Epitaph Road (10 page)

It was nearly dark by the time Tia and Sunday returned. I'd migrated to the front porch, and although I resisted shouting
Hey!
this time, I surprised them when I walked out of the shadows. “You missed some excitement,” I said. I told them about the cops and Aunt Paige. I didn't tell them about my eavesdropping or where I thought the escapee was heading. I wanted to share, but I wasn't sure how far to go.

“I'm gonna go check my mail,” Sunday said. “Sorry about your aunt, Kellen.” She gave me a little wink, like
Here's your opportunity, knocking
. She went inside, leaving the door open, and ran up the stairs.

Tia stayed. “It's nice out here,” she said. “Is Dr. Mack still around?”

“In the study with my mom.”

“She gives me the creeps.” Tia sat down on a low canvas chair. I could barely see her face, but I noticed a glistening layer of perspiration on her forehead, a remnant of her long bike ride. My fingers itched to test the warmth of her skin. But all I managed to do was pull over another chair and sit next to her.

“Me, too,” I said.

“Do you know she's famous?” Tia said.

“I guess. She's got a big-time job.”

“But I mean she's
really
famous. She was around when this whole thing began. After Elisha, when the governments were just trying to figure out how to pull everything together and move along, she and a few other women took their ideas everywhere, pointed out what had changed for the positive, talked about how to make that change permanent, planted their philosophies and strategies deep, got them adopted for the long haul.”

“Does this have something to do with your new theory?” I said.

“It's not exactly
my
theory. But yes.”

“You won't tell me what it is?”

“I should do more research. And the bike ride gave me time with my thoughts, but I should do more thinking, too.”

“What if
I
tell
you
something?” I said. “Tia.”

Her face turned to me in the shadows. I could smell her — shampoo or soap or something. Not sweat. Whatever, it was light and fragrant and intoxicating. I breathed deep and held it in. “Something important?” she said.

“You decide.” I told her the rest of my story — the accidental overhearing, the attic eavesdropping, my conversation with Aunt Paige.

“Your dad's a loner, right?” Her voice was alive.

“Yeah.”

“But he's living near a population of throwbacks?”

“Afterlight's the name of the community. On the Olympic Peninsula.”

Tia stood. “Your aunt's computer is in her room?”

“Still there. I saw it when the cops came.”

“You think your mom's still in the study with Rebecca Mack?”

“I don't think they're coming up for air.”

“Let's look.” She pulled me from the chair. Her hand was warm.

“What about your theory?” I said as we rushed into the house.

She didn't answer. We cruised past the closed office door slowly enough to decide that Mom and Rebecca Mack were still in there, then climbed the stairs two at a time but quietly.

Tia sat down at Aunt Paige's computer while I paced, one eye on the open doorway, one ear alert to sounds of someone coming our way. I heard voices, but I recognized them as a couple of our housemates whose room was at the end of the hall.

When I got over to the desk, Tia had a screen up, but it was a page of medical records, headed with the photo of a young woman. “Give me a minute,” she said. “Your aunt has files everywhere.”

She thought a moment, tapping a pencil on the wood surface of the desk, then attacked the touch pad so fast her fingers blurred. In an instant, another screen appeared, but she touched a prompt and jumped to another.

This one was some kind of bulletin.
CONFIDENTIAL
, it said in bold letters across the top, which made me even more nervous than I already was. I slipped over to the door again, listening and looking, and hurried back to the desk.

“This is what your aunt was talking about,” Tia said. “The quarantine advisory.”

I crouched down to peer over her shoulder. She didn't move to give me room, so I was forced to get nearer. Which gave me something else to think about.

I speed-read the notice. Tia was right. It was an advisory sent out by the Council to doctors, hospitals, government officials, law enforcement agencies, emergency response teams, the National Guard, the Coast Patrol, all of them based in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia. “They make it sound like a drill,” I said, still reading.

“Your aunt didn't think so.”

No. And why would the PAC cops be after her if it were just a drill? I got to the specifics. Nearly the entire peninsula, from the southern tip of Hood Canal north to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, from Puget Sound on the east to the Pacific Ocean on the west, would be quarantined. No traffic of any kind — highway, logging road, trail, ferry, private boat, aircraft — would be allowed in or out for a minimum of two weeks.

“Done?” Tia said.

“Yeah.”

She scrolled to the next page. I found what I was looking for: a date. The “drill” was to be initiated on June 21. Less than two days away. No wonder Aunt Paige was in a hurry.

Tia logged out. “Come on,” she said, and I followed her down the hall, relieved to be away from my aunt and mom's room, but not relieved about anything else.

Sunday was sitting on her bed, making faces into her e-spond, when we walked in. Her idea of messaging apparently involved dramatics. “You want me to leave?” she said innocently.

“No,” Tia said, not looking at me. We took turns telling Sunday what I'd overheard, what happened with Aunt Paige and the PAC cops, what we found on her computer.

“She went to warn your dad, you think?” Sunday said. Her e-spond was forgotten.

“I know she did,” I said. “But I don't see how she'll get to him. They'll be waiting for her. She's driving, and there's really only one road in.”

“Maybe she'll leave her car,” Tia said.

“And hike?” I said. “She doesn't have time.”

“I don't get the whole quarantine idea,” Sunday said. “It sounds like they're expecting an outbreak of something contagious and deadly.”

I realized I didn't get it, either. Exactly what kind of catastrophe could scientists forecast so confidently?

“Elisha's Bear,” Tia said.

“But how can they predict
that
?” I said.

“You wanted to know my theory,” Tia said.

“Both of you were curious,” Tia said, moving to her desk, touching her computer to life. Sunday and I hovered. “I wanted to do more research so we'd know for sure, but let me show you what I've found so far.”

“When did you come up with this?” I said.

“While we were still in Nebraska we had a teacher — remember Hernandez, Sunday? — who encouraged independent study. And I found some stuff doing a PE history project that just seemed too neat and coincidental. I didn't know what to do about it, though. I just kind of let it go.

“Then today in class the San Francisco video and discussion stirred up my interest again. Not the information itself, so much, but the fact that Anderson was so into it. And when I looked at our take-home — the junkyarddog stuff — I got the impression she was trying to tell us something important.”

I felt like asking a million questions, but I didn't want to risk looking dumber than I already felt.

Tia turned to face her computer display, where excerpts from that day's take-home — excerpts I hadn't yet read — suddenly appeared. “Did you look at the whole lesson?” she asked me.

“No,” I admitted. “Half, maybe. My brain got full.”

“Where did you leave off?” Sunday asked.

“We'd just invaded Mexico. But I've got the whole thing printed out. Hold on.”

I raced down the hall and back. When I returned I had the printout in my hand. I liked having an assignment on paper. I liked looking at it, folding it up, sticking it in my pocket, carrying it around, unfolding it whenever I wanted. It was the book thing, all over again. Maybe I really
was
a throwback.

But Tia wasn't impressed. She stayed focused on her monitor. “You stopped right before it got interesting,” she said to me. She scrolled up and stopped at an entry while I found it on my printout. Sunday crowded in close. Whatever we were looking for, she must have missed its significance the first time.

I suddenly realized I wasn't breathing. I was cold, even though the bedroom was sticky-warm. I didn't know where this was going, exactly, but I knew it was somewhere dark and suffocating.

“Two weeks later, Elisha struck,” Tia said. “That's a fact. It's history. But why did Anderson choose to show us these events leading up to it? I began checking into it when we were at the library. I couldn't figure out what McDonald's and Starbucks had to do with it, so I started with the lab on Grand Cayman — the Brighter Day facility — and the story about the male monkeys. I dug into old records from Brighter Day that showed its statement of purpose, organizational chart, and rosters of employees.”