She thought about Scarborough and a kind of darkness trickled through her mind. Anger. And other feelings she immediately repressed. The Shell again. Up went the Shell. Richards mustn’t see ... He mustn’t perceive her true interior, as riddled with faults as Southern California.
“Don’t worry, Doctor. Thanks to our media connections, the public is starting an about-face in its perceptions of Everett Scarborough. No longer is he the champion of logic and reason, the clever and articulate skeptic—he’s a crazed murderer now ... A charming psychopath who has fooled the public for years. If he comes anywhere near the real truth and tries to express himself ... Why, by then, the harm will have been fully done to his respectability. He will be perceived as a paranoid of the very first water ... A hapless victim of reading far too many Robert Ludlum novels.” Richards smiled and pulled out a thick book. “By the way, I just finished the latest Ludlum on the plane. Care to borrow my copy?’
She shook her head. “I don’t read fiction, Mr. Richards, you know that.” She returned to the previous subject. “But Scarborough ... You are trying to catch him, aren’t you?”
“Why yes, of course.”
“And kill him?”
“We can’t allow him to run about free now, can we? Not with what he seems to know now.”
“A thought, Richards. Kill him by all means, if it’s necessary. I understand your position. But if you manage to merely capture him, and you wish to question him ... before you terminate ...”
She paused, groping for the appropriate words.
“You want him, don’t you; Doctor,” whispered Richards, a hint of a vicarious thrill in his voice.
“Yes,” said Dr. Julia Cunningham. “Let me have the great skeptic for a while.”
Despite herself, a small smile crept over her unglossed lips.
Chapter 3
The one thing nice about getting assigned to Nowheresville, U.S.A., was that the houses were a hell of a lot cheaper than the bigger metro areas.
Marsha Manning had bought her pleasant Cape Cod-style home, complete with a precise acre of tree-spotted and lawn covered land, with the help of a VA mortgage and a small inheritance from her grandfather for the down payment. She was getting close to two years’ worth of equity, which was nice; but two years also meant reassignment time. She wouldn’t lose a drop of money in the move, and maybe she’d get an even better deal wherever she was going—and just maybe she’d get an apartment there and rent her house out. Whatever happened, she’d have to leave the house, and she’d certainly miss it, no question about that.
Marsha Manning was thinking this as she turned the wheel and drove her blue Hyundai Excel off Kepler Drive and into the macadam apron of her driveway.
A late spring afternoon sat gently upon the slate shingles, the red brick, tousling the leafy and grassy hair of the trees and the ground with its breeze like a fond parent. The smell of fresh beech leaves and tulip blossoms from her garden rolled out to meet her. A bunch of kids were skate boarding by the curb up the road. It was a family-oriented suburb, a friendly, safe place. She knew most of the neighbors, and they were always trying to fix her up with some cousin twice-removed, or the nice accountant that lives down on Elkins by himself, after his wife left him. What was a young single woman doing, living here? they probably asked themselves after she left their coffee klatches or Tupperware parties. Goodness, she must be awfully lonely in that big house!
Marsha turned the ignition off, put the emergency brake on and hauled out her brown bag of groceries.
Actually, what she was doing here was cooling her heels after a long relationship. Actually, she just wanted to be by herself. Oh, she’d go out with some of the guys Jill Perkins and Harriet Durk set her up with. It wasn’t like she’d decided to be anti-social or anything. She just didn’t want to get involved emotionally, and so when she got assigned to this area, she’d bought herself a nice comfy house and started working on some personal psychological housecleaning. Out with the dust of dependency! Strip that yellow-wax buildup of a decayed love! In with some bright new furniture of reading! sports activities! subliminal self-improvement tapes! Paint these drab walls a new Marsha Manning hot pink, and start to feel good, like a competent woman of the nineties should!
And all this was going very, very well indeed, until she’d met Doctor Everett Scarborough.
She got out her key chain (complete with a miniature circuit-board the guys at computer training had given her when she’d aced them all in finals—ha-ha) and unlocked the door. Who would have thought that an eminent scientist, author, and self-proclaimed UFO debunker on the wrong side of fifty would have sent her neat emotional interior-decorating into disarray? To say nothing of putting her professional career teetering on the brink ... Everett Scarborough. Well, she thought, switching on the light, she’d done an incredible song-and-dance to her superiors, and at this point it didn’t look as though she was going to get court-martialed (if Colonel Walter Dolan had more power. she would have been). Thank God she’d taken the time to do everything as by-the-book as possible when she’d yanked Scarborough out of that Air Force brig. And thank God the general she’d gotten out of bed to sign the papers was someone who liked her and owed her a favor. Otherwise ...
Well, she just didn’t like to think about it. The Air Force was her career, and while she wasn’t exactly on a honeymoon here, it was a commitment, a relationship, a—
She set the bag of groceries on top of the kitchen table and looked around, frowning.
Something was wrong here.
She could sense it.
Everything looked in its place, all right. The zinc of the sink was fresh and sparkling, the coffee mugs with their funny sayings and Far Side cartoons hung just so in their placements and the cabinet doors were all closed snugly.
All the same, she had this sensation on the base of her spine. Not fear precisely, just a kind of catlike wariness.
Was there a burglar in the house?
Her internal alarm was still ringing.
As it happened, there were a couple of local police—Jim Nichols and Rob Prosky—who’d taken a fancy to her. She’d gone out with Jim once or twice and she’d have gone out with Rob, only he was married. So she had a good relationship with the local police. “Call us anytime, Marsh. You’ve got our number—911. You even get a whiff of a problem, babe—we’ll be painting the streets with rubber to get to your house. Even if you just need someone to have a coffee and a donut with!”
She’d never called them before. She didn’t want to cultivate an impression of helplessness with anyone. That just wasn’t the Manning style. Besides, there’d never been a good reason. Not even when Pressy, the neighbor’s cat, had gone up on her roof. She’d borrowed a ladder and gotten the creature down herself.
There was something wrong here, though, and after what had happened to Mac Mackenzie out in Iowa-well, Marsha Manning was a lady who knew where pride should end and pragmatism should begin.
She wasn’t exactly a phone person, so she kept only two in the house: one in her study (so she could hook it up to her modem for her IBM PC), the other in her bedroom. The bedroom was closest, since it joined the kitchen through a short hallway, so she went there.
Maybe she was being silly, she thought as she turned on the light. Better, though, to be silly and cautious, then to end up violated or dead.
The princess phone was by the bed. She went to it, picked it up, and started to dial.
Nine.
One—
The man must have been hiding in the closet. He came up behind her and put one hand over her mouth, the other around her waist.
“Don’t move,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you. Is anybody out there with—”
Even before basic training, Marsha had taken some martial arts classes. Her response was automatic and reflexive; she simply used her body as a fulcrum, pushing her butt back into the man’s legs and hauling him over her shoulder. He landed in a surprised sprawl on the floor.<
br />
“Hai!” she cried, lifting her hand and making a weapon of it.
She was about to bring it down on the intruder when his voice registered in her head. She stopped and stared at the upside-down face. That registered as well.
“Scarborough!” she said.
Lying by her feet was a face recognizable as Dr. Everett Scarborough’s, but just barely.
“Christ, Marsha!” he moaned. “I didn’t know you were a Master of the Far East, or I would have used a stage whisper from the closet.” He shook his head, rolled over, and staggered shakily to a kneeling position. “I didn’t see ... did you come in with anybody?”
“No. I’m alone. God, Everett! God! You have my phone number. You could have called!”
He shook his head. “No time. Christ, the house may even be watched. But I had to take the chance. I need your help. Really badly.”
He got up and sat on the edge of the bed. He was Everett Scarborough all right, but he wasn’t the Scarborough she’d first met at the Iowa farmhouse of Mac MacKenzie. He had about a week’s worth of beard growing for one thing (on a formerly impeccably shaven face). His hair was shaggy and unkempt where it had once been well-groomed; he wore dirty jeans, a tom flannel shirt, and a blue windbreaker, where his previous attire had generally included ties even at his most casual. His eyes had bags under them; he generally looked pretty haggard.
She was speechless.
“I got in through an open window today. I was so tired I fell asleep on the bed. When I heard you come in, I didn’t know if you were alone. Sorry about the announcement of my presence. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“Ev ... Ev ... What are you doing here?”
He looked down at his scuffed walking shoes and for the first time ever Marsha saw him looking almost defeated-and definitely very vulnerable. “You said ... back at National Airport. You said that if I needed to, I could come here. You gave me the address.”
“Of course you’re welcome here,” she said, a bit at a loss. “I didn’t mean it that way, really ... I mean, what’s happened ... I read about that government agent falling off Hoover Dam ... About your disappearance ... I honestly didn’t think you’d tum up here.”
Scarborough nodded. “Yeah. They didn’t release the full story. Actually, they want my ass. Bad. They just don’t know how to couch the words. Hey, you think I could have some coffee? My head feels like it’s filled with cobwebs.”
“Sure. Think you can make it into the kitchen?”
‘’As soon as my spine and a couple ribs mend.”
She laughed despite herself. “You live and you learn, Doctor. Lie on the bed for a while if you want. I’ll go in and grind some Colombian and plug in the coffee machine.”
“Thanks. But I think I can struggle out.”
He moved creakily, but he did make it out to the kitchen, where Marsha proceeded to start up the coffee.
“You want something to eat?”
“Yes. I’m pretty hungry.”
“How did you get here from Nevada, anyway?”
Scarborough put his head in his hands and sighed. “Maybe you’d better get some coffee into me first, kiddo, and then maybe a quick shower. I feel like something the cat dragged in and then buried in the kitty litter box.”
She fed him a cup of coffee and then showed him where the bathroom was and gave him a fresh towel.
When she heard the thrum of the water hitting the tub, she went out and poured herself a cup of coffee, added some Equal and then some 2% low-fat milk.
It was only then that Marsha Manning permitted herself a slow, slight smile.
Well, so Everett Scarborough had come into her life again streaming clouds of strangeness and stubbornness, mystery and adventure!
She was happy to see the guy again.
Very happy.
Chapter 4
Marsha Manning fixed him a hearty meal of eggs and bacon, home fries, orange juice, whole wheat toast, jam and anything else he cared for that she had in her icebox.
It was delicious.
On the road, he hadn’t eaten much; hadn’t been able to keep much down. Besides, he’d kept to the back roads, away from the high density civilization along interstates, shying away from well-trafficked truck stops and McDonald’s, keeping to small town Mom and Pop stores where he purchased hasty sandwiches. He ate these gastronomic wonders in his car, keeping the beat-up Spark car radio on any local all-news station he could find; or failing to find such, enduring the groans of country-western or the moans of Top Forty to catch any breaking news bulletins about him, about UFOs, about the further work of the outlaw government organization that was out to get him.
He got nothing new.
There weren’t even any real follow-ups in the newspapers. Just one big splash in the next two days, and then zip. Or anyway, nothing that he found in the papers he could get ahold of in 7-Elevens or from machines. Coincidentally, he had seen the sensational report just the other day on A Current Affair, when, totally exhausted he couldn’t take another night in the backseat and hazarded a stay in a ramshackle old neon-sputtering motel in on the outskirts of Muncie, Indiana. Of course the ironic thing about that show was that most of it had been in the can for weeks; he’d done special interviews for that show to go along with his new book, Above Us Only Sky. All the sensation-sharks had to do was to change the slant of the piece, toss in some fevered commentary, trot out some stem-faced troopers and officials, and show the bloodstains on Hoover Dam and Kazam! Instant trash-TV! Scarborough felt as though he were watching some other guy mouth those tart zingers about the credulous, the unwashed, and the uneducated. Now, after all that had happened, he was a different man. Exactly who, though, he had no idea.
God, it was so good to be in a friendly place, to smell friendly cooking smells, to see Marsha’s little magnet knickknacks on the refrigerator, the homey quilted pot holders hanging near the stove. He longed for his own home in Bethesda desperately, that little oasis he’d built himself, tucking his heart and soul away from life’s brickbats; it had been especially important to him after his wife’s death, since it held most of the memories of her still decorating the inside. It was his big, semi-expensive nest, housing his library, his stereo, his record collection, his desk and word-processor—all the lovely things that insulated him against the outer chaos, the cold and the dark of life. Warmth, reason, intelligence, clarity; these were the things his house held for him. But now, of course, Scarborough didn’t know when he’d see it again, if ever, and so he took great gratification in the little details of Marsha’s house. The old grandfather clock, the antique chair in the dining room, the sprawl of broken-spine paperbacks and winged magazines over in the living room. It gave him a feeling of home, but even more it gave him more hints into this woman’s life and personality.
“Hmmm,” Marsha said, watching him as he tucked away the eggs and crunched the bacon as they made the small chitchat he insisted upon, asking her this and that about the house and her life. talking about anything but UFOs and the dilemma he was in. “Guess I’d better make you some more.”
She did, and he dug in heartily.
Under normal circumstances, Everett Scarborough might have objected to the high cholesterol content of the meal. At his last yearly checkup, the HCL had clocked in at a touch too high, and he’d been cutting down on fatty stuff lately. However, since he was hungry as a horse and didn’t know if he’d live past the next week anyway, he didn’t make any objections.
He just ate.
When he was feeling a little better, when it didn’t seem as though bile was going to claw a hole through his abdomen, and the coffee singing in his veins was making him feel reasonably human again, he answered her long-standing question, bringing the conversation squarely back to the subject that had hovered over them like dark, moiling clouds.
“I bought a car.”
She raised her eyebrows and put her coffee cup back down into its saucer.
“A car? Where did you get the
money to buy a car? And I.
didn’t see a car parked outside!”
“It’s an old beat-up Ford Falcon and it’s parked down the road, off on a side street.” He dipped a slice of toast into the last of the yolk of his eggs-over-easy and took a bite. “Didn’t want to be parked right in front of you, Marsha. We are linked together, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve already heard from the FBI on our relationship.”
“Yes, indeed. But there’s no strong tie between us. I just liberated you from that holding tank in Virginia. You were being held there illegally. I did nothing wrong. When they said that you were a murderer, that you’d killed a CIA agent and were being sought as the possible murderer of Captain Eric MacKenzie, I acted properly horrified and promptly promised them, Scout’s honor, to turn you in even you even bothered to send me a postcard!”
“Wise move.” He put a piece of bacon into his mouth, savoring its smoky, salty taste as he chewed thoughtfully. “They’re really bringing out the Guard on this one, Marsha. The government wants me very badly. Apparently I can do a lot more damage to them than I ever thought possible.” He shook his head sadly and stared morosely down at his meal. “What a fool I was. What a patsy, for so, so long.”
“Hey, you haven’t got time for any of that silly self-recrimination, buster. You promised to tell me about how you got that car. Where’d you get the money?”
Scarborough looked up, the memory of the past week sieving through his mind. “Credit cards. Cash advances. Machines. Oh, they’ve got a lot of ATM and MOST machines in Las Vegas, you bet. I charged up my limit before they got to my credit companies. Soon as we got to the quarry, I knew they’d be after me and after me soon. It’s just a wonder they didn’t get me while the Arizona police were questioning Camden and me.”
“About what? The quarry? What quarry?” Marsha shook her head. “You’re going to have to start from where I dropped you off at National Airport, Ev ... but tell me first what was at the quarry.”
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 42