by Erik Carter
People like Jonah.
Which brought about another thought, one Jonah had been trying to deny.
The cause for his need.
Amber was dead.
He’d already processed the grief. A little less than two months ago. Not long after she disappeared. He’d known she was gone; he’d felt it in his bones.
And yet…
He refocused on the screen.
When Brett finished entering the long number and pressed return, a strange website appeared. In fact, it looked more like a piece of software than a website. Like the back end of a bank’s computer network.
Or a governmental system of some sort…
Just a black screen with a flashing, pixelated, green cursor at the top, blinking.
Brett typed what he’d typed before, what he’d entered into Yahoo!, which appeared on the screen in green block text.
“ray beasley” orlando
A line of text immediately appeared below.
SCNND RSLTS — SPCLST APPRVL
Strange. And oddly technical looking, esoteric. Jonah’s lips parted. He turned to look at Brett.
“What is this, Brett?”
He stared at the side of Brett’s face—which was squinting, as though dissatisfied with the computer’s results—and waited for a response.
Didn’t receive one.
Brett drummed his fingers.
The growl of an espresso machine, quiet conversations and laughter.
A new question.
“Who are you?” Jonah said.
Again, no reply from Brett.
Brett was just about to type again when there was a shrill, electronic BEEP.
Jonah jumped.
The sound hadn’t come from the computer. Brett pulled a pager from his pocket, looked at the small screen.
“Excuse me,” he said.
He rose, leaned in front of Jonah, blocking his view of the computer monitor, and pressed command–Q on the keyboard, closing Netscape. The computer’s desktop image showed again, a flat, turquoise field with small tilde shapes and an icon in the upper righthand corner that said Macintosh HD.
The mystery program was gone.
Chapter Fifteen
Silence stepped outside to the sounds of plodding traffic on the four-lane street in front of him.
The coffee shop was in a ubiquitous area of commercial urban sprawl, all the brand names and recognizable logos that one could imagine lined up and down a street that was technically a highway but in town was constricted by numerous traffic lights. Strip mall after strip mall. Fast-food joint after fast-food joint. Utility lines dangling from an endless procession of wooden poles.
And someone watching him from a bench in front of a jewelry store, hidden mostly, but not entirely, by the trunk of a crape myrtle.
Mr. Honda Accord, no doubt.
Silence hadn’t seen the man at Beasley’s townhouse, but if he’d followed Silence here, that meant he had to have trailed him to Beasley’s as well.
The guy was good.
C.C. had taught Silence how to tame his wayward thoughts, so he knew how to stay focused on one task while not forgetting about the others on his list.
He made a mental note of Mr. Accord’s position and continued with the task at hand.
His beeper still in his left hand, he retrieved his cell phone with the other. The number on the beeper’s tiny, brown LCD screen bore an 865 area code.
East Tennessee.
Lola.
Or, more likely, Mrs. Enfield calling via Lola’s cellular phone, as Mrs. Enfield didn’t have a cell of her own.
A single ring, and his call was answered.
“Si!” It was Mrs. Enfield. One syllable. That’s all it took for him to tell she was in hysterics. “They took him! Surgery. They’re cutting him up! My Baxter.”
“I’m sorry.” He swallowed. “What happened?”
He strolled away from the café entrance, along the sidewalk bordering several metal tables full of chatty, coffee-sipping patrons. Silence always paced when he “talked” on the phone. He’d had the habit in his previous life, when he had a normal voice, but now as a near-mute, he phone-paced even more, his idle energy agitated further by a hampered ability to take part in the conversation.
He kept Mr. Accord visible in his periphery.
“They…” Mrs. Enfield stopped, shuddered, cried. “They think he swallowed something, that something’s stuck in his tummy.”
“Will be okay.”
More sobs, fading away. A sniffle. And a sigh. “I hope you’re staying safe. Are you drinking?”
When Silence and Mrs. Enfield first met, when the Watchers moved him into the house next to her, it had been only a short time after C.C. had been brutally murdered. He lived a largely drunken existence in those days, and though he’d since quit binge drinking—doing so largely at Mrs. Enfield’s insistence—the old woman still monitored him, all these years later.
“Yes,” Silence said.
“Silence Jones! What are you drinking?”
“Coffee.”
A groan. “Don’t sass me, boy. I’ll tan your rear end as dark as mine. I don’t care how old you are.” She took in a deep breath, and when she spoke again, her voice had returned to melancholy. “Oh, my poor little guy! Cutting him up. They’ll have to shave his belly, you know?”
“Yes.”
She shuddered again. And was quiet. The phone’s scratchy speaker relayed a tinny version of the sounds of the veterinarian’s office waiting room—telephones, dogs barking, a receptionist calling for a patient to be seen.
She spoke again, but muffled, indiscernible, pulled away from the phone, talking to someone else.
A moment later, her voice returned with clarity and volume. “Lola wants to speak to you.”
Silence didn’t respond.
Ear-splitting distortion as the phone traded hands. Silence pulled his phone away from his face.
“Hi, Si.”
“Hi.”
“They think Baxter swallowed something.” Lola’s tone was more serious than it had been at Mrs. Enfield’s house that morning. “Like a piece of plastic or something. They’re gonna do exploratory surgery.”
“I know.”
“Your voice sounds a bit different to me than the last time I visited Mrs. E. Have you been doing vocal exercises? Physical therapy?”
Silence’s voice did not sound different. It sounded like a construction foreman with a bad head cold doing a terrible Barry White impression through a scratchy, malfunctioning megaphone. As always.
Lola was just trying to spark conversation.
“No,” Silence said.
Lola didn’t respond immediately. Just the sound of dogs barking around her. Then she said, “I’ll take good care of your neighbor. We’ll keep you posted on Baxter. Goodbye, Si.”
“Thanks. Bye.”
He ended the call and immediately pressed the 2 button, held it for a couple seconds—speed dial.
A Specialist answered after one ring.
Silence identified himself by codename and number. “Suppressor, A-23.”
The Specialist confirmed.
“Information retrieval,” Silence said and swallowed. “On the fly.”
The Specialist asked if he wanted the information sent through the electronic system that Silence had already been using.
“Yes. Ray Beasley. Orlando. Former cop.”
The Specialist asked if Silence suspected the former police officer of corruption or other foul play.
“Yes.”
The Specialist told him information would be available in five minutes.
Silence pressed the red END button, collapsed the phone and dropped it into his pocket. He turned for the coffee shop’s entrance and was two steps toward the door, when he immediately pivoted and sprinted toward Mr. Accord.
That same dark blond, curly hair he’d seen earlier through the Honda’s windshield, splayed out on either side of the man’s face, parted
in the middle and tapered from the bottom, looking like something from the 1920s, like Charlie Chaplin. The same cleft chin, blue eyes, grim expression.
Yes, it was the man he’d seen throughout the day.
The good news was that the guy was on the same side of the highway as Silence and the coffee shop.
The bad news was he was about a block and a half away.
But Silence sprinted after him anyway.
For a moment, Mr. Accord froze on his bench, like an animal caught crossing the road, foolishly staying in place, staring at its oncoming demise. Evidently he was stunned that Silence was even making the attempt, and for half a moment, this bewilderment cemented him in place, eyes locked on Silence.
And then the man jumped off the bench and bolted away.
But his hesitation had given Silence a chance to catch up. He was still far behind the man, but he was close enough to see the details—the back of his button-up short-sleeve shirt flapping, individual strands of his curly blond hair catching the sunlight.
Ahead, the man took a corner around a Hardee’s, and as Silence commanded his legs to push harder, faster, he glimpsed the area behind the restaurant—an open stretch of parking lot leading to one of the many strip malls, this one of the lower-end variety with a rundown chain hobby store and a bottom-tier home improvement store along with a hodgepodge of small shops. That big open space of parking lot would work in Silence’s advantage.
He made it to the Hardee’s, turned the corner…
And found nothing.
There were a lot more places for the man to have disappeared than he’d thought. Cars and trash receptacles from a renovation project at the far side of the strip mall, which had several abandoned storefronts, all of them places for Mr. Accord to vanish.
Pursuing the man any farther was a death wish for Silence.
He straightened his sport coat. Sniffed.
And turned around.
He would let Mr. Accord come back to him.
Chapter Sixteen
Jonah closed the door behind him.
A small, one-toilet bathroom. Maroon paint, low lighting. A stainless-steel handicap railing on the side wall. An overpoweringly pungent air freshener on the back of the toilet.
The floor was grimier than he would’ve expected from the chic coffee shop. And the mirror was littered with water spots and fingerprints. He regarded the cleaning sign-off sheet on the wall—dates and signatures. The last entry was attributed to M. Campbell. Campbell hadn’t been taking his or her sidework seriously.
He put his hands on the cold porcelain edge of the sink, lowered his head.
He remembered what he told Brett earlier, what he’d been telling everyone for weeks—that he’d already dealt with Amber’s death, already processed it inwardly because in his heart of hearts, he’d known that Amber was gone from this world.
But the part of him that didn’t know that she had died now had confirmation.
He’d seen the outline under the drape on the stretcher. Her outline.
Drugs in her system…
Had it been his fault? Had Amber turned to drugs after finding out that he’d cheated on her only months earlier?
He saw it again in his mind. The blanketed shape on the stretcher. The mound at the top that would be her face. A little valley and then another mound, breasts. A longer valley that culminated at the peak at the figure’s end, Amber’s feet.
A shape. A figure.
A body.
Amber.
She was dead. She was. She really was.
She was dead.
He didn’t have to tell himself that anymore. He didn’t have to convince himself, to believe somehow that he had a mystical connection with Amber, that he could intrinsically sense that she’d passed.
Now he knew.
She was dead.
Jonah bent at the knees and wept.
Chapter Seventeen
A full sheet of Amber’s notes. In her adult handwriting. Covering one of the blank pages at the back of The Secret of Summerford Point.
Gavin felt his mouth gape, and his gaze instinctively went to his brother, who had closed his eyes some time ago and hadn’t reopened them. His recliner was fully laid back, and the now-empty tumbler was on the end table beside it.
For the last several minutes, Gavin had flipped through the age-brittled pages, littered with Amber’s notes. Most of the notes were in her sloppy childhood scrawl, but he’d found several more in her adult handwriting sprinkled throughout. None of these made much sense to him—as they seemed highly connected to the content of the book—and none were as alarming as the first one he’d found:
I think I might be in trouble.
When he’d turned to the last page of the last chapter, he’d been frustrated—these adult notes of Amber’s could be something to help him figure out what had happened to her, but there were so few of them.
That’s when he’d slapped the book shut.
And gotten a glimpse of a page at the back of the book, a page the publisher had purposefully left blank, now covered with notes in Amber’s adult hand.
His eyes scanned over the writing. So many notes. Amber’s questions to herself. Observations. And not just her thoughts about the book.
Notes about Carlton’s former police district.
District C11.
What the hell had Amber been doing?
1971 to 1982
1980 to 1984
“refined” and “crude”
Florida State Highway Patrol
Oil Man = Warren
District C11 is like Summerford
The Well
There were several instances where Amber’s adult hand had mentioned the tactics that Kara, kid explorer, had used in the book, notes like:
How would Kara handle the “refined” angle?
Despite the pain, despite just finding out conclusively that Amber had passed, Gavin smiled. Because these notes about the protagonist of a children’s book exuded the personality of his niece.
This was the Amber he knew, someone who, as an adult, would still look up to the idol of her youth, seek the guidance of a literary child. Amber had a certain naïveté about her, a certain simpleness.
It was something that Gavin’s brother had always hated. Carlton had been insistent that Amber grow up, mature, but Gavin appreciated her relative innocence. Purity was not a bad thing. Amber might not have been the most highly intelligent person ever, but she had heart.
But these notes… What the hell could they all mean? What was she after, and how was she connecting her father’s District C11 to this children’s book?
Gavin realized that in order to understand, he was going to have to read the book.
He let the pages roll over his thumb, back to the front cover. He flipped past the title page and other front matter.
And began.
Chapter 1
A Pleasant Drive in the Country
Had there ever been such a sunny day?
Well, yes, surely there had. But certainly none so delightfully cheery. And Kara just kept on smiling as she sat in the passenger seat of the car, the aromatic sea breeze tussling her hair, the sun warming her right arm and her cheeks.
Grandmother had both of the front windows rolled down. The car was a beauty with curves and smells and textures of which Kara was unaccustomed, as it was an old thing, from the 1950s, Grandmother had told her.
Goodness! The ’50s! Kara hadn’t even been born yet.
But the car, like Grandmother herself, had proceeded beautifully through the years, both of them clean and precise, both with a charming dignity, both having a warm, comforting presence.
Kara stuck her face closer to the open window, felt the wind on the tip of her nose, tasted the Atlantic air. The sun painted the field outside a bright green. The water sparkled beyond, a long slice of a horizon below the sapphire sky. Summerford’s quaint downtown appeared in the distance, around the curve, at the bottom of the hill, right
on the coastline. Little brick businesses and two-story Victorian homes, real-life dollhouses.
Yes, this was going to be a wonderful visit.
Gavin had been reading for half an hour. He’d smiled several times throughout, not so much because of the story itself but the memory of reading it with Amber. It was amazing how much of the story came back to him, so many years later and after having read to Amber so many Kara books and countless others.
The first few chapters saw Kara, kid detective, visiting her grandmother at the small seaside town of Summerford, Maine, with plans of going on many pleasant walks, many antiquing trips, and many visits to quaint restaurants and bookstores.
On her first night in Summerford, Kara and Grandmother stopped at Carlito’s Café for coffee and croissants before they were to attend a play. Grandmother had excused herself to visit the restroom, at which point Kara glanced across the street and saw a sinister-looking man with a disfigured face parked in a vehicle on the opposite side of the street, twisting around in his seat to look through binoculars at the docks at the far end of town. Kara thought this quite odd, especially with the awful feeling she got from the man—his bitter expression, the slicked-back, dark hair, and a scar that traced up his left cheek, over the corner of his left eye.
At first, Kara convinced herself her imagination had gone wild again, and she chastised herself for being so judgmental. But when the man suddenly exchanged his binoculars for a camera with a long telephoto lens, Kara’s junior detective instincts tingled.
The man spotted her staring in his direction, which made Kara quickly look away. Fortunately, this was right when Grandmother returned. The coffee and pastries were so delicious that Kara would have completely forgotten about the scarred man had he not driven by a few minutes later, looking in her direction with a dark stare as his car drifted past.