Following Christopher Creed

  I awoke early and was on the phone by six forty-five, realizing I had no computer and no way to get the PayPal money Claudia had promised to wire me for the extra room. The cheapest flight change I'd ever heard of was seventy-five dollars. I called the airline, which said it could set me up for a Monday three p.m. flight and it would cost me ninety-five dollars. Next step? Try being really bad in math.

  Innocently, I gave them my ATM Visa number, really just biding for time, waiting for them to say that the charge wouldn't go through. But somehow, it went through. I hung up, simply hoping the "insufficient funds" notice wouldn't get to them until I had boarded the plane and taken off.

  Next. I needed to eat for the next day and a half, and I had six bucks on me. The last thing I wanted to do was to call RayAnn and tell her I was in a jam. It was time to finally start my diet anyway. RayAnn's favorite fruit in the whole world is Barnum's Animal Crackers, and I remembered there had been half a box of them in my carry-on bag, which she'd been pecking at on the flight. There were nine crackers left—a decent breakfast for a dieting guy. I ate them. Next step taken.

  I fell back asleep again and woke up at nine. At this point, I had to accept that Justin had gotten his butt slung into some sort of mess with his mom, or maybe he'd even gotten pulled over by the cops and arrested for not having a license. He was unstable and might not be coming at all. I didn't want to ring his cell phone for fear it was in the Mother Creed's clutches. Bad luck is one thing, but to have to answer some morning-after, groveling third-degree about where her son was, or who I was, didn't appeal to me in the least. I didn't want to call Claudia and tip her off that I was trapped in a motel with no ride out—not after I'd told her so vehemently to trust me. I would tell Claudia afterward—after I had solved my dilemmas. All of them.

  I went around to the front office of the Twilight Inn, but it was closed and I didn't know where the owner was. The place seemed deserted, and I thought of that white church everyone in Steepleton went to that Adams had written about. Or maybe the owner was still taking Sundays off, him being the type of old man who, perhaps, had been doing everything the same way since the days when everyone took Sundays off. My room for Saturday night was paid for; he had no reason to be here.

  Anything was possible; nothing was etched in blood except that I would have a hard time getting to civilization.

  I sat in the room until one in the afternoon, writing out in longhand a story about Steepleton and what creepy behavior may or may not be related to a new dead body in a place that was "collectively depressed." That was a term I made up. I was proud of it. It wasn't the slam-banger story that I could send to Salon.com, but in case something happened, I had only to find a fax machine to actually meet a deadline. Claudia might raise an eyebrow about having to find somebody to type it into a hard drive, but it was Sunday and libraries were closed. By one o'clock, I was itching to find a way out of this motel. I was suffering images of having fallen into the Twilight Zone and I was stuck forever in this ghost motel with nobody ever coming except spooks.

  I needed to fax this story to Claudia. Somehow. I had my cell phone in my hand with Bo's number staring back at me. All I had to do was dial. But the guy had funeral arrangements to make and grief to bear. I couldn't call him for a ride, couldn't call Adams because I desperately wanted him to see me as a professional and not some sort of loser who couldn't get his rides together, couldn't get his shit together.

  Take the next step.

  Lanz had overprotective energy as we stood at the edge of the parking lot, looking down this two-lane highway with no shoulder and only woods on the side. But twenty minutes or so into our journey, I stopped panicking every time I heard a speeding car behind us and simply took four or five steps to the right to be cautiously into the woods when it roared past.

  I started calling this "good luck Sunday" just to spite the devil, and as we walked and dodged vehicles, I reminded myself of my good luck issues so I wouldn't give in to utter panic: My plane ticket change had miraculously cleared my insufficient bank account. I had a story in my backpack that I'd written under extreme conditions—no laptop, no Internet, no anything but a pen and tablet—and yet it wasn't half bad. I had dog food in my bag for Lanz in case we got stranded, and a bottle of water.

  To ward off images of Lanz and me being flattened by approaching cars, I thought about my $6 million settlement that my lawyer felt he could get from Randolph, if I could just hang in for six more months of not being able to afford shoelaces. Even the $1.5 million settlement was beyond my wildest dreams, and thinking of a life of being able to afford someone to drive me around forever kept me bouncing down the road.

  Justin's forty-five-minute walk took Lanz and me slightly less than two hours, but I stood in front of the city hall at ten minutes past three feeling like I ought to try Mount Everest next. It's this thing with how you look at circumstances—life is grand or life blows, depending on where you allow your focus to be. "The next step" was working, which was blotting out people in my history who had told me that blind people have no business leaving cities without either a trusted family member or an employee of Services for the Blind.

  Next step... I was starved. I fed Lanz out of his Ziploc bag and gave him a long drink before heading into an Indian grocery store for a bag of East Indian chips. They tasted like corn. While eating, I started getting beyond steamed at Justin, then at his mother, and I told myself firmly, Don't waste your energy on anger. You need your energy for you.

  I had to remind myself, after fighting off anger over having to make that long walk, that I was in a better way than those two. I'd rather be me than them.

  Then I went over to the police station. Rye was there, even though it was Sunday, and he came out from behind the big glass window to speak to me.

  "I'm going to Philly to pick up Danny Burden's body. The funeral director and I. I can't talk right now, but there's nothing new except that the crime scene has been wiped clean of evidence. We're getting a forensic specialist down here..."

  Crime scene ... they were thinking homicide. I tried telling myself that was out of my jurisdiction.

  "It's okay," I simply said. "I was actually just wondering if I could use your fax machine. Library's closed and I'm not familiar with—"

  "Sure," he said, opening the door and leading me behind the glass.

  Claudia or RayAnn ... Gut instinct again, but I went for RayAnn, speed-dialing her on my cell.

  "It's me. Are you home or at school?" I asked.

  "Home. Are you okay, Mike?"

  "How are you feeling?"

  "My lip resembles a nerf football but... how are you?"

  She sounded completely worried, and I found myself grinning. "Great. Thanks."

  "Are you coming home today?"

  "Tomorrow afternoon. Listen. I know you're still in recovery mode, but if I fax you something, can you type it and send it to Claudia?"

  "Your story?"

  "Yeah. It's not the mother lode. But it will tide her over until I can think about the best way to ... to put all this down."

  "It'll keep my mind occupied. Sure."

  "Your father wants to kill me, I suppose."

  "Actually, he's more pissed at himself. Parents always feel responsible when something happens to their offspring. I keep telling him he's not a soothsayer, and neither am I, and who would have thought Fort Lauderdale in April would be safer than a quaint little Jersey town." She sighed. "My mom wants to come after Lydee and his passel of car-stealing friends. She says she spent years trying to create a life for her kids that circumvents what she calls school psychosis."

  I'd been around the Spencers enough to make an educated guess as to her meaning. "School psychosis: a lengthy list of horrors that schooled kids will commit upon each other when thrown together into one building, all day every day, with no parental figures."

  "Bravo," RayAnn said, though her laugh was cockamamie, making me think her swollen lip still bothered her. But it was good to h
ear her laugh.

  I felt better. "I've gotta be quick. I'm in the cop station."

  "Give me the fax number. I've got something to send to you, too."

  I found it on the side of the machine and repeated it.

  "Oh. And Claudia called me," she said.

  Fire of burning pride hit my cheeks, and I tried to stay calm. "Did you tell her you were almost strangled and our car got stolen temporarily?"

  "I don't know her that well yet. She'll think I caused it. I don't like the way she looks at me. She thinks I'm a youngster. She's got no respect."

  "She doesn't warm up easily, but once she's your friend, she's a friend for life," I said, hiding relief. I couldn't blame RayAnn if she'd told Claudia the whole thing, but I wasn't ready to hear "I told ya so" from my editor in chief.

  I asked, "Why'd she call you and not me?"

  "She figured you might have trouble getting the money out in the middle of nowhere and wanted to do a direct deposit into your bank account from the office. But she didn't 358 have your bank account number. She has mine because I get direct deposit for my stories. She wanted to know if she could put the extra money for the motel room in there. I said yeah, we use the same bank, and I would transfer it by phone. That was early this morning, so there's fourteen hundred bucks in your account."

  "How much? " I asked in amazement.

  "Fourteen hundred."

  "Why so much?"

  "Because ... once Claudia got a travel budget approved for your motel room, she was able to charge your plane ticket, too." I could read the huge smile in her voice. I could buy back my laptop. Getting to the airport would not be a problem. No wonder the flight change blew on through my bank account.

  "RayAnn?"

  "Yeah?" She waited in thick silence. I couldn't stop gulping.

  "I'll, um ... I'll tell you later." I hung up, guilty of using silence to sidestep opportunities. I told myself I could do this "take the next step" thing with my love life after I was done with my professional life.

  Chief Rye was already gone by the time I got the last page through, but Tiny Hughes was at a desk, filling in paperwork of some sort. As I waited for whatever RayAnn was sending, I approached.

  "Is there a local cab company?" I asked.

  "Not really. There's Yellow Cab in Atlantic City. But it'll cost you an arm and a leg to get around with them."

  "Mmm. I'm looking for the best way to get to the airport tomorrow."

  "Oh. There's an airport shuttle that leaves from the Borgata Casino on the hour, weekdays. I think it's only around twenty-five bucks."

  Bingo. "And what's the best way to get to the Borgata if you don't drive?"

  He watched me long and hard, maybe trying to picture the life of a legally blind person, and his face grew concerned. "Any friends in the area?"

  "Well..." I wondered if Bo and Ali and Torey would qualify now as friends. It was a nice feeling to wonder that. I added aloud, "They're all, um, detained with funeral plans."

  "I'll get you a ride," he said, and picked up the phone. I started to object. I didn't want to accept gestures of kindness in my game of do-it-yourself.

  I was surprised and confused when, after a moment, Tiny said into the phone, "He's here." Then he hung up again.

  "Who was that?" I asked.

  "A friend of yours," he said mysteriously. "Somebody who's been looking for you. Someone who called this morning and said to call back if you showed up here."

  Well, obviously it wasn't Justin. He was the only person who knew where to find me.

  Tiny must have liked my confused grin. He raised his arms in a dramatic shrug.

  "Maybe..." he said, "it's Christopher Creed."

  I smiled as I heard the fax machine ring and let that mystery take a back seat to this one. "I think this fax is mine."

  The article RayAnn alluded to came through very slowly, the way only an old-fashioned fax in a small town can do. Before I could get too antsy, the door of the police station opened. Torey Adams came walking toward me. I framed out the red ski jacket from last night before seeing his face.

  He smiled, then heaved a sigh, something like a sigh of relief.

  "You're my mystery caller?" I asked.

  "Yeah."

  "Something ... you forgot to tell me last night?"

  "No. You didn't take anyone's number but Bo's last night. I had no way to find you. But considering what you were doing here, I figured you'd either call or show up here at some point today." He sounded awkward. It didn't exactly explain why he was looking for me, but I watched him look all around the place, as if maybe it was bringing back memories. His eyes stopped on two chairs outside the glass window, and then he pointed at it.

  "This used to be all wall," he said. "Glass is new."

  I just went along with his mystery appearance. "Everything changes, my man. Nothing stays the same."

  "Nothing except ... how this place creeps me out."

  I turned back to my fax, smiling to myself. "You mean Steepleton in general, or the police station?"

  "Steepleton in general," he said, then smiled, jumping tracks without further explanation. None was exactly needed. "Ali went with Bo and his mom to make funeral arrangements. I figured maybe I could help you out."

  I was full of myself—full of a new infusion of confidence. I wanted to spend time with him, for sure, but not on those terms.

  "Torey, that's nice, but I'm playing a game with myself. Today is officially 'Mike Is Not Taking Help Day.' It's a psych-out exercise, to exorcise all the demons I got from listening to all the people who ever said blind people can't live outside the city, can't hold professional jobs, can't can't can't. I'm actually doing very well."

  We did a staredown of the shades for only a moment. He then laughed. "Oh! I don't mean that sort of help. The idea is very clear to me that you can do anything you set your mind to. I mean, well..." He held out his hands. "I'm a writer. A different kind of writer, obviously. But if I sit in the house for another minute, thinking of awful things and people in my past, I'm going to lose it. Maybe ... you'd be helping me by letting me help you. "

  I laughed. Torey Adams wanted to be my writing assistant. That was funny. Very funny.

  "Well, we are kind of in the same boat," I said, watching a third page slowly plop into the fax receiver. "You talked to me last night about how you'll be posh after your tour ends. I'll be posh after I win a lawsuit against my school over the baseball-in-the-head thing. In the meantime? If you got access to a car, I'll put some gas money in it."

  "I have a car. And my mom gassed it up this morning," he said. "Tank's full. Thank God she wasn't relying on me for that."

  We laughed together. It felt great.

  I pulled the fax out of the machine. I moved the paper around until the headline came into view. "'Natural lightning reservoirs maintain an electrical charge after being struck,'" I read. "It's from ... a four-year-old National Geographic. My girlfriend, RayAnn—she's a research maniac."

  "You got a girlfriend?"

  Yeah, and we staked out your house yesterday. I decided to skip it.

  "We had a recent blowout," I confessed with a sigh. "You got a girlfriend?"

  "No," he said. "Not since I left Berkeley." He left it dangling, leaving me with the feeling he didn't want to talk about his relationship any more than I wanted to discuss mine. "So what are we doing here?"

  I passed him the pages, again shaking my head in disbelief that he was here. "Right ... tell me if that's anything interesting."

  He took the pages and read the article aloud. I walked into the outer lobby slowly, listening as he followed me while continuing to read. I sat my weary legs down in one of the two chairs. Lanz lay down at my feet, sighing contentedly at his chance to rest. It was a luxury not having to read the thing. He stopped halfway through and said, "I knew about this. I knew about lightning traps."

  I turned and found his face, which looked hypnotized. "Do tell."

  "Well..." He laughed ne
rvously. "After finding a dead body in a limestone cave, I read up on everything limestone in these parts. My mom helped me. Let me see if this article contains anything I didn't know..."

  Officer Hughes came out of one of the rooms down the corridor and stopped in front of us, having seen Adams. Torey breezed through the rest of the story silently, then handed the article to the officer.

  "We think you might want to look at this," I said.

  I could tell it was of interest to Officer Hughes, because instead of simply scanning it, he sat down beside me and read the entire thing.

  "Why did I never see this?" he asked. "Can I make a copy?"

  "Why did I never post all my limestone findings on my website?" Torey asked guiltily.

  I said to Officer Hughes, "I'm sensing that the concept of 'natural lightning reservoir' might provide the answer to a couple mysteries around here."

  "Uh ... yeah," he said, then laughed uneasily. "Nothing will provide answers to all the mysteries these woods hold—unless of course the industrialists come through and knock down every tree in the Pine Barrens and wipe the slate clean. But this might explain why sometimes people have seen strange lights flickering out on Doughty Road, and other places near the Lightning Field."

  "Lights flickering in the woods..." I reached behind my seat, trying to remember where I'd left my backpack.

  "What are you looking for?" Torey asked.

  I told him. He disappeared and a minute later returned with my pack. I pulled out one of the pads RayAnn used and handed it to him. I pulled out my recorder—what RayAnn and I called double backup—and heard him click a pen. Officer Hughes went on.

  "It's just something that happens maybe once or twice a year. Someone calls in, says they think there's a fire in the woods, or with an unobstructed view, they say there's something that looks like lightning. But it's coming up from the ground, they say, and it's all very strange. When we get to the spot the caller points out, there's never anything happening. This has been going on since the Lightning Field got struck."