Dust Devil (50 page)

“
I
know you can’t watch all these videocassettes this evening,
Renzo. Maybe you don’t even want to see any of them tonight—or
ever. But I wanted to let you know they were here.” Sarah
paused for a moment, watching him
draw
silently on his cigarette, take a long swallow of his wine. She
wondered what he was thinking. But she was intuitive and sensitive
enough not to ask. “I’m going to go on upstairs now, take
a bath, read for a little while, talk to the fairies... my wind
chimes,” she elucidated, flushing a little with embarrassment
at his inquiring glance. “That’s how I imagine they speak
to me—the butterflies, the bluebottles and the fireflies, I
mean. Oh, I know it probably sounds silly, but somehow I’ve
just always thought of them as fairies.”

To
her surprise, Renzo nodded, understanding. “You never did know
this before, but that’s what I thought you were the first time
I ever saw you, Sary.” His voice was low, soft, husky with
emotion at the memory. “A fairy child. I’ll never forget
it. It was long before that day at school when Evie confronted you
over that old lunch box. It was an Indian summer, stretching even
then toward fall, and you were in the meadow, dancing and
singing—that song about the tallyman and the bananas. You wore
a shabby, faded pink sundress, and your long brown hair hung down
your back, almost to your knees, and your feet were bare. You had a
bouquet of flowers clutched in one grubby little fist, and all of a
sudden, you dropped them, stretched out your hands and closed your
eyes as though you were whispering a spell of enchantment. And then
the most magical thing happened. A big yellow butterfly came to light
in your palms. And that was the moment I fell in love with you, Sarah
Beth Kincaid...that I somehow knew that when I grew up, I was going
to love you for the rest of my life____....” Renzo’s
voice trailed away into silence. He

smoked
his cigarette, drank his wine, watched the glistening
tears
drip like raindrops from her green eyes to slip soundlessly down her
pale cheeks.

After
a long moment, utterly unable to speak for the lump in her throat,
for all the love and emotion that welled in her heart, filling it to
overflowing, Sarah turned and went wordlessly up the stairs. And
Renzo—understanding that, too—slowly rose to take from
the shelf the first tape, labeled in her seventeen-year-old
hand
Sarah,
Pregnant.

He
pushed it into the VCR, punched the Play button. The TV screen
flickered briefly, and then the images began to unroll before him—all
the things he should have seen, and never had, never would, except
here, in the vignettes Sarah had captured for him for all time. She
had set the camera up on a stand, he realized, using the battery pack
to record the videocassettes herself, because she sat in their
meadow, beneath their sycamore tree. Her soft, sweet, smoky voice
spoke to him, telling him the date and what was happening.

“
Today
the doctor did the sonogram. Oh, Renzo, we’re going to have a
son! I’m so happy, so excited! I so wanted a little boy, one
who will look just like you! That probably sounds strange to you, I
know. But the truth is... the truth is that even though you’re
not here, I can’t seem to stop loving you, to stop wanting a
part of you that will be mine forever and ever. Mama and Daddy wanted
me to have an abortion. But I wouldn’t do it! Now, they want me
to put our baby up for adoption. But I won’t do that, either! I
wish you were here—to help me be strong. But you’re not,
so I just have to go on the best I can. It’s—it’s
so hard, sometimes. Because you see, you weren’t just the
boy
I loved. You were my best friend. I don’t know if you’ll
ever even see this tape—or any of the others I’ll make. I
have to hide the camera and videocassettes, so Mama and Daddy won’t
find them. I—I got expelled from high school, for being
pregnant. It was so awful! Mr. Dimsdale said he was so terribly
disappointed in me. So I’m working as a waitress at the diner,
and with the money I’m making, I bought a small steel locker,
and I put it in our tree house. That’s where I keep the camera
and tapes. It’s the best I can do at the moment.”

In
silence, Renzo watched as the months passed, as Sarah’s belly
grew round and swollen with their child, her face so luminescent that
it made all the more visible beneath her eyes the dark, crescent
smudges born of her solitary struggle and fragility. Then, finally,
after more than two hours had passed, there was nothing on the TV
screen but snow and only static came from the speakers. By then, the
ashtray was full of cigarette butts and he had finished the bottle of
wine he had opened earlier. Getting to his feet, he put the
videocassette away carefully, closed the entertainment cabinet and
shut off the lamps one by one. Then Renzo slowly climbed the stairs
to the woman he loved.

She
was asleep, a fairy woman-child in a long, sleeveless nightgown of
delicate, diaphanous, lace-edged lawn, bathed in the silvery radiance
of the moonlight that streamed in through the French doors and
windows. He undressed in the semidarkness, slid into bed beside her,
slipped the nightgown from her naked body, watched it float like a
white cloud on the wing to the floor. His tender mouth and gentle
hands woke her, and when, at long last,
he
sank into her, winding himself like the ribbons of moonbeams around
her, her soft keening of wonder and splendor echoed in the summer
night, to mingle dulcetly with his own low, profound cry.

There
is a strange charm in the thoughts of a good legacy, or the hopes of
an estate, which wondrously alleviates the sorrow that men would
otherwise feel for the death of friends.

Don
Quixote

—
Miguel
Cervantes

The
package had been delivered to the
Tri-State
Tribune
on
Saturday afternoon, but as he had left Morse in charge of the
newspaper over the weekend, Renzo didn’t receive the big
manilla envelope until Monday morning, after he had driven into town
and dropped Alex off at summer school. Although the package was
addressed to Renzo, he didn’t recognize the handwriting, so he
examined the manilla envelope carefully—having, since exposing
the Racket Club, been wary of receiving a letter bomb. But he saw
nothing about the package to alarm him, so at last, with the letter
opener on his desk, he slit it open to pull a single piece of
stationery and another, smaller manilla envelope from inside. The
missive had been composed and printed out on a computer, on
Field-Yield, Inc. letterhead.

Dear
Renzo Cassavettes,

You
was rite about what you said that day at the ole quarry, about
me not bein smart enuff to take yore advice—except that it
ain’t that I ain’t smart enuff, it’s that I just
don’t see the point when I have thought of a plan to get
rich in a hurry. And the man ought to pay anyway fo what he’s
done. But just in case somethin should go wrong, I am sendin
you these diskettes. If I should turn up daid, you’ll
know what to do with them, seein as how you are a Poolitzer
Prize-winnin reporter and ain’t afraid of ole lard-ass
Tweedledum.

Later,
dude.

Lamar
Rollins

As
Renzo stared down at the small package that had accompanied the
letter, he was of two minds. Part of him knew that he should take
everything over to Judge Pierce immediately, as Hoag Laidlaw could
not be trusted with it and it was plainly evidence in Lamar’s
murder. Another part told Renzo to open the envelope himself, as
Lamar had trusted him to do.

In
moments, Renzo was using his letter opener to cut through the brown
string tied around the envelope and to slice the packing tape that
sealed it. There were several diskettes inside, all neatly labeled in
numerical order.

Renzo
knew without a doubt that whatever information they contained was
what Lamar had been killed for.

Turning
to the computer on his desk, Renzo shoved the first diskette into the
A: drive and attempted to access its files.
Enter
Password
flashed
on his screen.

“
Damn!”
he swore softly. “How did you expect me to help you, Lamar, if
you didn’t even trust me enough to give me your password? But I
guess this was your way of stalling me in case I tried to read the
information on these diskettes while you were still alive, huh?”
At random, Renzo typed in a few different words that came to mind,
but none of them allowed him access to the files. At last, picking up
the receiver on his telephone, he pushed one of the intercom buttons.
“Morse, could I see you in my office a minute, please?”
Morse Novak knew more about computers than anyone else Renzo could
think of in town.

“
On
my way, Boss.” Presently, Morse wheeled himself into Renzo’s
office. “What’s up, Boss? Something I didn’t handle
to your satisfaction this weekend after your little dustup with Hoag,
Dwayne and Bubba?” Morse grinned hugely, wishing he had seen
it.

“
No,
nothing like that. You’re a top-notch journalist, Morse—even
if that article you wrote about my brush with the law
was
terribly
slanted. I’ll bet old Hoag was fit to be tied when he read it!”
Renzo grinned back at Morse before explaining the situation to him,
saying, “Take a look at this first diskette and tell me what
you make of it.”

“
Hmm.
It’s asking for a password, isn’t it? Well, that’s
a relatively simple security device,” Morse observed as he
studied the monitor thoughtfully. “The trouble is that the
password could be anything—a word that had some
meaning
to Lamar, a random series of letters, a combination of letters and
numbers. All those, as I’m sure you’re aware, are used to
access online accounts like America Online, CompuServe and GEnie, for
example, or to lock up files in various word processing, database and
spreadsheet programs, and the like.”

“
Right.
So my question is, how do we figure out Lamar’s password?”

“
Well,
you could just sit there for however long it takes, Boss, entering
words and so forth off the top of your head, hoping to get lucky,”
Morse announced cheerfully, obviously knowing this wasn’t the
answer Renzo was after.

“
Actually,
I
was
hoping
for a little better solution than that, Morse.”

“
Why
don’t you let me work on the diskettes for a while, then?
Having done my fair share of hacking over the years, it may be that I
have a couple of programs of my own at home that will help us find
out what’s on these babies.”

“
Good.
And, Morse, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that none
of this is to go beyond you and me. You’ve got to know I’m
withholding evidence in a crime, breaking the law by not immediately
turning these diskettes over to Hoag, particularly since Lamar’s
note to me makes it clear he believed his life was probably in
danger.”

“
So
you think whatever’s on these diskettes is what got him killed,
Boss?”