Like Jane’s husband, Sidney’s wife left a note before killing herself, an even more disturbing, cryptic message than Nick’s: Sweet Sayso says he’s lonely all these years, why did Leenie stop needing him, he was always there for Leenie, now I need to be there for him.
Neither Sidney nor his and Eileen’s—Leenie’s—three children, who were all in their twenties, had ever heard of a man named Sayso.
Jane had traveled to Chicago and met with Sidney Root soon after being granted leave from the Bureau, early in her unofficial investigation, before she discovered that because of such inquiries, she would be targeted by a mysterious conspiracy as elusive as a confederacy of ghosts. She had used her real name then; and of necessity she used it now when he answered on the third ring.
“Oh, yes, I tried to call you a few days ago,” he said, “but the number you gave me was out of service.”
“I moved, went through a lot of changes,” she said, which was as much explanation as she would give him. “But I’ve still got this monkey on my back, you know, still looking for an explanation, and I hoped you might spare me a few minutes.”
“Sure. Just let me close my office door.” He was an architect in a large practice with four partners. He put her on hold, and a few seconds later returned. “Okay. What can I do for you?”
“I know the world of nonprofits is enormous, and it was your wife who moved in those circles, not you so much, but do you recall Eileen talking about something called the Gernsback Institute?”
He thought a moment but then said, “Means nothing.”
“What about the Seedling Fund?”
“That neither.”
“Now a couple of names. David James Michael?”
“Mmmmm…sorry, no.”
“Quinn Eubanks?”
“I’m not always good with names.”
“The seminar in Boston where Eileen had the migraine—you said that event was a presentation of Harvard University.”
“Yes. You can look it up.”
“I did. But I’m wondering if she attended any other conference shortly before or after that one.”
“Eileen was passionate about her work. She had a busy schedule. I can’t recall, but I could find out for you.”
“I’d be grateful, Sidney. Say by this time tomorrow?”
“You really do still have that monkey on your back.”
“Don’t forget those suicide statistics I gave you.”
“I remember. But as I told you at the time—look around at all the craziness in the world, all the violence and hatred these days, the economic crises, and you don’t need any other explanation for why more people would be more depressed than ever.”
“Except that Eileen wasn’t depressed.”
“Well, no. But—”
“And neither was Nick.”
“She wasn’t depressed,” Sidney said, “but that’s what I tried to call you about the other day. You remember the note she left?”
Jane quoted the opening of it from memory: “?‘Sweet Sayso says he’s lonely all these years….’?”
“We didn’t share the contents widely at first,” Sidney said, “because…well, because it was so strange, not like Eileen. We didn’t want people to remember her as…mentally ill, I guess. Recently, her only living aunt, Faye, found out about the note and solved the mystery. Sort of. For a while when Eileen was four and five, she had an imaginary friend named Sayso. She talked to him, made up stories about him. Like that kind of thing always does, it passed. Who knows why at the end she would flash back to that?”
Jane shivered at the idea of a long-forgotten imaginary friend calling a fifty-year-old woman to join him in death, though if she’d been asked to explain the chill, she couldn’t have done so.
“How are you doing?” Sidney asked.
“Good enough. I don’t sleep well.”
“Me neither. Sometimes, if I snore myself awake, I apologize to her for the noise. I mean out loud. I forget she’s not there.”
“I’ve been traveling a lot, staying in motels,” she said, “and I can’t sleep in a double bed. Nick was a big guy. So it has to be queen-or king-size. Otherwise, it’s like admitting he’s gone, and I don’t sleep at all.”
“Are you still on leave from the Bureau?”
“Yeah.”
“Take my advice, go back to work. Real work, instead of chasing an explanation for something that can’t ever be fully explained.”
“Maybe I will,” she lied.
“I don’t mean to noodge, but work has helped me.”
“Maybe I will,” she lied again.
“Give me your new phone number so I can call you when I find out if Eileen was at another conference around that time.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said. “Thanks, Sidney. You’re a peach.”
When she hung up, she appeared to be the only person remaining in the park. The lawns and pathways were deserted to the limits of vision. Not one pigeon strutting. Not one scurrying squirrel.
At the wrong time, in the wrong place, a city could be as isolate as the Arctic.
On the flanking streets to the north and south, traffic passed: grumble of engines, swish of tires, hiss of air brakes, occasional bleat of horn, rattle of a loosely fit manhole cover. Even as she stepped away from the sizzle of the spritzing fountain, the traffic noise seemed curiously muffled, as if the park were enclosed with insulated dual-pane glass.
The air remained calm under pressure, the sky full of iron-dark mountains that would soon collapse in a deluge, the city expectant, the windows of buildings shimmering with light that normally would be faded by the sun at this hour, drivers switching on headlights, the vehicles gliding through the faux dusk like submersibles following undersea lanes.
Jane had taken only a few steps from the fountain when she detected a buzz like swarming wasps. At first it seemed to come from above her, and then from behind, but when she turned in a circle and faced again the grove of palms toward which she had been moving, she saw the source hovering twenty feet away: a drone.
16
* * *
THE HIGH-END CIVILIAN-MODEL quadcopter drone, a small fraction of the size of any military version, resembled a miniature unmanned moon lander combined with an insect. It appeared similar to the DJI Inspire 1 Pro, though somewhat larger, about seven thousand dollars’ worth of aeronautics. These were used by real-estate companies to film for-sale properties and were increasingly put to work by many other commercial enterprises. They were also favored by well-heeled hobbyists who ranged from legitimate drone enthusiasts to the contemporary equivalent of Peeping Toms.
Hovering only eight or ten feet off the ground, in the shadows under the cascading crowns of the phoenix palms, it was an effigy of the feared machine god of a thousand movies and stories, a lighter-than-air menace with heavy-as-a-sledgehammer impact that sent a jolt of fear through her. The craft was in violation of all the rules applying to civilian drone use, at least as Jane knew them.
She didn’t imagine that its presence here could be a mere coincidence. Its three-axis gimbaled camera remained trained on her.
Somehow she’d given them her location. What her mistake might have been did not matter right now; she could work that out later.
If a backup battery provided the craft with twice the flight time of an Inspire 1 Pro, it could remain in the air for half an hour to forty minutes. Which meant it must have been launched from somewhere in the vicinity, most likely from a surveillance van.
The drone operator would monitor her until enough officers arrived to arrest her. Or maybe they weren’t from a legitimate law-enforcement agency, in which case there would be no officers, and they would just…take her. They were after her. The omnipotent, almost mystical They. But she had no idea who They might be.
In any case, they were already near.