The Burning Road

by Ann Benson

  How long would it be before passion overtook her sensibility?

  These thoughts engaged her so completely that she barely heard any of what the chatty Marie had to say as they progressed on their route. It was too dark to take in the wonders of the city, now tarnished by anarchy but still thoroughly marvelous; and before she knew it, they were inside a cobblestoned courtyard, standing in front of a massive wooden door.

  “Bonsoir,” Marie said to the servant who answered their knock. “We bring a message for your master.” She handed a small folded parchment to the man. “We are to bring back a reply, if possible.”

  The manservant said, “Wait here, please.”

  “Will you not invite us in?” Marie asked boldly.

  The servant seemed slightly distressed by the question and looked back into the house over his shoulder. His reticence piqued Kate’s curiosity and she tried, without attracting too much notice, to peer around him while he was engaged in an exchange with Marie. But there was little she could see, for most of the house was dark. Even the rich do not waste candles these days, she thought. Behind the servant was a large reception area that gave way to what she thought were several other rooms or passageways. Most were dark and unoccupied, except one, which glowed with soft illumination. The salon, she decided by her brief glimpse of its furnishings. Two guards stood stoic vigil outside the lit room. They stared straight ahead and paid no attention to the curious visitors leering from the door.

  She heard no sound from the glowing room, no conversation or movement, and it occurred to her that someone in that room might be reading or studying something. Kate found herself drawn to the soft light like a moth, and strained to catch a glimpse beyond the manservant in the doorway. Marie was still trying to convince the entrenched valet to let them cross the threshold—without much luck. But it was not for lack of trying that they were not allowed to enter.

  “I think perhaps you should wait here,” the manservant finally said. “I have heard enough persuasion.” He said it with an odd smile, then closed the door and disappeared with the message.

  As she stared at the sturdy wood planks that now filled her view, Kate considered the irony of it: I am a king’s daughter. A servant has just closed a door in my face.

  She did not have long to ponder that absurdity, for in a short while the door opened again. When she looked beyond the servant this time, she saw that the previously illuminated room was now dark and the guards were gone.

  Very suddenly, she thought. Why?

  There would be no answer. The servant handed Marie the same parchment, refolded once again. “Give this to Marcel,” he said.

  “Très bien, monsieur,” Marie said. “Bonsoir, et merci.”

  And with a small curtsy, she turned. Kate lingered a brief moment longer, hoping for another look inside. Finally Marie took her by the arm and pulled her along.

  From his small barred window, Alejandro looked out to the street below. He peered intently into the velvety Paris darkness, hoping for some sight of the unexpected visitors that had been the cause of his sudden upstairs banishment. He spoke aloud, to stay in the habit of it, and did not care if his guards thought him odd. Let them. They despise me already for being a Jew; let them also think me insane. “Tomorrow,” he whispered aloud, “he will put me on display to his chosen guests, yet tonight he does not wish these strangers to see me here.”

  He heard the creaking of the heavy gate, and the footsteps of the departing visitors. He saw two figures emerge from the courtyard door, and understood why the steps had sounded so light. They are women, he realized when he saw their shapes. One very tall, like my Kate. His heart ached with the thought of her.

  The visitors disappeared into the darkness, and as they faded from his vision he felt a desperate wish for the simplest contact with them, for even the smallest exchange of words so that he might prove to himself that he was not dreaming his hated isolation. To change places with one or the other of them, even for a moment, would be the most wonderful blessing he could imagine.

  Right now, he mused sadly, I would even consider being a woman, should freedom come with such a condition.

  They came into the house through the servants’ door to the kitchen, as Kate and Karle had done the night before. “Monsieur said he would have many gentlemen about tonight,” Marie told Kate. “They are discussing their war again. He does not wish to be interrupted. Nor have I any wish to be disturbed by their silly demands for service. Do this, Marie! Then do that, Marie! So we shall not let them know we are back just yet, eh?”

  Karle will be among them, Kate thought. She surprised herself with a sharp pang of disappointment that she would not have him to herself.

  The expected din of male voices floated down the cellar stairs as Kate and Marie passed time again at cards. The words were garbled by distance and walls and were therefore unintelligible, but the excitement of the discussion was clear and its urgency unmistakable.

  “They love this war,” Marie said with a sad shake of her head.

  “Only those who have not seen it firsthand,” Kate countered. “This war is too cruel to be imagined.” A quick silent recollection of some of the horrors she and Karle had witnessed in their journey to Paris flashed through her mind, numbing her. The remembered atrocities came back too vividly and weighed heavily on her soul. She felt her spirit sink, and fatigue settled onto her like a cloak of wet wool. “Suddenly I am very tired,” she said. “I would like to go to bed.”

  “Shall you sleep upstairs again?” Marie asked, one eyebrow arched in curiosity.

  Kate sat quietly for a moment, then folded her hand of cards. “Is there another room?”

  “No, but a pallet could be laid here in the kitchen for you, if you like. Sometimes I sleep here myself, although it remains unknown where I shall be tonight.” She winked and laughed. “In any case, you are welcome. But it would not have the comforts of the straw bed.”

  Comfort was something she needed desperately this night, whatever its shape. “Then I think I shall go upstairs.”

  “Comfort it is, then,” Marie said. “Monsieur would not mind if you took some wine before going to bed. He himself almost always does so. He says that it improves his—how shall one describe it? His temperament. Perhaps it will improve your … repose.”

  “If so, then it would be a most welcome potion.”

  Marie quickly found the goblet and flagon and poured out a good dose of the dark red stuff for Kate. Then she splashed a few sips into a smaller mug, which she raised in toast. “May you find great and gentle comfort in your bed tonight.”

  Indeed, Kate thought, and downed her wine.

  The gathered leaders of Paris stilled their voices and watched as she passed quickly and quietly by them, her head bowed and her eyes lowered. It was something the men of King Edward’s Court had never done. But then she had been an annoying child, not the lissome, golden-haired object of desire she had grown into. She could feel the eyes of the unfamiliar men burning into her as she quietly rounded the staircase and padded up the stairs. And one by one, she felt the burn fade away as their unspoken fantasies dissipated, unfulfilled, and each of the salon’s occupants turned his attention back to the cause at hand. Their voices rose again, and their utterances were filled with the words of war. Though the tone was now more muted, it was certainly no less enthusiastic.

  But as she disappeared into the small upstairs hallway, the presence of Karle’s gaze still lingered. She felt it like a hand on her back and it stayed with her as she shed her outer garments and lay down on the straw. And as the wine drew her into sleep, she imagined that hand warm and firm on the small of her back, even in her dreams.

  She awoke later to find him kneeling at her side in the darkness, his real hand where she’d imagined it to be, the fingers working soft circles into the flesh of her waist. She opened her eyes and saw him looking at her, his face full of uncertainty.

  How could he think I might not want him? she wondered dreamily.
She took hold of his hand and brought it to her lips, and kissed it gently. The palm was rough and callused from sword and rein. And then she drew him to her. He came willingly, a great and gentle comforter, and wrapped himself around her. They declared their mutual affection, quite unsensibly.

  Alejandro awoke with a jolt of fear from a disturbing dream, and struggled desperately to throw off the haze of terror that had overtaken him. But the cold fingers of fear would not be loosed, and gripped his belly with unshakable resolve. The thought that his nightly terrors, finally conquered after so many years, might return, filled him with a haunting, overwhelming dread. “Ah, Carlos Alderón,” he whispered into the night air, “have you come back again? Please,” he begged the shade who had haunted him for such a long time, “leave me to enjoy what little peace I have.”

  But as he searched his brain for the memory of the night’s dream, he realized that it was not the ghost of the blacksmith who had marched angrily through his sleep. It was Kate, not her ghost, but the living image of the girl herself, who had made the macabre visit to his psyche. And unlike his former dreams of Carlos Alderón, in this new midnight ride it was not the shrouded blacksmith who gave chase, but Alejandro himself, and the prey, to his horror, was his daughter. But she would not be caught, and instead slipped past him at a seemingly impossible speed. He called her name aloud and reached out to grab her, but his hand came up short of her skirts, and she sped away, out of his reach, beyond his control, a woman quite apart.

  14

  With the journal safely stashed at the depository and her personal treasures seen to, Janie felt a bit less vulnerable. Thus freed, she set out on a new journey, the one Kristina Warger had so temptingly laid out before her.

  Her first step was to contact the new owners of Camp Meir.

  “We took it over from the previous owners two years after the first Outbreak,” Jason Davis told her when she called. “We went there as kids ourselves, my brother and I.”

  “Is your brother also involved in the operation of the place?” Janie asked.

  “He probably would be, if he were still with us. It was my wife and I who bought it.”

  She should have known better. “I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t do my homework very well.”

  “We’ve all lost someone, Dr. Crowe. I’m not offended. Anyway, my mother and father thought it was a terribly important thing for us to go there, that it helped to shape us as young men, so I used some of the money from their estate toward the purchase. The price was very good at the time. It seemed a shame that no one was keeping it going, and I thought it was a fitting memorial to them. Have you ever gotten out there?”

  “I haven’t,” Janie said. “I’d like to, though. I’ve been a little loose with my allotment of fuel lately. I’m trying to be careful.”

  “Oh. Well, unfortunately, the buses don’t go out that way yet.”

  “Maybe that’s not so unfortunate. But your Web site is very well done, and I think I got a pretty good idea of what the camp is all about.”

  “The physical camp, yes. It’s a good representation of what the place looks like, what the facilities are—but the thing that made it really special, the thing you can’t see in the pictures, was the sense of spirituality we came away with. Not religion, necessarily. The program never really focused on religion. It was something more subtle than that. Maybe—community. Something we don’t seem to have much of in this world anymore. And it’s grown there, believe it or not.” He brought forward a fond memory and shared it with her. “My mother always said that when I went to Meir I was already a nice boy, but when I came back, I was nicer.”

  “Well, that’s a pretty significant thing in a teenage boy,” Janie said.

  “Don’t I know it,” Davis said. “I have a teenage boy. He can be a real terror.”

  Of course, that teenage son would have been a camper.…

  She figured backward. “How old is your son, Mr. Davis?”

  “He’s seventeen now. Though he likes to think he’s thirty. I keep trying to tell him not to grow up too fast.”

  “Did he attend the camp before you took it over?”

  “He did.”

  “Was he there during the summer when there was the Giardia scare?”

  Davis seemed to hesitate slightly before answering. “That was before we owned it.” He cleared his throat. “My wife and I were having some difficulties that year. She took our children up to Maine that whole summer to stay with her family. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”

  You may never know how right. “Well, kids are very adaptable.”

  “They are. DR SAM sort of put everything back in focus for us, and we were able to work out our differences. We’re still together, I’m happy to say.”

  “That’s really nice to hear.”

  “Anyway, my son went back to the camp after we bought it. I’m not sure he appreciated it the way we did. He was too busy being a boy of the new millennium. But enough of my fascinating story. You said you were interested in some of the old records.”

  It was something of a relief, finally, to get to the matter she’d contacted him about, not that she found Outbreak nostalgia disturbing—it had become almost a part of the new etiquette to trade stories, almost as a greeting. “Yes, but from before your ownership, during the summer when there was the Giardia scare. I’m involved in the care of one of your former campers, a young man by the name of Abraham Prives. He had an unfortunate accident and I’m—working with his mother.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He collided with another boy while playing soccer and suffered a severe spinal break.”

  There was complete silence on the other end of the conversation. Janie thought for a moment that they’d been thrown off the network. “Mr. Davis? Are you still there?”

  “Yes,” he said, after a moment of hesitation. “I am.” His tone was quieter, almost pensive. “I’m just shocked, that’s all. It’s every parent’s worst nightmare.” He seemed to recover a bit, and added, “But I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you, Dr. Crowe. The records from that time are very incomplete. They were kept on paper, you see, and while no one was taking care of the place, there was quite a lot of vandalism. One of the file cabinets was nearly destroyed by some squatters. We did manage to evict them eventually, but not before they had a chance to do some pretty substantial damage to the place.”

  She felt her stomach sink on hearing this news. “I don’t understand why people behave that way.”

  “Neither do I.”

  After a long sigh, she said, “It would be extremely helpful to have a list of the boys who were treated for Giardia. Failing that, a list of the general population that summer would do.”

  “I don’t know if we have either, to be quite honest with you.”

  “Do you have any record of who it was that made the determination of a potential Giardia problem?”

  “I would assume it was someone from a public health agency. But I really don’t know.”

  “And what township is the camp located in? Maybe someone involved in the local government would remember.”

  “The town of Burning Road. But if you don’t get anywhere with them, you might try the county.”

  What little faith she might have had in local government was completely shattered by the time Janie finished dealing with officials from the town of Burning Road and the county in which it was seated. They would not give her anything until she filed a request using Freedom of Information Act forms.

  “I want employment records showing who was working in the health department at the time, not the psychosexual history of the mayor,” she said to the clerk in charge; later, she considered in a moment of regret that it might have been an unnecessarily aggressive thing to say.

  But what can you do when confronted with morons, psychopaths, and mental defectives? she thought with some bitterness. And when she spoke with Kristina Warger later that night to report on the results of
her first task in their joint quest, Janie felt compelled to say, “You know, some of what I did today is stuff that doesn’t really require me, specifically. Why is it that I need to do these things, and not you, or someone else from your group?”

  “Because right now we don’t have anyone but me available. We’re not exactly a big group. And you have more credibility than I do. You’re more mature, probably a lot more adept at social things. And I remind all these people of their own children,” she said. “They won’t talk to me the same way they’ll talk to you.”

  “I’m talking to you.”

  “But you’re smart enough and curious enough to look beyond my youth. Most people aren’t.”

  Indeed, Kristina’s youth was part of what Janie found fascinating about her. Somewhat bemused, she said, “Which aren’t they? Smart, or curious?”

  “Oh, lots of people are smart. But curious … it’s a quality you don’t see enough of. People don’t seem to ask questions anymore.”

  Anymore? Janie wanted to ask, sarcastically, if the youthful Kristina had come to this astute conclusion through a prolonged period of observation, if it was a tidbit of wisdom gathered over the span of her life. But she reserved the question for another occasion, when she might have a better handle on the girl’s unusual quirks.

  For the moment, she simply agreed. “I think that’s a result of people getting unsavory answers for the last few years. There are lots of things we all just don’t want to know. So why ask? It’s completely understandable.”

  “And completely tragic. But there’s another reason why we need you. Some of us have rather high profiles. Don’t misunderstand me—you’re not exactly unknown. But it would be very difficult for some of my colleagues to look into these things without raising a few eyebrows.”

  Colleagues? Janie wondered when young girls had started to have “colleagues.” “I guess this wasn’t what I expected when I signed on. I mean, I actually did take care of some loose ends in my life, but if this is what this project is going to be about, I don’t think I’m going to face much in the way of danger.”