Jill
THE BREAK-IN
July 12
IT WAS SIX-THIRTY on a hot July Friday. Jill was weary when she stepped off the bus around the corner of her block. She set her mother’s old, scuffed leather briefcase on the sidewalk and closed her eyes for a moment to collect herself. She’d had a rough day. A lot of meetings, a lot of details, two important missed phone calls from Kumasi that she would have to follow up on this evening from home. Maybe the schools were making a difference, and they wanted to let her know?
Fat chance. More likely they were going to cause a civil war or something.
A whisper of air brushed her cheek and rustled the leaves of the oaks that lined the street. It was safe now to breathe in the scent of the Millers’ new-mown lawn and Alice Jenkins’s full-blooming Eleanor Roosevelt roses.
When she rounded the corner, the sight of a Metro police cruiser parked in front of her house broke her brief tranquility. Five or six neighbors stood on the lawn. Emmie’s au pair pointed at the house, then at the street, while the cop took notes.
She loped in awkward, sweaty haste toward her house. Manfred was lying on the front porch in front of the door, which was odd; Jill had left her in a fenced area of the backyard this morning. She jumped up and ran to Jill.
The officer turned when the au pair pointed and said, “That’s Jill.”
“Oh.” He was one of the joggers she’d met the day she moved in. This time he was in uniform, with a name badge. “Detective Kandell. Daniel, right?”
“Bad news, I’m afraid. Someone broke into—”
“I called the police,” said the au pair. Jill couldn’t remember her name. “It was only an hour ago. Really, I couldn’t believe it at first. Broad daylight, and—”
Kandell quieted the au pair with a slight, polite movement of his right hand. “I’d like to ask Ms. Dance some questions, in private. Could we sit on the porch?”
Jill said, “Thanks a lot,” to the au pair. She led the officer up the stairs. Manfred followed. Jill asked, “Do you mind coming in? I need something to drink.”
“That’s fine.” Detective Kandell’s voice was professional and even, and had a calming effect on Jill. His eyes held a hint of humor, which she supposed he was trying to hide, since she could see nothing funny about this. As she got out her keys, she asked, “How did he get in?”
“The front door’s open.”
It was, just slightly, as if it had been closed in a hurry behind someone and the latch had not caught. “I’m sure I locked it this morning.”
“He came in through the front door. He left, quite rapidly, out the back, through a window that he broke. A shredded bit of his suit indicates that your dog bit him when he dropped into the yard.”
“Good girl!” Manfred wagged her tail.
“Would it be possible for your dog to stay on the porch while we go inside? I don’t want her to disturb anything.”
Jill told Manfred to sit, lie down, and to stay with quick hand signals. Kandell raised his eyebrows. “I’m impressed.” He pushed the door gently with his foot. It swung open, creaking, and revealed the wide foyer, the long staircase to the right, and the hallway to the kitchen straight ahead.
“Please just stand here for a moment. Can I take your briefcase?” His fingers brushed hers as he lifted it from her hand. “Take your time. Do you see anything different?”
“No,” she said slowly, drawing out the word. “Not yet … Wait a minute.” She pushed the door back to full open with her foot, so that it doubled back against the wall, affording her a full view of the library. She took a few quick steps and stopped. “The ladder.”
The room smelled of beeswax and the peculiar smell that old books, when they reach a certain density, exude—a mixture of dust, cracked bindings, and inexorably mildewing paper. “The rolling ladder has been moved since this morning.”
“You’re sure?”
She nodded.
The large partner’s desk, which had come from her grandparents’ house, looked as it had when she had left this morning—strewn with papers. It sat catercorner, facing the glassed double doors and the front window at an angle with its back to the bookshelves and a window. The old wooden venetian blinds that covered the side window were tilted upward, throwing stripes of light onto the ceiling. She saw that she had left the blinds to the front windows, behind the couch, open to the porch and the street.
“Did he rifle the desk?” asked Kandell.
She laughed. “No.”
The gently sagging, once-elegant couch, upholstered with soft but indestructible moss-green fabric, was surrounded by stacks of books she had been reading. A coffee cup sat on top of one pile. Untidy towers of books hid the top of the coffee table. After the party, she’d wasted no time in creating a comfortable mess.
“Did the intruder do that?” he asked, nodding toward the couch, covered with crumpled papers discarded from a report she’d been working on.
“No,” she said, almost certain that he was making fun of her housekeeping rather than detecting. “But he did remove three books from the shelves.”
Hands on his hips, he raised his eyebrows slightly and gave her a look that she interpreted as skeptical.
“There.” She walked over to the shelf-lined wall and pointed to a tiny gap just above her head, left of the desk. “And up there—he used the ladder. He did move the ladder. I left it on the right side of the fireplace.”
“Can you think of any particular reason he would want those books?”
“No. They were some of my dad’s old engineering books from college. I’ve never actually read them. My brother and sister might have at some point.”
“Are your parents still alive?”
She hesitated for the slightest bit of time. “Yes.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, without a trace of sarcasm.
She blinked, and sighed. “Not really. Officially, they are both missing.”
“Are they in the military?”
She looked at him. “Does it matter?”
“I need to make a list of everyone that has access to the house. For instance, do your brother, sister, and parents, if still alive, have keys?”
“Yes.”
“Might one of them have just dropped in to borrow a book?”
“It’s possible, but unlikely. You can put the briefcase down. Right there is fine. Can we move into the kitchen? I’m dying of thirst.”
“Sure.” He followed her down the hallway. She kept an eye out for further signs the intruder might have left but saw none. Over her shoulder she said, “I’m not positive that someone took those books after they removed them from the shelves. They could still be in the room somewhere.”
“You mean you couldn’t tell?” This time she was sure she heard a note that her mother would have called smart-alecky, but when she glanced at his face it was impassive.
“It’s been a long day.” She slipped out of her suit jacket, a cream-colored, cool silk from Hong Kong, and hung it on the back of a chair.
“Tailor-made.” It wasn’t a question.
She turned to her left, saw the broken window the thief had left behind, and sighed. “Damn. Another repair. Just when I thought I was getting ahead. Have a seat. Iced tea?”
“Sounds good.” He moved past her, opened a glass-fronted cupboard to the right of the sink, and took down two large glasses. Just before setting them on the countertop his hands stopped abruptly. “Spacies.”
He set the glasses down, and continued to stare, an odd, yearning look on his face. He glanced at Jill. “Do you mind?”
“Knock yourself out.”
With gentle reverence he picked up a black astronaut holding a little radio receiver in one fluffy-gloved hand. “Estrella.” He removed her helmet and revealed a wild Afro.
“You know their names?”
“Oh, yeah. This is a real one.”
“Real?”
“You know what I mean, right?” He gave Jill a keen glance.
She was ever so afraid that she did. “No.”
His deep, pleasant voice had a reasonable timbre that she suspected infused everything he said. She wondered if he ever got angry. “The original Spacies are much more refined. No little plastic tags sticking out of the seams; actually, no visible seams at all. The colors inside are realistically human”—he grinned—“although I don’t suppose you ever sliced one up in order to find out, like I did.”
“Why did you?”
“I had to find out if they were black all the way through. You know what I found?”
“I have no idea.”
“They regenerate.” Now his voice sounded a wee bit strained. A tiny, V-shaped frown appeared between his eyebrows.
“What do you mean?”
“If you cut one in half, two perfect Estrellas will grow back.”
“How? I mean, they seem pretty tough. How in the world did you even cut it?”
“With a vise and a circular saw.”
“Oh. A real professional. Kind of like Snidely Whiplash tying Little Nell to the train tracks?”
“I thought of it more in the vein of scientific inquiry. And they grow back by nanotechnology, of course.”
“Really? Self-replication like that is incredibly controlled. I mean, it’s possible, of course, but it’s so highly regulated that…” She thought of the Game Board. She thought of a lot of other things, like the fact that self-reproducing, self-regulating nanotech was actually a deep national security issue, the very discussion of which the government had repressed completely ten years earlier when the issue first burst into national awareness. Now, the term “nano” mainly referred to harmless commercial products that actually had nothing to do with nanotechnology, or was invoked in kids’ cartoons. Her Q-Schools couldn’t self-replicate; at least, that’s what her designer had told her. But they did, of course, repair themselves. At any rate, they would probably never exist.
Detective Kandell was not, perhaps, exactly what he seemed, yet he didn’t seem to care if she knew that. Wanted her to know it, in fact.
Or maybe he was just being a friendly neighbor.
“Will it grow into anything else?”
“Not that I know of.”
“And was she black all the way through?”
“No, she was strangely real, kind of a whitish-beige, like you or me, under the skin. So actually, I was satisfied.”
“These Spacies all belong to my younger brother and sister. I guess I was a little too old for them.”
“The original ones are hard to find. It’s as if someone collected as many as they could and sequestered them somewhere.”
“So I guess we could make a fortune by putting these in the blender and keep making more.”
“That’s a thought. Ever wonder why, when you really like something, it disappears? Like brands, for instance?”
“I just always thought I had such esoteric tastes that no one else liked what I did.”
He startled her by joining her laugh, then set Estrella back on the windowsill, picked up the glasses, and turned to what they’d always called the icebox. “I know that you’re probably trying to do a historically accurate renovation, but don’t you think it might be time to invest in a new refrigerator?”
“This one works fine.”
He pulled down the lever of the old Crosley, small by present standards, with rounded, somewhat slouching corners, and the freezer door opened. “Nice big ice bin. Good idea.” He shoveled ice into the glasses with the metal scoop that Sam had always kept in his ice bin.
“I get bag ice at the store. I hate ice cube trays. The tea is in that jug.”
“Some people are shocked when their house is broken into,” he observed, after he filled both glasses with tea and took a seat across from her. The newspapers were rather low today, so they could see each other tolerably well. She was surprised that he didn’t ask if the intruder had stacked them there.
“I probably am. Mainly, I’m just tired. It’s been a long week. So you think he got in using a key?”
“The doors have deadbolts.”
“I might have forgotten to lock it when I left,” she admitted.
“Then he could have picked the lock. These old houses are easy. He was in a hurry to leave, though.”
He scribbled in his notebook. “Can you call your brother and sister and ask them if they were here today?”
She called Brian. When he picked up, she said, “Quick question. Were you at the house today?”
“No.”
“Megan, do you think?”
“No. Why?”
“There was a break-in. I’m talking to a detective right now.”
“I’ll be right over.”
Jill hung up and told Kandell that Brian hadn’t been there.
“Okay, here’s what we know. He arrived on foot, but someone probably dropped him off around the corner so he could walk down the street and make sure he was safe. He wore a gray suit and tie, and he was white. He also wore a homburg. He was of medium weight, wore glasses, and was about five foot ten. This is all from your neighbor’s description. She was watching from her living room. He appeared to knock and ring the bell and then hunched over the doorknob for a few minutes. He then opened the door and closed it behind him. She said that she knew that you weren’t home from work yet because—”
“Because she’s nosy as hell.”
“Because you always take the dog in. She went out on her porch with the phone and called 911.”
“Why did she go out on the porch?”
“To keep a better eye on things, she said. A minute or two later she heard barking and yelling. He shot out of the side yard with your dog biting at his legs. She saw him get into a car that was waiting at the end of the street. A light-colored late-model car, she didn’t know what kind. It was too far to see the license plate. I pulled up about two minutes later. We’re looking for that car.”
“You got here fast.”
“I live two blocks away. I was just pulling out of the driveway for work when I heard the call, so I took it. Normally they’d send an officer rather than a detective.” He looked quite official, sitting there at the table, yet she felt at ease with him. “I have a little boy, and I want the neighborhood to be safe.”
“How old is he?”
“Seven.”
“Mine is five.”
“A nice age.”
“Sometimes.”
Kandell said, “I wonder if he got what he came for. He seems to have known what books he wanted, and exactly where they were. Who else, besides your family, have you had over here?”
“I just moved back in two months ago. Before that no one had lived here for quite some time. I had a party here a week ago.”
“I’ll need a list of names.”
“They were from the World Bank, where I work, and Georgetown—some professors and students—and neighbors. Sort of a moving-in-housewarming-change-of-life-circumstances party.”
“I see. Did you go to Georgetown?”
“I finished my poli-sci doctorate at Georgetown a couple months ago.”
“Was the house empty before you moved in?”
“Empty of people. Otherwise, all the same stuff was here.”
“So he could have come in at any time before you moved in.”
“Yes. And he could have taken whatever he wanted then. All of us—my brother and sister and I—used to come by at least once a month or so just to check on the place, make sure that the boy down the street was really cutting the grass, things like that. But no one lived here.”
“Okay.” He stood up. “Let’s just check around and see if anything else is missing. Or if he left anything.”
“Such as?”
“Anything. Evidence, or something placed here deliberately.”
She kicked her shoes off under the table and stood up. It seemed to her that Detective Kandell was taking this quite seriously. Which was good, but it seemed odd, somehow. Except, perhaps, that he lived nearby.
“What would they leave except maybe a bug or a bomb?”
“Exactly. Is there anything sensitive about your job?”
“No.”
He followed her as they walked through the dining room, which was also at the back of the house, with a bank of double-hung windows opening onto the overgrown backyard. This was the one room where everything was always pretty much the same, and after the party, it had reverted to form. Knickknacks on the buffet had a new coat of dust, just a few days later, which wasn’t quite fair.
They’d made a full circuit and were at the bottom of the stairs when Brian came in.
“Hello,” he said, and held out his hand. “Brian Dance.”
“Detective Daniel Kandell.”
They shook hands. “You from around here?” asked Brian.
“Couple of blocks away.”
“The reason I ask, you know Truman Kandell? He was my classmate.”
Detective Kandell had a very nice smile. “He’s my brother. You went to Dunbar?”
“Yeah. In fact—”
“This is marvelous and all,” interrupted Jill, “but I’m getting tired and we still need to look through the upstairs.”
“What happened?” asked Brian.
Jill and Kandell went through the events of the day. Jill said to Brian, “He took three books.”
“Which ones?”
Jill closed her eyes. “Electronic and Radio Engineering, The Theory of Groups and Quantum Mechanics, and The Nature of the Chemical Bond.”
Kandell said, “I can’t believe that.”
“Believe it,” Brian said.
Jill headed upstairs. Manfred had decided she’d waited long enough and rushed up ahead of them and Jill was too tired to send her back down to stay until released, which she ought to have done. “It might be harder up here, except most of the rooms are pretty dusty, except for Whens’ and mine, so that might help.”
“Whens?”
“Stevie,” she corrected. “He’s five and opinionated about his name.”
“Did you go to Dunbar?”
“Yes,” she said shortly. Just in another time line, when the whole country and especially D.C. were torn by riots.
He didn’t ask any more questions about that, for which she was thankful, and they glanced through the mess of the upstairs room without him saying a single snarky thing, which rather impressed Jill.
“I don’t think he had time to come up here,” he said.
Back downstairs, Jill walked down the hall to the sunroom. Detective Kandell was behind her. His footsteps faltered for a moment and she turned around.
He was looking at a picture on the wall, a print.
“Monet,” said Jill.
“A rather obscure Monet. The Magpie.” He pointed at the black bird that sat on a broad ladder leaning against a snow-laden hedgerow. All the elements of the painting—the long house on the right, the twisted, heavy branches with their burden of snow, leaned toward the magpie.
Jill had always liked the painting. She stepped closer. “It looks like late afternoon, doesn’t it?”
“Cold, but with a bit of life. A sunny winter day, just ending. Long shadows.” He paused at the next print. “Ah! Matisse.” After studying it for a moment, he turned to her and said, “I found a puzzle lately, a wooden puzzle of an elephant that I had as a child. It has, oh, I don’t know, ten or fifteen pieces. I was pleased that all the pieces were there—surprised, actually. But my mother had kept it. I thought about giving it to my son, but he’s too old for it. I dumped it out and put it back together. It was very strange. I felt the thrill of realizing that the elephant’s trunk fit into the arc of a circus tent behind it. I felt … it was a kinetic memory, but magical, almost, the way that movement felt…” He shrugged. “Anyway, these paintings give me that same feeling.”
Then he stepped back from her. Stared at her, tilted his head. Then brushed past her in the hallway and went into the sunroom.
She followed. “What is it?”
He had taken a few steps into the room and was turning in a slow circle, looking at the banks of windows, the mahogany wainscoting. The tiny V between his eyebrows reappeared. Jill watched his expressions, which changed rapidly; she thought she saw fear, wonder, and then, resolution—the look Whens got just before he planned to do something scary, like jump off a high rock. She’d learned to recognize it so she could grab him first.
Kandell nodded once, then walked briskly to the back of the room, with its view of the gullied backyard and the woods. The windows were open, and a breeze stirred the long green drapes.
He squatted and pushed aside one of the drapes. “There,” he said. He ran his index finger over something that Jill couldn’t see.
“What?”
“I … did this. I’m sorry to admit.”
Jill bent down and saw a rough capital “D,” carved into the wood. The wainscoting had since been stained, so it wasn’t very visible.
“I knew that it was here.” He stood up and spoke very slowly. He said, “My little brother went to school here. And I stayed here after school some days. I was in public school. I was, maybe, ten.”
Jill walked to the nearest chair, an old rocking chair, and sat down hard. Her heart was beating fast.
He kept walking around, delight in his face and in his voice. “It’s like the puzzle. I remember Truman learning to write, how excited he was. Tracing the letters. The teacher, Miss…”
“Bette,” Jill filled in, her voice dull.
“Yes. Miss Bette! Truman adored her. My mother made us call her ‘Miss.’ She wanted us to just call her ‘Bette.’ She had me work with the little kids. She did something she called organic reading.”
So. Jill had probably seen him, way back when. Even though it seemed impossible. “Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s method,” said Jill, her mother’s lecture, which she had heard many times, kicking in. “Warner’s insight was that the Maori children she taught weren’t stupid, as the British believed, just because they couldn’t learn to read using English primers. She developed a method to link their own lives, their own words and stories, with the act of writing. Children can write phonetic words about six months before they can read them, decode them. Writing and reading are two different processes. Warner had them dictate their own stories to her, and then writing and reading suddenly made sense—it was about them, their feelings, their own lives. Emotion is kind of the missing link between learning to read phonetically, mechanically, and not really caring, and realizing that it is a tool you can use to say things that are important to you, and no one else.”
“Yes!” Kendall paced the room in a fit of reverie, excited. “She’d get all the kids to tell her their own word, and then their own stories. It was all phonetic. I’d sound out each letter as I wrote it for the kids on…”
“Computer punch cards,” said Jill, her voice still flat. Bette got them from American University, where she was working on her doctorate. Jill remembered how the Magic Markers used to stick in the little rectangular holes when she was writing out the kids’ words for them, and how Bette’s little recycling economy was so irritating because of that.
“Yes! And they’d trace over them with Magic Markers, and then they knew them. They owned them. They could pick their word out of a big pile of all the kids’ words. We’d dump them out every day, hold one up, and whoever wrote it would call out the word. God! It was like the world just came alive for Truman, overnight. Suddenly he could read! After tracing the letters with his fingers and learning their sounds and writing them … what’s wrong?”
Jill began to rock furiously in the rocking chair. “So, when you came over here this afternoon, did you remember that this had been your brother’s schoolhouse?”
“No.” He flattened his lips together and shook his head. “That is strange, isn’t it?” His laugh was a sharp single bark.
“My brother and sister don’t remember that either.”
“But you do.” His keen look pulled assent from her, inch by inch. She had freely told the therapist because, after all, the therapist just thought she was crazy.
This was different. Detective Kandell believed her.
“Yes.” Her throat was tight and the word came out as a whisper.
He chose a straight chair from a side table, straddled it, rested his arms on the top of its back, and perched his chin on top of his hands. “My not remembering it isn’t all that strange. It was a long time ago. I didn’t come here often, maybe once a week for a few months. We moved to Massachusetts when I was ten. My wife and I moved back here about eight years ago and we just didn’t get over this way. She worked at the Justice Department and my beat was always in Southwest, and we lived in Georgetown. Our divorce was just final, and I decided to buy in the old neighborhood. Easier to take care of the old folks here, anyway. It’s just in the past few weeks that I’ve started jogging in this direction. I felt a sense of recognition, but I feel that way about the whole neighborhood. Why don’t your brother and sister remember it? Were they too young?”
Although shaken, Jill stood briskly. “Yes. Well, no clues here? Anything else?” As she followed him, she wondered, Does he have the same memories I do? About history? She tried to think of some casual question that would reveal the answer to her, but she was, finally, deeply disturbed and too tired to think—for the rest of the evening, she supposed, aggravated at her state of mind, at her sheer exhaustion.
They went back to the foyer. Kandell gave Brian and Jill his card and told them to call him if they thought of anything. Jill thanked him and shut the door behind him. Then she went into the library and flopped down on the couch.
“Wine,” said Brian.
“Right.”
He returned with a beer for himself and a glass of wine for her, settled into the desk chair, and leaned back. “Where’s your son?”
“With his dad.”
“Who probably won’t let him stay here now.”
“The hell he won’t!”
“I’m just saying. So who did this?”
“A man wearing a now-bitten suit and, rather improbably, a hat.”
“Like, a homburg?”
“That was the impression the girl across the street gave Detective Kandell. She saw the book thief at the front door.”
“Nothing more low-down than a book thief,” Brian said.
She ignored him. “Either he had a key or picked the lock. He came in, went right to the books, took what he wanted, then jumped out the back window.”
“Ouch. Because the cops came?”
“He saw the au pair on her porch using her phone.”
Brian said, “But why did he take those books?”
“Maybe they’re rare and valuable and he can sell them for a ton of money?”
“They were Dad’s. Maybe there were notes in them.”
“Probably, but so what?”
“I think Dad was working on something really important.”
“Yes, like protecting the Declaration of Independence and—”
“More important.”
“Like what?”
“You tell me.”
Jill was silent.
“Fine,” he replied, with cutting sarcasm. “I thought we were all ready to talk.” After a moment he said, “Sorry. That guy might be back. You need to stay with us tonight.”
“No. I have a nice evening planned. I’m going to go over some work and then I’m going to watch a PBS show. And first I’m taking a nice, cool bath. If he does come back, I want to be here.”
“Are you nuts?”
“Manfred bit him. He’ll be afraid to come back.”
“Right.”
“Unless he can tell I’m gone.”
“I called Megan to tell her, but Jim answered her phone and said she’s out like a light, going to New York early tomorrow morning. He’ll tell her tomorrow.” He paused. “I guess I’ll stay here tonight, then.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Don’t you. I’ll call Cindy and tell her what happened. She’s at the hospital with Bitsy, and she’s spending the night. I’ll pick up the kids from the sitter’s and bring them over here. Right now, I’m going to call Jimmy and have him change the locks and put in a deadbolt.”
“But what if—”
“If what?”
“What if Mom and Dad come back? They won’t be able to get in!” Jill’s glass of wine slid from her hand and spilled on the scarred wood floor. Her face crumpled and she gasped for breath.
Brian came over, pushed some books off the corner of the coffee table, and sat down in front of her. “Jill.” He handed her the paper napkin he’d brought with her wine and she blew her nose.
“What?”
“I don’t think they’re coming back.”
Jill sat stone-silent for a while. Finally Brian said, “Sis, I have something to show you.”
He went out to the truck and came back in, carrying his portfolio bag. He sat down on the couch and unzipped it.
And pulled out the Infinite Game Board.
Jill picked it up.
And remembered Truman.
The board is full of stories.
Megan
MEGAN’S MEMORIES AND THE WALKING MAN
July 12
MEGAN’S MEETING GOT OUT LATE, and everyone was snappish, anxious to begin their weekends. There had been the usual, disquieting rumble about funding cuts. It was beginning to seem to her that only privately funded research institutions could recognize the importance of memory research. She didn’t want to look for a new job, not right now, but maybe it was time to get out of government.
She strode out into five-thirty downtown, joining throngs of just-released office workers. Humidity and heat enhanced the smell of concrete and asphalt, and she was soothed.
Megan generally loved everything about these afternoons, particularly Friday afternoons, when everyone was in a comparatively good mood. She loved crossing the street with twenty-five other determined people; enjoyed the green plunge of temperature as she walked diagonally through a park. Jim made fun of her enthusiasm. She told him it was because she took vitamins. Now, she wondered if perhaps that Hadntz drug was finally taking hold. Her anxieties were soothed too. Jill had finally agreed to discuss everything, just two days from now, the soonest they could all get together.
She’d tried to put Jill’s talk about Gypsy Myra and Eliani Hadntz out of her mind during the week, and she’d been pretty successful, as usual, at compartmentalizing. Taking an evening shift at the hospital to spell Brian and Cindy had made that fairly easy, though she did use Q during that time to do some research on Jill’s underground comic. Her inability to find anything could mean several things. Maybe Jill was imagining it. Maybe Q was fallible and didn’t know everything. Maybe it was real, and Q chose to hide it. The third possibility was the most intriguing one. At any rate, Megan knew when she was reaching her exhaustion threshold, and she was close. After her New York trip tomorrow for a Saturday morning conference, she could turn her attention to family problems.
At the Metro entrance she stopped and bought a bouquet of frilly pink carnations speared by austere purple irises from a street vendor, as was her weekly custom, and held the crinkly cellophane wrapper on her lap as she sped underground. She tried to relax into the bright colors, but she could not. Neither was she soothed by the Metro ride, as she usually was. Once in Tall Oaks, she peered out the bus window, trying to spot Walking Man.
By the time she climbed the hill to her house, her shoulder ached from her briefcase strap. She went inside, a mixture of heel-clacks (she kicked off her shoes immediately), cellophane crinkles, and a cheerful “Hi!” She put the cone of flowers on the counter, promising them that she would get them a vase and water as soon as she changed.
“Mommy!” Abbie, her face slightly grimy, pounded down the stairs and smashed into her. Abbie lifted her up, licked a finger, and wiped dirt from her daughter’s cheek.
“What’s up?”
“Come and play a game with me.” She tugged at Megan’s hand and led her down the hall. Jim, in his office, was on the phone. He smiled and waved as she passed. Abbie’s bedroom was a phantasmagoria of toys, a spoiled child’s utopia.
“Okay. But just let me—” Then Megan forgot that she was sweltering in panty hose, that her skirt waistband was too tight. “Where did you get that?”
Abbie yanked at Megan’s hand. “Sit down! Show me how to play!”
Megan shucked her skirt and panty hose and tossed them onto a chair, leaving her in cool cotton underpants and a bedraggled silk shirt. She pushed back her hair, which was wet with sweat, and sank cross-legged to the floor. Very quietly, she said to Abbie, “Where did you find this?”
Abbie smiled. “I don’t know.”
Megan tentatively touched the upturned edge of the Infinite Game Board.
Abbie had unfolded the metal legs, so it sat about a foot off the floor.
About the size and shape of a cafeteria tray, the board had intriguing patterns on its aluminum surface, all of them diminutive, so there was room for many, many games, or suggestions of games, even games that opened outward from other games. A chess- or checkerboard—and indeed, Megan recalled that tiny checkers and chessmen had come with it, sealed into a plastic bag. There had also been colored markers to use with games that required the spinner, in one corner, which pointed toward numbers on colored backgrounds. There had also been a deck of playing cards, and other cards for playing other games. There was a hexagon divided into triangles, each of which held a number; a pair of dice; interlocking squares with a colored dot in each of their grids, a baseball game.
The instruction booklet was long lost. But it had been, Megan recalled, rather thick, printed on thin paper with a font too small for, at least, her own childish eyes to read.
She touched the board again, and remembered the day they bought it. In fact, Megan suddenly realized, the entire day still stood out for her as if it were a set piece she could enter again and again, a day that would never lose its odd numinosity.
* * *
Jill had been sick, and the doctor prescribed cough syrup. Their mother drove down the street to Peoples Drug and said, “Must be my lucky day,” as she zipped into a vacant parking spot right in front of the store.
Jill, as usual, stopped for a second and took a deep breath when she went into the store, then headed for the comic book rack, where she put her nose right up next to them and inhaled more deeply.
“That’s gross,” said Brian.
“They smell wonderful,” she said, and held the most recent Superboy issue to her face, sniffing it before opening it.
“That’s enough, Jill,” said their mother. “You’re spreading germs.”
“She doesn’t act sick,” said Brian, as their mother, ignoring him, receded to the back of the store.
“You’re just jealous because you had to go to school,” Jill said, piling up her sickbed dues: just about every comic on the rack.
Then Megan saw it.
The Game Board was in a dusty cardboard box with a cellophane front, which displayed its mesmeric diversity. Megan said, “What’s that?”
No one paid any attention to her. She couldn’t reach it, and she couldn’t get Jill to help. Her mother was talking to the pharmacist. She saw a stepstool down the aisle and dragged it over to the shelf.
She climbed onto the stool and could just barely reach the bottom with her outstretched fingers. She teased at the bottom and finally it fell off the shelf, taking down several boxes of tissues along with it.
Megan climbed down. She ignored the tissues, picked up the box, and gazed through the cellophane in a state of complete rapture. It was dusty. She sneezed.
“What’s going on here?” Her mother stood over Megan. “Did you make this mess?”
Megan glanced at the boxes on the floor. “Um, I guess.”
“Well, pick them up this minute. Hand them to me.” She replaced the tissue boxes. “Now where did this box come from?”
Megan embraced the large box as best she could. “I want it.”
“What is it?”
“Games,” she said. “See? Lots of games we could play with Jill while she’s sick.”
“How nice of you to think of your sister.” She lifted the box from Megan’s arms.
Brian showed up with a plastic truck. Jill held about ten comic books.
Their mother looked at Jill’s stack. “You’re just sick. You’re not dying.”
“Mo-om.”
“Don’t whine.”
“I need these.”
“Put half of them back, please.”
“When do I get my allowance?”
“I said—”
“Okay, okay.” Jill slouched back over to the rack and began smashing some of the comic books back in.
“Those are the ones you will get, young lady.”
“But they’re bent.”
“Exactly.”
Megan recalled her sense of deep triumph as her mother asked the pharmacist, “How much is this?”
He frowned. “Don’t recall seeing it.” He turned it over and over, searching for a price tag. “Whew. It’s dirty. Sorry about that. It’s probably been here for years.” He put it on the counter, wiped his hands with his handkerchief, and then ran it over the box. “Well … How about two dollars.”
And then—
“Mom!” Abbie was shoving her on the shoulder. “Play!”
And then, Megan didn’t remember anything else about it.
She frowned. “Be quiet, Abbie. I’m trying to think. About the games,” she added in haste.
Abbie pouted and flung herself on the bed.
It was true. She really couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember playing any of these enticing games, this infinite-seeming phantasmagoria …
Infinite …
“Hey.” Jim stuck his head in the door.
“Hi, sweetie. Do you know where Abbie found this?”
“It was up in your loft. The top of the closet. Next to a stack of old photographs.”
“Oh. They were from the attic. I haven’t even had a chance to look at them.”
“She made me go up and get it. She said you’d be mad.”
“I don’t remember putting it there.”
“Well, that’s where it was.”
“I got some flowers. They’re on the counter. Could you put them in a vase? Please?”
“Sure.”
“Let’s play now,” said Abbie.
Megan stood, picked up the Game Board, and grabbed her clothes from Abbie’s chair. Abbie followed her into her bedroom and sat on the bed while Megan changed into shorts, a T-shirt, and zoris. Megan thought while she changed.
Finally she said, “Tell you what. I need to find the game pieces first, okay? We can’t play anything without the pieces.” As casually as she could, she slid the board on top of a tall wardrobe. “Want to go for a walk to the lake?”
“Yes!”
Bingo appeared immediately, romping and barking.
* * *
Megan walked toward the lake in somewhat of a daze, the weirdness of the day beginning to tell on her. She resolved to take some extra vitamins when she got home. Maybe she should lay off the memory enhancement stuff for now.
She was almost positive that she had not brought the Game Board along with her when she’d gotten married. She had lived at home during part of college, but moved into an apartment later, and could not recall bringing such a thing to her apartment or to her Tall Oaks home. Her old room in Halcyon House was more or less the same. In fact, it was probably exactly the same as when she had left. The bed had not been made, the pile of clothes she’d dumped out of the dresser, all too small, were probably still there—oh, except, she remembered Jill mentioning that Whens had chosen her room. So it might have been straightened a bit. But knowing Jill, perhaps not.
Bingo ranged on his leash, jerking her here and there, sniffing every tree, rock, and bush while Abbie ran on ahead, a flash of green shorts and yellow hair, brightening and dulling as she passed through shafts of sunlight and patches of shade. Megan resolved for the hundredth time to take Bingo to some kind of training course and immediately forgot the thought.
They arrived at a minuscule sandy beach. Bingo almost pulled her over as he lunged for a stick, but she turned around after Abbie tossed a few rocks into the water.
The path had been widened over the years to accommodate service vehicles, and was fairly busy this time of day with joggers, bikers, and other dog walkers. Megan had always felt perfectly safe here. But for the first time, she was anxious when she lost sight of Abbie for a moment.
“Abbie,” she yelled. “Abbie!”
Abbie came around the bend, running toward her. “Look what I found!”
The small plastic soldier crouched on a flat pool of plastic, his rifle aimed at anything in front of him. He was completely Army green, including his skin, and unremarkable to Megan. “Uncle Brian used to play with these when he was little,” she said. “He bought bags of them at the dime store.”
“Dime store? Is that like a dollar store?”
Megan smiled. “Kind of.” Come to think of it, she hadn’t noticed these once-ubiquitous soldiers for years. The much more positive Spacies had replaced them.
“Can I keep it?”
Megan slipped it into her pocket. “After I wash it. We don’t know where it’s been.”
“It’s been on the ground.”
“Right. Okay, time to go home.” Abbie turned around and ran toward home.
Then Megan saw him. The Walking Man. Tiny in the distance, but heading directly toward Abbie. Of course, there was no other way to walk, but still …
Megan began to run, yanking Bingo with her. She wanted to yell Abbie! But that would give him Abbie’s name. She settled on, “Hey!”
Abbie turned around. “Get back here.”
Instead, Abbie ran forward. Megan caught a glimpse of the Walking Man disappearing into the trees. Small side paths laced the woods. She continued to run until she caught up with Abbie, and grabbed her tightly by one arm. “Don’t get so far ahead of me!”
Abbie held up one of her feet, upon which she wore a sandal with flashing lights. “These make me go fast. I can’t help it.”
“I can,” said Megan. She had the fleeting notion that the Walking Man could perhaps tiptoe from thin tree to thin tree, making himself as skinny as the tree, like a cartoon character.
She grasped Abbie’s hand firmly. Maybe she really should return Abbie’s classbook. Jim had been keeping it, just giving it to her for school, and supervising her homework time with it.
Megan fell into the maelstrom of dinner, cleanup, and getting ready for tomorrow morning’s meeting before falling into bed.
* * *
When Megan woke up, the next morning, her luminescent digital clock said 3:17 A.M.
She closed her eyes against the baleful time, but the afterimage insisted that it was an ungodly hour of the morning and that she was fully and absolutely awake. It was, indeed, Saturday, and in just a few hours she was going to make a quick trip to New York to catch a Saturday conference at Columbia.
Ugh. Maybe Jim was right, even though his oft-expressed wish that she would develop a drug to treat workaholism, and take it, was actually a joke.
At least, she thought it was.
Jill’s message from yesterday, relayed by Jim when he came to bed, that someone had broken into the house, was unsettling. But not to worry.
Of course. Jill never worried. And Brian was staying there. Poor Cindy. She had to be getting to the end of her tether. But maybe not. Cindy was a teacher, although she claimed that she was never patient in the classroom. “That just confuses the kids,” she said.
Slipping out of bed, Megan made her way to the wardrobe. She tripped over a pair of shoes and cursed. Jim’s snoring stuttered, then resumed its regular, comforting cadence.
The Game Board was right up … there. She grabbed it and tiptoed out of the room.
Bingo jumped up from in front of Abbie’s door, huffing and snorting and wagging her tail.
“Shh.” They went downstairs. The Game Board winked and glowed in the dark, which irritated her. She wanted it to be just a normal piece of metal with paint on it. Clearly, it was not.
The stove light lit the kitchen, dimly. The window over the sink was open, admitting the smell of new-mown grass. Megan, thinking about the Walking Man, reached up and pulled it shut and locked it. She set water to boil and sprinkled chamomile tea into a Dumbo-shaped teapot. Come to think of it, that was from the Halcyon House attic. A lot of things here were from that attic. She leaned against the counter and waited for the water to boil and then waited for the tea to steep, hoping that she would become drowsy.
No such luck. Finally there was nothing else to do but take her perfectly brewed tea, perfectly flavored with milk and sugar into the dining room, along with the Game Board, and sit down to have a good long look.
A green dot winked at the upper right corner. Megan leaned forward and took a swig of tea.
It would appear that the Game Board was somehow infused with Q. If it weren’t for the fact that Q did not exist when her mother had bought it for her, this would be no big deal.
The board had not manifested this dot earlier today. A slight shiver ran through Megan. Abbie had handled this. She bit her lower lip, thinking.
Finally she got up, and went downstairs, and rummaged through their collection of backpacks, suitcases, and tote bags, and found a fairly large plastic tote bag that read INTERNATIONAL MEMORY CONFERENCE, MADRID, 1989. Beneath that was printed INHANCEX, which was the name of a drug that claimed to impede the progress of Alzheimer’s disease.
Good. The board fit. She zipped it inside and set it by the front door, next to her briefcase. She didn’t want to leave it in the house, where Abbie could get to it.
She’d given herself an extra hour so that she could have a proper breakfast at her favorite café in the station. She would call Brian and have him or Jill meet her in front of Union Station in the morning to pick it up.
She lay down on the couch to rest just a minute before getting dressed.