by J. S. Volpe
“And what exactly is it we’re planning to do tonight, huh?” Violet said. “From the sound of it, you don’t have a shred of actual proof this is the guy.”
“We have way more reason to suspect Roger Grey than you guys did with Theodore Walsh!”
“Now, now,” Mr. May said. “Let’s not squabble. Are we not all pursuing the same end? Let’s pool our knowledge and resources and strive to resolve this situation as best we can.”
Donovan was afraid Cynthia would continue to protest Violet’s involvement. But though she rolled her eyes, she didn’t say anything else. She just sat down on the couch next to Calvin and crossed her arms over her chest.
“Please sit,” Mr. May told Donovan and Violet. He motioned at a loveseat. They sat. “I trust you two know Mr. Beckerman here?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen you in the lunchroom,” Violet told Calvin. “You’re always reading books.” She said this a little sadly, as if reading books were an irredeemable character flaw.
“Hey,” Donovan said, giving Calvin a nod. He wondered again if Calvin and Cynthia were going out. Cyn had denied it before, but he wasn’t sure if he should believe her. She kept her private life very private, even with family. Donovan knew practically nothing about her lovelife, not even if she had one. In fact, for a while there last year he had been wondering if there was something going on between Cyn and her friend Jessica Asher, given how much they had been hanging out together. Not that there was anything wrong with that, of course. Actually, lesbians were kinda hot. Well, mostly; if it turned out Cynthia was one, that would just be weird.
“I know you two are new here,” Mr. May said to Donovan and Violet. “So do you have any questions or concerns before we begin? Or would either of you like anything to eat or drink?”
“Um, I don’t suppose you have any beer?” Donovan said.
“Sadly no. No alcoholic beverages whatsoever, I’m afraid.”
“I have a question,” Violet said.
“Yes?” Mr. May said.
She pointed at the floor. “Are there, like, really bodies buried in the basement? Cuz, you know, I’ve heard stories at school that there are.”
Cynthia muttered something to herself and put her face in her palm.
Mr. May just smiled. “No. I have to put the bodies upstairs. The torture devices take up too much space in the basement.”
Violet blinked at him with uncharacteristic surprise for a moment, then burst into laughter.
“You’re pretty funny for an old dude.”
“I’m so glad you approve.”
Donovan watched Mr. May closely, sure that underneath his good humor the old guy must be pretty peeved at the comment. But instead Mr. May was regarding Violet with a small, almost wistful smile. Donovan wondered if she reminded him of someone he used to know. A guy his age must have met pretty much every type of person there is.
Mr. May sat down in an antique armchair and said, “Let’s call this meeting to order,”
And then there was lots and lots of talk. Donovan tried to follow most of it, but the fact was, Mr. May and Calvin and Cynthia were the kind of people who liked piling up huge towers of information and hashing over facts and details, and Donovan always had trouble keeping up with stuff like that. His eyes started glazing over shortly after Mr. May said, “First of all, let’s review what we know…” Within five minutes all he could think about was how badly he wanted a smoke. A quick glance around the room showed not a single ashtray in sight. The increasingly restless stirring beside him indicated that Violet was jonesing too.
Still, he caught the gist of the discussion: Roger Grey was the most likely suspect in Emily’s disappearance. The plan was to find a way into his house to look around. There was a lot of debate about how to get into his house without his being aware of it. Violet’s main contribution to the discussion—namely, why not just wear masks, bop Grey over the head, tie him up, and search the place?—was met with an awkward silence and then, to Donovan’s surprise, a polite explanation from Mr. May as to why that wouldn’t be a good idea (primarily because it was hard to bop someone over the head without potentially causing them serious injury). “We want to do this stealthily and without violence, if possible,” Mr. May explained. To Donovan’s further surprise, Violet didn’t protest or snark at him, but accepted this explanation with a thoughtful nod.
“We mustn’t forget that we are on the side of the angels,” Mr. May added. “We mustn’t cause any harm unless absolutely necessary. We’re the good guys, after all. We don’t do things like that.”
Donovan frowned. Mr. May’s comment, in combination with the whole rallying-of-the-forces thing that was going on, dislodged a memory in his spacey, nicotine-starved brain. A memory of Emily. Of the speeches she gave while mustering her troops during the Zoo Wars…
2
The Zoo Wars began two years ago when Donovan decided he was too old to still own over four dozen green plastic army men, and subsequently bequeathed them to Emily, then eight. She wound up employing the army men in an elaborate game she dubbed the Zoo Wars (even though it technically had nothing to do with zoos).
The Zoo Wars pitted the army men against Emily’s menagerie of stuffed animals. The army men represented the evil Mr. Mudge (the five-star general) and his henchmen (the lesser ranks), who had kidnapped the animals from their idyllic jungle home and taken them to Mudge’s sinister circus where they were starved and beaten and forced to perform dangerous stunts for the amusement of boorish spectators. But one day Otto the elephant, Emily’s favorite stuffed animal, incited the animals to revolt. The animals escaped into the wild with Mudge and his henchmen in hot pursuit.
Over the course of several months Emily enacted numerous encounters between Mudge’s men and the animals. She would spend hours at a time setting up and then playing through each battle, the furniture in her bedroom serving as an exotic geography—the chair a mountain, the edge of the bed a cliff, the wastebasket the lava-spitting caldera of a volcano.
Before each battle, Emily would pretend to be Mudge as he mustered his troops. Cackling and rubbing her hands together in stereotypical bad-guy fashion, she paced back and forth before the assembled army men and exhorted them to capture the wicked anarchistic animals in the name of revenge, orderliness, and mucho profits. She hatched plans of attack and barked orders to her silent green troops and instructed them to win by any and every means possible, no matter how cruel or underhanded.
Then she would take Otto’s role. He, too, paced about and talked to his troops, but in a gentler, more humane fashion. He urged them to avoid cruelty, to play fair, and to refrain from taking life. “Unless they leave you no choice,” Emily/Otto would add. “Then you can kill the crap out of ‘em.” Emily always ended Otto’s speeches with the line, “Don’t forget: We’re the good guys, and the good guys always win in the end.”
Indeed, the battles bore this out. No matter how outmatched the animals were, no matter how bleak things sometimes appeared, Otto and his crew wound up winning every time, and hordes of generic henchmen died in hideous and painful ways, though Mudge always escaped death to return next time with a new batch of generic henchmen. In fact, the outcome was always so certain and invariable that Donovan wondered why Emily even bothered. Everything was predestined. Why act it out?
Emily eventually came to agree. After a few months she got bored with the Zoo Wars, and ended them with a final epic battle on a mysterious island “all the way at the farthest end of the Earth.” The last of Mudge’s generic henchmen died, a few animals perished bravely (usually while sacrificing themselves to save other animals), and at the very end Mudge’s own greed proved his undoing when he refused to let go of the basket of the huge hot-air balloon that was carrying the animals away from the sinking island. “No!” he cried. “You will be mine! Mine!” Then he lost his grip, plummeted “a hundred thousand feet” to the island below, and was impaled on the needle-sharp peak of the mountain at the center of the island.
&nbs
p; With no further use for the army men, Emily started sticking them in odd places for people to find. For the longest time they were popping up everywhere—inside shoes, on pillows, in the fruit bowl. The general/Mr. Mudge turned up inside the toilet tank. Emily denied all responsibility and faux-innocently speculated that ghosts or elves were doing it. Eventually she ran out of army men, and that was the end of it.
3
“Do you understand the plan?” Mr. May said.
Donovan looked around, blinking. Everyone was looking at him.
“Uh, what?” he said. He realized he had been so immersed in his recollections that he hadn’t heard a word anyone had said in the last few minutes.
“Do you understand what we’re going to do?” Mr. May said.
“Um…” Donovan winced. “Do you think maybe we could go over it one more time?”
Mr. May grimaced. Cynthia rolled her eyes. Beside him Violet muttered, “Dude, zone much?”
“All right,” Mr. May said with a small sigh. “This is the plan…”
Chapter 23
An Incident on Grace Road
1
Roger sat in his recliner staring at a TV show about life on the ocean floor but not really watching it. He was mulling over the proposition Emily Faux had presented to him yesterday afternoon. She hadn’t reappeared since then. Which was just as well, since Roger wasn’t any closer to reaching a decision.
On the face of it, hitting some temporal reset button sounded like a fantastic idea. Emily would be alive again, and Roger would be off the FBI’s radar. Even if magically resetting time meant letting the real Emily go and forsaking any chance to live out his fantasies, it would be preferable to the present situation. But murdering two more children on nothing more than the word of a phantom was a price he wasn’t sure he was willing to pay. Though the phantom had helped him with the FBI and had proven its reality several times already, Roger couldn’t shake his fear that the whole thing was a set-up, a trick to redden his hands even further before unleashing the authorities on him.
“They’re coming,” Emily’s voice said.
Roger started, but only a little. He was getting used to this. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
He turned. Emily Faux sat on the couch again. He felt both relieved and distressed to see her.
“Who’s coming?” Roger said.
“People who suspect you. You need to get ready.”
“What? You mean the police? The FBI?”
“No, not the police. Though the police will be here soon, since you’re going to call them.”
“What?”
She smiled. “Just do what I tell you, and everything will be fine.”
2
Cynthia, Donovan, Calvin, and Violet—the Grace Road Housebreaking Squad, as Cynthia couldn’t help mentally dubbing the group—squatted in the line of thick bushes that separated Roger Grey’s house from his neighbors’ to the south. Calvin and Cynthia wore black ski masks, and everyone except Violet wore headsets linked to long-range walkie talkies that were clipped to their belts. The walkie talkies kept them in constant contact with each other and with Mr. May, who sat in the tower of his house halfway across town. Mr. May had supplied the walkie talkies and the headsets. He said he had used them on countless anomaly investigations in the past.
The quartet in the bushes looked out through the foliage at Roger Grey’s house. Night had recently fallen, and Grey’s curtained living room window was lit up. The rest of the house was dark.
Calvin glanced at the others and whispered, “Okay, we all know what to do?”
“Dude, we’ve only been over it, like, sixty gazillion times already,” Violet said.
“All right, all right. Let’s get started, then. Agent Four, go.” Violet was Agent Four. Calvin, Cynthia, and Donovan were Agents One, Two, and Three, respectively. Mr. May was Shepherd. Mr. May had insisted they use code names just in case anyone was listening in on their transmissions.
Violet wriggled out of the bushes and strode toward Grey’s front steps. The others watched.
“She’s gonna fuck this up,” Cynthia said as Violet rang the doorbell. “I just know it. We should have given her a more specific plan.”
“No, I told you,” Donovan said. “This is perfect. Without a plan, she has nothing to fuck up.”
Cynthia frowned. “I think that’s one of those things that only sounds like it makes sense.”
“No, I think he’s right,” Mr. May said, his voice coming in loud and clear over the headsets. “I haven’t known Agent Four for long, but I get the distinct impression that if we had given her a specific plan, she wouldn’t have followed it anyway. She’s one of those people who works best extemporaneously.”
“Extemper-what?” Donovan said.
Before anyone could reply, Grey’s front door opened, revealing a thirtyish man with glasses and neatly combed light brown hair.
“We’re going,” Cynthia whispered to Donovan. “Remember: Keep us informed. Tell us what Grey’s doing.” She remembered who she was talking to, then added, “Not, like, everything, of course. Just whether he’s inside or outside or whatever. You don’t have to tell us if he picks his nose or something.”
“Aw, but that might be funny,” he said with a smile. But though his mouth was smiling, Cynthia could see the worry in his eyes. He was cracking jokes to hide how nervous he was.
“Just stick to the plan,” she said.
“Right.”
She and Calvin slipped out of the bushes and onto Grey’s neighbors’ lawn. The lights were on in a couple of rooms in the neighbors’ house, but all the blinds were shut tight. Hunching low and sticking to the shadows at the edge of the bushes, they scurried toward the rear of the house.
3
“Can I help you?” Roger asked with a small frown. He recognized this girl. She lived nearby. Sometimes he heard her yelling things late at night. Once he had spotted her rummaging through Ms. Souter’s trash can. Another time he had seen her sprinting down the middle of the street with an overweight cop in panting pursuit.
“We need to talk about your lawn,” she said.
“What about my lawn?” He pretended he didn’t hear the faint rustle from the bushes on the south side of the property.
“You need to do something about the crab fungus.”
“The what?”
She rolled her eyes as if she thought he were being willfully obtuse.
“The crab fungus. It’s already starting to spread to the neighbors’ lawns. Everybody else is too chickenshit to talk to you about it (you know how these suburban dweebs can be), but I’m not. So here I am, and I’m talkin’.”
“Crab fungus?”
“Yes. Crab fungus. You know.”
She looked and sounded so convincing that he caught himself wondering if she might not be telling the truth after all. But then he heard Emily Faux say, “She’s just trying to lure you out of the house.”
He glanced down. She stood next to him in the doorway.
“Play along,” she said. “Just like I told you.”
Indeed, just then the teenage girl said, “Come on, I’ll show you.” She made a “follow me” gesture, then turned and trotted down the steps. She didn’t even glance back, as if she were sure he would follow.
He did.
4
Calvin was starting to wonder what was taking so long when Donovan’s voice came over the headset: “Okay, he just followed her down the steps and onto the lawn.”
“Perfect,” Mr. May said. “Agents One and Two move in.”
Calvin and Cynthia pushed through the bushes and hurried across Grey’s backyard to the rear of the house. There they paused and looked around at the neighbors’ houses to make sure they were unobserved. Several windows in the houses were lit and uncurtained, but no one was in sight. Thankfully Grey didn’t have any outside lights on, and only faint light came from inside his house, which meant Calvin and Cynthia were mostly in shadow. Eve
n if a neighbor looked out, he or she likely wouldn’t be able to see the black-clad duo at all.
Calvin and Cynthia tried the windows. They were locked tight. The back door was, too.
“Everything’s locked,” Calvin said.
“Can you see in through the windows?” Mr. May said.
“Yeah, the curtain’s parted a little in one of them,” Cynthia said, peering in. “It’s a kitchen. There’s just…kitchen stuff. There’s a single light on over the sink.”
“Go ahead and use the glass cutter, then. But be quick.”
Calvin took out the glass cutter and the putty Violet had given him. He stuck the putty onto the glass, then started to cut a circle around it, wincing at the occasional screech it made. Grey was too far away to hear it, but Calvin couldn’t help fearing that someone else might be in the house. An accomplice or a girlfriend or something. If Calvin and the others got caught, they would be in huge trouble. Of course, the authorities might be willing to overlook a few well-meant illegalities if it turned out that Grey was indeed the man who had abducted Emily. But what if he wasn’t? What if they were wrong?
When Calvin had voiced these concerns at the meeting earlier, Mr. May had dismissed them, saying, “I am all but certain Grey is the culprit. And if I’m wrong and if you get caught, I’ll take care of things. Though I rarely travel far from home these days, I still have considerable sway in this community, plus enough funds to grease as many wheels and official orifices as necessary.” At the time, in the cozy comfort of Mr. May’s parlor, this reply had been enough to assuage Calvin’s doubts. But now, as he watched his shaking, black-gloved hand swing the glass cutter around to complete the circle (more like a scalloped oval, really), all of his doubts and fears returned, and new ones surfaced. Maybe Mr. May could get them out of jail if they got caught, but what if they didn’t survive long enough to get caught? What if Grey had a gun and shot them? It was legal for homeowners to shoot intruders, wasn’t it?
He popped out the circle of glass, then reached in through the hole and unlatched the window.