Authors: Chris Jordan
“After you,” I say, losing some of my conviction. “Don’t bump your head.”
The air temperature is dropping quickly with the sun. The old trailer is an icebox that never warmed up and because of the low headroom Shane has to remain in a crouch as he fumbles for a flashlight. No surprise, the power has been shut off. No heat, no lights, and we have to wade through the bottles and cans and rubbish that Roland left behind. It’s doubtful the state police search could have made things worse. This has the feeling of long-term disorder, and the cold stench of rot and frozen mildew is all-pervasive.
If this is how the monster lived, how he was raised, then for the first time I have a twinge of sympathy. A very small twinge. Living in circumstances as wretched as this must be truly awful, but it doesn’t mean you get to take it out on innocent children.
In addition to being disgusting—to say the man lived like an animal would be insulting to most animals—the place, basically one small room with a nonfunctioning toilet, the place is
spooky,
okay? You can feel him here, and understand why he might have welcomed violence as an alternative to an unbearable reality.
“So what are we looking for?” I ask, my voice a little shaky.
“I’ll know it when I find it,” says Shane. “Maybe.”
“You’ve seen places like this before,” I say, picking up on his vibe.
“Believe it or not, I’ve seen worse.”
The flashlight beam sweeps through the debris underfoot. Everything seems to have ended up on the floor, possibly as a result of the police search. Or maybe because gravity is trying to suck the place back into the earth.
“This explains why Troy was so sure Roland didn’t have a functioning computer,” I say. “He didn’t have a functioning anything. Not even a TV set.”
“And yet he had an iPod,” Shane muses.
“Anybody can buy an iPod,” I point out. Keeping my hands in my pockets so I don’t have to touch anything. Trying not to breath mold spores through my nose.
“You still need a computer to put songs on it,” Shane reminds me. “You need, at the very least, an Internet account, and there’s nothing to indicate he did. He didn’t have a credit or debit card. He didn’t have credit, period. So where did he get his music and how did he sync it to the iPod?”
“Maybe somebody gave it to him fully loaded—no Internet or computer required.”
“Exactly,” Shane says. “Like the three grand.”
“You know what?” I say suddenly. “I’m going to wait out in the car.”
“Good idea,” he says, shuffling carefully through the discarded junk, prodding it with his flashlight. “Hold on!”
I freeze in the open doorway. The first thought, an almost electric cascade of raw nerves, is that he’s come
upon a booby trap. A trip wire or timer. Another bomb that will blow me into darkness, again.
But it’s not a bomb, it’s a book. A thick paperback swollen with absorbed moisture. The cover has been torn off and the title page is missing. Shane holds it up, illuminating the stiff, water-damaged pages with the beam of his flashlight.
“The Rule of One,”
he says, squinting. “Isn’t that Arthur Conklin’s famous book?”
12. What Shane Sees
After we bought our dream house Jed and I spent all of our free time trying to make the dream part come true. First thing you need to know about old farmhouses is that they are old. Old means the sills have rotted, a sizable undertaking to repair, best left to contractors who specialize in that sort of thing. Old means it isn’t properly insulated, especially upstairs under the eaves, and that means taking down the crumbling lath-and-plaster walls. When the plaster is finally gone, the wiring is exposed, so you might as well bring it up to code. Once the new gypsum-board walls are painted you start on the floors. Stripping, sanding, repairing, refinishing. Oh, and don’t forget the ancient lead-sealed plumbing, left over from the Romans, apparently. Best to remove all that nasty lead if you’re planning to get pregnant and you don’t want the baby to have two heads.
Jed pitched in for the first few projects, but then he got very busy at work and had to do a fair amount of troubleshooting, which took him away for days at a time. So I became a Haley-of-all-trades, no job too small, and I must say I did one heck of a good job. The house is as tight as
a tick—a phrase picked up from the old-timers at Home Depot—and stays warm and cozy even when the Montreal Express comes wailing down from Canada and batters us with freezing forty-mile-an-hour winds.
The one thing I’ve never been able to repair is the creaking. When those big winds blow, my beautiful dream house moans and protests. Its old bones and beams creak ominously. The new windows shudder in their rebuilt frames. The chimney whistles mournfully. Jed always said the old place was talking to us. As part of our routine I’d dutifully ask, so what’s it saying, Jedediah? And he’d grin and go, it’s saying put another log on the fire and pour yourself a drink.
In those first crazy days after the school blew up I threw away all the alcohol in the place, refusing to numb myself to the pain, so the best I can offer Randall Shane is a mug of hot cocoa. Real cocoa topped with real whipped cream, the way Noah likes it.
“That’d be great,” he says.
“Throw another log on the fire,” I suggest.
He glances at the Hearthstone in the kitchen, which is already flickering merrily. “Really?”
“Kidding. It’s gas, not wood. Much cleaner. I meant you could turn up the thermostat if you’re cold.”
“Nah, I’m good,” he says, rubbing his big hands together. He listens for a moment. “That wind,” he says.
He makes small talk about the weather while I prepare the cocoa. Seems amazed that I bother to whip up the cream—haven’t I heard of Reddi-wip?—but then admits my version tastes way better than the canned stuff. Mug in hand he leans a hip against the counter, claiming he’d rather stand than sit, he’s had enough sitting for the day,
thank you. Standing means I have to look up at him to respond, and suddenly it seems so strange to me, to be here in my familiar kitchen with the wind moaning and a tall handsome stranger in a leather bomber jacket, smiling at me with whipped cream in his mustache. My late husband had a jacket like that. There’s nothing going on, no actual sexual tension—swear on a Bible—but the casual intimacy of sharing a counter gives me such a pang of longing for Jedediah that I have to put my mug down and turn away and pretend to fuss with the Hearthstone.
“So where are we?” I ask after clearing the lump from my throat.
“We had a busy day, didn’t we?” Shane says cheerfully. “I learned a lot.”
“So you believe me?”
He speaks carefully. “I believe there’s a strong possibility that Roland Penny didn’t act alone, whatever the result.”
“That’s something, I guess. More than I ever got out of the state police detectives. So you’ll take the check? You’ll help me find my son?”
He holds up a cautionary hand. “We’re not quite there yet, Mrs. Corbin. I need to consult with a couple of experts before I make that decision.”
“What experts?”
“Former associates still employed by the FBI. I’ll make a quick trip to Washington, consult with them, and then get back to you.”
I’m not sobbing or anything, there are no convulsions of crying, but all of a sudden the tears are flowing freely and I have to brush them away or risk blubbering. “Get back to you,” I say, my voice thick. “That’s what they say
when they reject you for a job. They’ll get back to you. They never do.”
“I will get back to you,” he promises.
“You’ll call. It’s easier to walk away by phone.”
He shakes his head. “No phone calls, I promise. Swear on my life. I’ll come back here, to this house—my car will be waiting at the airport, remember—and we’ll discuss the options in person, face-to-face, whatever I learn in Washington.”
“But what about the book!” I wail. “He had the book! That proves he’s one of them!”
Shane remains utterly calm, hands me a tissue to blot my tears. As if it’s a common occurrence, witnessing a mother cry her heart out, and for him I suppose it must be. “The book is why I’m going to Washington,” he explains. “I know very little about Conklin’s followers, or how his organization functions. I need to learn more.”
“Rulers—that’s what they call themselves. Like they’re rulers of the universe,” I add bitterly.
Shane takes the swollen paperback from his pocket. “Twelve million copies in print,” he says, glancing at the back cover. “And this is an old edition, so it must be more by now. Did your husband talk about this book? What it means? What they believe?”
“A little. Not much, really. It’s about being selfish, he said. How it’s good for the individual to be selfish.”
“Guess I’ll have to read it on the flight down.”
“Good luck,” I say. “I tried to read it once, so I’d have some idea what Jed went through as a boy, but to me it was all mumbo jumbo. This tedious stuff about bees and insects and parallels to human behavior, and the differences
between hive minds and drone minds. None of it made sense to me, so I quit. When Jed found the book he threw it away. Said it made him uneasy to have a copy in the house. When I told him I didn’t understand it he laughed and said nobody did, not really. That was how his father made all that money, because people paid him to explain what the book really meant. Joining the Rulers means you keep paying them for more and more explanations, for as long as you live, because it takes a lifetime to understand what it really means,
The Rule of One.
”
Shane takes it in, considers his reply. “Just because Roland Penny had a copy in his trailer, it doesn’t mean he read it. Maybe he tried like you and then put it down. There are twelve-million-plus copies out there.”
“But that was the only book there, right?”
“Only one I could find,” Shane admits.
“So maybe Roland really did read it and it made him mental. Like those loonies who think
The Catcher in the Rye
is telling them to shoot people.”
Shane grunts and shakes his head. “
The Catcher in the Rye
doesn’t make you shoot people. I loved that novel.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I do.” He tucks the book into his jacket pocket. “Listen, this is a bit awkward, but I have a favor to ask.”
“Anything, if it means you’ll look for Noah.”
“Could you drive me back to my motel? In my car? It would mean taking a taxi back here.”
I shrug. “Sure, why not? But what’s really going on? What’s the deal with not driving? You drove all the way from Connecticut. Six hours on the highway.”
He sighs, grimaces. “It’s boring, but I suffer from a
sleep disorder. What I have is more than common insomnia, which can be pretty bad. When I’m unable to sleep—and I haven’t slept now for thirty-eight hours and counting—my brain does funny things.”
“Yeah? What kind of funny things?”
“It’s called wakeful dreaming. It means I sometimes see things that aren’t really there. Which makes it very dangerous to drive.”
The big man sounds deeply embarrassed, and I get the impression he wouldn’t be sharing unless it was absolutely necessary.
“That’s why you left the FBI,” I say, realization dawning. “You’re disabled.”
“I hate that word…. But yeah.”
“Okay. So I drive you to your motel. How will you get from there to the airport?”
“I’ll be fine by morning,” he explains. “Tonight I’m taking a pill. It’ll knock me out for five or six hours and then I’ll be okay to drive.”
“What caused it?” I ask. “You didn’t have this all your life or you’d never have gotten into the FBI in the first place.”
“You don’t miss much, do you?”
“Is it a secret, what happened? Some mission you were on?”
“Nothing like that. I was off duty at the time. It was a vehicular accident. A bad one. I sustained brain injuries that may or may not have triggered the sleep disorder, nobody can tell me for sure. Some doctors think the cause is organic, others think it’s purely psychological.”
He finishes his hot cocoa, rinses the mug in the sink,
sets it on the drain board. I hand him a tissue, indicate the whipped-cream mustache. He looks embarrassed, doesn’t want to meet my eyes.
The whipped cream isn’t what makes him look away.
“What do you see?” I ask. “When you’re, what do you call it, wakeful dreaming?”
He winces, as if jabbed with a pin, keeping his gaze averted.
“You said you wouldn’t lie,” I remind him.
He nods, admitting as much. “The doctors call them artifacts. Images from my memory so distinct they look real. It can be very…distracting.”
“What do you see?” I insist.
He looks directly at me with eyes that have witnessed an eternity of sorrow. “Sometimes I see my wife and daughter,” he begins. “They died in the accident.”
1. Kaboom Means Never Having To Say Goodbye
He’s thinking it’s amazing how young the SAs are nowadays. Some of them look like teenagers in adult costumes, although most Special Agent applicants are in their late twenties by the time they get the minimum college degree, plus law enforcement and/or military experience. He was what, twenty-eight before he finally qualified for the FBI? Something like that. But he never looked this young. No way.
It’s kind of a kick, hanging out in the concrete fortress of the Hoover Building, just observing.
In the lobby, agents come and go, speaking of Mafia gigolos.
Actually he’s in the mezzanine, not the lobby, and there’s probably less chat about the mating habits of mobsters than there was back in the day. The main mission now being terrorism, both domestic and international. But the old place still has the same feel, the same thrum of energy from ambitious kids wanting to break the big case. They come in all colors and ethnicities, but they have in common the desire to be heroes, to get the job done, no matter the risk.
Most will burn out, that’s a given. Some will leave angry and cynical, disappointed that they hadn’t been able to change the world. Others will take an early out, the result of physical or mental traumas suffered on the job or off. Not that you’re ever off the job. Not when you hold the badge.
“Mr. Shane?” A young, pleasantly chubby lab tech peers at him through small, stylish eyeglasses that give her the look of a pretty goldfish. “Dr. Newman will see you now.”
Shane laughs. He can’t help it, but the lab tech looks startled, and then slightly offended. “Sorry,” he says. “For just a second there, it was like Dr. Newman was my proctologist, and this was an appointment. You know?”
The lab tech says, drily, “You better hope he’s not your proctologist.”
“Actually, I don’t have one.”
“Excuse me?”
“A proctologist. Charley’s an old pal of mine. He didn’t mention?”
“I’m filling in, his regular’s on maternity leave.”
She marches away on squeaky crepe soles, leading him through security, waiting as he’s wanded, collecting him on the other side, taking him to a different part of the huge building—Hoover’s labyrinth. Charley Newman’s lair has obviously been moved since the last time he looked in.
Shane worries that maybe his old friend has been demoted, but that isn’t it. As the Bureau’s senior expert on explosive devices, he’s finally gotten a bump up to bigger and better digs, courtesy of al Qaeda. He actually has an office with a window now, not a glorified closet shared with two assistants and a secretary.
“The prodigal son!” Charley cries, bounding out of his
padded chair to grab and shake his hand. He stands back, takes a good look at Shane, appears satisfied. “Your eyes are clear. You’ve been sleeping.”
“Like a log,” Shane replies. Which is not quite true. With the help of pills he did render himself unconscious for several hours the night before. And then on the shuttle leg down from LaGuardia he actually fell asleep unassisted. Okay, twenty minutes of snooze time in a fully reclined exit-row seat isn’t going to make an entry in
Ripley’s Believe It or Not,
but for Shane it’s something of a breakthrough.
“Interesting stuff you sent me,” Charley says.
“I was hoping you might have some thoughts,” Shane says.
“Thoughts or answers?”
“At this point, I’ll settle for whatever you’ve got.”
Charley shoos away the temporary lab tech, whose antennae have risen—what are the bad boys up to now?—and drags Shane into an adjoining room. Not, as expected, a workshop, but more like a conference room, equipped with a long table, a projection screen, and an old-fashioned chalkboard upon which is scrawled the enigmatic phrase,
Kaboom means never having to say goodbye.
Tall and thin, though not quite as tall as Shane, and with narrow, bony shoulders rounded by years peering into microscopes, Dr. Charles Newman, who traded his three-letter school—M.I.T.—for a three-letter agency—FBI—seems as engaged and energetic as ever. When they were both young and full of mustard some of the SAs took to calling Charley ‘Doc Brown,’ for the Christopher Lloyd character in
Back to the Future.
Despite the thinning, wavy hair and the big proud honker of a nose—and the fun
he had blowing things up out at his containment bunker in Quantico—Shane never saw the resemblance. To him Charley is and always will be The Chalk Man, a character all his own. Never a Special Agent himself, he’s one of the Bureau’s many overqualified, underpaid civilian employees. Long married to his high-school sweetheart, he and his wife, Trudy, had been godparents to Shane’s daughter. Death hasn’t broken that bond. Nor has Shane’s bad habit of not making contact for months at a time, and usually only when he needs to pick his old friend’s large and well-stocked brain.
As is his habit, Charley heads for the blackboard and starts thinking with chalk, the dust from which will soon adhere to him from forehead to foot. “Okay,” he begins. “The device was placed in a janitor’s cart, one of those wheeled jobs. Estimated forty pounds of military-grade C-4. So assume the center of detonation is between ten and fourteen inches from the floor. That’s consistent with photos of the blast mark. Sound about right?”
“You’re the expert.”
“Yeah, but I’m working from e-mailed attachments. You were at the scene.”
“Negatory on that,” Shane tells him. “The gym was bulldozed a week after it was released.”
“What?” Charley looks stunned.
“It was determined the damaged structure was a danger to the adjoining school. Which maybe it was. So as soon as the state police released the crime scene, down it went. I got the impression that everybody involved wanted to see it gone. Didn’t like having all those kids walk past the wreckage every day.”
“They maybe have a point,” Charley admits thoughtfully. “Still, I was hoping to have your on-site impressions.”
“Sorry.”
The Chalk Man chuckles. “That was just to be polite. I was going to ignore whatever you said. The scene was very well documented, no problem there.”
“Good. So you figured it out.”
“Nah, I made calculations. Which I then converted into a three-dimensional rendering in my handy-dandy, blow-it-up software.”
“Kaboom.”
“It seems like an appropriate name, no? The foam goes up, the stains go down.”
“Huh?”
“As seen on TV. In addition to being the pet name for my dimensional-force software, Kaboom is also the brand name of a toilet-bowl cleaner.”
“Charley, Charley, Charley.”
“The Chalk Man will have his fun, even if it means bathroom jokes.”
Shane shakes his head, grinning.
“As to your question, can one small boy be effectively atomized by that quantity of explosive, in the circumstances described? Kaboom came up with an answer—my software, not the aforementioned cleaner—where was I? Right, okay, the big answer from Kaboom is
no.
Almost certainly
no.
”
“Almost?”
“Nothing is certain in this quantum-haunted world,” Chalk Man admits with a sigh. “Not even with a fairly standard chemical combustion explosion. But aside from the physics, we have the evidence of the other two victims.
Both bodies severely damaged in different ways. The cop was prone at floor level, the perp standing upright within a few feet of the blast center. You will have noted in the crime scene report that significant skeletal and bone fragments were recovered from both adult victims. The perp’s head was more or less intact. Separated from the rest of his body parts, granted, but nevertheless identifiable. You saw the grisly pictures, bro. He was still wearing his earbuds.”
“Strange things happens when stuff blows up.”
Chalk Man scratches his big honker. “That could be the title of my memoirs. Indeed, strange things do happen, not all of them predictable, no matter how good the software, and Kaboom is very, very good.”
“I have no doubt.”
“Bottom line, all things considered, and a dew-moistened finger up to the mystical wind for luck, The Chalk Man says it wasn’t the C-4 that made your boy vanish.”
“That’s what I was hoping to hear,” says Shane. “Thanks, Charley, you’re the best.”
“Is this an overnight? Can you do dinner? Trudy’d love to see you.”
Shane regretfully declines. He has another expert to consult, and miles to go, and promises to keep.
2. When The Phone Trills
“He promised to come back, no matter what he decides.”
“And you believe him,” Helen says. “That’s good.”
Keeping my voice low, I make my case, wanting my friend to share my sense of confidence, my renewed sense
of hope. “He found out more in two days than I have in six weeks,” I tell her. “That’s pretty amazing, right there.”
Helen beams. We’re in the library, her domain, and a hushed murmuring comes from the children’s reading nook, where a book is about to be ‘talked’ by one of the volunteers for the Every Day Reads program.
The daily book talk is Noah’s favorite part of a visit to the library. If I close my eyes I can almost hear him among the eager children, struggling to keep his voice down. It hurts, but no more than usual. I haven’t gotten used to the pain, but have come to expect it as a constant presence in my life. The fact that someone is finally following up on my suspicions has helped immensely—I’m no longer quite so alone.
“What’s he like?” Helen wants to know.
I shrug. “Kind of retro, I guess. Fortysomething. Get this—his hobby is visiting diners.”
“Diners? Are you serious?”
“As serious as pie à la mode. He loves those funky old roadside diners, what can I say?”
“Okay, a diner maven. What else? I heard he was really tall. Basketball player tall.”
“More like football player tall. Hey,” I ask suddenly, “what do you mean you heard? What did you hear?”
Helen smiles, her gray eyes alight with mischief. “Troy’s dispatcher has a five-year-old,” she explains, nodding at the reading nook. “That’s all she had, a physical description. Tall and yummy. Her words, not mine.”
Yummy. Sorry, but I don’t think of Shane that way. Any more than you’d be assessing the yummy factor when a fireman is carrying you out of a burning building. Later, maybe, after you’re safe.
I’m a long way from safe. Safe will be when I have my little boy back, then I can decide whether or not Randall Shane is yummy. Until then, all that matters is, is he willing to run into a fire?
“You said he doesn’t care about the money,” Helen prompts.
“Doesn’t appear to. Won’t take a penny until he’s convinced he can help me find Noah. If that’s part of a con, it’s a really good one. Plus, I think for him finding missing children is more of a life mission than a way to make a living. What happened, he lost his wife and daughter in a road accident.”
“Oh my god.”
“Which explains his sleep disorder,” I add.
“Excuse me?”
“Just before he left, the big guy finally revealed some of the gory details. How he and his wife and daughter had been coming back from Washington, D.C. How Shane was nodding off so his wife took over driving on the Jersey Turnpike, and that’s when they got hit by a truck whose driver was asleep at the wheel of his big rig. Car crushed, Shane the only survivor, waking up to find them both gone, his life forever changed. Sleep and death are now associated in his mind, hence his aversion to normal sleep. Or that’s what the shrinks have told him.”
“What a terrible thing,” says Helen, her eyes glistening.
“Yeah,” I agree. “You want to know an even more terrible thing? He tells me that, and my first reaction is to be glad it happened, because if it didn’t, he wouldn’t be helping me now. Isn’t that awful?”
Helen pats my hand. “No, my dear, it’s not awful. It’s
human. We’re all human. Even your big, yummy knight in shining armor is human.”
“Not too human, I hope,” I say.
Home again, home again, where I’m not quite bouncing off the walls. Brain humming with all the recent facts and details…The bomber’s expensive new wheels, provided by person or persons unknown. The mysterious disappearance of the supposedly matching tissue samples. From a lab owned, however distantly, by Jedediah’s father. Whose famous book was found in the bomber’s wretched trailer. All of it more or less confirming my gut, that the whole terrible siege of the school had been a smoke screen—a literal one in those final moments—for whisking Noah away.
But why? For what purpose? What Arthur Conklin might want with a grandson he’d never met? Can’t bear thinking about that. Was it possible that the old man never knew the boy existed until Jed died? Was it the plane crash that set off a chain of events that turned me into the madwoman of Humble, wandering the streets in search of her lost son?
Possible, yes. From everything my late husband alluded to, his father would not be constrained by what we mere mortals consider right or moral, good or bad. What he wants he takes. No apologies. No consideration for the normal attachments of parent and child.