by John C. Ford
181
SMILES WAS GOING to spend it all in one place. He was going to spend it at a lobster shack called Fran’s Fish House on the outskirts of York, Maine. They had left the bank an hour ago, and now Smiles was parking the Infiniti on the street across from Fran’s, Zach’s meeting place of choice. He liked the clam chowder, Erin said.
They had passed through the city center five minutes ago to find themselves here, where the pretty resort spots gave way to ramshackle buildings failing the test of nature the salt air imposed on them. The red paint on Fran’s Fish House had cracked years ago, revealing lifeless wood in a leopard-spot pattern. The overhead sign hung at a fifteen-degree angle that spoke of nor’easters past.
Smiles pulled the check from his back pocket and noted the time. “We’ve got ten minutes, right?”
“Yeah, he said ten thirty, but he probably got here early. Dude can be anal.”
“All right, one sec.” Smiles consulted the list of phone numbers he’d made back at the cabin, then dialed the agents. If he was going to do this, he wanted to be sure it was set in stone.
Cole answered right away. “Yeah?”
“We’re on for four o’clock,” Smiles said. “Right?”
The guy exhaled. “Yeah. Like you said. Prudential Center, four o’clock. The food court. Do you need directions or something? Another confirmation or two? A wake-up call at three thirty?”
“Just have the money. And I want to talk to Ben first.”
Another sigh, then silence.
“Good idea,” Erin whispered, then peered toward Fran’s for signs of Zach. Smiles congratulated himself: For once he’d thought of something first.
Eventually, Ben came to the phone. His voice sounded clear, normal.
“Smiles?”
“Hey man, how you holding up?”
“I, uh, okay, actually.” His voice had dropped, and Smiles could sense the presence of the agents. Ben was being careful with his words, but there wasn’t any hidden message in them. Maybe they really did have him coddled in five-star luxury.
“Smart of you not to talk,” Smiles said. “Guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“Yeah, right, thanks.”
Smiles nodded into the phone. He was suddenly nostalgic for all the afternoons he’d spent at Ben’s place in the inflatable Budweiser chair, talking about nothing. “Sorry it took us an extra day to get all this together.”
“It’s okay,” Ben said, and Smiles was relieved. Getting into the whole Zach situation probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do right now.
“Anyway, I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. We’re going to get you. We’re going to get that money for you, too.”
“Yeah, good.”
He sounded pleased, but he was still keeping a tight leash on his comments. It occurred to Smiles that this would be an ideal time to negotiate his split of the cash. Instead he said, “All right, bud. Hang on for five hours and you’re going to be rich.”
Smiles ended the call and turned to Erin. “Showtime.”
Zach was polishing off a bowl of clam chowder when they slid into the booth across from him. He was sporting yet another muscle shirt. The guy had made a bad choice for his trademark look; his arms hadn’t gotten any bigger since the last time they’d seen him.
Zach dropped his spoon into the bowl with a clatter and pushed it aside. For a suspended moment they all just sat there. Smiles was on the outside, Erin against the window. Underneath the table, she placed her hand reassuringly over his thigh. It must have been weird for her to be facing her ex-boyfriend like this, but she wasn’t showing it.
“Beautiful place you’ve chosen,” Smiles said, turning his eyes to the dirt-streaked windows. The sill was caked with bird crap. He couldn’t tell whether the grimy lobster traps lining the walls were decorative or functional. A transistor radio playing the Red Sox pregame from the kitchen was the only other sign of life in the place.
“She never had a problem with it,” Zach said.
“Yeah, well, tastes change.”
“Do you want the cipher,” Zach said, “or do you want to fight about a skirt?”
Erin rolled her eyes. “Please.”
“I’ve got the girl already,” Smiles said, and felt Erin pinch him lightly. “I came for the cipher.” He held the folded check in front of him.
“A check?” Zach said suspiciously.
“It’s written on the bank, clod,” Erin said. “It’s as good as cash. What’d you expect, we were going to come in here with duffel bags?”
Zach shrunk into himself for a second, aware that Erin was right. Smiles had to make himself frown to keep from cracking up.
Zach hoisted Erin’s messenger bag onto the table. From inside, he produced a page from Ben’s notebook and a small green thumb drive. Smiles remembered seeing the green drive sticking out of Ben’s netbook—it appeared to be the genuine article. To prove it, Zach produced his own laptop from his side, fired it up, and placed the thumb drive inside. “Go ahead, see for yourself. I haven’t touched a thing.”
Erin swiveled the computer around and tapped on the trackpad. Smiles made a show of checking the screen, but he had no clue what he was looking for. He was gladder than ever to have Erin at his side.
“We’re good,” she said.
“Make it to cash,” Zach said to Smiles. It didn’t hit him what the guy was talking about until Erin pulled a pen from her bag and handed it to him.
“Yeah, right,” Smiles said, wondering if either of them could sense his embarrassment for habitually forgetting to bring pens to occasions like these. He wrote Pay to the order of CASH on the back of the check and signed underneath.
After that it all went very fast. Erin grabbed up her bag and the page with the algorithm. Almost before she’d extracted the thumb drive and shut the computer, Zach had taken the laptop back and held his hand out for the check. Smiles gave it to him, and then he and Erin were out of the booth, out the door, not looking back.
They shut themselves inside the Infiniti and looked at each other.
Erin held the thumb drive out. “We got it. We actually got it.”
“I kept waiting for something to go wrong,” Smiles said. A laugh passed through him in a wave. He had just saved Alyce Systems. He was about to save Ben. He was about to get rich. “I can’t believe it. You’re my good luck charm.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Erin said.
“Back to the cabin?”
“Yeah, it’s still early—we’ll have some time before we have to head back to Boston. I want to show you how lucky you are.”
191
“MEET ME FOR lunch?”
Melanie had sent the text during physics. Jenna had a double lunch, and Melanie was hoping she would hold off and join her for the late period on the patio. It was a lot to ask of Jenna, who always seemed eager to eat as early as possible at Alyce. As usual, Melanie had found her own table out on the newly landscaped grounds behind the Kingsley Prep cafeteria; it didn’t seem quite as pathetic to eat alone when you were outside.
It was mostly girls out there today, none of them seniors as far as Melanie could tell. They all wore Kingsley’s tartan uniform: purple blazer, plaid skirt, gray kneesocks. The fit of their white shirts and the hang of their gold ties gave each girl a look of her own. Sun shone through the new leaves of the sugar maple trees at the edge of the patio area, which had been planted with great fanfare when Melanie was a freshman. The school had brought in some transcendentalist poet, a Kingsley alum of course, to dedicate the trees with an interminable piece about nature and education. “How Walden Grows,” he called it. It had all sounded very Oprah to Melanie.
She put her tuna sandwich down and opened her notebook to start another list. She wrote:
What I Learned
1.
2.
; 3.
4.
There had to be something useful to take from her weekend . . . but Melanie wasn’t sure what. The empty spaces stared up at her until she sensed something on her left.
“Good luck with that,” said Jenna, who was eyeballing the page over Melanie’s shoulder.
“I know, right?” Melanie said as Jenna circled to the other side of the bench. “I thought the most humiliating episode of my life might come with some helpful insights, but I guess not.”
“So does your dad still want to kill you?”
Not the best phrasing, perhaps, considering how close Melanie had come to accusing him of actual murder. She nodded. “He is not pleased. How’d it go for you?”
“Grounded,” Jenna said casually. Her eyes followed a lanky guy dribbling a basketball over the patio, headed to the courts in the distance. “Would you look at that? No, that’s wrong. He’s a sophomore. That’s robbing the cradle.” Jenna was talking more to herself than Melanie. “Anyway, so did you hear from Smiles? Was that some new item with him?”
“No clue,” Melanie said. “I haven’t even thought about him that much since we saw him. Kinda weird.”
Jenna was working at an orange, tossing bits of peel onto the table. “So you’re not going to meet that Northeastern professor?”
Melanie shook her head. “No point.”
“Well, you did take those CPR classes last year,” Jenna said. “He might be in need of your assistance any moment.”
Melanie laughed and looked at the sugar maple trees. “I’m letting it go.”
Her cell rang then, and wouldn’t you know: Smiles. “I think I’m letting a lot of things go,” she said as she sent it to voice mail.
After lunch, she was going to get the “What I Learned” list out and write on the top line: To be thankful for Jenna Brooke.
193
SMILES STARED WITH half-lidded eyes at the wooden timbers lining the ceiling of the master bedroom. His mind had been blown. Three days ago, on his eighteenth birthday, everything had been going so wrong. Now he’d almost made it all the way through the biggest challenge in his life, and in a few short hours he was going to come out on the other side. He was going to save Ben and his dad’s company, and collect a fortune in the process. Not to mention Erin, asleep next to him, her soft breath tickling his neck. He didn’t even know her three days ago.
Her eyes eased half-open, and she exhaled with the pleasant exhaustion of sleep. “Are we gassed up for the ride back?” she cooed.
The Infiniti had been low when they pulled in. “I’m on it,” he said, slipping out from underneath her. “We got a half hour. I’ll be back in twenty. Think about how you want to celebrate tonight.”
“Mmmmm,” Erin said, and rolled over.
Ten minutes later he pulled into the old Squam Lake gas station where his dad had always stopped before their trips back home. The owner sat in a rocking chair outside the beaten garage door of the repair shop. He was wearing the same coveralls Smiles had seen him in a thousand times before. It was familiar here—the twenty-year-old Coke machine, the view of the inlet across the road, the peculiar mix of smells from the gas station and hamburger stand next door. Smiles couldn’t help it—it reminded him of Melanie.
They used to wave to each other from the back windows of their parents’ cars as they fueled up. They used to stop here together when they came up by themselves, too. Melanie had made friends with the old man who ran the place.
Smiles grabbed his phone out of his pocket. The pump clicked off behind him, his tank full. Smiles didn’t bother with it yet—first he owed Melanie a call. Yeah, she had broken up with him, but they had a history. It had been a rough weekend for her—the least Smiles could do was to call and check in, offer a friendly voice.
Straight to voice mail. He thought she’d be at lunch now, but then Smiles had never really gotten a good handle on her schedule. He didn’t know what to say, so he hung up. At least she’d see his effort to reach out. It gave him tremendous satisfaction as he raced back to the cabin, feeling like he’d checked a final item off his to-do list.
It was fair to say that Smiles had never been happier in his life than he was when he entered the cabin and called up to Erin, his voice filled with great expectations for the things yet to come that day.
“Erin! Wakey wakey!”
But Erin didn’t answer. Erin didn’t answer because she was gone.
197
AT FIRST SMILES didn’t feel panicked, or distressed, or terrified. What he felt most of all was mystified.
Fifteen minutes ago he had left her right in that bed. And now she was just . . . not there. She wasn’t anywhere. He did a loop of the house, checked in every room. He’d looked in the hot tub, in the lake. She had just . . . vanished? Impossible, unless David Copperfield had dropped in and pulled a fast one while he was up at the gas station.
He wasn’t even worried that the agents had decided to double up on their hostages. The thumb drive was right there in Erin’s bag. They wouldn’t have left without grabbing the cipher. So where did she go? It was mystifying in the extreme.
For the next ten minutes he went back through the house, racking his brain for possible explanations for Erin’s disappearance. Maybe she went for a walk—girls had a thing for walks—but she knew they were supposed to get going by one thirty, and it was past that now. Maybe someone had an emergency out on the road, and Erin had gone to help? But you couldn’t even hear the road from the house, much less when you were asleep. He couldn’t come up with anything.
Smiles was going to have to leave without her in a minute. Standing at the top of the spiral stairs, tapping his head in frustration, he finally thought of her phone. Smiles had plugged her number into his phone when she first gave it to him. He pulled it up now, punched it, and closed his eyes. “Please please please . . .”
A high-pitched chime sounded in his ear, and an ethereal voice said, “The number you dialed has been disconnected. Thank you for choosing AT&T.”
Smiles wanted to scream. Had he entered the number wrong? What was going on here?
He was going to be late for the exchange at the Prudential Center if he didn’t get going, like, five minutes ago. But Smiles couldn’t leave like this. He had fallen in love with her—he was sure of it now.
He went through the house a third time, this time opening cabinet and closet doors, as if Erin had maybe shrunk to pint-size while he’d been gone. It was ridiculous, but if he stood still his head was going to spontaneously combust.
In the guest bedroom where he and Melanie used to stay, he picked up the lantern that had been left on the bedside table. Melanie loved that thing—maybe she’d slept in this room when she’d come up to the cabin.
He plunked down the lantern and noticed, for the first time, the three old pictures lying beside it on the nightstand. He rifled through them—the first a shot of Mr. Hunt about a hundred and fifty pounds ago, wearing an embarrassingly nineties flannel shirt. He must have had a Kurt Cobain phase that Smiles didn’t know about. The next was Smiles’s dad in some kind of college hallway with two other men: one a younger guy with milky skin and questionable facial hair, the other an older professor type with crazed eyes. Smiles didn’t know what to make of it.
The guy with the milky skin was in the last picture as well. He was chatting happily with Smiles’s dad at some kind of picnic, observed by a knockout woman. She had a baby in her lap, and she was giving a steamy look to the milky-skinned guy.
Unfortunately, at some point Smiles was going to have to stop ogling the chick in the picture and try to figure out what was going on here, back in the present day. He tossed the pictures Frisbee-style onto the bed, where they landed facedown. Smiles saw some writing on the back of the last picture.
He read his mom’s bubbly handwriting and almost blacked out:
Math Department Fa
mily Day—Robert with Andrei Eltsin, Darya Eltsin, and baby Benjamin.
199
A VERY STRANGE sensation was taking over Smiles’s body.
The suicide case that Melanie had told him about, the guy who had killed himself on Smiles’s front lawn—his first name was Andrei, Smiles was pretty sure about that. And he had a baby named Ben. Ben Eltsin.
Slowly, heavily, a giant gear engaged in Smiles’s brain. It was like the thick door of a vault being shut. And then the clicks of the wheel being spun, and then only silence. Silence, and the terrible realization that you had been locked inside.
His hands shook as he pulled the page with the phone numbers from his pocket. His ears were hot. His brain was hot. He had fallen to his knees on the hardwood floor, upright against the bed.
He tried the number for the agents.
A high-pitched chime. An otherworldly voice: “The number you dialed has been disconnected. Thank you for choosing AT&T.”
Smiles’s mouth went dry.
Ben’s cell had been destroyed in the casino parking lot. Smiles tried it anyway, frantic. “The number you dialed has been disconnected. Thank you for choosing AT&T.”
Oh no oh no oh no no no no no no no no . . .
211
OH YEAH.
The cab turned and Ben saw the first real sign of home: Mercado Rosanna, the fixture on the corner of the tiny street he’d grown up on. The painted faces of the Puerto Rican girls on the mural smiled like they were in on it, too, like they were proud of him. You did it, Ben. You did it. He’d done the impossible, and he could hardly believe it.
He wanted to leap out of the cab. He’d ridden over with Russell, the two of them cooped up in the taxi liked they’d been cooped up in the hotel room for the last two days. He rolled down the window to take in the scent of empanadas. The smell pulled his smile wider as the cabbie advanced up the street. Ahead, Uncle Jim burst onto the porch. He shouted into the street, giving them a grand welcome.