“It’s fearful,” Tom corrected, “but it’s safe. At least they think it is. It allows them to think they know the whole size and shape of their world. Except for when you kids are talking, you almost never hear someone talk about the world that was. People don’t ask one another where they’re from. I mean, they kind of know, and certainly if you look around, Mountainside is a microcosm of global diversity. Doc Gurijala was born in northern India, Old Man Sanchez came here from Oaxaca in Mexico. The Mekong brothers are Vietnamese. Chong’s Chinese, our dad was Japanese. And yet as far as you could tell from conversations around town, we’re all ‘from Mountainside.’ End of story. The rest of the world no longer exists. Do you know why?”
“I think so,” said Benny. “If they talk about where they’re from, they have to talk about what happened. And … who they left behind.”
“Right. Fear fueled by grief.” Tom rubbed his face with his palms.
“What about the bounty hunters and … and what you do? People have to talk about the outside world for that.”
Tom nodded approval. “That’s true, and it’s a cultural quirk that surfaces once in a while, but once the closure is accomplished, then the client goes right back into their shell. There are plenty of people who were clients of mine in the past, who walk by me on the street without a flicker of recognition. Either they pretend to ignore me, so that they don’t have to think about the service I provided for them, or they truly have forgotten it, as if a door closed in their minds. I can count the number of former clients on the fingers of one hand who will even talk to me about the closure job I did for them.” He paused. “Jessie Riley is one of them.”
Benny’s teacup paused an inch from his lips. “What? Nix’s mom was a client of yours?”
“Yes. Years ago.”
“But … but Nix said that it was just her and her mom.”
“Nowadays, sure. But everyone has family somewhere, Ben. Nix had a father and two older brothers.”
“First Night?”
“First Night,” Tom agreed.
“God! Does Nix even know?”
“That’s hard to say. If Jessie told her, then either Nix has chosen not to say anything to her friends or she’s blocked it out like everyone else does.”
Benny shook his head. “Nix would have told me.”
“Are you sure?”
“She would have told me. Especially after I told her …”
Benny’s voice trailed off and Tom nodded. “After you told her about our trip to the Ruin?”
“Yes.”
“It’s up to her what she chooses to tell you, but as far as what I’m about to share, that’s confidential. Family business. You can’t tell her about this.”
“But—”
“We never break a client’s confidence. I need your word on this.”
Benny finished his tea as he thought it through. He didn’t want to agree, but he couldn’t construct a single reason why not.
“Yeah,” he said, “okay.”
“Good. Now we get to what you want to hear, because the story of Nix’s family is tied to the Lost Girl.”
“Wait!” said Benny, “In the story the artist guy told me, there was a woman who had a baby. Was that baby Nix?”
Tom sat back and cocked his head to one side. “How long ago was First Night?”
“Almost fourteen years ago and … oh. Right. Nix will be fifteen in a couple of months. Can’t be her.”
“My brother, the math genius.”
“Sorry.”
“There is a connection, though, but it’s not a blood link, not a family tie,” Tom said. “I was doing the closure job for Jessie Riley. Rob had done erosion portraits of Mike Riley and the boys, Greg and Danny, and Jessie said that when she fled her house, she’d slammed the door behind her. Very few zoms can turn doorknobs, and most of them don’t have the coordination to climb out of a window. So unless someone else opened the door, there was a good chance they’d still be there.”
“How long ago was this?”
“About five years ago. Remember the first time I left you with Fran and Randy Kirsch? I left on a Sunday, as I remember, heading northeast. There were a lot more zoms roaming free back then, and the farther I went from Mountainside, the more of them I saw. Most of them were singles, walking along, following some movement—a deer, a rabbit, whatever—but there were groups of them, too. Biggest group I saw was about fifty, standing in the middle of an intersection. Probably they’d come down different roads and met at the intersection and had nowhere else to go. Sounds weird, doesn’t it? But that’s what happens if there’s nothing for them to hunt and nothing to attract them. They just stop.”