The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Mr. Seton? Winston Seton?”

  Not a mugger, I thought; they don’t name the victim first. I nodded.

  “May I have a few words with you? I’m Jeremy Kersh, FBI.”

  He flicked open his I.D. and I wondered which had come first, the many TV agents flicking open the same kind of I.D., or the event itself. I shrugged and opened my door, and he followed me inside.

  He had a round, soft-looking face, too pink and smooth, as if he had to shave every third day if that often, and the kind of build that puts more bulk below the waist than above it, but I suspected he was not as soft as he looked. I motioned him to a chair, and crossed in front of him to get to the low dressing table where I had a bucket of ice cubes and a bottle of bourbon. He drew in his legs to let me pass. It was the kind of motel that had two chairs, a tiny round table with a hanging lamp that you brained yourself on frequently, a king-size bed, and a dresser with a big mirror.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Kersh?” I asked, taking the shrink wrap off a glass. “Drink?” I eyed the bottle and hoped he would say no; after six days there wasn’t much left. He said no, and I poured myself bourbon, added ice cubes, and edged past him to sit on the side of the bed. He sat with his legs apart, his hands on his knees, leaning forward. He looked uncomfortable.

  “You’ve been following the story about the crash of the Milliken Lear jet, I suppose,” he said. I shook my head, and for a moment he appeared confused, as if his game plan had been scrapped without warning. “You know who Joe Milliken is, don’t you?” he asked then.

  Every kid knew about Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, Jack the Giant Killer, the Hope diamond, the Milliken millions … I nodded.

  “Okay, Mr. Seton. As soon as you open a news magazine, or turn on the television, or see a paper, you’ll get some version of the story. I’ll give you ours. Two years ago Milliken’s daughter and her baby vanished, and Milliken said it was a kidnapping. Brought us in. We haven’t come up with mother or child in all this time, and the case is as open as the Montana sky as far as we’re concerned.”

  I held up my hand as memory of the event seeped into consciousness. “I read that the mother took her child and left of her own accord.”

  “You could have read a lot of things,” Kersh said with a shrug. “He, the old man, says they were kidnapped. There’s been no note, no ransom demand, nothing. Even so, it’s on the books, unsolved. To complicate things, when mother and child vanished, so did all their hospital records, the child’s prints, blood type, everything. Okay. Two weeks ago Mr. Milliken got a phone call, a woman said she had his granddaughter, and that she had sent him a picture that should arrive any minute now. She said she would call back, and hung up. He called our office in Houston, and our men were there when the picture arrived, a Polaroid of a kid with brown eyes and light hair. Like a million other kids. But also like his daughter at that age. He said it was her, his granddaughter. End of argument.”

  Kersh sighed; he looked tired, as if the past two weeks had been tough. “I’ll cut it short,” he said then. “Milliken and the woman struck a deal. She would deliver the kid to him in Houston, no one else, and he called us off, just like that. They planned for her to bring the kid to him in one of his Lear jets. His pilot told him they’d had trouble with the electrical system and he blew up. He wanted that kid in that plane and on her way to Houston right now. So a week ago last night we stood with our thumbs in our mouths and watched a woman and a man take a little girl aboard the Milliken plane in Philadelphia. We had planes in the area and planned to track them every inch of the way, be there when that jet landed. But half an hour out of Philadelphia the pilot got on the radio; he said something was wrong with the electrical system, and then silence. It went down.”

  Kersh had left his chair restlessly; he looked like a man who wanted to stamp around and found it frustrating that there wasn’t enough room. I thought he wanted a drink, but didn’t make the offer a second time. He glanced inside the bathroom, the tiny dressing area, and came back to stand at the foot of the bed with his hands deep in his pockets.

  “We recovered the bodies of three women, two attendants and the other woman, and three men, pilot, copilot, the man who boarded with the woman and child. No kid,” he said, scowling. “We had people there within minutes, the whole area was being covered within half an hour or so, but no kid.” His eyes had appeared unfocused, now he turned his attention to me. “And you haven’t seen it on the news, read about it?”

  I shook my head. “What do you want with me, Mr. Kersh?” I asked patiently. “It’s an interesting story, and I’ll catch up with it in the papers any day now. Why are you here?”

  “We want to enlist your help,” he said; his attitude, that had suggested nothing more than fatigue a second ago, had become harder, not menacing, but not yielding either.

  I wondered if other agents were out in the parking lot, if a chase car was nearby. I had to laugh to myself at the full-blown scenario that had come to mind. I sipped my drink and waited.

  “We think you talked with the child at least twice in Atlantic City,” Kersh said. “We want you to return and hang around for a few days, see if she approaches you again.”

  Now I got up, but since he was blocking the only moving-around space there was, I sat down again. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said after a moment. “If she’s there, pick her up, get an identification, be done with it.” Then I remembered the little girl who had mooched ice cream, but the memory only made my temper flare. “You’ve been watching me? For God’s sake, why?”

  “Only since Monday,” he said tiredly, not at all placating me, merely explaining. “Sunday, a local police officer thought he saw the child. We had an APB out, naturally. Anyway, he thought maybe it was her, but she told him she was waiting for her daddy, and she ran to you and you bought her an ice cream. He forgot the whole thing. The next morning, he saw the two of you again, on a seawall or something, and felt that he had been right to put it out of mind. Then he saw you driving off alone—seems you have a noticeable car—and for the first time, he got suspicious enough to do a followup. We checked the license number and came up with you. For all we knew you had the kid stashed away back with your gear, so…”

  I stared at him. “I don’t get it, Kersh. You know where that kid is, go get her. But the kid I saw isn’t the one you’re looking for. She’s too old, four, or close to it. You’re looking for what, a two-year-old?”

  Kersh scowled more fiercely than ever. “I’ve got a tape recorder out in the car. I’d like you to make a statement, how you came to see the child, what she was wearing, what she said. Will you do that?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But, Kersh, she’s the wrong child.”

  He started for the door. “Then you’ll be out of it, won’t you? Right back.”

  It was after ten and I was tired and sleepy. I had been in bed by ten every night and up before six every morning since my trek started. I yawned, but the Milliken story intruded and I remembered more of it now. Soap opera stuff. Daddy had been a brute. Poor little rich girl married someone unsuitable, a tennis player, jockey, grounds keeper, someone like that. It didn’t matter who he had been, he had not lived long enough to see his child born. A fatal accident of some sort. I couldn’t remember the details. Then, when her baby was a few weeks old, the Milliken daughter vanished with the child, and no one had seen them since as far as I knew. And that meant the child was only about two now. The reward must have climbed up to a million, I remembered, and tried to shrink the kid I had seen down to the right size. I couldn’t; the wrong kid. I yawned again.

  Kersh returned with a space-age tape recorder, all silver and black. “What we’d like, Mr. Seton, is for you to begin by stating your name and the date, to the best of your recollection, that you saw that little girl, and then just tell about it in your own words.”

  “You know the date better than I do.”

  “Probably, but we want it for the record. Ready?”

 
; It didn’t take very long; there was little to tell, after all. When I finished, Kersh asked, “Mr. Seton, will you help us find that child again?”

  “No,” I said firmly. “I’m on vacation. I don’t know any way I could be of help.”

  “She trusted you,” he said. “She came to you a second time without fear. We think she might approach you again.”

  I simply stared at him in disbelief.

  Kersh sat there for a moment, then he said thoughtfully, “I wonder what you want, Mr. Seton.”

  “Aren’t you going to turn that off?”

  He did something to the tape recorder, possibly even turned it off, but I wasn’t particularly interested. I watched him.

  “We know that everyone wants something,” he went on, still meditative.

  “We want your help, of course. But what do you want? Could we appeal to your sense of chivalry? Your sense of justice? An annual income, tax free? Business thrown your way?”

  “I want you to get your butt out of here so I can go to bed.” When he didn’t move, I stood up, put my glass down on the bedside table, and started to unbutton my shirt. “Listen to me, Kersh. That kid I saw is not, repeat not, the Milliken girl. She’s too old. She showed no sign of being a kidnappee. I’ve told you all I can about her, and I don’t want to be involved in any scheme you’re working. Now, I’m going to bed, and you can sit there all night for all I care.”

  He stood up, smiling slightly. The smile took ten years off his apparent age; he could have been a teacher in a junior college, pleased with his students, pleased with life.

  He went to the door and then said, “I wonder why, when you finally caught up with Steve Falco and your wife, you didn’t beat the shit out of him. When I know the answer to that I’ll know how to get your cooperation, Mr. Seton. Good night.”

  * * *

  When I knew the answer to that, I thought, I’d know the answer to the riddle of the universe. I poured another drink and sat in the chair Kersh had vacated. It was very warm. Twelve years ago my grandfather died and left me a small fortune and his house in Atlanta. I moved to New York, married a model, Susan Lorenza, started a photography, graphic arts business with Steve Falco, and bought the Thunderbird. Batting average way down, three strikeouts, one home run. Three years later, Susan and Steve had cleaned me out, and headed west. I still had the house in Atlanta—they hadn’t known that it was a very fine house—and I still had the Thunderbird. I got drunk and stayed drunk for a long time, two years’ worth of drunk, and then I went looking for them, and finally found them in Los Angeles.

  Susan was still beautiful, but with a Hollywood gloss that was new, and breasts that were also new. She was wearing a yellow sweater that showed them off admirably. “I had to do it,” she had said. “I had to try to make it on my own.” Her voice was new, also: voice-lessons new; she had learned how to put a little throb in it. The detective I had hired had reported that she was doing porn movies; I hadn’t believed him. Now I did. Steve Falco was exactly the same, shorter than me by several inches, black hair, dark restless eyes. He snapped his fingers a lot, I remembered, and he was snapping them that day. “We’ll make it up to you, kid,” he said. “We always said we’d make it up to you, soon as we got the breaks.” They were in a shabby little stucco house with plastic furniture. I took a step toward them, huddled together by the sofa, and Susan screamed, “Don’t hit him! Winnie, please. Let me explain.” Steve had cut in, “Star quality, that’s what she has, wasted. I’ll turn her into the biggest—”

  For two years I had lived with a pit inside me that was filled with red hot coals, and suddenly that day, looking at Susan’s new breasts, I felt as if the pit had sealed itself off, the coals were gone, and there was only a hollow place there. I turned and walked out, patted the T-bird, got in it, and drove to Atlanta where I mortgaged the house and started Phoenix Publishing Company.

  And I still didn’t know why I hadn’t beat the shit out of him. It had something to do with the plastic furniture, I thought, pouring the last of the bourbon with regret. Plastic furniture, plastic breasts. That had something to do with it, but I couldn’t sort it out more than that.

  I remembered the day I called the Atlanta tenants and asked permission to inspect the house. I hadn’t seen it for fifteen years. It had been beautifully maintained, with sparkling white woodwork, gleaming oak floors, and fine furniture. Camellias and azaleas were in bloom out front, and sunlight poured into the spacious rooms like a healing balm. I stood in the wide foyer reassuring the tenants that I had no plans to force them to move, and I was overwhelmed by shame.

  When the tenants left two years later, I moved in.

  I turned off the lights in my motel room and sat propped up in bed, not ready to sleep, but not willing to let Kersh know his visit was keeping me awake. He had tried to stir up the ashes, bring something to life that had died a long time ago, until now even the ashes were gone, no embers remained, only a hollow space, and all the poking and prodding he could manage would be as futile as shaking a stick in a vacuum. But he had tried. That was the salient point. He had tried. And I didn’t know why.

  He had tried to arouse what? My anger, frustration, my desire for revenge, retribution, the feeling of betrayal that had colored all the rest? Any of the above, all of the above? Or simply my curiosity? I grimaced in the semidarkness. He had done that. I couldn’t even guess how many work hours, how many dollars had gone into the background check they had done on me in just a few days. Why?

  I eased myself down into the bed properly and stretched. If they were after the Milliken kid, I thought then, this was a false trail, and Kersh must know it. The child I had talked to was simply too old. I didn’t know a lot about children, but two-year-olds were still infants, still in diapers mostly, still doing baby things, and the little girl I had bought ice cream for was well out of that. She was already a little person, not a baby. Not particularly pretty, or even cute that I could recall, but, in fact, I could recall little about her physically. Just a kid with brown eyes and blonde hair tangling in the ocean breeze.

  But what if they were simply using the Milliken kidnapping as a cover to get to this other kid, I thought then, and came wide awake again. Slowly I shook my head. I didn’t believe that. What could be bigger than Milliken’s millions, his influential friends, the power he wielded?

  * * *

  I checked out of the motel early, and when I pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant half a mile away, the black Ford pulled in beside me.

  “That’s a sweetheart of a car,” Kersh said admiringly. He trailed his hand over the silver hood. The car was dirty, but class showed, dirt and all.

  “Who’s your supervisor, Kersh?” I asked, walking toward the entrance of the restaurant. He told me and I went to a pay phone near the door and dialed information, then the FBI number in Washington, and when I got through to them, I asked for his supervisor. When I entered the restaurant itself a few minutes later, Kersh waved me to a booth. There was a pot of coffee on the table, service for two. Only a few other people were eating at this early hour.

  “We hoped you’d think of checking,” he said. “Thought you might, but if you hadn’t I was going to suggest it. I’m having pancakes with blackberry jam. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?”

  I poured coffee, seething. Assistant to the Director Leland Murchison had been expecting my call, he hoped I would cooperate, of the utmost importance, debt of gratitude, national interest.… He had had a list of buzz words at hand and used them all. And told me absolutely nothing.

  The waitress came to take our orders and when she had left again, I said, “Now what, Mr. Kersh? You tried reason, and hinted of bribery. Today do we advance to threats? IRS audits, red tape of one sort or another?”

  He laughed. It was disconcerting to see. Scowling, or even simply neutral he was like an actor trying to portray the stern FBI agent, but smiling he could be the guy next door, the good buddy with a six-pack and a brand-new joke.

&
nbsp; “No, Mr. Seton,” he said then. “Audits take too long, for one thing. And we want your help now. Today. What we decided to do is tell you the whole story.”

  Now I laughed.

  His expression became rueful. He opened the briefcase on the seat beside him and brought out a sheaf of papers clipped together. “You know how I asked you to start your statement, name and date when you saw the kid. We’ve done them all the same way. These are preliminary statements, like yours; the questions and answers get a bit bulky, I’m afraid. This should be enough for now.” He slid the papers across the table. “Just read through them,” he said, and poured more coffee for both of us.

  I nudged the papers to the side and he looked at me with a glint in his eyes that I hadn’t seen before.

  “Read them,” he said softly, “or I’ll ram my little black Ford into that big silver baby of yours.”

  I started to read the papers:

  Ruth Hazeltine, Feb. 16

  I’ve been a pediatrics nurse for fourteen years, always the graveyard shift. I like it, and now I’m so used to it, it just feels natural. It gave me the chance to be with my own kids in the evenings, when they needed me most, and I could sleep in the mornings when they were at school. It worked out fine. I was on that night. It was during that bad snow storm and we were shorthanded. Gloria Strumm got snowed in, and couldn’t make it, but it was a quiet night and Vanessa and I were managing okay. There were nine babies, not counting the preemies, who are in a separate wing so we didn’t have to deal with them. It used to be that once you got the moms tucked in for the night, that was it, but we went to feeding on demand ten years ago, and sometimes one of the babies is in with his mom two, three times a night. The Hilyard baby was one of them. While they’re in with their moms we straighten up the cribs, change the sheets if they need it, just tidy up a bit, and I had done that to his crib, had it all ready for him. I wasn’t gone more than three minutes. Walked down the hall to Hilyard’s room, collected the baby, said a word or two to the mother, and went back, and she, this little baby girl, was in his crib. No diaper, no bracelet, nothing, and sound asleep. I put the Hilyard baby down in a different crib and examined the girl baby; not a mark on her, good professional job with the cord, nice and warm. Born within the past three hours was how she looked to me. Around seven pounds, just a normal little baby girl. I covered her up and went out to get Vanessa. We called Dr. Weybridge, and he called Security. I didn’t see anyone bring the baby in, didn’t see anyone come on the floor after midnight. Just me and Vanessa.