In Between (6 page)

“Good God!” Lori gasped when she read that account. “It's unraveling like lightning.”

“I think it just needed a spark to set off the conflagration,” Sam said. “The rumor about the safe burglary must have set a speed record in spreading. I wonder how many people feel free enough now to add their own little bundle of kindling to the fire.”

“Let's just burn all that blackmail stuff when it comes,” she said. “Why chance its getting opened by the wrong person? A wife, husband, kid might open mail and just cause more grief. It seems that we don't need to confirm anything.”

Sam agreed. “Our work is done,” he said. “Your work, I should say. You accomplished what you set out to do. Satisfied?”

“No. There's nothing concrete, nothing actionable. In Hollywood rumors come and they go and the high and mighty shake themselves off and it's back to business as usual. Some of the stuff I gathered is illegal, actionable, IRS goodies. I have to mail those boxes.” She pointed to the post offices boxes stacked on the desk. “Sam, if no one does anything about that material, so be it. I'll figure that I tried and if no one else gets interested, that's it. Done.”

He breathed a sigh of relief. “I'll hold you to that,” he said in warning.

The blackmail packages arrived the next morning and they spent a good part of the day feeding their own fire on the grill on the patio, creating a miasma of foul smelling smoke.

At one thirty in the morning they walked down the road to the Hutchinsons' house. “They're an old couple,” Lori said, “a retired orthodontist and his wife. Four grown children scattered around the country, and a slew of grandchildren that they visit a lot. Gone four or five weeks, back here, gone again after a few weeks. So we borrow their car, they report it missing, and the police find it unharmed miles from here and label it kids joyriding.”

“You know where the keys are?”

“Sure. I popped in this afternoon just for a second. The keys are on a side table near the front door. I'll go in, pick up the keys, open the door and hand them to you. Pop back out and we're off. We'd better push the car down the driveway, not start it until we reach the road. They'll be in bed but they might hear something in the driveway.”

Before long they were on the black road winding through woods, heading for the highway. Lori was driving when Sam said, “Pull over.”

She pulled off the road onto the shoulder, turned off the headlights and the motor, and watched her hands melt through the steering wheel. Another car passed by slowly, almost close enough to touch.

“Want me to take over driving?”

“Not yet. Which is more nerve-wracking, driving or watching out for a living creature within interacting distance when you don't know what that distance is?”

“We'll toss a coin to settle it later,” he said. “Onward.”

They didn't want to get close enough to anyone to lose their bodies, have the car continue on its own and probably crash, possibly injure someone. And scatter the boxes to be mailed. They stopped again minutes later and this time they changed places. Usually the trip from the airport to her retreat took about an hour and a half, Lori had said. That night, aiming for the nearest branch post office, miles from the airport, it took two hours.

“That's it,” Sam said, pulling in at a curb. He turned everything off and pocketed the keys. Across the street a post office truck was leaving, and there was a car stopped at the outside mailboxes. They watched the truck until it vanished, then watched the car. The driver, a short woman, had to open her door to reach the mail slots, and evidently she had a lot of mail to post. Another mail truck appeared, this time going to the rear of the building.

“Okay, let's do it,” Sam said when the woman finished and drove away. “Let's leave the car here and walk over, in case someone else turns up. And let's do it fast.”

They each picked up boxes, then, after making sure no one was in the process of coming or going, they ran to the mailboxes and shoved the boxes through the package slots. The last one was being swallowed by the collection box when a car turned in and headed toward them.

“Pray that stuff doesn't go to the DLD,” Lori said.

“What's that?”

“Dead Letter Department.” She took his hand and they popped across the road.

In the car they looked at each other grinning. “We actually did it,” Lori said in wonder. “It seemed impossible, a dream, a fantasy wish, but we did it.”

“We deserve a celebration,” Sam said.

“Absolutely! I put champagne in the fridge this afternoon.”

He had not been thinking of champagne, but it would do for starters. “Now we drive around a while, ditch the car miles away from here, and go home. Right?”

“You've got it.”

They left the car in a park miles away from the post office branch, and they left it running. “Joyriding until they ran out of gas,” Lori said. “Home, James.”

“We can go anywhere we want,” Sam said the next morning. “What would you like to see?”

“The Sphinx and all of the pyramids, inside and out.”

“The Great Wall of China.”

“That active volcano in Hawaii.”

He was clicking through television stations, catching news items, and she was at her computer. “Scrubbing,” she had said. “I'm making an external hard drive copy of everything. I'll bury it under a rose bush. Just in case anyone ever breaks in while we're away. Put the tree trails in Costa Rica on the list.”

“Done. Macchu Picchu. We can go first class all the way, stay in five-star hotels, luxury suites on luxury liners— Hey!”

She looked up. “What?”

“I know them.” He had half risen from the floor in front of the television and reached out to turn up the volume. “…Malcolm Vicente was known to be an avid outdoors man and spent time each year at the ChemAg resort, where the murder occurred last night.…”

“Who's he?” Lori asked, leaving the computer to join Sam.

“Vice president of the company. I know his son, Alex. We were in the same writing workshop at Iowa State.” He put his finger to his lips and they both listened to a recap of the murder of Malcolm Vicente. He and his wife, his married daughter and her husband, and his son had gone to the Idaho lodge to celebrate Vicente's sixty-fourth birthday. Also present were several close friends and associates. An altercation between Vicente and his son arose at dinner, and afterward Vicente had gone to an office he used at the complex. His body had been discovered the next morning by a housekeeper. He had been shot. The news reader moved on to another subject and Sam turned the television off.

“Wow!” he said. “Alex is in deep shit. They'll pin it on him if there's any way on earth they can.”

“Back up,” Lori said. “What's the story here?”

“Okay. We met at the workshop, and we clicked. You do sometimes, you know. He invited me to the lodge for Christmas a couple of times and taught me how to ski. We've kept in touch over the past ten years. He wrote essays for awhile, did some newspaper work, and I wrote some plays. A few years ago he began to write articles about agriculture, GMO research and practice, climate change, things like that. He was getting a good reputation in the environmental movement. Months ago he told me he was writing a book, an exposé of ChemAg, including a lot of emails that reveal company knowledge of bad effects from some of their GM products, seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, you name it. Studies had been hidden, discounted in various ways, destroyed. And he planned to show the manuscript to his father, give him a chance to come clean, turn whistle blower or some damn thing. It wasn't going to happen, but he had to try before he submitted the manuscript.” He drew in a long breath. “Do you know the Rachel Carson book,
Silent Spring?
Decades ago, an exposé of the unintended consequences of DDT.” She shook her head. “Okay, it was a revelation and it caused a public outcry about the indiscriminate use of DDT, and eventually its being banned except for limited uses. His book is like that. He sent me chapters, bits and pieces now and then. It's dynamite, Lori. Great research, footnotes, references, claims all proven and proven again. And they had an altercation on the night before his old man was killed. Why even mention that in such a preliminary account? Who do you think they'll try to pin it on?”

“Maybe he did it.”

Sam shook his head. “No way. He wanted to save his father embarrassment, maybe legal hassles, maybe even jail time. Murder isn't his style.”

“What else, Sam? There's more, isn't there?”

“Yeah. He saved my life. Like I said, he taught me how to ski. That first year up there, we were skiing cross country, with me a bumbling, awkward oaf. There was an avalanche. Not one of those big headline grabbers, but enough to send me flying. I ended up with a broken leg and Alex put together a makeshift sled and hauled me out, down to a clinic. Up to his hips in snow, half pulling, pushing, carrying me all the way. Protocol was to go get help, but he was afraid I'd go into shock, die from hypothermia, or else get buried in snow.” He looked down at his hands, spread them wide apart, then said, “Next Christmas, here he comes to our house in Des Moines with airline tickets for Boise, and he insists that I go with him, back up to the lodge, back to skis. Last thing on earth I wanted to do was go skiing. I was scared to death of trying again, but he made me. That was the year I learned how to ski, the second year, not the first. I owe him, Lori. He taught me more than just how to ski.”

“Okay, we have to go there,” Lori said. “I need another half hour on my computer. You can get the grill inside the garage, straighten up a little in the kitchen, and we'll be ready. Deal?” He nodded. “And, Sam, you know how limited we really are. There might not be much we can do for your friend.”

Sam saluted and set about his chores. It didn't take long. Standing on the back patio, breathing deeply of the incoming marine air, he closed his eyes for a moment. They didn't need the food they grilled, or the beer and wine they drank; they didn't need anything since they were never sleepy, tired, too hot or too cold, hungry. He doubted that they needed to breathe. But he drew in a long breath of cool ocean-scented air and it was good. They were pretending, just pretending to be normal, and that was good, too, he thought. That was good.

Then, thinking of the pretense that was their way now, he wondered how Ben was doing in the pretense of his life. The decision to look in on Ben and the transition were almost simultaneous. He stood in Ben's study, where Ben was yelling at someone on the phone. Ben was pale, drawn and haggard. Next to his desk stood a short, plump woman who looked at Sam with a wide smile.

“I'm so happy to see you,” the woman said. “I was certain you'd pop up if I waited. It's good to see you, my dear. My goodness, what ever have you and Lori been up to here? I'm afraid Ben is a quivering mess of nerves, and everyone else gone, vanished. I'm afraid you've been naughty.…”

The Voice! She was moving toward him with her hands outstretched, smiling broadly, not at all intimidating, nothing but good will apparent in her features. She had dimples in her unnaturally pink cheeks, bright blue eyes, frizzy white hair. She was inches from touching him when he cried, “No!” And he was back in the cabin in the woods, breathing hard, shaking.

“Sam! What's wrong? What happened?” Lori jumped up from her chair and ran across the room to put her arms around him. “You look like you've seen a ghost.”

“I have seen a ghost,” he said hoarsely. He cleared his throat and held her tighter. “The Voice,” he said. “She was there, she almost touched me, and I jumped back here. Lori, if she'd touched me, held my hand, she would have taken me to quarantine, or something.” He shuddered. “We'd have been separated and she would have started searching for you. Never go back there, Lori, back to Ben's place. Never.”

“Never,” she said. “Let's sit down a minute. Tell me about it.”

They sat on the sofa holding each other and spoke in whispers. “She looked like what your favorite aunt ought to look like, or your grandmother,” he said. “Someone you trust without question. But what if she can look like anyone she chooses? We can't trust anyone who can see us. She might have workers who would report to her if we're spotted. Spies. Cops. A ghost APB.”

“That means we can't go back to see our families,” she said in a faint voice. They had both been talking about doing that, just looking in on her parents, his parents, his sister.

“Or the cemeteries where they buried us.” They had talked about that, too.

“Maybe any place we'd be likely to revisit.”

“Do you think she can trace us to this place?”

Lori pulled away and said, “I don't see how. If she knew about it, she'd have shown up already, wouldn't she?”

“Yeah, right. But let's beat it as soon as you're done with the computer stuff.”

Sam had been at the resort only twice, and that had been ten years ago, and the place that had come to mind was the restaurant. That was where he and Lori were standing now. Before, there had been a crowd; today there were two tables with people, four men at one table, three women at another.

Lori hurried to the group of men. Pointing, she said, “Pinky, Groucho—”

“What in God's name are you doing?” Sam demanded.

“Giving them tags so we'll know who we're talking about,” she said. “We can't just call them Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Mo.” She held her finger under her nose and again said, “Groucho.”

He had a big black mustache. Pinky had a very pink scalp showing through a stupid looking comb-over. “Colonel,” Lori said, passing her hand through the head of a man with a buzz cut who was scowling at his companions. “And last but certainly not least, Fats.”