“Are you busy? I can come back,” she says.
“No. Come on in,” he says, and sits up. “And, yes, you can take the car.”
“I’m sorry—?”
“The emergency car. Orson Calhoun told me you were asking about it. I assume you want to track down Ellis Gonzalez and ask him a whole bunch of those questions you’ve been collecting in your notebook.”
“I—” She’s stumped. She had a whole lie prepped and ready, a good one, but apparently she won’t be needing it now. “Yes, I had considered it.”
“I saw Lyndon Lancaster earlier,” says Cooper. “He told me you were asking about Ellis. He mentioned something about Abilene to you?”
“That’s right.”
“Sometimes you seem to forget—people in this town love to talk. And I’m the closest thing they have to a shrink. So things tend to get back to me.” Cooper glances over the paperwork on his desk, as though he’s ready to move on to the next order of business. “I think it’s definitely worth a follow-up. You should go.”
“Really? Because before—”
“What is it they say about gift horses and mouths, Deputy Dawes?” Cooper looks up at her and gives a little smile. “You were right. This is a serious matter. If it means heading off the reservation for a day, so be it. I’d offer you my truck, but I’ve got my own errand to run tomorrow. I just made an appointment to see Dr. Holliday.”
Dr. Holliday is not a name that comes up in conversation very often, and when it does, it’s typically spoken with reverence. Dawes can’t help but ask: “What’s it about?”
“I considered what you said about Gerald Dean and Hubert Gable. This incident with Gable is a serious breach. So I’m going to personally visit Dr. Holliday and put in an information request. Get Gable’s file unsealed, and hopefully Dean’s and Colfax’s, too. Let’s finally get some real answers, right?”
“I’ve never met Dr. Holliday,” Dawes says. “Is she—what they say she is?”
“That all depends on what they say she is.”
“You know—impressive.”
“That, she definitely is. If you think about it, none of this”—Cooper gestures toward the door to the town beyond—“would exist had it not sprung from the depths of her fertile mind.”
“I thought it was Dr. Fell who founded this place.”
“Fell pioneered the technology, but I think he had other applications in mind,” says Cooper. “In any case, he died before Caesura ever opened. So this particular forsaken experiment?” He leans back in the swivel chair and holds his hands wide. “This is all Holliday’s baby. She makes the rules. And, if I prove charming enough tomorrow, we’ll see if she’s willing to make an exception.” He looks back down at his paperwork, by way of a dismissal. “You have yourself a good trip, Deputy.” Let her drive off and track down Gonzalez, he thinks, as he pretends to peruse a form. Let her marry Gonzalez for all he cares. So long as she’s out of his hair for one day. Just one day—a day that promises to be quite eventful here in town.
“Thank you, sir. I’ll let you know whatever I find out.” When he doesn’t answer, Dawes lets herself out of the trailer.
12.
FRAN CHECKS EVERY DRYER for the missing sock but finds nothing. She rummages through the lost and found box—also nothing. Isaac, meanwhile, has enacted a temporary speedway, with a single toy race car, on the peeling linoleum floor of the Laundromat. He races the car in a noisy circuit, around and around, making rubbery race-car gear-shift sounds with his mouth. She watches him for a moment: lost in a world of his own invention. How easily he escapes. To a hidden place with its own rules and regulations, its own dramas and crises. That’s no surprise, she thinks. It’s all he has. An elaborate imaginary realm that only he can access. She hasn’t asked him about the missing cigar box and doesn’t plan to, not yet, at least. He’s so alone in this world, she thinks. He needs the solace of his own secrets.
From above the row of washers, the TV drones—someone switched it back to the all-news channel, apparently.
—has become a national story. Vincent, the tech tycoon who was injured in a brutal domestic assault and lay in a coma for over a year, attracting national headlines—she looks up to see a man in a polo shirt, handsome, smiling, at a podium—and only now, after many long years of recovery, is looking to restart his political ambitions—this apparent politician has a warm smile, he’s appealing, she has to admit—after making his fortune in the science of predicting elections, he’ll now try his luck at his own Senate run. Addressing the media earlier today, Vincent—the man, familiar to her now, she knows this face, she realizes, he’s the same man from the news report she saw the other day, it hits her with a painful twinge, the whine of the TV now making her head throb slightly; the man’s talking now, seated, in an interview, coolly answering questions, in soothing tones. He’s a natural, she thinks, though his voice, she can tell, is still affected somehow by whatever accident he endured, his words ever so slightly slurred—what’s in the past is past, and I can only wish her the best. What I’m interested in is moving forward, together with the good people of the state of California, if they see fit to entrust me with this. For years, I studied the best ways to predict how people would vote. Now I’m just trying to win those votes the old-fashioned way—he chuckles, warmly, on cue, but believable nonetheless—but it certainly is unusual to find myself on the other side of the ballot, so to speak—the interviewer nods, volleys a few more questions and the sharp chatter of the TV surges, stoking Fran’s burgeoning headache; the edges of her vision blur; this one’s worse than ever; her stomach lurches; she feels like she might tumble; she shoots an arm out to steady herself on a nearby machine. Now Isaac’s tugging at her shirt, now he’s asking if she’s okay, his voice distant and tinny—
Then it passes. She finds the nearby remote and mutes the TV. Now the hopeful politician is simply smiling and nodding warmly in muted silence.
So strange that once upon a time that kind of ambient electronic gibberish was the soundtrack of her everyday life, she thinks. That she actually found the staccato of the TV comforting as background noise. Once you spend enough time alone out here in the middle of nowhere, with silence as your counsel, on your steps at two A.M. counting endless stars, you’ll forget how you ever managed to filter all that toxic white noise out, let alone find it welcome.
Given all the peace she’s found out here.
Save for the occasional gunshot.