“Upstairs,” I said.
“I was thinking my place,” she said, clearly a reference to Thomas clicking away upstairs.
“He won’t be coming out of his room. Sometime around midnight, or later, he’ll hit the bathroom and brush his teeth and pack it in. We’re not going to see him before that.”
So we slipped upstairs. I steered Julie into the bedroom at the end of the hall, and over to the queen-sized bed my father had slept in, alone—so far as I knew—since my mother’s passing.
“Isn’t this your dad’s room?” Julie asked.
“This is where I’ve been sleeping. Would you like to go out to the car, like last time?”
She gave me a look. “No, this’ll do.”
I barely had the door closed when Julie started unbuttoning my shirt. I slid my hands under her sweater and felt her warm skin under my palms. My mouth was on hers as we moved to the bed. Julie pushed me onto my back and straddled me, reaching down and unbuckling my belt.
“I know some excellent stress reduction techniques,” she said, swinging her legs back off me so she could slide off my jeans and boxers. She tossed them onto the floor, got back on top, crossed her arms to the opposite sides, and whisked her top off in one swift motion, exposing a lacy, purple bra. She gave her head a shake to get her hair back into place.
“Purple?” I said. “Is that the same—”
“Oh please. I was a skinny, 110-pound school brat.”
“Just asking.”
She reached behind her back in that way women can that makes you think their elbows are going to snap, and unhooked and tossed her bra in the direction of my jeans.
“Come here,” I said. She leaned over, allowing her nipples to brush lightly across my chest.
“Ray!”
Julie sat bolt upright. “Jesus!” she said under her breath.
My heart went off like a trip-hammer. “Fuck,” I whispered.
I could hear Thomas’s door open. “Ray! Come here! Ray?” I’d never heard him call for me this way before.
I went to call out, then stopped myself. I didn’t want to bring him in here. Julie half-naked. Me entirely so.
“Where are you?” he called. I heard the guest bedroom door open. “Ray? Are you in Dad’s room?”
Julie looked at me, wide-eyed. She whispered, “You have to do something.”
“Thomas! Give me a sec—”
The door flung open. Thomas walked straight in. Didn’t even look at Julie as she hopped off me and grabbed the bedspread to cover herself. As she did so, she exposed me, and my current state, completely.
“Ray!” he shouted. “It’s gone!”
“Thomas, for Christ’s sake, can you see—”
“It’s gone! The head’s gone.”
“What?” I said, swinging my legs off the bed and reaching down for my boxers. “What are you talking about?”
“You have to see this!” he said. He exited the room and ran back down the hall to his own.
I followed him, wearing nothing but my underwear. Julie had struggled back into her top, not bothering with her bra, and came along after me.
As I went into Thomas’s room I saw that he had all his monitors focused on the window on Orchard Street. It sure looked like the same window, except this time there was nothing in the frame. It was black. No more bag-wrapped head.
“What the hell?” I said.
Thomas stood there, pointing. “Where did it go? What happened to it?”
I stammered, “They must, they, I guess, they must have updated it. Taken pictures of the street again.”
“No!” he said. “Everything else is exactly the same! The same people on the street. The same cars! Everything’s the same except the head is gone!”
I dropped myself into Thomas’s chair and looked at the screen. “Son of a bitch,” I said.
Thomas grabbed a sheet of paper off the table and handed it to me. A printout of the original image, like the one he’d sent with me to New York. “It’s exactly the same, right?”
I studied the printout. “It’s the same, Thomas, it’s the same.”
Julie sidled up next to Thomas, then took the printout from me and studied it, not saying anything.
“Why, Ray?” Thomas asked. “Why is it gone? Why is it gone, right after you went into the city to check it out?”
I was shaking my head. I couldn’t make any sense of it. In the last twenty-four hours, someone had gone into this site and wiped out the image. Since I had been down there. Since I’d knocked on the door and had a few words with the neighbor.
I felt a chill. And not just because I was sitting there with almost no clothes on.
Julie touched my brother gently on the arm. “Okay, you know what, Thomas? Start from the beginning. Tell me all about what you’ve seen, and what you think it means.”
THIRTY-NINE
LEWIS Blocker called Howard Talliman Monday morning.