Eric launched into a story about how being in trouble as a boy in Oakland, California, had led to him moving to Seattle to live with his grandmother. Good grades in high school and a love of writing had earned him a spot at Columbia University’s School of Journalism. After graduating, he’d come home and gotten a law degree from UW. Though he’d practiced for a few years, alcohol and drugs had taken over his life, and he’d kicked around at a number of jobs, even working as a lumberjack at one point.
The more he talked the more curious Tess became. “How did you and Oliver meet?”
“Eric is my tennis instructor,” Oliver said. “He’s a pro at the Amy Yee Tennis Center.”
“You teach tennis?” Tess said. “You gave up law? It seems such a waste.”
“Tennis has been pretty good to me,” Eric said. “It paid my way through Europe a few times, and provides a decent life for me now.”
“Paid your way . . . You mean you played as a pro? In tournaments?”
Eric told them stories about his playing days and some of his travels. Brussels. Paris. London. He said he was even thinking of moving to Europe when he retired.
“You’d give up living here? But isn’t this your home?” Tess said.
“It’s true I grew up here. When my parents got divorced my father even came back to be closer to my grandmother. But roots are not always enough to keep someone bound to a place. Sometimes you have to get out of your comfort zone.”
“Wouldn’t you hate to leave your friends?”
“Arthur Ashe once said the hardest task in his life was being black in America. He said, ‘Instinctively you are undervalued as a human being . . . too much time is expended showing to others your true value and worth.’”
“You’re black?” Tess had never thought about the color of Eric’s skin. “Gee, could’ve fooled me.”
Eric laughed. “Guess it doesn’t matter much to you. My grandmother was Native American. A Blackfoot. She faced prejudice every day of her life, but I think even she knew how much worse it can be for black people.”
Tess wondered if she would have treated Eric differently if she’d known he was African American. She hoped not. Now that she’d been on the receiving end because she was different, she realized how cruel prejudice could be.
“Now I know why our principal keeps nagging us to be nice,” she said.
This time Oliver laughed. “You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not. He says we should treat each other the way we’d want to be treated.”
“Good advice, if you ask me,” Eric said.
The conversation quickly turned to other topics, and they talked for what seemed like hours. Eric had tons more stories, and Tess found him fascinating. Soon enough, though, she could barely keep her eyes open, and she stifled several yawns. For a while, the diversion had taken her mind off everything that had happened. Now exhaustion and fear began to overtake her again. Oliver must have noticed, because she heard him abruptly making excuses to Eric about needing some rest. Eric offered Tess the spare bedroom and Oliver the couch.
Oliver came and took her hand. “Come on,” he said in a low voice. “I’ll show you where you’re staying. Well, you know what I mean.”
He walked her down a short hallway and helped her get settled. She wanted a hot shower, a clean nightshirt, and her own bed, but she was almost too tired to care.
“You going to be all right?” Oliver said.
“Yeah, I guess.”
What other choice do I have?
“Well, goodnight.”
She felt his hesitation, heard no movement. A thought struck her. “Should we check e-mail?”
“That’s probably a good idea. I’ll go get the laptop.”
He was back a moment later, and she waited impatiently while he booted up the computer.
“Okay, I’ve got it,” he said. “Two e-mails. One from Tad and one from, well, whoever’s calling himself your father.”
Tess bit back a retort.
I know the e-mails are coming from Dad!
Instead, she said, “Tad again? What’s he want?”
Oliver was silent for a moment. “You don’t want me to read this one.”
“Why not? What is it?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to hear it. He’s ranting about Carl. He wants to know where you are—you’re not going to respond.”
“Fine. Read the other one.”
“It says, ‘It’s 10:35.’”
“That’s it?”
“No,” Oliver drew out the word. “There’s a file attached. I’m downloading it now.”
A moment later, Tess heard the strains of a familiar song. An image of her parents singing it instantly came to mind, the memory bringing tears to her eyes before she could stop them.
“I’m . . . growing . . . weaker,” Oliver said in a thready voice.
She laughed in spite of herself. “Oh, shut up, you. My parents would sing that whenever they wanted me to quit misbehaving.”
“‘Stop! In the Name of Love’?”
“The worst part was they danced to it like The Supremes used to.” Badly, too, she remembered, which was funny the first few times, and embarrassing after that, but it had never failed to divert her from whatever she might have been doing.
“So, what’s it mean?” Oliver said.
“I don’t know. I suppose we’ll have to get the book.”
“Why? I can tell you exactly what’s on that page. At 10:35, a bunch of the animals are playing blind man’s buff. Sorry if that sounds insensitive, but that’s what they’re doing.”
“You actually remember the page that clock is on? What else?”
Oliver described the scene in detail. When he finished, Tess was no closer to understanding what the e-mail was trying to tell them.
“Are you sure you can’t remember anything that might connect with the song?” she said.
“No—wait, there’s a radio up on a shelf. Nothing on it, though. There’s a bingo card in the bottom corner.”
“That’s right—numbers that correspond to letters. But that’s a clue to the mystery in the book. I don’t think it’ll help us here.”
Oliver yawned. “Why don’t we sleep on it? It’s been a crazy day.”
“I guess you’re right. Well, goodnight.”
Tess heard the soft click of the door closing. She lay down on top of the bed and curled into a fetal position. But sleep wouldn’t come.
CHAPTER 26
I woke in the middle of the night, soaked in cold sweat, confused and disoriented. Through the window, a streetlight limned the unfamiliar shapes of Eric’s living room furniture, and I slowly remembered our flight from the U District. The springs in the couch reached up through the padding and poked at me, but they weren’t what had awakened me. It had been the troubling, and troublesome, thoughts about the responsibility squatting on my shoulders like an overweight organ grinder’s monkey.
I’d taken a minimum-wage job with the possibility of advancement and performance bonuses, and ended up with a person’s life in my hands. I was just getting used to the idea of being self-sufficient, and had been truly responsible for myself for only a few days. Worse, I discovered I actually cared about the snotty little Chiquita. I even liked her. But staying one step ahead of gun-toting mercenaries hadn’t been part of the job description, and I laid there wondering if I owed Tess—or Alice—any allegiance. After all, I hadn’t even been paid yet. Seemed like they were asking a lot for nothing.
My mind hummed with energy, flitting on rapidly beating wings from one tasty thought to another, alighting just long enough to sample the flavor before moving on. Intrigued by one, I hovered, lingering at several blossoms on the same bush.
I’d lied to Tess. By inadvertent omission—so maybe not a real lie. I’d since remembered that the border of the illustration I’d described to her contained a message written in Morse code. The windows were already turning gray from the encroaching dawn, so I swung my legs off th
e couch and reached for the laptop. It cast a blue glow across half the room as it booted up.
Had I ever joined the Boy Scouts, I’m sure Morse code would have been imprinted in my memory like most everything else. But I’d never been much of a joiner. I’d been one of those kids usually picked next to last for baseball teams or PE’s dreaded dodgeball sessions. I pulled up the code online—combinations of dots and dashes representing the alphabet. It didn’t take long to figure out the message in the book had nothing to do with the e-mail Tess had gotten. I sat back and thought. Someone had sent her an MP3 file—a song that held personal meaning for her.
Why? Exhorting her to “stop in the name of love?” Quit following clues? Warning us—her—it was too dangerous?
The tune echoed in my head, the chorus caught in an endless loop.
My aha moment smacked me in the face long after it should have—Tess probably would have figured it out far faster.
I grabbed a pencil and a scrap of paper from my backpack and started decoding the rhythm of the song. “Stop!” was obviously a dot. The Supremes also sang the words “in the” on short notes—so, dots again. “Naaame” had to be a dash, followed by “of love,” two more dots. Discouragement soon set in when I realized how many ways the dots and dashes could be combined. Depending on phrasing, the notes of the song could stand for different letters. The notes of an I and a T together made a U, and an M and a T made a G. I played the song clip on low volume and listened to it several times in succession. Then I went to work again and wrote down possible series of letters. None of them made any sense. I listened to the clip one more time, trying to decide if notes were staccato dots or legato dashes. When I was satisfied I had the right string of letters, I realized that I could see them by light of day through the window and not the glow of the laptop screen.
Rustling sounds came from the back of the house, followed by the flush of a toilet and water running. Several minutes later Eric appeared and waved at me on his way to the kitchen. Pretty soon, a kettle in the kitchen whistled, and a moment or two later Eric brought me a mug of tea.
“You can stay as long as you need to,” he said. “I have to get to work.”
“I’m going to straighten this out,” I said. “Today. We’ll be out of your hair, I promise.”
He shrugged. “No worries. Lock up when you leave.”
“Okay. Thanks, Eric. See you around.”
As soon as he left the house grew still again, traffic in the street the only sound except for the hum of the refrigerator.
I turned back to the letters in front of me. If they comprised a message, it had to be an anagram: E, I, T, A, O, N, T, I, T, M. I started moving the letters around to form words. The number of combinations that worked surprised me, but few made any sense. I picked up the mug of tea and discovered it had gone cold. A yawn nearly swallowed me whole. I’d been awake for hours—most of that time spent avoiding a decision.
I heard stirrings, and a small voice said, “Oliver?”
“Out here in the living room,” I called. “Need help?”
“No, I’ll find you. Just keep talking.”
“Sure. Let’s see. I’ll start with ‘Good morning, sleepyhead.’ It’s a beautiful day. Some showers, but right now the sun’s broken through, and there are a few patches of blue up there. It’s almost nine, so you’re officially late for school. And—Ah, there you are.”
Tess appeared at the end of the hall, straight black hair tousled, clothes rumpled. But she looked better than I did. She stopped and smoothed her hair demurely, suddenly self-conscious, as if reading my thoughts.
“Head straight for the sound of my voice. A little left . . . Almost there.” I stood up and took her hand. “Couch is right behind you. Can I get you tea or coffee?”
She shook her head.
“How’d you sleep?” I said.
“Better than I thought I would. I laid awake for a while, but after that . . .” She lowered herself onto the couch. “Where’s Eric?”
“Went to work.”
“What have you been up to?”
“About that . . . I didn’t describe everything in that illustration last night.”
“Oliver! Why not?”
“Sorry. I forgot to mention the Morse code in the border.”
“You didn’t think that might be relevant?”
“I forgot, okay?”
She flinched. I rubbed the back of my neck, wishing I’d gotten more sleep.
“I didn’t think you could do that,” she said in a small voice.
“It’s different.” I thought about how to explain it. “Different types of memories are stored in different parts of the brain. We access them differently. I can pull up scenes, moments in time—especially if they’ve made an emotional impact—and tell you with reasonable accuracy what people said, what they wore, where they stood, down to small details. That doesn’t mean I don’t forget things. I can be as absent-minded as the next guy.”
“But you remember the code?”
“Every dot and dash. It doesn’t help.”
Her face fell. I was struck again by how normal she looked. A little dreamy, maybe, because her eyes couldn’t focus, but unless she was feeling her way around a strange place, she didn’t act like a blind person.
“I figured maybe we were supposed to use the Morse code to decipher a message in the song clip,” I said.
Tess brightened and leaned forward. “What did it say? Did you find a message?”
“Nothing that makes sense. I’m sorry, Tess.”
She frowned. “I don’t understand. Was there something there or not?”
“Look, I went over the clip a million times. I came up with ten letters that don’t spell anything in order. So maybe an anagram. There are all sorts of possibilities.”
“Like what?”
“How about ‘imitate not?’ No? Doesn’t work for you? Try, ‘to me it ain’t.’”
“Ain’t what?”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Okay, how about ‘it ain’t Moet?’”
She pouted. “That’s terrible English. My dad wouldn’t use ‘ain’t.’”
I sighed and steeled myself for what I was about to do. I couldn’t avoid it any longer.
“I have to take you back, Tess.”
“What? Why?” She bit her lip and sank into the cushions.
The anguish on her face stabbed me in the heart. I was glad she wasn’t able to see my shame, my cowardice.
“I can’t protect you out here,” I said, “Whoever’s after you has too many resources. They’ll find us eventually.”
“But Alice said . . . What if it’s not safe?”
“Isn’t your uncle ex-military? Can’t he hire bodyguards?”
“I don’t want to go through that again! Why can’t you—?”
“I’m a student, Tess! I’m supposed to be your assistant, your guide dog. I’m not a bodyguard.”
“What? It’s not in your job description, so you’re going to quit? What will happen to me?”
“Look, I think you ought to hand this whole thing over to your uncle. He’s your guardian, right? Where’s he been, anyway?”
“Traveling. On business. He’s almost never home.”
“He’s the one who should be protecting you, not me.”
“He couldn’t keep my parents from getting killed.”
“I thought that was an accident.”
“So? All those men, all those guns . . . I don’t want that again.”
“What men?”
She told me about all the security Travis had brought in a year earlier, right before the accident. Men with guns to protect her father from an unexplained threat. Travis and her parents had kept the truth from her so she wouldn’t be frightened, but she’d known something was wrong, had been aware of the presence of all the bodyguards. Not that they’d done any good in the end. They’d failed to protect her parents, and Tess, too.
“I still think it’s for the best,” I said
when she finished. “At least they have a chance. We don’t, not by ourselves.”
Silence hung in the air like swamp gas with no dog to blame it on and neither one of us wanting to acknowledge it.
She caved first. “You mean now? Fine. I need a shower, clean clothes, lip gloss, a toothbrush, brush for my hair—”
“Shower’s no problem,” I interrupted. “But you’ll have to wait on the other stuff.”
I wondered how she managed, but wasn’t brave enough to ask. She grumbled something unintelligible and made her way to the bathroom, refusing my offer of help.
An hour later, we sat on a bus headed toward downtown Seattle. Tess was nearly swallowed up by a sweatshirt I borrowed from Eric’s closet. A baseball cap covered most of her hair. The brim pulled low made it difficult to see her eyes and disguised the fact that she was sightless. The baggy clothes made her look smaller, more childlike. I kept a paranoid eye out for anyone following us. Other than a toothless drunk who kept leering at Tess, no one paid much attention.
We changed buses downtown and caught one headed across the lake. I kept glancing at Tess on the way, but she was a closed cupboard, heart hidden from view. I wished she’d take it out and pin it to the front of her sweatshirt like a nametag: “Hello, my name is Angry.” Something to give me an indication of where I stood with her. Then again, it didn’t matter since I was about to quit.
“We’re almost there,” I said finally.
“I’m not talking to you.” She folded her arms and turned away.
“Come on, Tess. You have to talk sometime.”
She hesitated, then faced me. “So what’s your plan? You going to call Alice and see if the coast is clear, or just brazen it out and walk in?”
She said it so coyly I wondered if she knew something I didn’t.
“No, no plan,” I said.
“For someone so smart, you’re not too bright.”
“I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do,” I said, rubbing the spot on my ego that had taken her hit. “I’m not going to walk right in, and I’m not going to check in with Alice. I don’t trust anyone—not even you.”
“Me? Why wouldn’t you trust me? What did I ever do to you? I’m blind, Oliver, remember?”
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