Angsley looked back at him simply. “No.” His eyes were glowing with fervor.
They rounded a bend in the river, and the city appeared before them like a gift: the golden stupas of the Royal Palace, the glinting red and green temple roofs.
If they could do it … if they had verifiable cases … then they would be able to do what nobody yet had done—not William James, not John Edgar Coover at Stanford, not J. B. Rhine at Duke, who shut himself in the lab all those years with his ESP cards. They would have found evidence of the survival of consciousness after death.
“We’ll need to go back tomorrow, first thing in the morning,” Anderson said slowly. He was working it out as he spoke. “We’ll get the girl and bring her to Phichit, see what she can identify. I’ll meet you in the lobby at five thirty.”
Angsley chuckled and swore softly. “All right.”
There was a pause. Anderson could scarcely breathe. “Bobby,” Anderson murmured. “There are really other cases like this one?”
Angsley smiled. He inhaled on his cigarette and let forth a long plume of smoke.
The light on the stupas was blinding in the setting sun, but Anderson couldn’t stop looking. He could hardly wait until morning. There was so much work to be done.
*
“Recalculating.”
How many times had the GPS said that? Where was he?
He’d taken a wrong turn somewhere.
Anderson pulled over to the side of the muddy road and got out of the car. Trucks zoomed by him on the highway, which stank of asphalt, exhaust, a false sense of importance: America. He looked around for road signs; last he’d noticed, he’d been somewhere outside of Philadelphia. How far had he gone astray?
He tried to shake the sights and sounds of Thailand out of his head. He felt his friend’s presence near him, as if he had just left his side.
His best friend, gone now; it was all gone: the Institute, that fine edifice he and Angsley and Angsley’s money had built. And what excitement they’d had in building it, when the field was theirs to discover and the cases flowed one after the other, sending them off: to Thailand, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, India, each case compelling and new. They’d had a good ride of it, too, until Angsley died suddenly, six months after Sheila, walking up a hillside on his property in Virginia, his heart seizing and stopping, just like that.
At the wake (Catholic, traditional—Anderson should have known right then that the widow would slowly drain the money from the foundation like the blood in her husband’s veins) there was a look of surprise stamped on Angsley’s face even the funeral director hadn’t been able to erase. Oh, my friend, he had thought, looking at that familiar body plumped with formaldehyde, rouge on its cheeks, headed for the family mausoleum—not the burial you’d imagined, your old bones bare on a cliff, gleaming in the sun.
Oh, my friend. You beat me to it. Now you know, and I don’t.
Angsley was dead. The Institute was closed, its files shipped off. There was only one thing left to do, only one more case to investigate. All he had to do was finish it.
Sixteen
Ashview, Virginia, made Janie nervous. It was a suburb of D.C., full of the kind of Stepford McMansions she had always scorned: homes lacking any sense of history, taking up every inch of the space allotted with vast unwieldy garages. And yet … she had to admit there might be something enticing, for a child, in these new, oversize houses, the large bright green front yards, the oak trees that lined the streets too neatly, their green branches arching over the road.
They had driven down the main street a few times. They stopped by three different schools (one of which, apparently, was Tommy Moran’s). Each was appealing in its own way, with its large ball field and playground.
“Do you recognize anything?” Anderson kept asking, but Noah said nothing. He seemed stunned, distracted, watching the buildings from the backseat, murmuring to himself every now and then in a singsong voice: “Ashview, Ashview.”
“We’ve been through here already,” Janie said to Anderson.
He had picked them up at the station and proceeded directly downtown.
“One more time. We’ll take a different route.”
He wheeled the car around and they headed back through the town’s thoroughfare. Janie had it memorized by now. Starbucks, pizza place, church, church, bank, gas station, hardware store, town hall, fire department: sliding by again and again like a town in a dream.
She glanced at Anderson. He drove stiffly, his jaw set with a stubborn resolve. He had twenty-four years on her and sixty-four on Noah, and there was no sign of fatigue in him. “I’m not sure he recognizes anything.”
“That’s not unusual. Some children are more attached to the actual house than the town. People remember different things.”