? ? ?
It was close to two a.m. when Berenbaum finally called. I’d figured I’d be tossing and turning all night waiting, but somehow the phone caught me in the deepest part of my sleep cycle and by the time I woke up I had already been talking to him for a second or two. The first thing I was completely aware of was his laughter.
“Are you high?” he said.
“I was asleep,” I said. “What did I say?”
“Something about handcuffs. I’m not sure I want to know.”
“I’m awake now,” I said. “Let me get to the computer and call you right back.”
At dinner, Teo had been impressed enough with my progress to give me permission to use his computer during the night. So I threw on my robe over the tank top and shorts I’d been sleeping in, wheeled my way down the hall, and knocked on Teo’s door. He answered drowsy and shirtless—ye gods—before turning without a word, climbing back up the ladder to his loft bed, and flopping back onto the mattress.
“There’s no way you’re sleeping through this,” I said. “I’m going to be talking the whole time.”
“I’m not sleeping anyway,” Teo grunted.
With a sigh, I wheeled myself over to the desk underneath him, shoving his chair out of the way and opening up a web browser before dialing the phone.
“You ready to do a little snooping?” I said to Berenbaum when he answered.
“I’ve got his usernames and passwords and secret questions and all that. For a checking account and two different credit cards.”
“How does a fairy get a credit card?”
“Most of them don’t, but Johnny’s got a whole fake identity set up, complete with job history and credit rating.”
“Why?”
“Even before all this went down, he was pretty sure he was going to retire here. He’s spent too much time on this side. Are you at the computer?”
“What am I looking for?”
“Go to the B of A site and put in the username Rivenholt.”
“So what happens to you if he starts, uh, fading?”
“You’ve seen my last couple of films, right?”
I decided not to answer that one. “If he spends more time in Arcadia, would it cure him?”
“Would take a long, long time. I’m sixty-seven years old, Millie. Maybe I’ll be around twenty years, maybe twenty minutes. Whatever time I have left, I’d like to have Johnny around.”
“We’ll find him,” I said. But as I entered Rivenholt’s info into the sign-in screens, I felt a twinge of guilt over the cop and the missing girl.
I wasn’t sure how much I should share with Berenbaum. Caryl, Berenbaum, and now this cop were all looking for the same man for different reasons. I honestly wasn’t sure I trusted any of them. My loyalty should have been to Caryl, but she had been the least forthcoming of all. She admitted she was damaged, she didn’t trust me with her phone number, and I’d seen wood rot when she looked at it funny.
“Here we go,” I said, looking at Rivenholt’s transaction record. I blinked at a charge from Amtrak. “Looks like someone skipped town.”
“I see that.” Berenbaum’s voice on the other end of the line was quiet; I’d have given anything to know what he was thinking.
“I wish it said where he was going,” I said.
“For that, check out credit card number two,” said Beren-baum. “Place d’Armes, that’s a hotel in New Orleans. Big fey hot spot. We stayed there when we were shooting Red Cotton.”
“Why would he take a train? That’ll take days. Plus, Union Station is creepy.”
“It’s his facade. Works like one of those ankle bracelets. If he goes outside the perimeter, some kind of alarm goes off and he becomes trackable. But Caryl says train tracks act like a signal scrambler or whatever; something about parallel lines of iron between him and the earth. Anyway, the good news is that an airplane could easily get there before he does.”
“Imagine his surprise when the Project greets him at the New Orleans station and offers to take his bags.” I was already on the Amtrak site, clicking and searching. “Wait, wait, hold up a second,” I said.
“What is it?”
“Would he be trackable on a bus?”
“If he was outside the perimeter, yeah.”
“There are only three times a week he can take a train straight to New Orleans,” I said. “Soonest one after his ticket purchase is three o’clock tomorrow. We can still catch him!”
There was a short silence on the end of the line. “Millie,” he said quietly, “I don’t think you ought to be working for the Arcadia Project.”
I blinked in the darkness. “Why not?”
“Because you ought to be working for me.”
21
My face flamed so hot I was afraid I would fry the circuits of my phone. It was a joke, right? I bit my tongue.
“You want to direct, right?” he said.
“What makes you think that?”
“Millie. I’m a UCLA alum, and I’m on the selection committee for the Seattle festival. When these words pop up in the news, I look at the pictures.”