by Jim Brown
She nodded and bit her carrot, chewed, swallowed, then snagged a piece of meat. He winced at the juxtaposition. She noticed and smiled coyly.
He sipped his milk. “Was it a male or a female?”
“What?” she asked, her young face dimpling.
“The ghost.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.”
“I don’t. But for argument’s sake, was this supposed ghost a man or a woman?”
“Neither.” She went back to the potatoes.
Dean frowned, perplexed. Piper Blackmoore smiled with obvious delight.
“You know, as arguments go, this is not your best,” he challenged.
“It’s not mine. It’s his.” Back to the meat.
“Okay, let’s review: yesterday morning – at approximately, what? Six forty-five? – Deputy Cheevers was at the elementary school crosswalk when he saw an androgynous ghost flying over the city. Is that about it?”
She nodded again. Commas of rich black hair bounced against her forehead. “That’s it - except it wasn’t an androgynous ghost.”
“It wasn’t? Then, what was it?”
“It was a machine.” She drank her milk and studied him over the top of the paper container, taking delight in his surprise.
Aware of this, Dean tried to limit his expression. She enjoyed shocking him, whether it was about the supernatural world, which she openly endorsed or whether it was flirting, wearing her sexuality like an evening gown.
“A machine?”
She cupped her hand to her mouth. “Echo, echo, echo . . .” she repeated with diminishing volume. “Maybe I should yodel. Would you repeat that, too?”
“Yodel?” he said before he could stop himself, then winced.
Piper clapped her hands in pure, childlike delight.
Dean laughed at himself, amazed at how quickly and easily she could touch the child in him. “Okay, okay. So tell me, how can a machine be a ghost?”
She shrugged. “He said it appeared out of nowhere, then disappeared – just like a ghost.”
A thought occurred to Dean. “That would make it a UFO.”
She shook her head. “It was not an unidentified flying object.”
Dean held up the palm of his hand. “Thank you.”
“Because it was identified.”
“So it was a plane?”
“No. It was a truck.”
“A truck?”
“A ghost truck.”
Dean laughed out loud.
“A flaming ghost truck,” Piper finished, laughing with him. Then, raising her right hand, added, “I kid you not. That’s his story.”
“Is this official school business?” he teased.
“Yes, it is.” She had finished her carrots and now reached across the table and speared one of his. “Part of my job as junior member of the history department is to embarrass any Nobel Prize-winning colleagues as much as possible.”
Finishing his meat, Dean moved on to his potatoes.
“Truth is, I don’t put much stock in Cheevers’ sighting,” Piper said.
Dean clutched his heart. “Quick, call the papers. Piper Blackmoore found a crazy idea she didn’t embrace.”
She threw the carrot stick at him. But her brown eyes continued to smile. To flirt. No, he was too old and she was too pretty. He thought of Mavis Connetti, a local businesswoman he had been dating, sort of, then he thought of his Judy. A cold snake of guilt climbed up his spine. How long had it been since his wife’s death?
Sometimes it seemed like forever, other times it seemed like yesterday.
No, don’t think that way. Remember what John said: “Judy would have wanted you to get on with your life.”
He felt his throat constrict.
“Hey, Doc, you okay?” Piper asked.
He swallowed and smiled. “Yeah, I’m fine, just fine.”
She turned her head and looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “Now you’re just bragging.”
He laughed. In many ways it was Piper and her whose effervescent personality that had brought him back from hopelessness and depression following Judy’s death.
Because of some placement procedure that Dean was never able to figure out, her classroom was just across the hall from his. She had started teaching at Westcroft College last year. Since then, she frequently took her lunch with Dean. He wasn’t sure why; he suspected pity but refused to let himself dwell on it for fear of diluting the magic.
Piper challenged him, shocked him, intrigued him.
“Penny for your thoughts,” she said, wiping her mouth with a napkin.
He felt his face redden.
Her smile expanded. “You horndog. You were thinking about sex.”
The reddening became a fire. He felt flushed.
She saved him from self-immolation. “I turned in the report to Mayor Perkins. You know, detailing the history of Black Valley. I don’t think he’s too happy with it.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t what he expected. In fact, it was pretty weird. He asked about you, though, asked if you had made a decision yet. Have you?”
“NxTech.”
“NxTech.”
He shook his head. “Not yet. It’s just – ”
Suddenly her face slackened. She stood up quickly, biting her lower lip.
“What is it? Piper?”
Her teeth dimpled her lip, the healthy, warm pink turning white.
“Piper?”
“Somebody’s watching us.”
He looked out the row of windows. A wind teased the brush and wild grass that grew just beyond the campus grounds, on Hawkins Hill.
“There’s no one out there,” Dean said, purposely striking the tones of teacher to pupil.
“It’s just . . . ” Her eyes narrowed. The grasses waved. “Just one of my . . . feelings.”
“Ah.” Dean sat.
“Ah? What do you mean, ‘ah?” Piper challenged, glaring at him.
He took a spoonful of potatoes. “Nothing.”
“I don’t think so. That was definitely something. You mean ‘ah’ as in ‘Ah, just another one of Piper’s silly, superstitious reactions.’ ”
“I only made a sound,” Dean defended. He ate his potatoes. They were cold. “It’s not even a word.”
“Close enough. I know what -” Her eyes widened. “There, there by the oak. A man. He’s moving.”
Dean stood. He caught a flash of something. Dark cloth. A cape?
“He went behind the tree.” She slapped her hands excitedly. “Aha!”
“Aha?” Dean frowned.
“Yes, I see your ‘ah’ and raise you a ‘ha’. I told you someone was watching us. I knew it.”
Dean moved to the far north corner of the room, where he could see behind the tree.
“I could feel it,” Piper said. Her voice softened. “In fact, I’ve been feeling strange all day long.”
“Piper,” he called.
“But I told you someone was watching us. Now do you believe me? Now do you see that some things are bigger than science.”
“Piper, come here.”
She hurried to where he stood. “What? Can you see him from there? Who is he? Do you know him?” She reached the corner and stopped, the truth revealed.
“There’s no one there,” Dean said.
“But I just saw him. You saw him.”
“No, I saw a flash of something. A towel blown off someone’s line, a tree limb, something, but not a man.”
“He was there. He was looking at us. Right at us.”
Dean returned to his seat. “Your potatoes are getting cold.”
She remained in the corner of the room, looking, searching.
Searching for leprechauns and
fairies, Dean thought. It wasn’t her fault. She came from a superstitious family. Orphaned at the age of four, she had been raised by her father, just the two of them alone in that big, old house on the other side of Hawkins Hill. Piper Blackmoore possessed the mind of a scholar but the heart of a child. Open to all the possibilities – and impossibilities – of the world.
Dean had known her mother, not personally but by reputation. She had considered herself a psychic, picking up pocket change by reading fortunes in tea leaves and outstretched hands.
Piper had heard the stories. This, he suspected, was the true source of her belief in the unbelievable, as if by embracing the supernatural, she was somehow embracing her mother.
Piper returned to her seat. Her smile had vanished. It was as if a great cloud had suddenly blocked the sun.
He wanted to reassure her. Instead all he could do was offer her his analytical assessment of what had just occurred. “You have excellent peripheral vision. I’m sure you glimpsed something without realizing it.”
She looked at him, the fluorescent lights flickering in her soft brown eyes. She tried to smile, but her gaze returned to the window. Outside, the sky was clear except for the northern horizon, where a thin line of charcoal clouds lingered. Stark, bare limbs reached toward the sky like skeletal hands grasping for salvation.
“He was watching us. I’m sure of it.”
The trees shook in the cold, stiff wind.
It took Dean a disproportionate amount of time to get his mind off the young history professor and onto his work. His internal clock said he had less than ten minutes before his class started, less than an hour and a half before he was due to meet Nathan Perkins and Clyde Watkins downtown with an answer.
Something.
The hair rose on his arm.
The air seemed suddenly cold and impossibly thick. He looked out the window at the foot of Hawkins Hill. The wind had picked up. Tree branches reeled, sending a flurry of rustling leaves tumbling through the air. Tall, dry grass swayed.
Something?
The window pane exploded.
Glass sprayed across the table tops, floor, and wall. A small projectile flew so close to Dean that he felt the air rip. The glass struck the wall like a cannon shot. The object burst through the Sheetrock wall.
He stumbled, his heart flash-frozen between beats. He looked at the wall. He forced himself to swallow, then to breathe. He could hear movement in the hall. Hell, he could see movement in the hall. The object had created a jagged hole roughly the size of a softball.
Dean stumbled out the door. Piper’s class had spilled into the hallway. A mass of students gathered around something on the far wall.
He caught Piper’s eye. “What the hell was that?” she asked.
“I don’t know. It just . . .” His words dried up. His mouth felt thick with cotton.
He shooed the students away. Piper hurried to his side.
The object, a burned crimson-brown, was embedded deep in the wall; a faint contrail of dust rose in the air. Dean moved closer.
“What is it?” Piper asked.
“A brick. I think it’s just a brick. But –”
Piper finished his thought. “How do you throw a brick through a window, then a wall?”
A subtle odor caught Dean’s attention. The contrail. Not dust, but smoke?
He reached out and touched the brick. His hand jerked back. The pads of his fingers burned. Hot! The clamor of the students was like the roar of a distant surf. He recognized questions, but by their inflections, not their content. His thoughts were elsewhere.
A brick?
He stumbled back into his classroom and stared at the ruined window. Outside, a cold breeze continued to ruffle the leaves. But that was all. Nothing else moved. A brick? Dean had been looking out the window when it happened. Certainly the brick had been traveling fast, and yet there was no one out there.
5
Metal joints squealed as the traffic light swayed in the teasing wind. A four-cylinder Honda Civic grumbled impatiently, held in place by a single red glow, while cars graced by the emerald shine were granted immediate passage. An old Cadillac in excellent repair purred by. A Ford Explorer with a dent in the rear fender followed, chased by a battered Dodge truck with a bad muffler and congested engine.
But he could still hear the light.
Squeak, squeak, squeak.
Main Street was a stereotypical carpet of black asphalt that stretched down a six-block hall of posed buildings before unraveling into frayed, wandering threads. The tallest building was five stories and stood three blocks to the east. But the skyline was dominated by the green behemoth that rose regally to the north.
The name, Hawkins Hill, was a misnomer; at 2,215 feet, it was actually a butte, not quite a mountain but certainly more than a hill. Behind it grew the Cascade Mountains, but their grandiose topography was blocked by the city’s proximity to the closer Hawkins Hill.
Hawkins Hill.
Construction on the butte was strictly regulated. Roads and homes were carefully inserted, built beneath the dominating Douglas firs so that, from ground level, Hawkins Hill appeared to be an untouched mound of pristine greenery.
Squeak, squeak, squeak.
The arc of the swaying traffic light had increased.
The wind brushed his cheeks, faint like a whisper. Though the sky remained predominately blue, the treetops swaggered, the first to feel the coming bluster. A cold wind, he knew. An unusually cold wind. Hot air rises, cold air falls. Usually.
Usually.
The green light turned amber, indifferent to the weather.
Squeak, squeak - zzzzzzz
The traffic light blinked once, twice. A jagged streak of flash-white electricity arced from the traffic light to the securing power line. Sparks exploded, spewing a plume of electric flares into the air.
The light flashed once more, then went black, dark, dead.
Traffic stopped. Drivers were startled, paused by indecision.
The dead light rocked.
Squeak, squeak, squeak.
It was coming.
Coming.
Mayor Nathan Perkins looked out at the city, his city, and smiled. It was a good town, an honest town, but unless Dean Truman said yes to NxTech, it would soon be a ghost town. No, Dean would come through. He had to. The last four years had been hell, pure hell, watching as the city died, businesses dried up like blood on the sidewalk, people left, abandoning their generational homes in search of green pastures.
Then Dr. Dean T. Truman won the Nobel Prize in physics.
That had certainly shaken things up. Suddenly the whole world was looking at Black Valley. He could almost hear the stuffed shirts in their fancy schools, with their ten-word titles, and their smarter-than-thou attitude gasping with surprise. Before the prize, no one had ever heard of Dean Truman or Westcroft College or Black Valley, Oregon. But they had now.
And the fact that Dean had developed his theories without funds or equipment, using nothing but his wonderful brain and uncanny ability to reason, made the story even more amazing. Nathan had tried to read Dean’s groundbreaking paper when it first appeared in the scientific journal but he couldn’t get past the title: “The Multifunctionality of Quantum Physics and Superstring Mechanics: A Study of Duality and Energy Reproduction.”
But he had read the stories in the mainstream press. Time had referred to Dean as a “contortionist of science, bending the laws of physics to the point of breaking.”
The job offers had been incredible, and Nathan still didn’t understand why Dean had turned them down. Truth was, Nathan had been too busy pining over the death of his city to notice. Then came NxTech. And with it the answer to Black Valley’s problem.
It wasn’t just the jobs the new plant would bring; it was also the support businesses. Nathan had done
the research. In every place NxTech built, dozens of support businesses followed. This deal could transform Black Valley from a dying timber town to a booming high-tech hub.
Nathan reclined in his wing-backed leather chair, head hammocked in his hands, enjoying the faint scent of lemon furniture polish. If Dean accepted the NxTech offer, what would Black Valley be like in five years? In ten? NxTech was just the beginning. Nathan could envision an onslaught of growth and expansion as the city became a harbor for technology, a place you went to, as opposed to a place you drove through. A budding city that retained small-town sensibilities.
The thought was as warming as a well-stoked fire.
On his obsessively neat gunmetal desk lay the tax assessor’s projected tax bill for NxTech’s first year. Even with incentive breaks it came to one-point-two million dollars.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Portland, Eugene, and Salem.
He knew what the rest of the state thought of Black Valley: weirdo world. Strange things happen in that little burg sandwiched between the Willamette River and Hawkins Hill.
Freaky things.
And historically, they were right.
When NxTech had first expressed interest in locating here, Nathan had commissioned a complete historical profile. He hoped to use the city’s rich history as further incentive for other support businesses. Piper Blackmoore, a young history teacher at Westcroft College, had taken quickly to the task. He had received her report this morning. It was fascinating reading, but completely worthless for his purposes. He could never show it to any prospective business partner. Never.
Freaky things.
At least two other settlements had been started here and failed. One, by Native Americans in the 1700s; the other, years later, by stragglers from the Oregon Trail. Both had been destroyed. The first, by a devastating wildfire that had burned the valley to the ground and given birth to its name: Black Valley. The second, was abandoned after the settlement was pummeled by “stones falling from the sky.”
Raining rocks.
The third settlement, started eight years later, was the one that founded the city. Still, unusual events continued to occur. How else could you explain a small-town teacher at a nickel-and-dime college winning the Nobel Prize in physics?