by F P Adriani
I’d have to watch the damn house tonight.
*
I drove in the Diamond dusk toward the Castano place, curiosity helping keep my foot on the accelerator. I wondered what the house was like, especially if it was a mansion. I also wondered if Julianne was a Sander. This morning she hadn’t seemed like one. Yet Hu had said she’d known Julianne’s mother for a long time. I really had no idea who the hell Julianne’s family was.
…But, her house was on the way to Tan’s house. This could be good, I thought, my mind working fast. Maybe I can swing by his place early in the morning, catch him before he goes to work….
I’d stay at the girl’s tonight while keeping an eye on the house, but they’d be on their own beyond the next morning.
*
I finally pulled up to the house. It turned out to be only half-mansion; it was big and brown—but plain. Like years ago someone wanted a big house here but didn’t want to put too much obvious effort into making a big house here. Houses on Earth used to look like this: understated gargantuosity. That was a look you didn’t see much on Diamond though.
The Castano house really didn’t make sense here, which was pretty much how I’d describe this whole damn day.
I parked my car in the driveway; then I walked up to the big painted-black door and rang the electronic bell near the black frame.
Lori Godwin opened the door to me; her light-brown eyebrows were now occupying a spot nearer to the top of her quite-high forehead. “Miss Sen—Pia. I don’t understand….”
I could feel my face turning bright red: already I must have looked like an incompetent. As a supposed professional, I’d made a promise that I’d get someone to watch the place tonight, and I’d been unable to accomplish even that small task. Starting off on a failure-footing really wasn’t a good way to interact with a client. But I had no choice this time.
“I couldn’t get anyone to come here,” I said bluntly. “So I’ll do the job tonight.”
Lori seemed satisfied; her arm motioned for me to come in.
The inside of the house looked like the outside: large, brown and airy, maybe too airy, too cold. No one but Lori and I were in sight in the hallway, but I heard movement in another room, a door opening and closing—and opening again.
Julianne finally appeared. She was wearing a sweatsuit—a red one. And now her short red self walked toward me.
“Will you take my case?” she asked, stopping in front of me.
“I don’t know. Will you show me the notebooks?”
“Why? I can tell you really want to see them. But why do you want to so much?”
I sighed, snapping my eyes closed and open in annoyance. “Do you, or don’t you, want me to help you?”
“What do you know about Diamond?” she asked me out of the blue now—fast, as if she knew what my response would be and that she’d be bored with it.
“Plenty. I was born here.”
“Well, I wasn’t. My mom brought me from Earth ten years ago. Some transplants think we should be called Sanders too. None of us first evolved here. Humans evolved on Earth. Why shouldn’t we all get to use the Sander title? But the Sanders born here are so strong. I’ll never be superstrong like them. I haven’t been here long enough to get more than a little excess strength. I seem almost normal, like an Earth person. There’s no force there. There’s a force here that gives humans strength.”
“That’s what some people think, Julianne, but there’s been no real evidence of a force.”
“Sometimes in science you must deduct everything known from an unsolved scenario. Then you’re left with a final distillation: the unknown truth.”
“You’re very intelligent,” I said. I was going to add “for your age,” but then I realized how patronizing that would sound.
Lori had no such misgivings. “It’s like she’s going on thirty, but she’s only fifteen—a superbrain like her mom.”
Now, with her big glass-covered eyes still on me, Julianne said, “Earth people think Sanders are superhuman. They’re afraid of Sanders. What would a Supersander be like, you think?”
“I don’t know,” I said, thinking this conversation was going nowhere when I needed to go somewhere. “I really should look around here—I’ll stay the night, keep an eye on the place—”
“—But when will you sleep?”
I blinked. “I can go without sleep for one night. That’s nothing new for me. I could use some stimulants though. Coffee—or maybe some meduna candy?”
“We’ve got a few bags of the candy,” Lori said as she walked away.
“I’m not that afraid to be here,” Julianne said, in a quieter voice now.
“No matter how smart, you’re still young and probably naïve about the world….”
“I don’t want you to not sleep—you look like a tired person,” she said, frowning at me heavily.
But before I could respond, Lori came back again. She handed me a bag of the candy; I popped one nugget into my mouth, the chewy caramel taste quickly coating my tongue. Then I shoved the small bag into one of my blazer’s outside pockets. “I shoulda bought some along the way, but I wanted to get here as fast as I could.” I turned to Julianne now. “Show me where the break-in was.”
Sighing a little, she walked away, saying over her shoulder, “It’s the double door by the back patio. It was open when we got here. The man ran out of there—I saw a gray jacket slide between them.”
When we got to the door, she moved the red curtain there aside and flicked on a light switch for inside. But when I looked down at the double-bolted reinforced lock and my hands played with the mechanism, I found no damage.
“The lock’s fine,” I said, looking up at her, and then at Lori behind her. With bigger than normal eyes, Lori stared back at me for a long moment before finally looking away.
“What do you mean fine?” Julianne said, her mouth twisting down yet shaking a bit. Now, she looked young again, young and scared.
“He must have got in somewhere else,” I said quickly. “Or maybe it was left open accidentally.” I was looking at her face, but in my peripheral vision, I saw Lori’s whole head twitch to the right, away from Julianne.
I said to the girl now, “Let me look around some—see what I can find.”
*
In my car before I came to the house, I’d packed part of my old kit from my old life; before I started MSA, I’d had some stuff shipped from Earth to here. And now I always kept my tools either in my office or in my special mirage-coated case, just in case I ever needed to use my tools again. Tonight definitely qualified for that I Need To Use Them Again category.
I took some stuff from my case, then I went back inside and had both Lori and Julianne stamp their fingers onto a piece of fingerprint-embossing paper. Alone outside the house again, I used my high-powered flashlight on the ground and the back first-story doors and windows, all of which windows seemed clean; then I used my Osier fingerprint scanner to check for fingerprints around the windows—again I found nothing. I went around to the front windows, and to both the porch and the driveway. People usually assumed intruders chose back entrances, but they didn’t always. Someone going in through a front looked more normal so less noticeable to neighbors.
In this case, however, prints around the front door especially might not tell me anything because the residents hands had been on there, as had mine, and Roberto’s, I assumed, and—sure enough—I now saw mostly smeared prints under the scanner’s blue field; the rest were expected known prints. I pressed the scanner’s Record button anyway, but, as I did, I realized that the front lock looked fine. As far as I could tell, it hadn’t been picked just as the other door locks hadn’t.
There really was nothing to see out here. If someone had “broken in,” that person must have been a ghost who could diffuse through walls. Or a real person with the security-system code.
Though there was the second floor….
I went back inside and told Lori I needed to look a
t the upstairs’ windows. She shrugged and followed me through the house, standing not too far behind me as I examined each of the windows. Nothing. Again.
I had been wasting time, in more ways than one. I got tired of putting on this show.
I didn’t know where the girl was right now in the house, though, and I didn’t want her to hear any of my conversation with Lori. So when I stepped inside what Lori had said would be the last room to window-check, I shut the door to the hall and turned to face her.
“How long have you known Arlene Hu?” I shot out.
Lori’s face collapsed a bit, one hand grabbed a desk beside her, the other grabbed her own skirt-covered thigh. “How did you—”
“Never mind! What the hell’s going on here? I want some answers. Now.”
Lori recovered herself, her back stiffening-straight. “I don’t know her. Amy did. She told me something bad could happen months ago. And that she asked for Hu’s help. What could I do? The girl’s alone now—no family here. It was just her and Amy. Amy and I were involved.” Her eyes looked at me defiantly. “I’m married but that marriage is crap. We don’t live together. But I like both.” Men and women, I took her statement to mean.
“Hu is scum—” I started to say.
But her shaking head and words cut me off. “No—no she isn’t. It’s about politics with her. She doesn’t really want to hurt anyone—”
“Doesn’t matter whether she WANTS to; she ultimately DOES.” I said that in a firm voice, but, inside, I didn’t feel so firm. Despite what she’d done to this planet’s people and to me personally, Hu and I now shared a common enemy from my past. And I still couldn’t be sure how much of what I’d learned about either side was true or was a lie.
“Why’d you leave the back door unlocked?” I demanded at Lori now.
Her eyes dropped away from me and fell on that side-desk. “I got a call from her—she calls my portable phone. Not regularly or anything, but if there’s something I need to know or I should do. She’s tried to find the notebooks in here—so have I. What else can I do? I’m afraid for Julianne’s having them. And no one can be trusted with Amy’s work. It’s the danger involved.”
“You keep saying that, but I’ve yet to see anything except a crude map. How do I know anything’s so dangerous—how do you?”
“It’s true that Julianne hasn’t let me read the notebooks—”
“Smart girl,” I said.
Lori’s thin lips let out a frustrated abrupt sigh. “Look, I don’t like doing this, but if what Hu says is true, what choice do I have?”
I didn’t respond to that. I just kept looking at her, I just kept waiting for more info.
“Can YOU help her—help us?” she finally asked me.
“Yes. But do I want to? That is the question.” I opened the door behind me and left her standing in the room as I went in search of Julianne.
*
The house was too big, the rooms too winding; I couldn’t find the girl. Then I wasn’t sure I wanted to find her. But I thought it strange that I hadn’t seen her inside any rooms even once during all my searching. Maybe she’d gone to sleep, and in a room I hadn’t been shown.
There was a small hot-pink couch in the big brown hallway downstairs. I plopped back onto that couch; then I popped another of the candies into my mouth as I shifted my gun inside my holster. I leaned my head back against the wall behind me, closing my eyes and hoping I could remain still like this for most of the night.
I’d rather experience boredom tonight than excitement; today I’d had enough of the latter to last me the rest of the week. If I were lucky, nothing else would happen while I was here, nothing bad.
…Apparently, luck was with me for tonight at least: I wasn’t on the couch for more than half an hour when Lori’s brother showed up. She’d called him after she and I had spoken on the phone, but he only just got off his shift at work.
He wasn’t exactly a brutish-looking person. He was tall and pole-like skinny, and kind of studious-looking. But he also looked very angry; probably that anger would be enough for him to look out for the place tonight.
I told him and Lori I was leaving now.
I really didn’t want to be there; I didn’t like the…atmosphere. I had already gotten in deeper than I wanted. And tomorrow I’d get in deeper still: I’d move Roberto to doing this job, to guarding the girl when she left this house at least. I could use Mike for the other office jobs Roberto would typically do. Where Roberto was normally part-time, Mike was normally part-time, part-time. But now he’d have to become part-time alone.
In the hallway still, I said to Lori, “For tonight, call the cops if anything else happens.”
Lori’s brother nodded at me, and Lori herself grunted at me.
I continued, “But at my usual rate for more dangerous jobs, I’ll move Roberto to your…case starting tomorrow. He’ll guard you. If that’s what you want.”
“I do,” Lori said quickly. “I’m sure Julianne would approve too.”
Now I asked, “Aren’t you supposed to be the adult here?”
There was a silence.
Then she said, “Julianne’s really very mature in personality. She could legally become an emancipated adult, you know.”
Pointedly looking at Lori’s face, I replied, “I’m sure she could. Maybe she should.”
And with that, I walked out the front door.
*
As I drove to Tan’s, I felt the excitement-jolt I always experienced whenever I was about to see him. I had my portable phone with me, but I didn’t bother calling him. I kind of just wanted to get there and tell him what had developed today. …Yet I didn’t want to tell him. I didn’t think he’d be thrilled upon hearing it.
Plus, I hated the way we’d left off earlier today when I’d sounded like an asshole and he’d hung up on me. Not exactly a highpoint in our relationship. And I didn’t want a repeat with a second phone conversation.
I wondered now if he’d even be home just yet as I never tracked all his movements. We didn’t have an every-single-day relationship. More like an every-other-day or every-third-day relationship. That was how I wanted it and he’d agreed…reluctantly. We’d argued over that too once, argued over that I never wanted to meet his mother.
“You know I’ve always been close with her,” he said then. “Yet twice I’ve asked you to come see her with me, and you won’t meet her. That hurts me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I’d replied.
And I really didn’t want to hurt him—my not seeing his mother wasn’t about him. It was about me and his mother. No one had ever “brought me home to his mom.” This was an alien situation to me. I suspected I wasn’t the type of person people brought home to their parents, period. What if Tan’s mom hated me? That might put an end to Tan and I, and I didn’t want to end anything with him now.
For the past six months, I’d been trying hard to change our interactions—I’d succeeded for a little while, and things between us had become more relaxed. But then he went for the museum job. And that was my turn to feel hurt….
I smiled suddenly: Tan was indeed home now; his red car sat parked in front of his house. I pulled my car beside his, walked onto his stoop, opened his screened door and rang his doorbell.
The light came on beside the doorframe, and when he opened the inside door to me, I noticed a small blob of tomato sauce decorating his chin. I wanted to lick off that blob. The candy had given me energy, and I planned on making good use of that energy.
“I’m sorry about earlier on the phone—I was so curt,” I said to him.
He shrugged now as I walked in; I promptly kissed him hello, my arms curling around his waist and pulling him closer. He’d changed out of his work-uniform and now stood in blue jeans and a slightly damp black t-shirt. He must have showered as soon as he’d gotten home. He always did, he once told me.
“I was just eating,” he mumbled now near my ear. “You want some? There’s extra.”
“What now?” he asked sharply.
“Well, Tan, you’re not gonna believe this,” I said, sighing as I sat down at his round table and looked up at his frowning face.
I spent the next ten minutes giving him a summary of everything I could about my experience with Julianne. Then, lastly, I dropped the Hu-Called-Me Bombshell. By the time I’d finished explaining that, Tan looked as confused and shocked as I must have looked during my conversation with Hu.
“I don’t believe this,” he finally said.
“As I predicted.”
Now his right hand shot through his black hair, his face looking paler than normal—yet pale with rage. His mouth shook as it shot out, “Goddamn my fucking ass. Sometimes I really fuck up. I’m a real fucking dumbass.”
“Tan, don’t say that about yourself—don’t. No one could have predicted today.”
“I just don’t believe this,” he repeated, his voice in a half-angry half-shocked haze, as if he hadn’t even heard my words. And now he sat down across from me at the table, pressing his face into his hands.
“You had tomato sauce on your chin before,” I said then.
“Who gives a shit!” he barked. “You lay all this on me and now you’re talking about my hygiene?” Shooting up from the table, he rushed over to the booze cabinet nearby to pour himself something fast, then drink it even faster.
“You know, I could use some of that.”
“You’re driving,” he shot over his shoulder.
“Well, I thought I’d stay tonight,” I said, feeling hurt at his not automatically assuming I’d stay. He usually would assume that; it was usually me who wanted to bolt, why I sometimes looked for excuses to stay overnight.
Now he spoke to me over his shoulder again: “I knew MSA would be a mistake.”
I jumped up from my seat. “Well, gee, maybe you should have said that before you agreed to start it with me?”