by J. S. Volpe
Anna tried to be the moderator of the trio, the voice of common sense, the brake on John and Emily’s sometimes runaway crazytrain. Often she failed, but she valued the friendship enough to keep trying. She didn’t always understand John and Emily, but she loved them and couldn’t imagine a life without them. They kept things interesting.
The Prius commercial ended and a show started. There was a shot of a white-coated scientist peering into a microscope, and a deep-voiced melodramatic narrator said, “Who are we? Where do we come from? What dictates our personality, our development, our choices? These age-old questions have puzzled scientists and philosophers for centuries, but now the answer is finally within our grasp.”
The title appeared on the screen: Cracking the Genetic Code. Dramatic music swelled.
They cut to a shot of some chromosomes, dark rods on a white background. Anna thought they looked like rabbit poop.
“The final frontier lies not ‘out there,’” the narrator said, “but within each and every one of us. Within our cells, our genes, our DNA…”
John turned to her. It was the first time he had looked at her since she came in. His dark eyes looked so distant and dead Anna’s first instinct was to shy away from him. But she held her ground.
“I saw a light last night,” he said.
“A light?”
“I woke up. I don’t know what time it was. Really late, though. I woke up and there was a light floating in the middle of my room. A ball of white light about the size of someone’s head. It made the shadows of everything stand out really sharp and black on the walls. The light hung there for a minute, and then it just disappeared like a soap bubble popping, and the room went dark again.”
He looked at Anna a moment longer, then turned his gaze back to the TV.
Anna stared at his pale profile, unsure what to think or say. The strangeness of the whole thing scared her.
“Are you…” She cleared her throat. “Are you sure it wasn’t a dream?”
He nodded without taking his eyes from the TV, where a DNA helix was spiraling around and around while the announcer talked about things called adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. “It was real.”
“Do you think it was…I dunno, like, a sign or something?”
“I think maybe it was her.” His voice was barely audible. “A last goodbye.”
Anna gaped at him, appalled and horrified at what he was suggesting. He didn’t notice her outrage—he was still staring zombie-like at the TV—so she grabbed his shoulder and twisted him toward her. The vacant look in his eyes vanished, and he blinked at her, startled, lucid. She felt glad and almost triumphant that she had shaken him out of his stupor, even if only temporarily.
“She’s not dead, John. Or, well, we don’t know. We don’t really know anything.”
He wrenched his shoulder from her grasp hard enough to make the couch shake. “I know. The light—”
“It was just a light. If it was even that. Maybe it was a dream. I’ve had dreams I thought were real.” (The memory of her zombie dream floated to the surface of her mind again. She forced it back down.)
“It was…” John scowled. He was mad at her. That was fine. Even if he hated her now, it was better than him being a dead-eyed zombie. “I saw it!”
“You thought you saw it.”
John regarded her uncertainly for a moment. Then his eyes narrowed. “What are you doing? Weren’t you the one who told the cops about some guy saying he was gonna show her fairies in the woods? The TV news people said it was a friend of hers who told them that, and it sure wasn’t me.”
“I…yeah. She called me last night and told me she was gonna have some really cool news to tell me today. I asked her what she was talking about, but at first she wouldn’t tell me anything. I kept pressing her, though, and she finally admitted that earlier in the day she had talked to some guy who said he could show her fairies in the woods around her house. I asked her who, but she wouldn’t tell me anything more than that. She was so excited. I told her she shouldn’t go anywhere with strangers, but she said he wasn’t really a stranger. She said she knew him from somewhere. She didn’t say where.” She shrugged. “But none of that proves anything. We don’t know for sure what happened.”
John snorted. “Yeah, right.” He shot her a contemptuous look that made her feel both angry and embarrassed.
“Who knows?” Anna insisted. “Maybe it was all true. Maybe she did see fairies. Maybe they took her away. I’ve heard stories about that: people being taken off to fairy land and coming back years later, the same age as when they left.” Anna didn’t believe those stories, or that fairies might be responsible for Emily’s disappearance, but she hoped John might.
He didn’t.
“Don’t be stupid,” he snapped. His eyes glimmered with unshed tears. “It wasn’t fairies. It was just some stupid sex pervert. Just another scumbag, like all the rest of them. Like the whole world. It’s all nothing but perverts and car crashes and death. Everything good gets destroyed while evil just goes on and on, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.”
In a way this outpouring of pessimism was more alarming than his deadness had been. But the pain and despair that lay behind it were clear as day, and they brought on Anna’s own tears. She laid a hand on his shoulder, not grabbing now, not forcing. Only comforting. Connecting.
“I don’t believe that,” she said in a soft, gentle voice. “I don’t believe that at all. But you know what? Even if you’re right and I’m wrong, there is something we can do. We can not let it make us bad, too. And giving up on people is bad. Maybe you’re ready to give up hope. Maybe you’re ready to give up on Emily. But I’m not.”
By the time she was done speaking, her face was wet with tears. Again. It felt like she had done nothing but cry all day. But that was fine. She had every reason to.
“Hope,” he echoed softly. The quivering films that covered his eyes finally broke, and a single tear slipped down each cheek. The tears dripped from his chin to dot the afghan, the spots almost invisible on the black fabric. He looked away at the TV. On the screen Frankenstein’s Monster was lurching forward, arms outstretched. The narrator was saying something about Frankenfoods and genetic engineering.
Anna edged in closer and put her arm around his shoulders.
“Everything’ll be okay, John,” she said. “One way or another.”
He didn’t say anything, but she thought she saw him give a tiny nod.
Chapter 6
Robert May
Calvin had never seen the May house before, and when he peeped out of the foliage on the eastern edge of the clearing in which the house stood, his jaw dropped. He couldn’t believe he had grown up only six blocks away from such a cool old place without ever knowing about it.
It was a Second Empire structure built of dark-red bricks, and although Calvin couldn’t see the whole thing from where he crouched, it appeared to be shaped like a plus sign, its four wings aligned with the four cardinal points. Each wing ended in a porched entrance surmounted by a second-floor balcony. The high mansard roof was covered with dark-gray fish-scale shingles and crowned with cast-iron cresting shaped like alternating circles and spikes. A gabled dormer jutted from the roof above each entrance, while from the dead center of the house rose a four-sided mansard-roofed tower with the same cast-iron cresting. Spaced like sentries around the tower were four tall brick chimneys. Despite its age, the house seemed to be in excellent condition.
Northeast of the house stood a brick carriage house that had been converted into a two-car garage. A small, decrepit wooden outbuilding, apparently a shed of some kind, sat due north of the house, right on the edge of the woods. The shed was leaning to one side, and all around it were bits of broken shingles that had slid off its sagging roof.
Weeds were growing up through cracks in the concrete driveway, which extended from the closed garage door to disappear amid the trees to the south of the house. There were no vehicles anywhere in sight
.
The late-afternoon sun was well below the level of the treetops, and the clearing was filling with shadow. When the wind stirred the trees, a few irregular patches of dim yellow sunlight flashed on the grass and the driveway. But then the wind died down and the shadows returned. Aside from the leaves, nothing moved. Every visible window of the house was curtained tight. Calvin’s tension was a knot in his gut.
“So what now?” he asked Cynthia, who was crouched beside him and likewise peering through the foliage at the May house. She was so close to him he could smell the herbal shampoo she used, could see a tiny mole on the edge of her left eyebrow, could hear the faint click and see the slight bulge of her throat when she swallowed. The sleeve of her T-shirt brushed his, and even that indirect touch made his heart leap. For a moment he forgot all about the gravity of the situation and felt only a flutter of delight that he was with her, next to her, sharing this singular moment with her, a thing they alone would share forever. When she turned to him to respond, he had to look down for a moment so he could clear the inappropriately dopey, spacey look from his face. He needed to focus on the task at hand.
“I guess we should try to see inside,” she said.
“Does that mean actually breaking in?”
“I don’t know.” She frowned uncertainly, as if only now realizing the possible complications and consequences of the path they’d chosen. But then conviction hardened her face, and she nodded. “I guess if we have to, yeah. I mean, I’d rather wind up getting in trouble and—and—I don’t know, going to jail or whatever, if it means at least finding out the truth. Even if she’s not in there and Mr. May has nothing to do with it, we have to find out.” She paused, then shrugged. “Or, well, I do anyway.”
“No,” he said. “I think at this point I do, too.”
She gave him a small, grateful smile. He smiled back. Her smile faded and her expression clouded over as if she had thought of something that troubled her. She turned to look out at the May house again.
“We should probably check the garage and that little shed, too,” she said. “Rule those out first.”
“Yeah. Plus, those’ll give us some good cover to approach the house. Everywhere else it’s just wide-open space. We’d be spotted in a heartbeat.”
They retreated a couple dozen paces into the woods, circled around the clearing until they drew parallel to the shed, then crept forward to the edge of the woods again.
The rear wall of the shed was blank, just dry old boards shedding decades-old white paint, but the east side sported a single bleary window in a rotten frame. Calvin and Cynthia rounded the corner and crept to the window. From here, they were in sight of the May house’s eastern porch. No one was on it, but that didn’t make them feel any safer. All Mr. May or anyone else inside had to do was step out the door and the jig would be up.
Calvin and Cynthia cupped their hands around their eyes and peered in through the window’s dirt-smudged glass. Calvin made out the dim shapes of hoes, shovels, a stack of crates, what looked like an old engine on the floor. Everything was old and filthy and festooned with webs full of spider eggs that looked like desiccated chickpeas.
“This place hasn’t been touched in years,” he said.
“Let’s check the garage.”
That was easier said than done. To get there, they would have to cross forty feet of open grass that would leave them in full view of the rear of the house. Pausing at the southeast corner of the shed, they took one last look at the May house, then one last look at the grounds around them, then one last look at each other. Calvin nodded. Cynthia nodded. They sprinted for the garage.
As Calvin ran he kept glancing at the house, sure a door would fly open and someone would come charging out with a shotgun. But no one appeared and nothing changed, and in surprisingly short order, Calvin and Cynthia were flinging themselves flat against the bricks of the garage’s rear wall. They remained there a moment, chests heaving, breath loud and fast, then glanced at each other and nodded again.
There was a door in the back wall of the garage, but it was padlocked shut. Next to it was a window almost as bleary as the one in the shed. Calvin and Cynthia peered through it. The garage’s shadowy interior was dominated by a long boxy shape draped with a white sheet. A car. A big one. Maybe a Cadillac or an old Thunderbird. The garage’s walls were lined with wooden shelves laden with gas cans, funnels, spray bottles, an oil pan, and similar items.
Calvin grunted. He had been hoping they would find some firm proof of either guilt or innocence without having to get too close to the house.
“So,” Cynthia said. She looked as nervous as Calvin felt. “The house, then.”
“Yeah.”
They slunk to the northwest corner of the garage and peeked around it at the May house. Nothing had changed. Everything was silent and still. The house’s curtained windows dimly reflected the sky and the woods.
They withdrew behind the corner again.
“I don’t know that we’re gonna be able to see in very well,” Calvin said. “Not with all the curtains shut like that.”
“I know. But that’s kind of telling in and of itself, don’t you think? It’s not like there’re lots of passersby who might glance in through the windows. I mean, this place is about as isolated as you can get around here, and he still religiously keeps every single curtain shut tight. Why?”
“Some people are just really private.”
“True,” she conceded. “Either way, we should still try to look in through the windows. The curtains might not be too thick. We might be able to see through them. Or there might be gaps we can look through.”
“Yeah.” Calvin peeked around the corner again for another look at the house. Each wing sported six tall, narrow windows on the first floor: two on either side, and two more looking out onto the porch. Chest-high bushes ran along the sides of the wings.
He drew back next to Cynthia.
“I’m thinking we should avoid the porches for now and just stick with the side windows,” he said. “That way, we can stay behind the bushes, out of sight.”
“Good idea.”
Both of them took a deep breath, then slipped around the corner and raced across the lawn toward the house. Like before, Calvin eyed the windows and doors as he ran, more certain than ever that someone would catch them, but they made it to the house without a hitch. They ducked behind the bushes that lined the east side of the north wing, then hunkered down in the narrow gap between the bushes and the house’s outer wall. The wall’s dark bricks ended a foot above the ground. Below that were big gray foundation stones. The ground was littered with crumbly brown leaves from autumns past. Calvin and Cynthia’s fast, ragged breaths were loud in the confined space.
After they had caught their breaths, they inched to the nearest window. Unlike the ones in the outbuildings, the windows here were in good shape, with clean glass and sturdy wooden frames free of rot. The frames could have used a new coat of paint, though; the light-green paint that covered them was cracked and flaking in places. Bits of it dotted the ground below.
Calvin and Cynthia looked through the window. The curtain was thin and slightly translucent, but not enough to show more than vague, dark shapes. Fortunately the edge of the curtain fell slightly short of the window frame, leaving a half-inch gap they could peer through.
Inside they saw a swath of a white washing machine, atop the closed lid of which sat an empty brown plastic clothes basket.
“Laundry room,” Cynthia muttered.
“Let’s try the next one.”
They made their way to the second window on this side of the north wing, but this time there was no gap to see through. They moved on, following the wall to the right-angle bend where the north wing met the east wing, then along the north wall of the east wing. The first of the two windows on this side of the east wing likewise had no gaps to see through. But the next one did. In fact there were gaps all the way around the curtain, giving Calvin and Cynthia a decent
view of the room inside. The room had speckled gray carpeting, a huge fireplace with a stuffed eagle mounted on the wall above it, a pair of red leather wingback chairs, and an antique-looking dark-wood table bearing a Tiffany lamp with a dragonfly on the shade. Every surface in sight was dull with dust.
“Why is everything so dusty?” Cynthia said.
“Are you sure he’s still alive?” Calvin asked. “When was the last time anyone saw him?”
“That’s a good question.” She thought for a moment. “The last time I saw him was…geez, five or six months ago, I guess. Back in the spring. I was coming home from school one day, and I spotted him prowling around in Indian Hill Cemetery, right across Potts Road from my house. God, for all I know, he might’ve been waiting for me, spying on me. I mean, he must’ve known what time school lets out.”
“Either way, has anyone seen him since?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Hm. Well, let’s check some more windows. Maybe we’ll have better luck closer to the front of the house. I mean, this place is pretty big and it’s just one old man. Maybe he just doesn’t use most of the rooms.”
They rose from their crouch, ready to move around to the front of the house, but froze dead when they saw Robert May standing on the other side of the bushes, watching them with an amused smile.
Mr. May was said to be nearly a hundred years old, and he certainly looked it. He was small and thin and bent, and his face was a network of wrinkles, like a piece of paper that’s been crumpled and smoothed out over and over again. His hair was fine and white like eiderdown. A pair of bushy white eyebrows overhung his moist brown eyes. He wore a black suit with a thin black tie, and leaned upon a black, silver-handled cane.