XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me (35 page)

With the same spooked look, Mrs. Leonard jabbed her finger past Janis. Her nightgown shuddered around her.

“I-I’m sorry?” Janis said, squinting. “Do you want me to leave?”

Only twenty seconds had elapsed, maybe fewer. Not nearly enough time for Scott. She tried again. “Because I just wanted to—”

The woman jabbed her finger with more force, shaking her head now.

No, she doesn’t want me to talk, or she doesn’t want me to leave?

Janis turned to where she was pointing. The newspaper! Protected by a plastic bag, it lay beside the walkway like a deflated balloon. Mrs. Leonard had been coming out to get it, Janis guessed, but now she was asking her to retrieve it. She probably didn’t want to be seen in her nightgown. Or maybe she didn’t want to be seen, period. Throughout her ten years of living here, Janis could count on one hand the number of times she had glimpsed her. And that’s really all they had been, glimpses. The woman was Oakwood’s version of Boo Radley.

“Would you like me to get the paper?”

Still pointing, Mrs. Leonard began to nod.

Thank goodness.

Janis set her books on the porch and returned down the walkway. The long bag dripped with condensation when she lifted it from the grass. Janis bounced it a few times from the neck of the bag, pretending to be concerned about its dampness. As she returned with it, she checked off another twenty-five seconds in her head.

Mrs. Leonard’s lips torqued into an expression of gratitude as she accepted the newspaper. She was younger than she appeared from a distance, her brown eyes sharp and clear. Tucking the newspaper to her side, Mrs. Leonard began to retreat inside the house again.

“Oh, but wait, I haven’t told you what my cat looks like.”

The woman made a quick waving motion with her hand. There was an urgency to it, a pleading.

Come inside
, the gesture said.

Janis looked from Mrs. Leonard up to the intersection. The sun had still yet to rise, and the street was blue-gray. “Oh, thanks, but my bus will be here any minute. I don’t want to miss it.”

The woman made a different gesture. She brought two fingers to her closed mouth and shook her head, and then with the same hand, mimed like she was writing something on the palm of her other hand.

“Ahh,” Janis said. Mrs. Leonard was mute. That’s what she was telling her. That’s why she hadn’t spoken. And now she wanted to write something down for her.

“I have a pen and some paper right here,” Janis said, stooping for her books.

Mrs. Leonard grunted. When Janis looked up, the mute woman used her hands to explain her bad back and that she needed to sit down. Another reason she stayed indoors, Janis thought. She felt sympathy clouding over the alarm that continued to pulse in the back of her mind. (
Don’t do it! Call it off!
) But it was too late to call it off. Scott would be in front of the shed by now, and she’d promised to buy him at least three minutes, more if she could.

Come inside,
Mrs. Leonard gestured again.

Janis wiped her hand against the side of her Levi’s, her heart starting into a fresh cycle of pounding.

“All right,” she said. “But just for a minute.”

* * *

For the second time, Scott swore under his breath. He adjusted his pressure on the tension wrench in the bottom of the keyhole and reset his grip on the pick that disappeared just above. At first feel, the lock had seemed like a standard five-pin chamber, which he could have opened in seconds. But these pins had to be pressed in a particular order, he learned; otherwise, they wouldn’t stay trapped along the shear line and the bolt wouldn’t budge.

He hadn’t had a lot of practice with security pins.

He took a quick breath and blinked at the perspiration in the corner of one eye, trying to forget the fact that he was in plain view. The timer on his watch showed more than two minutes. He had figured out the sequence of the first two pins. The third was proving a bitch. Every time he guessed wrong, he lost them all, and the pins were hard to set in the first place.

It took him twenty seconds to retrap the first two pins. The only good thing to be said for having already guessed and lost twice on the third pin was that it could only be the last one. He concentrated, probed the tip of the pin with his pick, pushed it up, and felt it click into position.

The penultimate pin would be a fifty-fifty shot. He chose the nearer one and pushed.

All of the pins fell out.

“Damn it!” he hissed, the spare wrench and picks nearly spilling from his mouth.

He reset the tension wrench, which had become slippery with the serous blood beading from his palms.

The timer raced past two and a half minutes.

The last time he’d done anything like this was when he hacked Army Information in late August. But he’d been under no time constraints then. The hack had taken him nearly fifteen hours, he remembered—fifteen hours to palpate the sequence of zeros and ones. Between the login and password, there had been fourteen characters, 112 bits of data.

The security lock was easier by comparison—far easier. It had components Scott could feel, fewer moving parts, and manageable probabilities. The disadvantage, of course, was that he had less time to sequence those moving parts—minutes, not hours. That, and he was standing in someone’s backyard, not concealed in his own dark bedroom.

But Scott knew the sequence now.

He worked pin one into place again, then pin number two. Runnels of sweat circled the rims of his glasses, gathering at the bottoms of the lenses. As his hands worked, he thought about how the Army Information hack had led him here, in a strange way. Discovering the tap that night, hiding his computer equipment, promising himself that he would use his moratorium on hacking as a chance to embark on his maturation, to embrace it. To get out there.

Oh, you’re out there all right.

He set pin three as he reflected on his Bud Body regimen, his updated wardrobe, old self out, new self in, Gamma—none of which would have happened without the tap. And neither would the disastrous Dress-up Night, the same night he and Janis rediscovered whatever quality it was that still bound them.

Pin four clicked into place.

But to her, he knew he was just an interesting friend from her past. His transformation wasn’t complete, not yet. Friday’s confrontation with Grant and Britt had been a step, as was his attempt to negotiate with Jesse. His note to Janis also represented a step. But here he was, not the person he had envisioned, not Scott Summers. No, he was still Stiletto, his pulse racing in terror and exhilaration over this, his latest stealth campaign.

He set the final pin and twisted the tension wrench. The bolt didn’t move. He’d turned the wrench the wrong way. When he tried to recover and go back, his grip slipped. All of the pins fell out.

No, damn it! No! No! No!

The timer raced toward four minutes.

He snuck a glance at the fence above the culvert, knowing he’d blown it, that his time was more than up. He imagined the front door closing in front of Janis.

With the weight of the house bearing down on him, Scott cut his gaze back to the keyhole. He blinked the sting of sweat from his eyes. He reinserted the tension wrench, hesitated, and then the pick.

28

Janis closed the door behind her and followed the ghost-like image of Mrs. Leonard through the dim front hall. The air inside the house smelled almost pleasant, like cakes of makeup. But within paces, it became apparent that the powdery fragrance concealed a cruder understench of cigarettes and dampness.

A living room opened to their right. A faded, floral-patterned couch and two chairs sat over a dull white carpet. Thick beige curtains covered the windows. Something told Janis that the room had never rollicked with party sounds, not while the Leonards lived here. To her left, a staircase climbed steeply into darkness. Mrs. Leonard led them back to a kitchen, Janis wincing as the soles of her sneakers, still damp from the grass, began squeaking over the black and white tiles. Only then did it occur to her that if Mrs. Leonard was mute, she was probably deaf as well.

“Excuse me,” Janis called, testing the idea.

Mrs. Leonard didn’t turn.

When Janis lifted her gaze, she stiffened. Beyond the round kitchen table stood a sliding glass door, and beyond that lay the deck, the same place Mr. Leonard had spent summer nights watching her house. From her vantage, the backyard where she and Margaret had grown up playing hide-and-seek and “colonial times,” where Margaret still sunbathed sometimes, looked dangerously exposed.

In a few more paces, they would be able to see down into the Leonards’ backyard as well.

Janis recovered herself and edged ahead of Mrs. Leonard to the far side of the table. She dropped her books and pulled a chair for her host, all the time shifting her body to block the view through the glass door.

“Rest your back.” Janis enunciated carefully. “I’ll get you something to write on.”

She pulled up a wooden chair beside Mrs. Leonard. Her fingers shook as she opened one of her notebooks and drew out a sheet of college-ruled paper and a blue pen. When Mrs. Leonard had taken them, Janis peeked behind. In front of the shed, his body bowed, face nearly touching the lock, stood Scott.

Janis turned back to where Mrs. Leonard’s hand traced thin scrawls on the paper.
Good, she writes slowly.
Janis kept her torso rigid, fighting the urge to twist around again, to watch Scott to safety.

She leaned toward Mrs. Leonard instead and noticed a fragrance about the woman. It was the smell of the house—fine and powdery on the surface but musty underneath—a smell redolent of illness and sorrow and being shut in. It was the smell of someone who didn’t go outside, not even for her own newspaper. Janis shifted her gaze to the bagged paper. A smear of condensation trailed behind it. At the place opposite Mrs. Leonard, Janis noticed a tall black coffee mug.

Or maybe someone prevents her from going outside.

And now Janis became certain that this woman was as in the dark as anyone. Whatever Mr. Leonard kept hidden under his shed, whatever his past crimes, whatever designs he had on Margaret, his wife knew nothing about them.

Mrs. Leonard pushed the piece of paper in front of her:
Your cat comes into our yard sometimes, but she hasn’t lately. I’m sorry.

“So I guess you already know what she looks like?” Janis said.

Mrs. Leonard took the paper back, nodding, and wrote something else, something a little shorter.

I’ve seen her through the window. She’s pretty.

“Oh, do you like cats?”

Mrs. Leonard bent over the paper again.

By her mental clock, Janis guessed it had been about four minutes. Scott had said he would bail if he didn’t have the lock picked within three. She peeked behind her. The top of his head was still stooped toward the door. Her toes began curling inside her white Keds, right foot, left foot, as if that could speed his progress. She turned back to the table just as Mrs. Leonard finished.

Yes, but I can’t have one.

“Why not? Cats are really easy to care for, if that’s, um, your concern. They’re very independent.”

Janis labored to speak slowly, to stretch out the seconds. She’d never been one for small talk, had never seen the point, but now that it was vital she string sentences together, her mind was coming up painfully short.

Mrs. Leonard shook her head and wrote out a fourth line.

My husband.

The word shot through Janis like a bolt, but she composed her face as she raised it back to Mrs. Leonard’s. “Oh, is he allergic?” Janis pointed to her own nose. “Do cats make him sneeze?”

But Janis knew the answer. She could read it in Mrs. Leonard’s conflicted eyes. Her husband had already decided that she wasn’t to have a cat, no matter how badly she wanted one, no matter how isolated she felt. And maybe that was the point—to keep her isolated, to keep her dependent on him. Janis had heard about such relationships from Margaret.

As if to confirm this, Mrs. Leonard shook her head again and began writing something else. And in that moment, Janis found that she was glad to be imparting a little company to this lonely woman.

Mrs. Leonard pushed the paper back in front of her.

He’s here.

Janis thrust herself up. The coffee mug tottered on the tabletop. She hadn’t heard the rumble of the garage door, but it wasn’t the door to the garage that was opening. It was the front door.

Footsteps landed in the hallway.

Janis spun to where Scott’s glasses were just fading into the darkness of the shed, the door closing behind him. And then she looked down at Mrs. Leonard. The deaf woman stared back at her, her face taut.

Wait a minute. How could
she
have heard? Unless—

“In here!” Mrs. Leonard called clearly.

It took another second for the full horror to dawn on Janis: Mrs. Leonard had been killing time, too.

* * *

Scott snapped on his flashlight and swung it around the shed, the stress of the lock-picking exercise still gripping his neck. Janis had expressed doubts about the things she perceived in her astral state, but the inside of the shed was how she’d described it—to the letter: shelves, old woodcutting implements, gloves. The space felt as claustrophobic as she’d described it, too. He ran his beam along the solid frame, then down to the pile of kindling.

Clamping the end of the camping flashlight between his teeth, Scott stooped and began moving the kindling to the shelves.

The wounds on his palms stung as he worked, but Scott couldn’t stop to brush away the flecks of bark. Outside, his race had been against Mrs. Leonard returning inside the house and seeing him. Now, safely inside the shed, his race was against Mr. Leonard returning home in the next thirty minutes, give or take. He considered donning the gloves, but they looked stiff with age and would probably make his hands hurt worse. Plus, who knew what lived inside them?

At last, Scott pried the plywood board up with his fingers and shook away the final layer of kindling. A few roaches scrambled away. He set the board against the door, took his flashlight from his mouth, and shone it down.