3:10 p.m.
Janis paced near the dugout, stubbing the toes of her cleats into the orange clay. Familiar sounds came at her — metal bats clanking, bulls thudding into leather, shouts, whistles — but it all originated from the other side of the chain-link fence. Janis sank onto the bleacher and punched her duffel bag.
Unbeknownst to her parents and Margaret, she had dressed for the final day of softball tryouts only to have Coach Sessions tell her she couldn’t practice without a doctor’s clearance: “You’re welcome to come and watch, attend team meetings. I just can’t let you play, not until you pass your physical. But don’t worry,” she’d whispered. “We’re planning to save you a spot.”
The thing was, Janis needed to play now. The competition, the regimen of daily practice, the sting of the grass, the sounds, even — without them, she might lose her mind.
She needed to reclaim at least the sports part of her old life.
Spotting her friend Samantha in the newly seeded outfield, Janis cupped her hands to the sides of her mouth. “You’re too shallow!” she called. Samantha shook her head of short hair. But Janis could see a ghost image of a ball in flight, its trajectory passing well above Samantha, who crouched beyond second base. A coach tossed up a softball and swung her bat into it. Samantha tilted her head, retreated several steps, then turned and broke into a full sprint. The ball landed several yards beyond her and rolled toward the outfield fence.
Far from vindicating Janis, the premonition weighed on her heart like a curse.
“You’ll never have your old life back,” she muttered, slinging the strap of her duffel bag over her shoulder. She surveyed her friends and teammates from the previous summer spread over the practice field and then hung her head and embarked on the two-mile walk to Oakwood.
* * *
The lights beyond the open curtains told Janis her mother was home. Janis stood at the foot of the driveway, a knot of resentment hardening inside her chest. Finally she continued toward the woods, mimicking her mother’s voice: “We’re all going to be just fine, you’ll see.”
Is that what you call the growing silence with Dad? Is that what you call the frigid exchanges?
And who was the man she’d seen her mom with at Westside Park? That had happened last week, en route to the mall with Margaret. She’d only gotten a glimpse, and at a distance, but Janis recognized her mother’s lavender pea coat and her Dee Wallace blond ’do. The tall man in the khaki duster and graying hair looked too old to be a fellow student. Janis glanced over at Margaret, who evidently hadn’t seen them. Was he one of her mother’s professors at the college? Was he the reason she’d been spending less time at home?
Her mother never mentioned the man, and Janis had been too afraid to ask.
Janis dropped her duffel bag at the entrance of the woods. She found a bat-length branch and tapped the ground with it as she sauntered. At the creek, she tossed a small stone into the air and nailed it with her stick. The stone sailed over the levee and landed in the leaf litter beyond — a solid shot — scattering a group of sparrows. Janis twisted her torso one way, then the other.
“Barely even felt that,” she grumbled, thinking about what Coach Sessions had said.
But she had felt it. The crack of stick on stone had awakened the deep smoldering in her liver. She clamped a hand to her side, as though to staunch an invisible trickle of blood, and climbed from the creek bed. The pain eased. Was a person just the activities she participated in, the friends she hung out with, the family she had grown up with — or was she something more?
Because absent those, Janis felt like thinning smoke.
She sighed. And the one person she could talk to was the one person she had to maintain the farthest separation from. She wasn’t thinking of Blake, though she missed him too. In the five weeks since their breakup, he had looked at her with less and less expectancy when they passed in the hallways — less and less familiarity, even, his smile too weak to form dimples. To add insult to injury, their breakup had become the flavor of the month in gossip circles.
Janis swung her stick through a growth of saw palmettos.
Amy Pavoni, with her little smirks, thought she had won. But she didn’t understand the stakes — no one did. Janis still heard the Leonards’ warning in her head, still dreamed of Scott being thrown down in front of her, his glasses smashed, the world bursting into a nuclear-fueled inferno.
When she sniffled, the taste of salt found her throat. She’d continued to keep her distance from Scott — she had to. Agent Steel remained a fixture on campus, along with the mysterious men who moved among the faculty, emitting strange space vibes.
But a few times, in her out-of-body state, Janis had gone to Scott’s house. Who are you kidding? Every time you’ve awakened in your out-of-body state, you’ve gone to Scott’s house. At first, she told herself it was to make sure he wasn’t going to the Leonards’ anymore, to see that he was safe.
But something more was happening, because as she hovered outside the force field and watched his dim window, Janis had come to feel a loss deeper than that which she felt toward Blake. With Blake, she experienced a wincing regret. With Scott, it was as though something were being uprooted inside her.
Janis realized she’d strayed from the creek, ending up on an old path. Without the tread of children’s feet to maintain it, the path had become faint and grown over. She followed the thin seam deeper into the woods until, despite the mostly leafless state of the trees, she could no longer see the houses on her cul-de-sac. The shifting patterns of growth around her appeared familiar, but in a dreamlike way. When was the last time she’d come back this far?
She spied something on the ground amid the leaves. A cone? She walked over and lifted it with her stick. The leaves fell away, and she recognized the spool of string, gray and stuck together now. Four trees rose around her, in the shape of a square. She was inside her and Scott’s old fort, the place they’d gone to a month before, in their shared past.
Why does it happen? he had asked her. What does it mean?
I don’t know, she’d answered.
She examined the four trees, running her hands over them. She found several old nail heads, half swallowed by the growing bark. She imagined the fort’s walls with their columns of strung-together branches, the roof with its trusses and layer of palm fronds that Tyler had cut for them with his father’s knife.
“Why does it happen?” Janis mumbled to herself. “And why here?”
She thought of something Mrs. Fern had told her last semester — or rather, what the dream face on the back of Mrs. Fern’s head had told her: “THINGS YOU HAVE ALREADY SEEN.”
Were these experiences — the one at the end of the Meadows with the Rottweiler, the one here — were they to show them something they’d already seen? Janis closed her eyes and frowned in concentration.
She and Scott had been building the fort. Tyler showed up and cut the palm fronds with his knife. Then Jesse and Creed appeared. Creed socked her in the stomach, and the three proceeded to destroy the fort so thoroughly that six years later, Janis had almost strolled right through the site without realizing it. But what had she seen?
Think!
She reached for the small cross at her chest. At the same moment, she remembered the faded white cross on Tyler’s old knife.
Of course.
Janis turned in a circle to orient herself. There. The spot where Scott had stuck the knife into the ground had been about ten paces toward the creek. She counted the paces off, her cleats crunching through the leaf fall.
At the approximate spot, she cleared debris away with her shoe. Then she plunged the end of her stick into the earth. Dirt flew up in front of her as she levered the stick. How could she have forgotten Scott’s discovery that had so fascinated her once? Well, after getting the wind knocked out of you and crying, you weren’t exactly in a hurry to come back here. True. And add to that the fact she’d been only nine years old, an age when lots of things
were competing for her fascination.
The end of the stick struck stone, the vibration driving to her core. Janis pressed her hand to her side, winced once, and knelt. The earth broke into clumps in her hands, and she tossed the clumps away. She wiped and blew the surface clean. A smooth section of cement looked back at her.
Still here.
She leaned on her stick, contemplating the unusual slab. She thought of the other slab in the Leonards’ shed — not a foundation for the shed itself, it turned out, but the ceiling for an underground room.
Janis tapped the cement with her stick. The sound was cold and hard.
The slab could have something to do with the neighborhood’s storm-drain system. A cement tunnel did open to the creek, but that was several hundred yards from where she stood.
She tapped the cement again.
Six years ago, she’d planned to return with one of her father’s shovels, the one with the flat head. The shovel still hung in their garage between two nails. If she couldn’t play softball, maybe she could come here after school and dig around the cement until it began to take shape, to make sense… because nothing in her life made sense right now.
And you’re alone.
She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and began walking in the direction of the cul-de-sac. She hadn’t gone more than four steps when a man’s voice called from behind her, almost too low to hear.
“Janis.”
She turned but didn’t see anyone. She twisted the other way. Then someone was climbing from the creek bank, to one side of where their fort had stood. He was without his glasses, and a wreath of hair fell to his shoulders, but Janis recognized him. At the top of the bank, he straightened, his long brow paler than ever.
Janis’s side began to throb. She stumbled backward.
“Don’t scream,” the man said as he continued toward her, palms held up. “Please.”
17
An hour earlier
Scott leaned against the wall beside his window, two fingers opening a sightline through the blinds. Janis was almost to the bottom of her short street, her ponytail swishing in time to the bounces of a blue sports bag against her hip. Scott stared, his brain swimming in a bath of teen hormones, then sighed impotently. “Guess it’s back to being full-on creepy,” he muttered.
Well, what’s to stop you from going down there?
“It’s not that easy,” he told the Bud voice.
Believe me when I tell you nuttin’ could be easier. She’s no longer seeing what’s-his-name, and now, look, she’s going into the woods all by her lonesome. How many more green lights does a fella need?
“I told her I believed in her powers,” Scott said, watching Janis disappear into the trees, “in her premonitory abilities. If she says we’re safer apart, then I have to respect that. At least until I can prove otherwise.”
Except trying to prove otherwise was proving challenging.
He’d yet to make sense of the traffic data, but with Jesse’s car being garaged (word around school was that he and the Bast brothers had been in a serious smash-up), the odd patterns had reverted to normal. The recording he had obtained from the Leonards’ basement remained hidden in his workshop, still scrambled. And Wayne’s “Runaway Squad” had yet to produce his housing data.
I don’t understand half of what you just said, pal, came the Bud voice. Premonitory who? Look, alls I knows is that if you woulda given her the card when I told you, you and the dame would be sitting pretty right now.
“I told you, I forgot,” Scott said.
And you’ve forgotten every day since, right? You go to the same school. She lives right down the street from you…
Scott let the blinds snap closed, then took the Bud Body booklet from his nightstand and shoved it into his top drawer.
I’m telling you pal, she’s not gonna wait around for—
Scott pushed the drawer closed. He turned to his mirror, where the picture of Cyclops stared down on him.
“Why don’t you ever say anything?” Scott asked.
A rap sounded on the door, and his mother’s frowning face appeared. “You have company,” she informed him.
Wayne bopped past her. “Why, thank you, Mrs. Spruel.”
He shook off his backpack and leaped onto Scott’s bed, hands behind his head, legs crossed at his ankles. He hadn’t bothered to kick off his dirty gray Velcro shoes. Craig and Chun wandered in behind him. His mother tensed her jaw and closed the door. She’d never been fond of Wayne.
Scott looked at Wayne’s backpack. “What’s up?”
“For starters, you’re late on payment.”
“Payment? What payment?”
“Hey, do you mind if we play this?” Chun had spotted the box for Dark Tower on a closet shelf and was pulling it out. When Scott nodded distractedly, Craig and Chun began setting the board game up on the floor.
Wayne stroked his ’stache. “Your lease on my laser covered you through the end of January. It is now…” Wayne consulted his digital watch. “…March eleventh. I’ve come to collect on months two and three.”
Scott hadn’t used the laser since his encounter with Jesse and Creed in the Grove (unless he counted popping the bulb in the streetlight), but he shrank at the thought of surrendering it. The voice he’d heard outside the Leonards’ shed, the facelessness of it, continued to haunt him.
“Fine.” Scott sidled past Chun to the closet and came out with the rest of his Avengers collection.
“Just set them beside my backpack.”
Scott looked at the cover of the topmost comic — issue 189, featuring a badass-looking Hawkeye — sighed, and did as Wayne instructed. He lifted his friend’s backpack just enough to gauge its weight.
“Ah-ah-ah!” Wayne sat up and snatched the backpack away. He stuffed it behind his head.
“Do you have the descrambler or not?”
Wayne grinned. “There’s something else you owe me. A certain movie poster?”
“Y-you did it?” Scott stammered, staring around at the others. “You got the neighborhood data?”
“Oh, yes we did. Do you have mine?” Wayne’s grin continued to sharpen until it formed a crease down the middle of his forehead.
“Eighty percent of it, maybe.” Scott made his face sag. “So, yeah. I guess you won.”
“Ha-haaa!” Wayne pumped his fists like a Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robot.
“Hey, not so fast. I have to see it first.”
“No problemo.” Wayne snapped his fingers. “Men?”
Craig and Chun rose reluctantly and unzipped their backpacks. They placed four thick manila folders on Scott’s desk, then returned to their game. Scott straddled his swivel chair and, fingers trembling, began flipping through the first folder. The printouts and copies of housing transactions had been organized by street, he noticed. Scott pictured each house as he went. Fifteen minutes later, he reached the bottom of the fourth folder.
All the houses for Oakwood were there.
Scott swiveled around, still struggling to affect disappointment. “I guess it’s official.” He shook Craig and Chun’s hands, then extended his arm toward Wayne. “Good job. You won.”
“As if there’d be any doubt.” Wayne’s grip was damp and confident.
“Don’t you want to know how we did it?” Chun asked.
Craig lifted his face from the Dark Tower game. “As you know, the digital database was incomplete.”
“Right… incomplete,” Scott said.
“Social engineering,” Wayne announced from the bed. “We showed up in person. It’s all public record, remember? The secretary even helped us sort through the data. It was like having a personal assistant in our employ — except we didn’t have to pay her one red cent. Not even for the copies.”
“Well, I have to admit… I didn’t think of that.”
“You overthought it. That’s where you erred,” Wayne said.
“Some interesting patterns in there, too,” Chun said.
&nbs
p; “Really?”
Chun came and stood behind Scott. “The original sales were in sixty-six, sixty-seven. The developer was a Phillip Erney.”
“Yeah, my mom’s mentioned him,” Scott said. “He’s still around.”
“Well, there were a few sales after that. Homeowner to new homeowner. Then in seventy-two, all of the houses were bought by another entity: Blue Sky Realty.” Chun opened the top folder, pulled out the stapled-together packet on the first house, and folded it back to the third page. “And look at what Blue Sky paid. That was like two times market value. And then they sat on the houses for a year. They did that with every single house.”
Scott studied the exorbitant price. “Our yardman said the neighborhood was barricaded in seventy-three. Said some sort of engineering corps came in here to do grading and flood control.”
“But here’s the thing…” Craig pushed himself up from the floor. He turned to the next page. “When Blue Sky resold the homes, they resold them for a loss. Every single one. And we’re talking a big loss.”
“What?” Scott took the packet from Craig and compared the two transactions that bracketed 1973. They were right. “Depreciation?” he asked, thinking aloud.
“Fifty percent?” Chun said. “And after a year’s worth of neighborhood improvements?”
“Forget it,” Craig concluded.
Scott closed the packet and drummed his fingers over it. Already, his mind was whirring with the implications. He would have to examine the data on every home, of course, but who was Blue Sky? His mother was always talking about this or that realty, and she’d never brought them up.
“Yawn,” Wayne said, getting up from the bed to leave.
“Wait, what did you tell the secretary?”
“About what we were doing?” Wayne dangled his legs off the side of the bed, his thin hair in disarray. “We explained it was a project for school. She was elderly and lonely, primed to be engineered.” He chuckled. “Anyway, she thought it was precious that we were learning about county records. She wheeled them out on a wooden cart along with this huge jar of gumdrops…”
But Scott was only half listening.
XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation Page 44