by Tom Clancy
Dinner proper was over-assuming there'd been one. Everything was cleared away, and the dishwasher was running, in sonic cycle at the moment to judge by the faint chronic jingling coming from the silverware drawer next to it. However, the fact that there had just been a meal didn't seem to have changed one of the verities of life in the O'Malley household. One of her four brothers was in the kitchen, looking for something to eat. In this case it was Sean, all six feet of him. But about two feet of the six seemed presently to be missing, because they were shoved into the fridge. The rest of him was wearing a very trendy-looking black sliktite that made Megan suspect he was getting ready for a hot date.
"You done in there?" Sean said.
"Done," Megan said, "yes. Finished. Through." She plunked herself dispiritedly into one of the wooden chairs by the scrubbed-oak kitchen table and briefly dropped her head into her hands, rubbing her eyes. "Everything is going to pieces, and the world is coming to an end."
Sean, still halfway into the fridge, said only, "Good, then no one has to go out and get milk."
"We wouldn't need to get it three times a day," Megan said, "if all you guys didn't drink it as if it came out of the faucet."
"I'm a growing boy," Sean said.
"You're twenty-one going on twenty-two, your bones are through growing, so don't give me that!"
"Speaking of which," Sean said, withdrawing his tall blond self, closing the door and heading out of the kitchen and down toward the den, "what are you getting me for my birthday?"
Megan looked at the ceiling as if imploring it for help, but no help came. The door leading to the hallway, the den and the bedrooms now merely produced another brother, this time dark-haired Mike, in jeans and sneakers and a bodyform T-shirt presently radiating in traveling abstract calligraphic patterns of blue and green on navy blue. He also opened the fridge, put his upper body into it, and a moment later came out with a large stack of cold- cut packages. These Mike carried over to the counter, where he rooted around in a cupboard over the work surface, acquiring a bottle of mustard and a small shake-on container of the deadly chili powder that he had been putting on everything lately. Mike then got a loaf of rye bread out of the breadbox on the counter and began hastily assembling something that bore the same resemblance to a sandwich that the Leaning Tower of Pisa did to more normal buildings.
Megan watched this performance with the resigned expression of a farmer on some African savannah watching the locusts make their scheduled descent onto the landscape one more time. "You might leave some of that for someone else," Megan said, in a tone of voice meant to convey a very strong hint.
"Why? They'd just eat it," Mike said, finishing the building of the sandwich. He took down a plate from the cupboard, moved the sloppy and unstable construction onto it with some difficulty, and carried it out of the kitchen. Megan prayed earnestly for an earth tremor, but none came.
She sat there at the table for a few more moments. I really should eat something, Megan thought. But whether from the events in her virtual arena, or from watching Mike throw together his snack, her appetite was now completely gone.
She could hear someone coming down the hall again, but to her intense relief it wasn't another of her brothers. It was her dad-tall, balding a little on top, dressed in jeans and a soft work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, holding his pipe in one hand, a Holmesian antique "deerstalker" meerschaum of which he was inordinately proud. "Dad," Megan said, "I need your professional help."
"What's the problem?"
"I want to kill my brothers in some way that can never be traced back to me."
Her father the mystery writer raised his eyebrows as he opened one of the kitchen drawers and started going through it, apparently looking for a pipe cleaner. "I have a few interesting new methods on tap this week. But all of them require considerable preparation, and no witnesses. And your conscience will still pain you afterward."
"Hah," said Sean, heading back into the kitchen and shrugging into an overslick as he went. "She doesn't have one. Six days till my birthday, Meg."
The door slammed behind him. "You see my point?" Megan said to her dad.
Her father turned around, leaning on the drawer to push it closed, and began performing the nearest thing to single bypass surgery on his pipe. "Your mother and I have invested a lot in their educations," he said mildly. "I'd hate to assist in their murder before we see some kind of return on our investment. Unless, or course, you're in a position to guarantee that you're going to make a salary the size of all their salaries combined."
"Plus twenty percent," Mike said as he came in the kitchen door again, putting his own jacket on, "and my birthday's coming up, too" He hurried out the back door after Sean.
Megan looked after him in mild annoyance. "You see what I put up with," she said.
Her father sighed. "More clearly than you imagine. Honey, have you had a bad day? My keen eye for observation suggests there's a certain sense-of-humor loss in the air." He removed the pipe cleaner he was working with from the pipe stem, eyed the horrible color it had become, chucked it into the garbage can and went looking in the drawer for another.
'That's a bad habit," Megan said. "You should give it up."
"I smoke one pipe a week. I breathe more smog than that in a day. Don't try to change the subject, honey. What's the matter?"
She told him about her afternoon's practice, the malfunctioning model-assuming that the malfunction was its and not Megan's-and Wilma's sudden departure.
Her father looked down the pipe's mouth, took the stem off and began reaming it out again. "A little unusual. And her mother said-what? That Burt had left home?"
"It sounded that way."
"This the first you've heard of this?"
Megan raised her eyebrows. "Not as such." She sighed. "Dad, far be it from me to describe this as the perfect family-"
He gave her a slightly cockeyed look. "I wouldn't go quite that far myself. Especially since I pay the grocery bills."
"Yeah, well, that's not what I mean." She fiddled with the fringe on one of the knitted placemats on the table.
"You and Mom," Megan said, "are extremely good to us… compared to some parents."
Her father straightened, put the pipe aside. "Well," he said, "it's always dangerous to get judgmental about other people's family lives, their interrelationships. There are so many factors that make a big difference, but never get exhibited to the world at large. That makes it hard to figure out what's really going on."
"Not always," Megan said. "Dad… Burt takes a lot of.. well, it's emotional abuse, really. There's no other word for it. His folks… I don't go over there much. We try to make ways for Burt to get away, because really, when he's home, both his mother and his father ride him constantly. There's just nothing he can do right. They find fault with every single thing he does, no matter how innocent. And when they do start finding fault, they really yell at him. Not just cutting remarks, sarcasm, or whatever. It's scary, sometimes. If I heard you or Mom ever make that kind of noise about something, I'd faint."
"You might be surprised," her father said, sounding dry. "I've heard your mother's end of some of the editorial conferences for TimeOnline. Pretty rough stuff."
"Maybe it is. But, Daddy, you've never treated any of us that way. I can't imagine what that kind of thing would be like, coming from your own parents. And Burt's been putting up with it for years."
Megan leaned back in the chair. "Lately he's been starting to mention not putting up with it anymore. Getting out. But Burt's never been clear about exactly where he planned to get out to. I don't think he had a lot of money saved, for one thing. If he's got enough money to move out, all of a sudden, I'd think maybe he'd robbed a bank or something… I don't know where else Burt would be getting it."
Her father brooded for a few moments, turning the half- pipe over in his hands, then fitting the stem to it again.
"Are there friends who might have given him a place to stay?"
&nbs
p; "Not that I know of. I mean, none who wouldn't tip his mother off right away once they got a feeling for what was going on. If he's staying with someone, it's nobody from school, I'd bet, or from the riding crowd. Someone none of us know." Megan began tying the bit of fringe into a knot. "But what's going to drive poor Wilma right around the bend is not knowing. She's seriously freaked already. If Burt doesn't at least get in touch with her to let her know he's okay, wherever he is, Wilma's going to get even more frayed at the edges."
And Megan groaned and put her head down in her hands. "I don't believe this is happening," she muttered. "Why couldn't he have waited until after the competition? What kind of person does this to their friends before they're about to do something so important? What kind of person does it at all?
"Burt's kind, apparently," her father said, leaning against the counter and sucking experimentally on the pipe. "Yech."
Megan looked up, for this was an unusual reaction for her dad, but it was the pipe he was scowling at, and now he took it apart again and went rooting in the drawer for another pipe cleaner. "Well," he said after a moment, "this leaves you with an interesting choice."
"I don't see that it leaves us with any choices at all," Megan said, mournfully.
"Whether to let this ruin your competition, for one thing."
Megan straightened up and felt her mouth set in a grim expression. "I'm not sure the horse isn't going to do that for us," she said. "Even without Burt, things are looking pretty awful."
Her father raised his eyebrows as he worked on the pipestem. "So even if he hadn't gone off wherever he's gone, you'd still have problems."
"More than enough," Megan said, and sighed again.
"No, I see your point, PopsMy life won't exactly come to an end. I may wind up looking incredibly incompetent and dumb in front of hundreds of people, but that's nothing, really…"
Her father's eyebrows went up higher, this time in response to her ironic tone. "I've done it in front of millions, in my time," Megan's father said. "That last review in the New York Times, for example."
"I thought you said that didn't matter, because the Times critic was an obsequious cretin."
Her father smiled very slightly as he put down the pipe stem and started working on the pipe end. "I meant that, first of all, he was wrong, and second, yes, he is an obsequious cretin. But lots of people think he's not, so I probably looked dumb to them." Her father shrugged. "They're not usually people who would have bought my book anyway, so I don't care what they think. It's the ones who bought it and didn't like it that I worry about. After all, I took their beer money and didn't entertain them. But third, and most important… how much does it really matter? In two hundred years who's going to care?"
Megan blinked… then sighed again. "Okay," she said. "This is that 'sense of proportion' thing you keep telling me about."
"When humor fails you," her father said, grimacing at the second pipecleaner and throwing it away, "there's no better substitute. Meanwhile, what have Burt's folks been doing about this situation?"
"I don't know," Megan said. "I should call Wilma and see if she knows anythingI don't want to call them myself. I don't know them all that well."
"And from the sound of it, you don't want to."
Megan shook her head. Every time she had called Burt's house in the past, there had been the sound of shouting in the background, and once, when the phone was on visual, she had seen Burt's mother go by in the background of the view, looking grim and purposeful about where she was going, and carrying.. She shook her head again. Surely nobody in this day and age actually hit their kid with a belt. She had to have seen that wrong. Oh, jeez, I hope I saw that wrong… "It's not high on my list," Megan said to her father. "I'll call Wilma in an hour or so and see what she found out."
"And what about Saturday?" her father said. "Are you going to be able to replace Burt if no one can find him?"
Megan rubbed her eyes again. "It's not that simple," she said. "The team qualifies as a group, and everybody has to have been preregistered as part of a team with the horse they're working with. If we're incredibly lucky, we might be able to get one of the other riders who's certified with Burt's horse to fill in. But there's no guarantee that whoever it is will've been working on the same figures and patterns that Burt was preparing… the ones the judges are going to be looking for." She sighed, looked up again. "Dad," Megan said, "what do you do when you see a complete disaster coming, and no matter how you try to cope, there's just no way to avoid it?"
He was frowning at the meerschaum pipe, screwing it together again. "Prepare your responses in advance," her father said, sounding resigned, "and do your best to make them graceful. People do remember that afterward, no matter what the winners say."
Megan sighed as her father went out of the kitchen, and got up to throw herself together some kind of dinner, while thinking morosely about Burt, Buddy, her sim of Buddy, and the general unfairness of life. Vd better get the nourishment into me now, because Vm not gonna have time in the next seventy-two hours…
Chapter 3
Later, three days later to be precise, Megan was standing in the shade of the big stands at Potomac Valley, in the "prepping area," looking down at her photocopy of her team's points sheet. She was thinking black thoughts about graceful responses and senses of proportion, since her sense of humor had so completely deserted her that she suspected she'd have to take out an ad in the paper and post notices around the neighborhood to find it again. All around her, people dressed as Megan was in dressage jodhpurs and black jackets were making their way back and forth, leading dapper and well-groomed horses of every description to and from the parking lot full of cars fastened to horse trailers. Around the little brown prefab temporary buildings under the stands that hosted the administrative offices, the air was full of the smell of wood shavings and sweat, and also of occasional cries of delight from people who had gotten their aggregate scores and were not horribly disappointed. Megan was not one of these.
She leaned against the wall of one of the prefabs and scowled at the scoring paper as if a mean look could make the digits twist themselves into more acceptable shapes. Her team's overall score was passable.. Just. It was not because they had done all that badly as a group. Mick Posen had volunteered to fill in for Burt on the horse the two of them had been sharing, McDaid's White Knight, and had done extremely well for someone who had come to the qualifiers prepared for a completely different routine-but Whitey was one of those horses routinely referred to as "bomb-proof," a steady, untemperamental, and good-natured creature who would do just about anything you asked him, short of jumping over the Moon, as long as you gave him extravagant amounts of horse goodies afterwards. Their teammate Rick had ridden his mount, Wellington Donnerschlag Second Strike (also known as Old Ugly) as perfectly as could be expected. And after that, to her own astonishment, Megan had actually had a good ride on Buddy. He had come "off the rails," performing very passable circles and running through the rest of the routine in an acceptable, if not exactly inspired, manner. It was as if the big blockheaded monster had just been pretending to malfunction-as if all the trouble of the previous week had been a big act. But as soon as he got out in front of the crowd, he began behaving like a well-oiled machine. Maybe that was something I should have added to the simulation, Megan thought suddenly, as she glanced down the scoring paper one more time. The smell of the sawdust… the roar of the crowd. There was no arguing the fact that some horses were performance freaks, egotistic critters who lived to be cheered at. Something to think about for later…
If there was even going to be a later. For, though their fourth teammate Joanne Fisher had done very well on Old Ugly herself, then it had come Wilma's turn to ride
Megan resisted the urge to cover her face and moan. Buddy had actually done pretty well, under the circumstances, but Wilma had sat him with all the grace and elan of a sack of potatoes. She was clearly somewhere else entirely while she rode. In the loser's circle, Megan
thought, and then grimaced in annoyance at her own cruelty… Worrying about Burt.
But she had had reason. No one had heard from Burt for three days now. His parents, according to Wilma, had called the police, but the police had told them what they usually told the parents of runaways. There were too few officers to chase too many kids who had gone missing, some of them for just a few days. Unless there were suspicious circumstances, they couldn't really helpand there was nothing particularly suspicious about it. Burt had simply taken off, leaving a note behind him that said he just couldn't stand it anymore. Additionally, he would be turning eighteen in a few months. If he didn't want to go home again, all Burt had to do was lie low until then, and after that claim emancipated-minor status under state law, if he wanted to.
Not that I don't understand why he'd want to, either, Megan thought. But… She sighed and let the thought go, for she'd spent too much time belaboring it over the past few days, and whatever her intentions had been, her practice schedule had suffered. She found herself wondering now whether she could have done a whole lot better on the suddenly-not-misbehaving Buddy if she had spent more of those seventy-two hours in the saddle and less of them consoling a crying friend.
But, dammit, Megan thought, getting angry at herself again, what're you supposed to do? What are friends for anyway if they can't depend on you to be there when they need someone to cry on? She folded her arms and hugged herself a little in annoyance. It's all so damn unfair…
"Megan!"
Oh, what now, Megan thought, and then once more angrily stomped on the thought as unworthy, and turned. Wilma was running toward her, and the difference between the droopy, sad, furious Wilma of a hour or so ago and this present one was astonishing. She was glowing, she was grinning all over her face, she was transformed. It was amazing, and a little annoying as well.