The voices from the other room receded until Plum’s voice pierced the quiet, saying, “You’re checking up on me.” Points of white and black pulled together in Ford’s mind to form a picture of Plum, her expression petulant, her arms crossed beneath her boobs. “I don’t care what you said, I can do what I want.”
The sound of footsteps quickly approaching filtered through the door of the bedroom.
“Where are you going?” Plum demanded, her feet pitter-patting behind the other set. “What are you doing?”
Sadie heard Ford teasing out the threads of Plum’s tone, part concern, part expectation.
The bedroom door flew open. The footsteps didn’t stop but made straight for the closet, and Sadie heard Ford wondering how many times these two had played out this drama before.
He was curious about what the man looked like, but seeing him wasn’t worth the risk of getting caught, Ford decided. As soon as he heard the sound of the closet door being thrown open, he slipped out from behind the bedroom door where he’d hidden. He caught a momentary glimpse of Plum hovering outside the closet, looking as though she was about to get a treat.
Ford had been right, Sadie realized as he took off. Plum had been setting him up. This was a game for her.
Bedroom to kitchen to back service stairs took him less than thirty seconds. He ran down two flights, then pushed through to the main hallway and took the elevator the rest of the way. By the time he reached the garage his pants were buttoned, his belt was done, and his shirt was tucked.
An older couple driving by gave him a strange look, and he realized he was still barefoot and carrying his shoes.
This is why it’s a good policy to stay dressed while at strangers’ houses, Sadie told him.
Night had fallen over the city, clear and sweet, with a deep blueberry sky that made the stars look like diamonds. Or maybe the stars always looked expensive around here, Ford thought. He glanced up at the icicle-shaped skyscraper he’d just left and began to laugh.
His mind replayed the last hour in dots of color: Plum on her knees; Plum reciting bad movie dialogue; Plum shoving his shoes into his arms. Sadie heard him wondering what usually happened to the guy in the closet: Was he horsewhipped and sent down in the elevator tied up, or did they give him a drink and dinner? Was this how they got their thrills?
Then he flipped to a much older memory of tomato soup and grilled cheese and a snowball fight, rolling a huge snowball off the edge of the roof onto James’s startled head. His brother’s eyes huge with surprise like Plum’s had been, James saying, “You got me good,” and then the two of them cracking up for hours.
God, James was going to laugh when Ford told him about what had just—
Ford stopped walking, stopped breathing. Sadie felt pain jolt him like a hard punch to the chest, racking his body, making every muscle, every sinew tense. Jagged shards of ice pierced him, his head rushed with noise, and he bent double right in the middle of the street in pure agony.
This wasn’t ordinary grief, Sadie knew instinctively, it was far worse than that. Because he’d forgotten. For a moment, for a second, he forgot James was dead. And when he remembered, the force of it was too much. This was grief so profound it was like being turned inside out by it, left with the most vulnerable parts exposed to the air. There was no escape from this pain. Every gesture, every motion made his body scream with it.
He didn’t want to go on, she heard him think, didn’t want to go anywhere. He wanted to stay in that place forever until something happened to take the pain away.
A car roared up, its horn blaring, and he stumbled forward blindly, barely making it to the curb before it passed. He sank back against the wall and closed his eyes, breathing unevenly. Sadie felt the agony inside him change, not subsiding but becoming less jagged, less piercing. Its sharp edges receded; its ache deepened and became more like a smooth round rock, still hard but now more the constant throbbing of everyday grief than the sting of a fresh gash. She thought she smelled pine again.
After a few minutes he pulled himself to his feet. Sadie felt the effort it cost him, but his breathing was normal and his head was clear. As he unlocked his bike his thoughts replayed Plum’s reaction when he’d asked how she knew his phone number. It should have been an easy question. She could have answered honestly, or picked one of a hundred simple lies. Instead she’d been evasive.
Looks like I found the right wrong question, he thought. If only he had any idea what it meant.
CHAPTER 19
Storm clouds massed all Thursday afternoon, mirroring the dark mood inside Ford’s head. His crew was demoing a library built in the 1920s, full of gorgeous details that Ford was devastated about destroying. He’d called and left three messages for Mason “Just Pretending to Care” Bligh, telling him about all the great stuff there, but the guy hadn’t called back once. No surprise, Ford figured. People who lived in those fancy spaceship buildings were selfish liars.
Oh, good. At least you’re keeping this all in appropriate perspective, Sadie said.
As he worked, crashing his hammer through a stained-glass window, smashing a water fountain shaped like a shell, he was haunted by his mother’s voice saying, “We need to talk.”
Ford disagreed. In fact, Sadie heard him thinking, he was sure that he didn’t need another lecture about how unlike his brother he was, how much he’d let her down, how disappointed she was…
“Storm coming. Unsafe conditions. All work to cease,” the foreman’s voice rang out from two rooms away. At nearly the same moment a silver thread of lightning split the sky, followed four seconds later by thunder that shook the twelve-foot ladder Ford was standing on top of, but he made no move to get down.
He was up there struggling to pry a hand-carved wooden medallion of an owl from the doorframe he was supposed to be smashing. Sadie loved these stolen moments at work with him when he went from destroying to rescuing things. He talked to them, flattering, cajoling, teasing. Sadie didn’t even think he knew he did it.
“Come on, boy,” Ford coaxed the owl now, leaning into the chisel he was using. “You’ve waited up here long—”
The medallion came flying off, hitting Ford in the shoulder and making him rock dangerously back on the ladder.
Sadie gasped with fear as it tipped backward. For a moment it hung suspended in midair at a forty-five-degree angle with Ford clinging to its underbelly. Then it tottered and rushed toward the floor. At the last possible moment before being smashed beneath it, Ford whipped his body to the side and rolled. He hit the ground a second before the ladder.
“Whoooooooooooooooooop!” he hollered, a victory cry, and both he and Sadie started laughing. “That was close,” he said aloud.
It was, she agreed, wondering what he looked like when he laughed like that. Close, but fun.
He tucked the owl under the tarp with the three other similar medallions he’d rescued and went to clock out. On his way to his bike he checked his messages and experienced a moment of surprise not to see one from Cali before he remembered the breakup. The same thing that had happened that morning when he checked and saw that Cali’s normal seven thirty A.M. “HAVE A GOOD DAY :)” text wasn’t there, and at lunch. Sadie had caught a pang of nostalgia but not sadness, and she had the sense that it was the rituals of the relationship he was missing more than Cali herself.
A wishbone of lightning flashed across the sky, followed by a crackle of thunder. The storm hadn’t come yet, but the wind was picking up. The Advert Alert Board over the intersection across the street advised all commuters to return home as soon as possible to avoid being caught outside.
Sadie heard his mind racing, trying to think of anywhere he could go besides home. He was considering all his old hideouts with Bucky, mentally cataloging them by proximity, when a Royal Pizza delivery van stopped in traffic directly in front of him.
I have to follow it, Sadie heard him think. It’s a sign.
A sign of what? she wanted to ask. That you are so
afraid of having a conversation with your mom that you’d rather follow a crazy hint from an insane person and risk being stuck in a storm on a bike?
Apparently yes. Letting two cars go in front of him the way he’d seen in movies, Ford pulled his bike into traffic and started following the delivery van.
Now that you’re such a believer in signs, maybe you should consider paying attention to those that say STOP like the one right in front—
He sped through the intersection heedlessly, and Sadie wanted to shake him with frustration. How could he be so brave in some ways and so cowardly in others?
Ford followed the delivery van onto a residential street, where it slowed like it was looking for an address. Sadie smelled cinnamon and wondered if he was hoping to find that the pizzas were real or that they were fake.
The delivery van stopped in front of an apartment building in the middle of the block and honked twice. An upstairs window opened, a guy yelled, “Be right there,” and a moment later came stumbling down, hair smashed to his head, pulling on a shirt like he’d just woken up. He leaned in, paid the driver, and came out with three pizza boxes.
That looked real, Sadie said. Can we go now?
But Ford wasn’t done. The van’s next stop was a two-story house. The driver honked twice again and a girl came out clutching a dog in one arm, a thick wallet in the other, and her phone cradled against her ear. Without pausing in her conversation she paid the driver and took her pizza, almost tipping it over before he called, “Watch how you carry that,” as she went up the stairs.
The rain still hadn’t come, but the air was heavy and the wind was wrestling him for control of his bike. As the girl disappeared into her house without a single suspicious gesture or sign, his body suddenly felt heavy and tired.
His mind teemed with doubts. What was he doing? Following a pizza delivery van as though it could lead him to—what? Answers about James’s death? It was completely moronic. Despite the slogan, Royal Pizza was just pizza, and the delivery vans were just delivery vans. Bucky must have been wrong, he decided. He might as well go home and let his mother yell at him.
Lightning made a Z in the sky. He started to pedal faster, determined to get home before the rain started, and was about to pass the delivery van when it signaled a right turn onto Love Your Feet Road. Almost unconsciously Ford jerked hard on the handlebars of his bike and swerved to follow it.
As soon as he turned, his mind wove glowing colored points into a rich tapestry of images. Using that fire hydrant as third base for baseball, the large oak tree as a goal for soccer, Bucky rigging up a lighting scheme for night games, a go-kart race. Some of these were less clear, and Sadie realized that was because those were multiple images superimposed on one another: dozens of games of baseball, a decade’s worth of soccer, a hundred different go-kart races.
The pizza van passed a house that Ford registered as Bucky’s old house, before stopping in front of 116 Love Your Feet Road. Linc’s place, Ford’s mind told Sadie, with a stack of other Royal Pizza boxes already on the porch.
Ford pulled his bike into the shadow of a tree to watch, and caught a fat drop on his forehead. Just let the storm hold off a little longer, he thought.
The delivery guy went up to the door—different than at the other houses, where he’d just honked—and was met by a girl in a bright pink dress. Against the white porch and gray sky she looked like she’d fallen from the tail end of a rainbow.
Maya, Linc’s sister, Sadie gleaned, watching Ford’s memory of her blossom into a multicolor array of dots. A little girl, his age but always younger seeming. People telling him that “Maya is simple” or “different” when he asked why she spent all day making necklaces with beads instead of going to school with him and why when she talked it sounded like birds instead of words. Now she stood grinning at the pizza guy before turning and chirruping something into the dark interior of the house.
Linc came out, shirtless, one strap of a pair of denim overalls on, the other dangling, a chicken drumstick in his hand. “I didn’t order pizza,” he said, loud enough for Ford to hear. He sounded bored.
The pizza guy shook his head. “I got a rush order for two larges, both with anchovies. For 345 EvergreenLawn Supplies Way.”
“Don’t know what to tell you,” Linc said, boredom replaced now with annoyance. “You got the wrong address, buddy.”
“Sure?”
“Positive. EvergreenLawn is on the other side of town.”
“Nuts.” The guy looked at the pizza, then at Linc. “Won’t be good by the time I get there. Why don’t you take it?”
“Okay. Here,” Linc said, fishing a tip out of his pocket and handing it to the guy.
Ford’s vision had dimmed as soon as the pizza guy spoke and became slightly blurry, as though the edges of the scene didn’t match up.
Sadie sensed it too, but she couldn’t pinpoint it until red and white and black dots in Ford’s mind arranged themselves into a pizza box and she heard Ford think, There’s a pizza missing. The delivery man had said the order was for two pizzas, but he’d only had one in his hands.
Could still be in the car, Ford thought. But instead of continuing to follow the delivery van, he decided to stay where he was, and five minutes later Linc came down the front stairs of his house with a briefcase, dressed like a guy going to an office job. He bypassed the car in the driveway and the bike on the porch and headed for the bus stop.
Ford trailed the bus, the sky tossing out occasional big drops but nothing serious, and forty minutes later he was propping his bike next to a fence around the corner from 345 EvergreenLawn Supplies Way. He’d gotten tangled in traffic and lost Linc’s bus, but he’d taken a chance on the destination and was just in time to see Linc leaving the house. Whatever his errand, it hadn’t taken long. Now he was strolling down the street toward Ford but on the opposite side, briefcase swinging.
Lightning tore across the sky, followed by a jolting crash of thunder. Linc bent to pat a tiny terrier on the head, offered to carry the groceries of a woman in a purple shirt, and had just turned the corner onto Hump Burgers Highway when a scream pierced the air. The woman in purple ran out of 345 EvergreenLawn shrieking, “Call Serenity! They’ve been shot! Someone shot my boys!”
Ford’s mind convulsed and his ears rang, as though refusing to let that in, refusing to hear, to believe—
“Dead! My boys are dead!”
Impossible, impossible, impossible, Ford’s mind repeated, but he took off running after Linc, every step echoing with another denial in his head. No way, not Linc, impossible, not him.
The storm opened up as Ford rounded the corner. Ford had to struggle to keep Linc in sight, weaving through patches of umbrellas that had sprung up like stalky mushrooms on the crowded street. He saw Linc stop walking, and at the same moment a black Range Rover pulled up alongside him. The door opened from the inside. As he stepped toward it, Linc turned to glance behind him, and his expression chilled Ford. It was serene. He could almost have been smiling.
Ford was halfway home when it hit him. The Pharmacist, Sadie heard him think. That had to be the explanation. Bucky had been right about Royal Pizza and he was right about this. Somehow the Pharmacist had changed Linc from the guy he’d grown up with to this… monster.
Which meant the Pharmacist was real.
And dangerous, Sadie added.
CHAPTER 20
The apartment was quiet and dark except for the flickering of the muted television when Ford got home.
The ride had been harrowing. For the first fifteen minutes the rain had sluiced down in sheets, making it nearly impossible to see. When it had slowed to a drizzle, the gutters lining the streets were so flooded that there were waves and currents dragging on the tires of his bike.
He left his soaked shoes and jacket in the hall outside the apartment door and was stripping off his sodden pants when a strained voice from the darkness said, “It’s time for our talk,” and the light next to the armchair clicke
d on. His mother was there in a faded oatmeal-color sweater and jeans. She looked frail like always, but also determined.
“Not now, Mom,” Ford told her, shivering uncontrollably, only partially from being wet. “I really—”
“Sit down.”
The shaking had started when he’d started thinking about the Pharmacist, and he didn’t seem able to stop it. It was as though there was some internal battle between how he’d believed the world worked and what he now had to acknowledge was true. “I really need a shower,” he said, teeth chattering. “My clothes are soaked. Can this wait until later? Tomorrow? Does it have to be now?”
“Yes. Now. Put on dry clothes and sit down.”
Sadie was astonished at the steel in her voice. She’d never seen Mrs. Winter like that, and she wondered what it meant. But Ford was too cold, too shell-shocked to give it more than a cursory thought.
He put on a sweatshirt and dry boxers from his closet, leaving his jeans and T-shirt in a wet pile on the floor, and sank into the couch. “Mom, look, I just saw the most horrifying, unbelievable—”
He stopped because she had set a folder on the trunk and was pushing it toward him. There was a handprint along the edge from where she’d clearly been clutching it, waiting for him, for a long time. On its cover it had the III symbol that was on his ID, printed large, with the words HEALTH HARVEST BY ROQUE, A GLOBAL FORCE FOR PEACE OF MIND written beneath it.
“I’ve been trying to protect you,” his mother said, shielding her eyes from the light and avoiding his gaze. “All this time. All I ever wanted was to protect you.”
Ford stared at the folder, hearing “All I ever wanted was to protect you,” over and over. His mind filled with dark dots, black, green, yellow, a little boy saying, “Why did you let him stay?” the female figure with a blank face answering, “He’s your father. He didn’t mean to hurt you.” It vanished as quickly as it had appeared, just a flash. Ford said to his mother, “What is this?”