Where (17 page)

He tries to stuff the papers he's found inside his shirt but they're too bulky. He can't run like this. He takes what he can carry and stashes blueprints and site plans in the galvanized Von Harten Dairy box outside the kitchen door. Given the number of early-morning search parties returning from the neighborhoods, he has to back and fill, dive for cover, duck and run all the way to Azalea House, so the mile between here and Ray Powell's dock will take more than an hour to cross.

He can't be sure he hears Boogie's voice above the others as he runs along behind Weisbuch's store; that could be guilt, roaring into his head because it's too late to do anything about it. Wherever he is, Boogie is suffering and even if he wanted to, there's no way he could help.

He's laid wide open now, torn by all the things he's failed to do, he comes thudding onto Ray's property, Azalea House spreads its porches like a Carolina matriarch: whatever you did while I wasn't looking, child, come on in
.
Davy would like to go in and find Ray, sit down and ask him about the stuff he took, item for item, so Ray can tell him what just happened. Is happening. Will happen, starting now.

He'd like to dump the whole mess on Ray's breakfast table—shuh, he'd like to
eat,
but Ray's long gone and there are cops or looters or both stalking the porches, so he crunches along behind the azaleas with no detours to the water. He wades out in the shadow of the dock.

It's easy enough to untie Ray's skiff. He goes flat against the bottom and lets the current take him out into open water. He won't turn on the auxiliary motor until he thinks it's safe. Then he can head back to Poynter's island, where by this time Earl's up and frying eggs or, if he's lucky and the gods are kind, this morning's catch.

 

18

Merrill Poulnot

Late

Merrill blinks.
Why do I see myself from a distance?
As if the camera just pulled back.

There's no time for reflection, now that they are in it. Everything is present tense, accent on the
tense.
For the first time since she got here, people fill her sterile living room: Neddy, a study in stop-motion; Steele, vibrating like a hawk arrested in midflight; Merrill, poised for whatever comes next.

Ned: “Outside the rim, Mer. For true!”

She gives Steele a long, hard look, as if to see through his pale eyes and into the area behind the saturnine grin, to divine or identify whatever he's hiding, but at this hour in this place, truth is elusive. “Outside the rim,” she says. “Really.”

“Yep.” Steele winks at Ned, as in, Thanks for the setup line. “Pretty much.”

Damn that reckless charm
. Scowling, she hangs tough. “OK then. Is it the way out of here?”

“One way. Maybe.” He spreads his hands. “I'm not sure.”

“Then we need to find out.”

“OK then.” He strips his hoodie and throws it at her head with a
gotcha
grin. “You'll need this.”

She snags the thing, but not before it wraps itself around her face like a parasite in a science fiction movie. For a minute, it's hard to breathe.
Not Axe,
she thinks.
God, woman!
It smells of him. “What for?”

He's in the doorway, his face a blur. “While you're waiting.”
Waiting for what?

Weedy Ned's at Steele's elbow with his face taut and his eyes too bright. “Me too, right?”

No.
“It's too late. I don't know what's out there.”

“Fuck!

You're just a kid!
She tries to take his hands in hers, but he pulls away. Tears start. “I have to keep you safe!”

“Fuck!” Her kid brother's head inflates and his fists clench; he's about to self-destruct and when he does, there's no stopping him. She reaches out, trying to make it better, but he shakes her off. “Fuck that, Merrill, bloody fucking fuck!”

Then Steele steps in and sets Ned aside with a simple: “Stay back. You're needed here,” and this is strange. The kid backs away, no problem;
he trusts the guy.
Then Steele bends close and mutters into his ear and Ned nods, all business, and backs away. Merrill wonders, but can't ask; her guide is out the door too fast.

He slips out into the dark and she follows. Ned slams the door on her heels as Steele drops off the side of the porch, into the deep shadow of the house.

He takes off, running along in the dark. Won't stop, won't look back.

Like he doesn't care if I come or not.
She has no choice. Cold, excited and anxious about leaving Ned in that dismal house, alone and overflowing with unanswered questions, she gulps down fear and plunges after Steele. Bastard, he doesn't even slow down to see whether she made it all right.

It's odd, seeing how he darts in and out between the patches of light, so swift and sure that she wonders when and how he got into the desert soup bowl where they're interned and how, exactly, he knows his way through this surreal landscape, even in the dark. To find out, she has to follow. So she takes out after him, running along in hopes that he'll lead her out of here.

Tearing along like this, blindly following a man she barely knows, Merrill is touchy, uncertain and vulnerable. She's exposed, quivering like a hermit crab turned out of its shell. It's the first time she's come out into the night without Ray Powell walking point. This is weird enough, but there's more. On their forays, Ray always looks out for her. Like a good father, Ray takes the lead, scoping out the route. He won't wave her on until he's gone ahead to make sure it's safe. Not Steele. Whether he's a good man is still in question.

Good or not, the Northerner came to Kraven island with an unspecified link to everything Merrill cares about, and this draws her along. He arrived in the low country with some unstated claim or deep history that so far, he's kept to himself. Standing with Merrill on her front porch on that last night on Kraven island, he was poised to tell her, she thinks. Electric, buzzing with it, teetering on the verge of laying it out, so she'd know. Then Davy pulled up and they were done.

Now he's running so fast that it's hard to keep up. Wait. Is he whistling through his teeth, some old song she almost knows, so she can follow? Who is he? What is this? They've come all the way from the low country to this bleak compound for reasons he can't or won't name, and she doesn't even know what brought him to the border islands, Kraven island in particular. Steele took the lead; it's in his nature, but when Merrill fell in behind him she expected something more, or better from him. Kindness. Explanations, but he won't slow down and he doesn't look back. He rushes on,
tss-tss-tss-tss
-ing as though he could care less whether she follows.

Furious, she puts her head down and lengthens her stride, running so hard that when without warning he stops short she smashes into him, body on body. It's like a little car crash.

She swallows a shout. “Shit!”

He turns on her, swift and urgent. “Shh. We're here.”

They are standing in front of a long ersatz-adobe building. It's made on the same plan as the ones lining the plaza, with one difference. There are no outside doors that she can see. No windows and no way in. Hell yes she's mad. “This? You brought me out here to see this? This is nothing!”

“My point.”

Everything in her rushes to a dead stop. “And the rim?”

“Oh, that. That's just a story I told the kid,” he says, and she has no way of knowing whether this is true. Before she can find the right comeback Steele takes her elbow and steers her behind the utility building, power plant, whatever this place turns out to be that makes it so important. He gestures at a heap of refuse. “In here.”

“What?” It looks like nothing to her. Jutting out from the back wall, a row of outsized cartons forms a makeshift annex. It's the first asymmetrical element she's seen in this nowhere place with its relentlessly unbroken planes. Then she understands. Made by human hands. “Your work?”

Stupid, expecting him to answer. Pulling a Maglite out of nowhere, he opens a flap in the biggest of the boxes and waves her inside. “Quiet. It's something you need to know about.”

“I don't see anything.”

“Please. This is where we wait.”

She considers her options: turn back. Go into this corrugated shipping crate and deal with whatever comes of it. Merrill has made it through her life in one piece so far because anxiety and remembered grief make her resourceful. She deals in fallback plans, and she's quick to devise them. In split seconds her mind scurries here, there, and comes back with one. Given the man, the hour, her options, she ducks into the unknown, thinking,
Lady, it's a
carton. If she has to, she can topple the thing and crawl out the bottom or punch her way out, banging at the corners until the tape gives— or, oh shit, what if this thing is stapled together? Then she'll …

As it turns out, she won't have to do any of these things. Steele stands aside as she enters and waits for her to settle before he follows. The thing is bigger than a piano crate, big enough to hold a forklift, but she has no time to speculate about how it got here or what it used to contain.

Inside, he waves her to a Styrofoam cooler positioned by the exit and hunkers down on the far side of the carton, setting a safe distance between them, as in:
whatever you're thinking, I won't.
Then he sets the Maglite on the ground between them with the beam aimed at the cardboard overhead, creating enough light for her to see him clearly. Like a magician, he makes a quick gesture:
nothing up my sleeves,
showing empty palms. At least he spares her the slick, performer's smile.

Nothing about this is feasible; the constricted space, the fact that it's below freezing in here and even colder outside; that she can see her breath but Steele is easy with it, sitting there in a sweatshirt, grinning as though the cold desert night can't touch him.

Measuring credulity, Merrill says, “You live here?”

“No. This is where I watch.”

What!

She can't speak. There are more questions than there are words: when and how he arrived in this— there is no right word for this place; she needs to know why he wasn't dumped in the same spot at the same time as every other soul on Kraven island the day they arrived; whether in fact, he was an advance man for whatever seized them or just another victim, caught in the wrong place. Waiting in his oversized carton with nothing between them but the harsh beam of the Maglite, Merrill strangles on the central question, the one that surfaces no matter how hard she tries to choke it down. There are too many possibilities, and this one terrifies her.

What if he caused all this?

Who are you, really? One of us, or something else?

The next thing he says to her answers no questions, but it blows her doubts to hell.

“I packed the tintype to show you, but when this thing happened, it got, um. Left Behind. Never mind, they had the photographer make two. If you don't have it your dad does, that's for true.” So odd: he sounds like somebody from home. “My great-great-whatever and his best friend Hampy home from the Citadel, two Charlton kids all brave and don't-mess-with-me in their dress blues and slouch hats with the ostrich plumes, fixing to go to war. Pictures of their new husbands to give the girls they left behind.”

She stuffs her knuckles into her mouth.

“You
have
seen it, right?”

The hell of it is, she has! Her great-grandmother Poulnot kept the image in its velvet pouch stored in the ancestral brass-bound box that Grandmother passed down; it came through the generations until the last Hampton Poulnot … Merrill winces.

He doesn't exactly smile. “Southerners do love to pass these things down.”

Exact phrase. She thinks:
That doesn't mean …
But it does.

“Two best friends in their new uniforms, all cleaned up for the man with the magic box. You know. In case they didn't come home.” Is it her imagination or is he grinning that same jaunty grin she saw on the young rebel officer's face?

“They made it back the first time, at least. Else we wouldn't be here.”

Yes she knows what he is claiming; she thinks,
I would. Would you?

“It came down in my family through the generations, but there were complications, and I only just got mine.”

“What?”

“Yours is still around, for true.”

Raging at her the night she moved out for good, Father ripped the case in two pieces and threw it into the fire, but it's not like she'll explain.

“Hey,” he says, grinning, “I owe you one. If the first Hampton Poulnot hadn't dragged my great-great-great-great off the field when he did, I wouldn't be here. Mine was named…”

She completes it from memory, “Archie Rivard. It's on the note…”

And he finishes, “… in the back of the tintype case. It's short for Archbold.”

“I know.”

The air between them changes, but it's nothing they said. At the first subtle vibration, his head comes up.

She begins, “You're his…” when he lunges.

“Shhh!”

Everything in her shudders to a stop. Even after he retreats to his corner she can feel the warmth of the hand he just clapped across her mouth— not gentle, exactly, but sure. Silenced, she listens as the building at his back comes to life. What comes next is too subtle to be heard, but the vibration penetrates her to the bone. It's as though the installation, the air surrounding and the sky above it are located somewhere deep in the guts of an infinite, mysteriously soundless MRI, and the great machine is imaging— what?