If Daddy thought it was related, he would have come flying back here," she said.

  "Your father thinks you were bit by a snake. That's the assumption we were going on when Marg called him. And that may be because someone removed the corpse—somebody not USIC. We really don't know who around here we can trust. Do we?" I'd never seen Cora stand up for herself before, and it was icy.

  Jeanine broke the silence. "Hey! Maybe it was Mrs. Kellerton who moved the skeleton. Some guy on my street was camping out here ten years ago. He heard a splash, and when he turned, she was standing on top of the water. Just staring and staring, her eyes like orange hell..."

  Though we loved that sort of thing a year ago, the speech did little more than irritate us. Rain stared until some annoyed laugh flew out of her mouth. She reached for the laptop and said, "We're showing my dad."

  I had thought Cora was merely playing with her keypad, but I heard a double click, just as Rain grabbed it. And she said, "I just hit a 'delete all' in my mailbox."

  "Great." Rain mumbled and stood up. "I'm telling him everything you said. And I'm waiting for him on the porch. Screw this bed-rest thing. Let's all go. I need fresh air. He's like a dad to you, Cora. Or he would be, if you would chill out. Untrustworthy? That's rich. Wait until he finds out you just erased something probably important to national security."

  I let Dobbins and Tannis go with her. Cora stayed seated and didn't look like she was all so four-star.

  "So much for asking for help," Dempsey said, meaning it as a joke, and somehow she managed to laugh between sniffs.

  I took the laptop from her, putting it on Rain's bed, and offered her a hand up. "Cora, I appreciate you taking up for my brother. No matter how I feel about it personally."

  She gripped the sleeve of Jon's jacket, staring out the window to the pond. It gave even more depth to her commitment to Scott. She was committed to him doing something that personally terrified her.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  CORA HOLMAN

  SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002

  8:00 P.M.

  PORCH

  ALEESE'S IMAGINED PROMPTS were growing maddening. I imagined she had prompted me to say the first unkind words of my life to Scott, and now he was bad off enough to need a morphine drip. If those were to be my last words to him, I could not endure it. And I had imagined her congratulating me afterward and prompting me to ask for advice on finding Hodji. And that had turned out so badly.

  I cursed her in my heart as I followed Owen down the stairs and took the arm Jon Dempsey offered me. I let the words actually form on my lips and fall out into the huffing breaths. And I heard the closest thing to an audible voice since that hallucination in St. Ann's: "You don't have to sound like me. I just want you to learn from me." My mother as teacher. Too strange a concept to dwell on.

  Below us, Rain opened the front door, and my heart leaped as red flashers filled the hall. I thought it might be an ambulance transport for Scott. Maybe Marg had decided a morphine drip wasn't good enough. But hurrying down, I saw it was a squad car. Mr. Steckerman got out of the passenger side, and Marg came out to meet him. They talked on the porch, and with the car's engine it was hard to hear as we huddled in the doorway, wondering if it was okay for us to come out.

  "...were up there together in Mike Tiger's car, and that's when he got the call to come to New York ASAP," Mr. Steckerman was saying. He looked none too thrilled. "How's Scott?"

  "He's on a morphine drip," Marg said, and I watched Mr. Steckerman try to hide a flinch.

  He sank down on the stairs, holding his head. Rain ushered us outside, and we moved fairly quietly. I'd never seen him break form before, and it made us move quietly around to the front of him and stare. Was he this upset about Scott? I knew he was capable of it, but he had just returned here in a Griffith's Landing police car.

  "Where's Mr. Tiger?" Rain approached her dad, though the rest of us stood back. She sat beside him on the step and put an arm around him when he didn't answer right away.

  "He had to go back to New York for an emergency meeting. The officer was good enough to bring me..." He suddenly remembered to wave at the policeman, who stepped back into his car and drove away again.

  "What kind of an emergency meeting?" Rain asked, patting his hair sympathetically.

  He mumbled something calming, and I think everyone was so relieved to realize this was not an ambulance for Scott that they missed the fact that he looked distracted and anxious.

  Rain glared at me and said in all her frankness, "Daddy, do you know any way to get in touch with Mr. Montu? Cora has something to tell him."

  Diplomatic of her, I supposed, swallowing my guilt. He gave me an absent glance, and I sensed he took her to mean I had a thank-you note for one of his gifts to us or that he had left something in my hospital room that I wanted to return.

  "Whatever it is, you should just hold on to it for now," he said. "Mr. Montu was in a pretty bad car accident about an hour and a half ago. He's in the Nassau County Medical Center on Long Island."

  Rain stared. "What happened? I thought you guys could drive a hundred and twenty and not lose control—"

  "He was trying to save the lives of two boys," he said.

  The woods sucked me backwards, and I heard through some long tunnel the gasps of people turning to me. Dempse
y was right there and kept me from tumbling sideways.

  "It can't be them," Jon mumbled. But I knew otherwise. I moved to Mr. Steckerman, my knees giving way just as I got to him and slamming the concrete, probably bringing me the types of bruises Marg loathed.

  "Go for it," Aleese said. "You've got rights. The right to know." I wondered if she had pushed me.

  He was saying something to Rain about "the Kid and his hacker friend" and a house fire and smoke inhalation, and he didn't have further details yet.

  "Mr. Steckerman," I heard myself say. "Is it USIC's fault that they're dead?"

  I hadn't time to cry or think about anything except that he could get very angry at me. I don't know what leap he took to suspect I was asking a logical or innocent question. Maybe Aleese hit on a subject that already consumed him. He nodded, slowly at first, and then emphatically.

  "Yes," he swallowed. "Yes. It was our fault."

  I knelt, frozen, the air so still that the crickets were deafening. My hand found the back of Mr. Steckerman's neck, which I rubbed in numb sympathy, but my eyes shot to Rain, who stared at me, dumbfounded.

  TWENTY-NINE

  CORA HOLMAN

  SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002

  9:00 P.M.

  HER BEDROOM

  WE'RE NOT ALLOWED TO SLEEP with our doors locked. Mr. Steckerman turned my knob at nine o'clock, nine thirty, and ten, having gotten wise to the fact that I had information for Mr. Montu. He kept asking in his kindest voice what it was and wouldn't I please share it with him. I wondered if Aleese had been off badgering him, as she had been strangely silent after I came into my room. But he looked completely sane—tired, but more sane than I felt.

  I merely gripped my laptop, staring off into space, feeling like I was falling off a cliff. Around ten, an e-mail dropped into my box, and I all but lunged for it, thinking maybe Tyler or the Kid had sent one last thing that had wandered through cyberspace before arriving. It was from Jeremy Ireland, and I saw in the subject line, "Re: Thanks for Further Help." I had titled my e-mail of this afternoon as that, just before Scott and I drove over to Griffith's Landing.