"I know. You're talking to a goat." Her tone seemed more annoyed than appalled.
But to make sure no lecture was coming, I said, "I don't want to talk about it."
"Can I just sit with you?"
It's a free country She sat down beside me on the step, scratched the goat behind the ears, and finally announced, "Marg said not to let the Professor in the house. He tries to come in, she says."
The Professor? I buried a grin. "What's the other one's name?"
"Sheep."
"Are you serious?"
She didn't laugh with me. She was fighting off my death-and-destruction monologue, which would be a kick in the stomach if you're so grounded in this world that you can't visualize the next. I knew Rain like I knew my face in the mirror. Here's her gig: She wants to fall in love, get married, have three kids, and be a gym teacher. Fine. But the truth is, if her kids were grown and her husband was bald and paunchy and she'd taught gym for twenty years and it looked like there was very little left except to get decrepit and croak, my dreams would be interesting to her. I'd be one of the few things left that wasn't boring. It's a convenience thing. She'll drive an SUV for twenty years and then think about what could be ultimately true.
And yet I couldn't resist picking up a piece of her hair and running it between my nose and mouth. That strong smell of shampoo ... everything about Rain was strong and real. She could bring me down to earth. You're a kick in the stomach, that's what you are, Owen. Just ... be nice.
I let go of her hair and flopped my hand onto her back. She quit petting the Professor, who strutted off—muffin gone, conversation over. I rubbed up and down her spine, which inspired her to lean forward, rest her head on my knee, and wrap her arms under her legs.
"Sorry," I said. "My weird dreams, they bend my head around..."
She didn't answer right away, which meant either that she was devising a way to play shrink and talk me out of wanting to see the end of this world, or I had freaked her out beyond words. When she finally spoke up, she didn't seem all that freaked out. "Unfortunately, I dreamed about elephants all bloody night."
"Elephants..." I remembered her saying in the limo that Miss Haley's comments about forced abstinence were like telling us, "Don't think of an elephant." It makes you think of elephants.
I said, "Dude, don't let Miss Haley open Pandora's box on you. You were, like, a completely hormonally repressed athlete before she said it. Remain that way."
"Do not say 'hormones' to me right now."
"A perfectly nonsexual creature."
"Do not say 'sex.' I don't think you get it. I think I discovered the most frustrating thing in the world this morning. It's called 'the half hour between the time that you wake up and the time that you get up.' In half an hour, I made out with Danny Hall twenty times."
I sighed. Back to earth. "Guys call it the Dreaded Fifteen—it's fifteen minutes if you're a guy. You're supposed to put your feet on the floor as soon as you realize your eyes are open if you're on a team that made the playoffs. It keeps your game tension good if you resist all temptations to think about girls during the Dreaded Fifteen."
Rain might be calling Dr. Hollis on me, but I was going to call Miss Haley on her and yell, Your speeches have train-wrecked a perfectly upstanding girl. Why did you have to go there? I hoped that would be the end of it, but it turned out Rain was just getting started.
"Remember when you guys brought that anatomically correct blow-up doll into the locker room for Dempsey on his birthday last year?"
My mind was a blank, but I pushed her head off my knee. I'm only human, too.
"Dempsey had asked out fifteen girls who all said no. Remember? Some of the guys thought that would make a funny birthday present. Dobbins threw it into the gym when the coach came out of his office to see what the ruckus was. And all the cheerleaders were screaming in horror..."
Blow-Up Beatrix Buxom Bunz came clear in my mind, with, like, nine guys dancing the seizure salsa with her in the locker room. One side of my mouth slid up, then the other.
"I almost got benched with those idiots. I told the coach I never touched the thing ... for some reason, he believed me."
"I wonder why?" Her sarcasm blew out in a sigh. "Anyway. I was online just now on my new laptop. I thought it might take away my urge to think about 'elephants' if I tried to find, like, Blow-Up Bernie Big-Beef Bronco—"
I turned to stare, and she turned as if something caught her attention at the far end of the porch, so I was staring into her hair. Was she messing with me? I figured she was, but I couldn't resist it. I bit.
"We would have a major problem with any anatomically correct blow-up doll."
"I'm having a problem now."
"A different type of problem. You have to blow up Beatrix with a hair dryer. Every time I heard your hair dryer turn on ... I would wonder if that was my cue to leave the floor quickly."
She put her forehead on her knees so I still couldn't see her face, but I heard this "Hah, hah, hah, hah" while her shoulders shook. I thought of something else.
"God forbid you jump on and blow a hole in the dude ... You'd be all psssssssssssst, down the stairs, out the front door, over the treetops..."
"...halfway back to Trinity Falls in my ... my red negligee attire. Hey. Maybe I wouldn't need my car out here after all."
The bronchitis part of Q3 started making us wheeze and cough after we'd cracked up enough. But I was on a roll. "Big-Beef Bernie probably wouldn't do much for you—unless he was uploaded with a voice box and five thousand different sayings. Things like, 'I understand how you feel.' 'I love how you put that. Say it again.'"
She usually punched my arm when my teasing struck close to her sore spots, but she just sat up, looked me dead in the eye, and got this huge victory grin on her face. Okay, so she'd made me laugh. My blow-up dreams had been neutralized by blow-up dolls. So, maybe they were just nightmares, and my brother was right, and this world can make you laugh sometimes, too. Score one, Rain.
But there was a slight problem here. I'd often thought if I lived long enough, I wanted to be a minister. And yet I'd spent half my life in a locker room. My sense of humor was under siege. I couldn't prevent myself from laughing at stuff like Blow-Up Beatrix Buxom Bunz. I was thinking about how I could have more self-discipline when this ice pick jabbed through my temple and left my stomach sick. This is how my Headaches from Hell often started—with a stabbing pain like an ice pick being twisted in my head for about four hours. Not again. Not so soon.
"On a different subject..." Rain's voice cut through. "I stole a tape for you from Cora's box in her closet. It's one her mom and Jeremy Ireland taped back in the 1980s. I know how much you love that woman."
"Thanks," I muttered, not wanting to let on to Rain that she'd worked so hard to make me laugh and right away some pain was bumming me again. I forced my mouth into autopilot. "It's our big secret that I think Aleese Holman is one of the coolest women of modern times. You can't tell Cora and Scott that I forgave her for the drug habit. Cora would hurl. Truth is, lots of eccentric people do weird stuff..."
"Anyway. You can watch it. I left it in the VHS for you."
I had thought the ice-pick pain was subsiding, but as the Professor walked around in the grass, the clangs from his bell started sending smaller tremors to follow the jab. All our headaches could be classified as strange, but this one was even stranger, coming on within a day of my last one, and so close to a meal that you'd almost think Marg had poisoned me.
TWELVE
SCOTT EBERMAN
SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2002
10:30 A.M.
BASEMENT
I FUMBLED DOWN TO THE BASEMENT, remembering the place as I'd seen it in a flashlight beam on last night's house tour. It had at one time been servants' quarters, and a fireplace sat in the center of the big room you entered at the foot of the stairs. There were no lights, Mrs. Starn had said, except for two outlets added thirty years ago in the photo historian's darkroom. But in th
e beam of the flashlight, I had seen this metal ornament over the mantel. I asked Mrs. Starn what that was, and she said it was a speaking tube that Mrs. Kellerton had used to summon servants without clanging bells or hollering.
I stood in the center of the big room, hearing Cora's muffled voice from down the hall. They had the darkroom door shut.
What I'd seen last night was buried under the fog of drugs and moving-day stress. I never miss a trick, but lately I relied on my instincts more than my memory. Something had interested me on the third floor, and I'd spent a long time looking at the same metal ornaments on the walls in all four bedrooms that were on the third floor. They looked like old-fashioned speaking tubes of some sort. Three of them had been filled in with concrete, meaning you couldn't hear through them. One of them had just been a hole.
I stared at the metal ornament above the mantel until my eyes got used to the gloom, helped by a little light coming from a basement window in a far-off corner. I could make out that metal thing and could even see the blackened hole in it. I had a one-in-four chance.
I could hear something, surely, though it wasn't voices. It sounded like something dragging, far off, maybe in another third-floor room.
My luck tended to swing like a pendulum. I had been one of four people in Trinity Falls who drank enough poisoned water to end up in a place like this. We were four out of a population of eleven thousand. That would make us very, very unlucky. But any time I've had bad luck in life, I've noticed I've had good luck in some other way that could be as charming as my bad luck was alarming.
"...wished the floors creaked just a little." Alan's voice.
"Dang. We should build our new offices out of these beams."
"Nah. I'd prefer to hear someone creeping up on me. Especially with my dear friend Scott wandering around. Get a couple of keys made for this room. He wouldn't break a lock, though if we ever left it open, he might feel privileged..."
I backed slowly up to a rocker that I spotted as my eyes became accustomed, and I sat in it, just as content as a porch dweller at the age of ninety. The voices weren't quite perfect. And they weren't so loud that Cora could hear it from behind that closed door when she was talking, and not so soft that I had to stick my ear right up to it. I rocked back and forth slowly.
Tiger's voice started this time. "So, guess what Hodji Montu picked up last night?"
"A woman? I hear he's going through an ugly divorce."
"He got lucky, let's say, but not that kind of luck. He found Omar."
"Sweet Jesus. So soon?" Alan said, and a moan followed.
"Omar's in Mexico."
"How'd Hodji get that?"
"It's classified. Some source to the New York squad, and I don't ask. But Hodji is leaving for there this afternoon with a few of those agents, and they'll meet up with some border people. They're going to try to lure Omar in. And where he is, you know VaporStrike is one step either ahead or behind."
"Jeezus, Mike. I hoped we might have a year off."
"Would have been nice. But apparently the cell is quite anxious to show off its new designer germs. They're planning to strike an aeronautical engineering convention."
"Any clue where?" Alan asked.
"Not yet. But I just got an update from Imperial while I was pulling in here. Latest simply says it's across the street from an amusement park. The amusement park would get hit, too."
"You really think the target is in America?" he asked.
"With Omar surfacing in Mexico, I think the writing's on the wall."
I flinched at the sharp sound of their footsteps. Maybe Alan went to the window, but the syllables I couldn't hear, I could piece together.
"I think logic would dictate that the target site is not only American, but it's very close to here, to Trinity Falls, to New York—'Home Base,' as those devils used to say."
"I thought we had decided that dogs don't return to their vomit," Mike said, "though obviously, Imperial wouldn't have called me on my cell phone if he didn't feel the same way."
"In this case, we would think that their next strike would be Spain or Egypt or somewhere utterly surprising. Except for one thing. Omar's lab. We found one lab near Trinity Falls but decided it was either a decoy or a small satellite lab. We found traces of the Q3 virus in it, but it was little more than a closet at Astor College, and it couldn't have contained the type of equipment it would take to cultivate strains of biochemical weapons. Since our CDC sources believe that Q3 had to be cultivated near the strike site, the real lab could possibly still be functional. They may want to get to it."
My skin crawled from my forehead to my ankles. They may be near here ... or coming here.
Alan went on. "I think they'd rather risk coming to their old lab than trying to move it, trying to move whatever molds and mildews and platelet blasters they're cultivating."
"Disgusting," Mike said.
"But logical."
"So we're looking for convention centers near here that are planning to house an aeronautical engineering convention. Do we have to wait for a lot of stats and printouts from headquarters? Or can we start looking into what logic would dictate?"
"What do you mean?" Alan asked.
"Summer's comin'. South Jersey's got three cities with a convention center right across from an amusement pier. If we find one having an aero convention sometime soon, can we start combing those cities for look-alikes to our photos on file?"
"I'm thinking we should wait for the stats. What's the likelihood it would be—" Alan said something that was probably a few cities, but he dragged a chair across the floor at the same time. I'd think it through later.
Mike Tiger said thoughtfully, "You could be dead-on. There are a lot of convention facilities in this state, but their business drops to nothing in the summer unless they're by the ocean. Still, I can't blame you for not wanting to tie up a lot of funds and agents on a whim."
"What happened to the Kid?" Alan asked. "Is our chatter-chasing guru functioning yet? I hope the New York squad had the good sense to transport him to Nigeria, or somewhere he can actually go back to work. Ironic, isn't it? He can work for the Americans so long as he's not on American soil?"
Mike laughed, though he didn't sound amused. "It's crazy. I can surely understand USIC's rules about not hiring minors. But I heard Hodji Montu say once that half the intelligence the Kid's dad sold us before he died actually came from the Kid. He's been at this from Pakistan since he was about ten years old. But I don't think they were able to move him out of the country. I understand he is extremely ill, though it's all very hush-hush. I highly doubt he's capable of tracking Omar, but maybe Washington has other v-spies. You want to wait for them before looking into—"
The chair skidded back a little and drowned their voices, and I heard footsteps moving away. Their voices turned silent. Meeting adjourned until later, obviously.
The Kid is extremely ill. That took some of the jollies out of me right away. Roger O'Hare had mentioned his bad asthma several times, but I thought the Kid had come to America to get rid of it. And is "extremely ill" a phrase you would use to describe chronic asthma? Something sounded amiss, and my paramedic alarm bell rang in frustration, like when my ambulance squad got a call and we couldn't find the house right away. However, asking would probably be useless. We had asked Roger for an e-mail address for the Kid once we got our laptop gifts, saying we wanted to write him thank-you notes. Roger had said he would pass on our thanks, and no address was provided.
The rest of this info was mind-boggling, and I let it roll through my head like water over a dry sponge. A potential terror attack nearby ... not across some ocean. I felt guilty feeling so happy about that. But then, if the dudes were going to make trouble, it ought to be near to me, where maybe I could get my foot into it somehow. I forced away thoughts of the Kid and sat there rocking contentedly and chuckling, ignoring my sore throat and feeling all the luck I'd experienced in life come rushing back to even the score a little.
I
glanced down the hall at Cora's darkroom door, hearing Henry's voice and realizing some of the challenges here. I fumbled in my pocket for the pile of tissues I always carried around lately, balled them up, and stuck them hard into the little hole in the speaking tube. It barely showed in the dark, and I hoped it would keep other people from hearing anything. They didn't need to hear USIC-anything, not while Cora was so busy trying to ignore all of that, trying so hard to be normal.
Jeezus. I couldn't even remember what normal was...
THIRTEEN
CORA HOLMAN
SATURDAY, May 4, 2002
11:45 A.M.
THE POND
I FELT ALEESE DRIFTING THROUGH ME during my darkroom lesson. After forty-five minutes of feeling like her ghost was laughing at my meager talents in the blackness, I was more than glad to head back upstairs. Fortunately, in my darkroom class at school, I had been a sponge, and Henry offered more praise and encouragement than instruction.
He and I walked around the grounds, and he also gave me some great pointers on how to frame a shot. We took priceless pictures of a goat with a bell around its neck—a perfect subject. He wanted to baa at us more than move around. Henry mentioned there being two of them, and I hoped to see the other as we walked down a trail that ended at the pretty pond. Seeing the water, I raised my camera to my face.
"You can always block the shot better in the darkroom, but try to block it as well as you can from the start ... from now," he said.
His camera was digital, whereas I still loved film. We took the same shot of the pond, and he was able to show me his in the viewfinder. His was far better, I gathered, as he had focused with the pond in the middle, whereas in mine it had been at the bottom of the frame.
"Stand there..." He moved ahead of me, turned, and took a shot of me holding my camera with one hand, a stray branch in the other. He showed it to me.
"See? And if you're shooting people, you want their eyes as much in the center as possible."