Simon?
No. I just can’t get my head around the possibility. The fact that I am down here close to where he was working—if that’s where I am—doesn’t mean it has to be him. Anyone could have gone down into the cellar, tracking a little oil and gas in as they did so . . .
The oil and gas prove nothing. I try to remember if I had smelled it the first time he came in to question me, but I can’t remember it. It strikes me as I compare the two visits that his demeanor felt quite different that first time, more reserved, less coldly playful. I don’t know what to do with that and come back to the smell, remembering that I noticed something else under the odor of oiled machinery. I reached for it with my mind and came up with, Rubber.
I frown to myself, pushing at the idea, but it holds up. Yes. Some kind of pliable rubberized plastic. And when I tried to hit him—more a panicked reflex than a real strike—I made contact with something hard where his face should be. That had felt familiar too. I put the two together, the plasticky scent and the stiff, resistant something around his head that had made it seem too big for his body: like the bull head of the Minotaur. But suddenly I am sure, though my certainty leaves me almost as bewildered as I had been when I didn’t know.
He is wearing the scuba mask.
Chapter Twenty
The power was still out. I wasn’t sure why that pissed everyone off so much, but it did.
“We’ll have to get more gas while we’re out,” said Simon. “Maybe pick up some more cans too, in case it doesn’t get fixed in the next few days.”
“Few days?” said Gretchen, dismayed. “Why does it take so long? It’s not even raining now.”
“Because it’s fucking Greece,” said Brad darkly. “The glory days of this island civilization-wise were like five thousand years ago, right, professor?”
Marcus smiled tightly and nodded.
“Well . . . something like that.”
“In some forgotten grave,” said Brad, “King Minos is probably still waiting to recharge his bronze age iPad and leaving himself voice mails saying, ‘As soon as the lights come back on, don’t forget to feed the Minotaur.’”
“Funny,” said Marcus.
“Just trying to keep things light, professor.”
“I really wish you wouldn’t call me that.”
“And I really wish I could turn the fucking TV on,” said Brad. “But as Mick Jagger once said, ‘You can’t always get what you want.’”
“God, I’m tired,” said Kristen.
“Me too,” said Marcus, still looking sourly at Brad. “I feel like I didn’t sleep at all, but I was totally out the moment I put my head down.”
“Me too!” said Kristen. “I don’t even remember getting into bed. But now I feel like I was run over by a truck.”
“Maybe ease off on the booze today, hon,” said Brad, looking out the window.
She shot him a quick, injured look, then gave Marcus and me an embarrassed smile.
“Might not be a bad idea,” she said. “One can have too much vacation.”
Brad snorted at that, a nasty, knowing laugh, though I wasn’t sure what—or whom—it was directed at.
“I had bad dreams,” said Gretchen. She looked distant, troubled, and I didn’t think it was about the awkwardness of last night’s spat with Brad. “People asking me questions in the dark. Monsters. It was weird. I think I was tied up or something . . .”
“Ooh,” said Brad. “Kinky.”
Gretchen shot him a look so savage and hostile that she looked, for a moment, like someone I’d never seen before.
“It was horrible,” she said. “It went on and on, and then . . . I guess I woke up. In my bed.”
“Best place to wake up,” said Brad, unmoved.
“What were they asking about?” I said.
“What?” she said, turning to me as if just realizing I was there.
“You said the monsters were asking you questions. What about?”
“Oh, I . . .” She hesitated and seemed to fade for a second, her eyes narrowing as she tried to remember, then widening suddenly, as if something unexpected had swum into view. Something unsettling. “I don’t remember,” she said, her face suddenly closed.
Now, I’ve told a lot of lies. I’m good at it, and I’m good at spotting when others tell them too. I wasn’t sure if it was because she wanted the attention, suddenly becoming the center of our glittering little circle as she had been the night before, but Gretchen was lying. If I had to guess, I’d say that it hadn’t begun as a lie but it had become one out of necessity as she blundered about in her own head, finding things and covering them up. I had done the same thing many, many times.
I watched her as she put her coffee cup down, and I thought her hand trembled slightly. I was almost sure it wasn’t the tremble of someone caught up in the thrill of misleading other people, the giddy rush of having secret knowledge no one else has. Gretchen was afraid.
Must have been one hell of a nightmare.
I must say, I didn’t feel great either. Like them, I had slept like a log, but now I felt wearier than ever. It wasn’t just physical tiredness either. I felt slow-witted and a bit out of it. Marcus had asked me what I wanted for breakfast, and I had just stared at him, knowing he was talking to me but somehow not able to process what he said, and I had already taken three Advil for a headache that rumbled in the front of my skull like a tractor trailer. Maybe Brad was right. It was time to lay off the vino and whatever-the-hell cocktails Mel kept producing.
“I need some air,” said Marcus. “This place is fantastic, but it doesn’t exactly circulate, does it?”
“Fancy a walk?” I suggested.
“Morning, people!” called Melissa, appearing from the other wing of the house and showing none of the half-awake misery that the rest of us were laboring under. “No walking off by yourselves. We’re heading into town for brunch. All of us. Won’t that be fun?”
She said it beaming and in defiance of our mood, though she couldn’t bring herself to look at Brad, who was glaring at her. But once Simon and Melissa put their minds to something, it would take an act of God—or at least a major fight—to derail it, and twenty minutes later we were boarding the Mercedes in compliant, if surly, silence. Where we were going, however, had not been determined, and our fearless leaders were not in agreement.
“Come on, Simon,” said Marcus. “For old times’ sake.”
“The Diogenes?” said Simon. “No. There’s a dozen restaurants in a two-block radius. We never thought the food was that good there. We just kept going back because it was familiar.”
“Exactly!” said Marcus. “We have to go at least once. Back me up, Kristen.”
“Absolutely,” said Kristen. “For old times’ sake.”
“Really?” said Simon. “Souvlaki and fries for brunch? Tomato salad drenched in olive oil? This is how you eat these days?”
“Of course not!” said Kristen. “Which is why I want to do it here.”
“I always kind of hated that place,” said Simon, and he wasn’t joking now. He meant it.
Simon had always had a tendency to push minor irritation into belligerence. Little things might stay little—meriting no more than a raised eyebrow or a resigned sigh—or he might dig his heels in and fight his corner like there was something real at stake. Still, I tried to remember him bitching about the restaurant before, but couldn’t recall him ever saying anything of the kind.
It was called Taverna Diogenes. It sat on the bus route from the hotel we had stayed in to Rethymno, though we had always walked there. It was less than five hundred yards from the Minos’s concierge desk, and it was someone there who had first recommended it to us.
“Probably his brother runs the place,” Brad had observed, not unreasonably. The local community seemed tight and interconnected. It was like a hundred other tourist-oriented Greek restaurants on the island, but it had become our place, and we’d eaten most of our meals there.
“You know, Si, it really might be fun,” said Melissa. “As they say, for old times’ sake.”