“He’s a green energy guy.”
Dryden and Marnie both turned. The speaker was a college kid with long hair tied back in a ponytail, standing among the shelves Marnie had just come from. He had answered her without looking up from the book he was paging through. He looked supremely calm.
“Are you sure the name is Hayden Eversman?” Marnie asked.
The guy nodded, eyes still on his book. “I read about him in Wired.”
“Thanks,” Marnie said.
The guy offered a nod and said nothing more.
Marnie crossed to Dryden, smiling a little. “Low-tech approach,” she said. “Let’s see them monitor that.”
“Don’t tempt them,” Dryden said.
*
In ten minutes of manual searching in the periodical section, they found four different articles about Hayden Eversman. One was the Wired write-up the college guy must have seen. The other three were in Forbes, Scientific American, and Business Week.
Dryden and Marnie split the articles between them to scan through them more quickly. Dryden started with the Forbes article, which was actually a long interview. He found what he was looking for almost immediately: The interviewer described arriving at Eversman’s fifteen-million-dollar home in Carmel, California. There was even a photo of the place, a sprawling ten-acre estate surrounded by wooded highlands above the seaside town. The grounds were fenced in by a brick property wall, and centered in the space was a colonial brick house that looked more suited to New Hampshire than California. One feature in particular seemed to explain why this photo accompanied the article: The house’s roof was covered entirely by solar panels.
“We got it,” Dryden said.
*
They spared another three minutes photocopying all four articles, then got back on the road. Carmel was two hours away if they pushed it. Dryden drove while Marnie read the copied articles aloud.
Hayden Eversman was forty-one years old. He had a wife and a young daughter. He had spent most of his adult life funding green energy start-ups, and clearly had made good at it. He was a scratch golfer and a private pilot, though by his own admission it was hard to make time for flying. He was notoriously protective of his privacy, especially with regard to his family.
There was no mention of an interest in politics.
There was nothing that hinted at a conflict with anyone powerful—beyond the obvious understanding that big oil companies were no fans of his.
That was it.
Marnie folded the articles and stuffed them into the center console compartment.
They rode in silence for a minute, and then she opened the plastic case and turned the machine on. Static, soft and inexorable as the flow of a stream. As the flow of time.
“Feels weird not to have it on,” Marnie said. “Like we might … miss something. Doesn’t it?”
Dryden thought of the hollows under Claire’s eyes again. He leaned and glanced at himself in the rearview mirror, and saw the faint beginnings of his own dark circles.
“It does,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“I keep coming back to the news report about the trailer,” Marnie said.
They were an hour from Carmel, rolling north along a valley that snaked among baked-brown hills.
“The news report that ended up not being true,” Marnie said. “About how the girls were dead. Burned in that cage.”
She was quiet for a while, then said, “In some way, it really must have happened, right? That original version. It happened, and it got reported, and because of that … it didn’t happen—you stopped it that time.”
“I guess you could think of it that way.”
“Some version of me really showed up at that scene,” Marnie said.
Dryden imagined she was picturing it, whether she wanted to or not: the nightmare she would have rolled up to if things had gone differently. The trailer, probably burned away to nothing but a few blackened supports. The cage intact within the charred ruin. The bodies. The smell.
Marnie stared forward at the road and the valley, the folds of the terrain revealing themselves one by one, like secrets.
“What Whitcomb said about the Group,” she said, “that they’re afraid to change the past … would you ever try it? I mean, if you had to? If something bad happened … something you couldn’t live with … would you change the past to fix it? Even if you had no idea what would happen to you in the present?”
Dryden thought about it. Whitcomb’s description of the idea—and Whitcomb’s own fear of it—had made perfect sense. What would it feel like, to do a thing like that?
“I don’t know if I would,” Dryden said. It was the only honest answer he had.
“I can think of times I would have been tempted to do it,” Marnie said.