"I can't believe your parents let you come out here," I said, after dropping my bag, finding the chair, and taking off my muddy sneakers. "Last week, you were sixteen."
She stood and moved her laptop bag over to a table. "Parents let their kids go to Florida on spring break. Is this somehow worse? Helping to cover a story for a newspaper?"
"There's been a murder here."
"There's been a death every year in spring break havens," she countered. "And besides. Nobody's screaming 'serial killer,' not even Chief Rye, beyond his bogus warnings at the Lightning Field. It's a domestic squabble that got carried away—that's what he said once they weren't listening."
"True." I recalled our final moments by the cars. "He says he's brain weary, looking for any excuse to keep those kids out of the Lightning Field. The police really hate those kids being back there. They'd need an SUV to patrol it, and I don't think that's in Steepleton's budget."
I sat on the edge of the bed, and RayAnn plopped down in the desk chair, looking disheveled. "Four months—wow. Do dead bodies decompose that quickly?"
"She might have had some help. Carbolic acid is ringing a bell, though I'm basically clueless. If she was burned or dropped in acid, then her clothes were put in the grave with her to keep all the evidence together. Maybe. It's hard to say how a skeleton gets in a grave with fairly intact clothing, but it's among the questions we'll ask at police headquarters tomorrow."
We had made plans to meet with Chief Rye or one of his officers and pick up any news on the whereabouts of this boyfriend, Danny. I'd have a load of questions for him then.
"We're supposed to be heading out of here Sunday. So, what's up with this funeral? I know you really want to go. But it won't happen that fast. I'm out of finances if we need an extended leave, so if I'm supposed to start working on my dad, I should probably know when I call home tonight. I'll have to call my professors..."
"One step at a time," I said, sensing that an extended leave would be a real mess. I also had four classes next week. Claudia had me contributing one byline almost daily to the Exponent. "A funeral is not a great place to be asking questions. Maybe they'll all come back tomorrow."
I had saved seventy bucks for food, and beyond that, I was out of resources. I thought, as I often did, of the $6 million settlement I had pending with Randolph over the dorm scrimmage that cost me my sight. Settlements do not happen quickly, and it might be another year until I saw that money. In the meantime, I had a free ride and any counseling I would have wanted, but I had to struggle for anything extra, right down to a pair of shoelaces. Randolph kept filing extension papers, thinking I might opt for the $1.5 million they offered if I retracted the suit. They could do that until September, technically.
The story had made the local papers, which I could not prevent from happening, and I often wondered if that was the link to how my mother traced my cell number. My lawyer is the only person who knows my whole story, and the truth had worked wonders in this particular case. He also gave me advice on how to get Randolph to let me remain a student, without lying, without revealing my family name and background, and without getting parental signatures. A college student's right to privacy goes beyond your wildest dreams.
I was holding out for the bigger settlement, but I knew I could also leap and settle if I was suddenly found by my family and I wasn't ready. A million and a half isn't bad, but who wouldn't try to hold out for the whole shebang?
Yet it kept my life in a "pending" status, which I tried to ignore, but it affected all areas of my life. It was hard to see any future with RayAnn, not that anything would happen quickly anyway. I tried to remind myself of that, too. But I felt keyed up tonight, more on edge than I had ever felt in the dorm.
"Does your dad expect me to get a different room?" I asked.
"Probably." She had her laptop on a small table by the window. I took off my shades and blinked as she turned on 98 another lamp. "Look. They let me live ninety miles from home with my great-aunt, who is seventy-five and deaf, where I could wind up pregnant anytime I wanted to make a stupid decision. I'm not stupid. They know me."
I was pretty blown away by her family's liberal ways. Even I had had this misconception about homeschooled kids before I met her, thinking they were all from families of strange religions who wanted to keep their kids under lock and key. I suppose some are like that, but by the time she was fifteen, RayAnn had spent four months in Italy, traveling from family to family on her mother's side. She'd flown alone to a sci-fi convention in L.A., did the exhibits with her older cousin in graduate school at Berkeley, and stayed with her in the dorm. She had wanted to learn conversational French, so she lived with a French Canadian family in Quebec for a summer and came back fluent. Her parents found her trustworthy enough, by age sixteen, to live in a house ninety miles away, where some distant great-aunt rented her three extra rooms to college students.
"Sorry, I can't rest until I get a grip on some things," she said, and I heard her clicking her wireless mouse, obviously trying to get online.
"Which thing are you going for?" There were a lot of issues.
After a moment, she was typing, which meant she had connected to the Internet and was surfing.
"First, that Elaine freaked me out with all that talk about five people seeing the same hallucination. But I remembered reading something once ... back when I won a hundred bucks in this essay contest about the perils of dropping acid."
"You won a hundred bucks in an essay contest?"
She let out a blast of a giggle. "I've won, like, tons of money and prizes entering Internet essay contests."
"You're kidding."
"That's what my friends and I and my sisters did. We didn't have essays due for 'class,' so we surfed around for essay contests and entered them. Instead of an A, if we did well, we got cash or prizes."
"Sounds like a better deal," I said diplomatically, though the homeschooling idea was hard to conceive of, considering I had to implant my mother into the concept to make it work.
"I've made a thousand bucks in my pajamas. Yeah. Good deal."
I collapsed backwards on the bed and found a stain on the ceiling to stare at. While she clicked through screens, she asked with a teasing giggle, "So ... did you use quantum thought to attract all these interviewees to a funeral?"
Her thought was rather unfunny. "Would I wish a girl dead? If Torey, Ali, and Bo were coming for a different reason, I could feel great."
"Yeah, well..." She sighed again. "Darla Richardson died. You couldn't help that. Now all we need is Chris Creed."
"Ha." I moved to the window to get some air, to get over the feeling that my hair was standing on end again. Jet lag, I tried to tell myself. The breeze felt good on my face, though the silence was still eerie. Not even one summer cricket had arisen from slumber yet. "I didn't want to get into it further with those kids about believing he's alive. However, this is not an occasion where we could expect Chris to show his face. He had no friendly relationship with Bo Richardson, Ali McDermott, and Torey Adams. They got friendly because of him, but because he was gone. He's got no connection to Darla Richardson whatsoever."
"I can dream, can't I? Mr. Dream Big."
"Frankly, I can write a better story without him."
"Why's that?" she asked absently.
"Because he's a myth. Once he shows up, he's just a regular guy again. I suppose I could write his memoir about the time since he left home, but then the story's over. Stories work best when they don't have all the answers."
She was distracted and didn't respond at all. I had to smile. RayAnn was a great sidebar to me. She did the work, didn't interrupt my interviews, but had plenty to say when it was just her and me. I felt the miles between her and the groups we had met tonight. I didn't sense that she had bad feelings about it.
I heard a double click after a moment, and a sigh of contentment. "Okay. Here's an answer to mystery number one," she said, "of how five kids see the same thing that isn't there. I
surfed for 'mutual hallucinations' just now and came up with this article I found when I was writing that paper. It's on peyote, a type of LSD. I didn't end up using this article, but it stuck with me: 'Peyote creates a highly impressionable mind-set among users. If a user hallucinates and states what he is seeing, hearing, smelling, or feeling to other users, often those users will suddenly experience the same thing. This was noted most recently in a paper by John Phillip Marcus, M.S.W., who videotaped four users in a Honduran village. One user became agitated, seeing falling green dots in front of his eyes. As he noted this aloud, all three other users became agitated, claiming to see falling green dots."
Interesting, the things RayAnn picked up on her travels-without-teachers. I said, "So, one of those kids sees a hallucination of what he wants to see..."
"None other than Chris Creed," RayAnn followed me.
"And as he states it, suddenly all five are seeing what he's describing."
"Correct."
"Were they taking peyote?"
"Elaine didn't say what type of LSD it was. I don't think she even knew." RayAnn scratched her head. I found her eyes, and they looked tired. "But any explanation is a start. I'm feeling slightly less like I want to forget all this and take the next plane out of these badlands."
"You're a great researcher, RayAnn," I said. "Marry me."
It was just a joke, one she only responded to with a slight nod, but it gave me a new pause to think of us here. It was like playing "married." I was alone with a girl in a hotel room. We could do whatever we pleased, so long as she was thinking the same thoughts. RayAnn was on a different thought wave, and some part of me felt relieved. I don't know why. She waited for something to download. I caught her staring into my eyes, distracted.
"You look unglued," she said. "Is it me?"
"Not at all," I lied, but she was getting better and better at reading me.
"Do you want me to get a separate room?"
"No."
"Thank God, because I do not want to sleep alone in this rickety motel, where the body of Christopher Creed could come climbing up through the floorboards," she said. She glanced over again at the bed I was lying on and smiled suspiciously. "I have to ask this, being that I sense your nervousness vibe whenever I also sense your romance vibe. You're not, like, also fighting some gayness vibe, right? I mean, you're going out with me for the pure reason that you're attracted to me, right?"
The glint in her eye pealed into my head, filling it with some bizarre suspicions she might have of me and ... who? Stedman? Todd Stedman is my roommate.
"One time in high school I had a gay thought," I confessed. "Not about anyone in particular. But it was right after the last time my mother rifled my room looking for nonexistent drugs, which she thought I was doing before she found out about Sydney, my girlfriend for five days. I had been going to Sydney's house after school and not getting home until six o'clock or something like that. It was one of those thoughts, you know, 'If all women can be like this, maybe I should think of a guy.'"
"And did you?"
"For about a minute and a half. It wasn't going very well." I smiled, but she just watched me.
"I don't think that counts." Her smile froze as she watched her screen. "You don't think all women are like your mom, right?"
I felt myself stiffen in spite of my best efforts not to. "Not on a good day."
I crawled back on the bed until the pillows were under my head, and I found a little piece of wall to stare at. I supposed I was feeling the anxiety rush through me that I was generally able to fight at school. Chasing down this story was dredging up my own home-based demons. Coming to Steepleton meant facing real-world stuff, complete with the Mother Creed's loud and surly speeches, and kids mean enough to push me. I didn't know which jolt of reality bothered me more, but probably the Mother Creed. I was like a person with a snake phobia in a world where half the population was part snake. To me, girls look and sound normal, but if provoked, they could slither, hiss, and rattle. College caters to matraphobics: Mothers are conveniently not allowed. If I got a caustic, obnoxious female professor, I could drop the class. The coeds, the campus personnel, the female reporters on the newspaper, were often in the red zone of volume, but they weren't domineering, weren't in my space.
I didn't think that mothers like mine, like the Mother Creed, were a dime a dozen. But they were definitely a breed, a part of this world, an infusion into all of reality. One could boa-constrict around my chest, suck my air, and—
I fluffed the pillow, found RayAnn's eyes, and a haunting thought struck yet again: Was I being fair to her? She was helping me, a lot, to become more trusting, more open. But was I being fair to her? Runaways, I knew from my reading, find real relationships nearly impossible for years, what with that violent disconnect from their very first relationships ever looming and spreading. Hence my research on how to start over. I had double indemnity—runaway syndrome coupled with a textbook case of domineering mother syndrome—which means you find women some combination of worship-worthy and terrifying.
To say I hadn't worshiped my mom would be a lie. It was a love-driven, hate-propelled, insane relationship that had me self-sabotaging most chances of friendship at school and was driving me nuts. I'd had some therapy, compliments of the State of California, in my first few months on the road, and thanks to it, I could admit to the love part of my love-hate thing with Mom.
I sat up and pulled a set of keys out of my pocket and fingered the strip of paper that Stedman had laminated for me while I was still in the hospital freshman year. It had words on it that were important to me. Finding what I needed to be running to—that was an act of desperation, a need to get out from under bad frequency. By the time I lay in the hospital, blinded by a baseball, I had had so many bad things happen in my life. I started to feel certain that the next bad thing could kill me. When RayAnn was preparing to invest in this plane ticket, I told her something she had never asked about but probably wanted to hear. I just wanted to prove to her that I could write about Chris Creed, the bullied, tormented kid, with some accuracy: The guy who hit me in the head with the baseball had done it on purpose.
I wasn't much good at sports even when my vision was 60/40, and the guy had been on his ninth beer of the afternoon. I kept losing grounders, and he was trying to be funny. Well...
He left school, a deranged and guilt-ridden mess, a month later. I was back in January, with Lanz and a whole new attitude. Completely blind for the first three weeks, I had heard an audio version of Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. I felt the need to ask the nurse for a pen and paper, and I wrote down in tiny letters three things Hill suggested writing.
RayAnn had seen me play with these keys a number of times, had seen me reach into my pocket to feel that plastic strip dangling off it when I needed to find my center. She moved so silently, I didn't hear her until she sat down on the bed beside me.
"New York Times Executive," she read, as if it were brand new, her usual show of respect. It had been the answer to Hill's suggestion to "write a clear description of your major desire in life, your idea of success."
"Write great stories so that others grow with me," she read next. That second line was my best shot at a more difficult assignment: "Write a clear statement of precisely what you intend to give in exchange for that which you desire in life."
"THE ONLY ROADBLOCKS WILL BE THE ONES I ESTABLISH IN MY MIND."
That was the last thing Hill had said to write, and I had put it all in caps. The two eye surgeries that offered little improvement in the following summers did not become roadblocks.
"I still can't believe you wrote that back when you were completely blind," she marveled, touching the lamination with her finger. She always said that. My printing had been, unbelievably, as neat as if I could see everything. So Stedman had it laminated for me on a keychain.
"Why don't you forget about Chris Creed and write about yourself?"
"Too raw," I said, "though I've thought about
it for maybe ten years up the road. Twenty years might do it."
"Mike, maybe you should get some therapy."
I had refused more traditional therapy after my accident despite having been offered it for free by Randolph even before I was approached by a dozen lawyers. My reasoning was that most psychologists try to get you to keep rewinding, going over and over your bad memories until... what? You grow numb to them? I certainly couldn't change mine. I had somehow fallen immediately in with the gurus who encourage you to fixate on your future and let go of the past. There were so many rags-to-riches stories out there. I'd read a slew of them. Many successful people had had rotten childhoods. Mine was certainly no worse. Generally speaking, I could not have asked for better results.
But "generally speaking" did not include a stellar mo ment like this, when I was alone in a hotel room with a beautiful girl and my foremost thought was whether she would transform into a cobra and sink her fangs into my jugular.
I found a roundabout but very honest answer to her question.
"Writers often write to escape their personal realities. And yet there's this homing device for truth, for the concepts that define the truths you really understand, and it's your job to state those truths so that others will understand them too. I quoted Adams tonight, out in the Lightning Field, saying Chris had become somebody else. Lines Adams wrote on his website totally jumped out at me, because I've been there too. Writing about Chris Creed allows Mike Mavic to ... to..."
"To become somebody else. But if the person's a lot like Mike Mavic, it allows Mike Mavic to write about himself. Sorta kinda."
"That was pretty good, RayAnn."
"What you're doing is therapeutic. You should put that in your research paper too." She squeezed my knee and stood up.
"One research paper at a time." I smiled. "You know my pace is slower than yours."