“You haven’t touched your juice,” she says. “It really is excellent cider.”
“With all due respect, I didn’t come for the refreshments and the pleasant conversation. I came to help these people and come back with some answers.”
She nods. “The funny thing about Johann Fell,” she says, “is that he never wanted any of this. He perfected the technology, but he resisted this application of it. So as much as I owe to him—an immeasurable debt, really—his death was, in some ways, the event that made all this possible. But Caesura was my idea—my baby, really. Do you know why he opposed it?”
Cooper shakes his head and sips his juice.
“He thought it was inhumane,” says Holliday. “Imagine that: inhumane to let people live again with no memories of their past. He worried that this hole in the mind, this abyss, would simply be filled with doubts and fears and questions about what exactly used to be there before. I disagreed, obviously. Do you know what that abyss looked like to me, Cal?”
“What’s that?”
“Freedom,” she says. “So the idea of seeding the Blinds with innocents—with letting people believe maybe they were simply witnesses to the unimaginable, shielded from their own traumas—that was my idea. My concession to Johann. After he died, I discarded it completely. There are no innocents in Caesura. But I allowed the fiction to persist.”
“But why?” Cooper’s throat is drier now, tighter, despite the drink. He feels the hot tendrils of the day’s climbing sun snake through the shade of the vines overhead and find his neck and set him to sweating.
“To give them hope,” she says. “It was the one flaw in Caesura, from the conception. If you leave the world and lose not only all contact but all knowledge of your previous life, what will keep you going every day? What gets you out of bed? The answer is simple: the same thing that keeps any of us going—hope. The hope that you’re different. That you’re special, somehow. That maybe, after all, you’re innocent.”
“But Fran is not an innocent. None of them are. They’re all criminals.”
“I’m afraid so,” says Holliday. “That’s the nature of the experiment.”
“That’s an awfully harsh experiment to carry out on actual people.”
“Remember, Cal, these people didn’t come to us with a whole lot of other options. For them, this program is an opportunity. Really, it’s a kind of gift. But what kind of gift, exactly? Answering that question—that’s what keeps me going every day.” Holliday takes another sip, her eyes on Cooper, watching him like a vivisectionist, her dissection now complete, she’s laid him out on that cold slab of a table and learned all she needs to know.
“Either way, she needs to leave,” says Cooper, his mouth parched, the words whittled to a dry whisper.
“She’s free to leave at any time,” says Holliday. “She just has to weigh the consequences.” She tents her long fingers in front of her face. She has an intelligent face. A kind face. A face that expertly camouflages the kind of mind that is well accustomed to twisting people into useful knots. “Go back to your town, Sheriff. Keep the peace. Don’t concern yourself with matters beyond your position.”
“I want her file,” says Cooper, cornered, stubborn, with no cards left to play but not yet willing to rise from the table.
“Trust me,” she says. “I’m tempted to show you. I’m a scientist. I like variables. But are you sure you want to know who she really is?”
“I want her file. Don’t forget, Doctor, that I’ve been there, in your town, in the middle of your experiment, every day for eight years. So I know a few things, too. Things people might want to know.”
Holliday folds her hands on the cold table. “Should I take that as a threat?”
“Take it as a variable. For your experiment.”
“I said I like variables, Cal, not tantrums.”
“Someday you can explain the difference to me.” He stands. “I want her file. I want you to fax it to me by the end of the day. If you’re worried about whether it will compromise my ability to do my job, then you can consider this my resignation. You either send me those files and I’ll quit and keep quiet, or you don’t send me those files, and I’ll quit and start writing my memoirs.”
She regards him like he’s a well-trained animal that’s disobeyed an order, and now she’s wondering if the fault lies in the animal, the training, or both. “Don’t forget—we’re on the same side, Cal,” she says finally. “I’ll consider your request and let you know what I decide. But I won’t endanger the fabric of this entire undertaking for one resident. I can’t do that.”
“It’s two residents. And one’s a child. Who never asked to be here, and who’s innocent. Truly innocent.”
“As I said, I’ll consider it.”
And it might just be Cooper’s imagination, or some trick of the shadows from the strangulated sunlight streaming through the vines overhead, but as she rises from her bench, she seems not angry but almost impressed with him, even proud, in the manner of a researcher watching a favorite rat, after years of struggling, years of failing, finally nose its way out of a maze.
Then again, Cooper thinks, as he starts his truck and pulls out of the driveway, if he’s come to understand anything in the last eight years of his life, it’s that the only reward for the triumphant rat is a bigger, trickier maze.
17.
DAWES PULLS INTO A PARKING LOT by a row of town houses in Abilene, then checks the address again.
She already stopped at the shipping store that houses the P.O. Box, a rented box that was a month in arrears, so she easily convinced the teenaged manager to hand over Gonzalez’s information. Her hunch—that the postbox was rented out by one Ellis Gonzalez—turned out to be correct, which means Gonzalez was running the mail into Caesura. Now Dawes sits in the dented Aveo in the parking lot, looking at a slumping row of gray town houses. A few laundry lines crisscross the cramped lawns, which are separated by peeling wooden partitions.
She gets out of the car and rings the bell of Gonzalez’s apartment. She’s not sure what she’ll ask him if he answers. Why he’s sending bullets to residents of the Blinds, for starters. But there’s no one home. Okay, now what, Lindy? She’s got only a few hours before she has to make the long drive back to the Blinds. She spots a kid on a low-slung BMX bike, turning circles in the parking lot. The kid’s maybe ten, eleven, dirty-faced and sullen, wearing a San Antonio Spurs ballcap with a brim so flat you could set a teacup on it.
She waves him over. “Hey, do you know the gentleman who lives here? Do you know when he might be home?”
The kid smirks. “I dunno—never?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Lady, that dude’s dead. He got shot in some gas station robbery like a week ago.”
“He robbed a gas station?”