Most seemed to listen. A few grumbled that Chase had only married her because he wanted police protection. Not even Becca was insecure enough to believe that.
She took a small portion of the spaghetti, barely enough to fill a corner of the plate provided, and then only because she loved the sauce. Mostly, she focused on the pizza, her iced tea, and Chase.
“What about this project?” she asked. “Anyone new surface?” He used his spoon as a counterweight to keep the spaghetti he was winding from falling off his fork. He worked at it as if it were a particularly difficult puzzle.
“Obviously, you never went to the city council meetings.” “Not for this, no,” she said. She avoided city business as much as possible.
“Half the town hated it. Some I didn’t expect, folks who had supported me when I wanted to redo Beiker’s Department Store downtown.”
“The preservationists went against you?”
“Yeah.” He ate the forkful, swallowed, and then drank some water. “They think the End of the World is a bad idea, a dangerous place, and the last straw in turning Hope into a replica of California.”
“Wow,” Becca said. “I’d’ve thought they would’ve loved it.” “Me, too,” he said. “I was stunned. A few actually threatened me.”
“You’re kidding.”
He shook his head. “Ray McGuillicuty, remember him? He told me I’d regret buying the End of the World.”
“You think that was a threat, coming from a ninety-year-old man?”
Chase shrugged. “I thought it was idle talk at the time. But he has money, connections, and a shady reputation. He made his money running illegal speakeasies in the late thirties, and gambling dens in the forties. Word around town was that if there was an illegal business—an abortionist, a fight ring, drug smuggling— McGuillicuty would rent space or manpower to that business for a cut, of course.”
She had heard the rumors, but she also knew Old Man McGuillicuty had been an upstanding citizen since the 1960s. “You think he’s still got that kind of pull?”
“I think if anyone in Hope is smart enough to stop my project by burying a body on the property, it’s Ray McGuillicuty.” “That’s giving him a lot of power.”
“If you’re right,” Chase said, “and someone is trying to shut me down, Ray’s my first choice.”
Becca tried not to laugh. She couldn’t imagine that old man caring so much about the future of Hope. But she wasn’t going to ignore this.
“Who else?” she asked as she finished her iced tea. She waved the glass at the waiter, and he nodded.
“Oh, Christ,” Chase said. “Damn near the entire preservation society. All the matrons and their husbands, too. Most of the old money in Hope—what there is of it—warned me away.” “Like Old Man McGuillicuty did?” Becca asked. The waiter showed up with a pitcher and set it on the table. He didn’t even bother to pour. He still seemed a bit nervous about Chase’s earlier outburst.
“Not that blatant,” Chase said. “But they all took time to tell me that the End of the World is the most unlucky place in Hope and that everyone connected to it has been harmed by that connection.”
“Lovely,” Becca said. “Superstition still alive and well.” “And apparently they thought I should make business decisions based on it.”
“You didn’t, though,” she said.
“I think some of my investors did,” he said. “The preservation committee knew who my usual investors were. A number of them were contacted and a few backed out. One even told me that old properties that had bad luck rumors usually had a reason for them.”
“Turns out he was right,” Becca said.
“She,” he said. “And I guess she was.”
“Which means”—Becca tapped a finger against her chin— “that someone knew about those bodies.”
“How do you figure?” Chase asked.
She smiled at him. “Bad luck rumors have to start somewhere.”
“You think that’s tied to the smell?” he asked.
“Probably not, but right now, those old bodies are the only crime I have to investigate. I’ll start there.”
“After you finish harassing the local businessman.”
“After I finish dinner with my former husband, who has had a hell of a day.”
THEN
She didn’t know what Jess Taylor meant by the humans getting to him, and he wouldn’t say. He paced around the front part of the cabin, poured some water from a pitcher into a glass, and drank.
Then he stared at her.
She wondered if he was sorry he’d helped her. Maybe he would turn her in.
Maybe she would scream.
She wanted to beg him to keep her, beg him to help her. But she didn’t. Daddy used to say that people who begged didn’t deserve help. They had to help themselves.
Only she couldn’t do that, not without knowing what had happened. The answers weren’t simple. Her home was gone—she knew that much. When the shanties burned, hers would’ve burned with it. Daddy always kept water near the candles. He used to say, This place is so primitive and so badly built that we’re going to die here in a stupid fire because we couldn’t get to it in time.
He’d been wrong about them dying. None of them had died in that cabin, although she wasn’t sure about the others, the people who lived in the shanties where the fires started.
She wished Daddy were here now. She wished he would talk to Jess Taylor, grown one to grown one. They would understand each other. They would know what had happened and what would happen next.
“Do you eat?” Jess Taylor asked. He swished the water around in his glass. He was still looking at her that funny way.
She had to form a mouth. She had lost it while he’d been pacing. Her body wasn’t sure what form to take so it was taking several at once, which made her dizzy.
“I eat,” she said.
“I mean, do you eat what we eat?”
“When I look like you,” she said. Her people’s food had gone away when she was really, really little. They had to become like the humans just so that they could take in human nourishment.
“When you look like me,” Jess Taylor repeated. “How about the way you look now?”
“I’m not anything now,” she said. “I need to be something to take in food.”
Something she understood. Something whose systems were somewhat compatible. Daddy and the other scientists had to work for a while to make their systems work like a human’s. They still had to make changes—changes she didn’t understand.
Daddy said she was lucky. She started changing into human form really young, so it would be engrained. If she had to hide, she could hide as one of them forever because her body was used to their strangeness.
His never would be. Some of the older people got really sick in the first years.
Some of the older people died.
“How often do you have to eat?” Jess Taylor asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Whenever you do, I guess.”
Because she always ate when Momma did. She was too young to pick her own times to eat. Eating had to be trained like everything else.
“Wonderful,” he said in that low voice of his, the one no one else was supposed to hear. Then he raised it a little. “How about water? Do you need that, too?”
“If I look like you,” she said, “I act like you. My needs are like yours.”
Thafs the beauty of it, Daddy said to Momma once. And the curse. If we stay here too long, we lose our identity. We become someone else. Then they’ll never find us.
Why would they look for us? Momma asked. For all they know, we missed our settlement location and made do.
They trace new colonies. They have to, Daddy said. We don’t just move there because of population growth. These places are carefully chosen for raw material wealth as well.
She wasn’t sure what “raw material wealth” was, but Momma had known. Momma had looked at Daddy disapprovingly. Daddy had shrugged, bec
ause he wore his human form all the time now, and then he had smiled at her.
They’ll track us down, if only to see what kind of wealth we discovered here.
And if we don’t find any? Momma said.
That’s not the concern, Daddy said. The concern is whether or not they’ll find us before we lose ourselves.
“So you’re going to have to pick a shape sometime tonight, aren’t you?” Jess Taylor said. He had moved closer to her. She hadn’t noticed before. Had she been so lost in her memories that she hadn’t seen him walk?
“I guess,” she said.
“Can you be something else for a while? A table, maybe, or the box?”
“I’m too little,” she said. “I can’t do it by myself, not for long. That’s why I couldn’t be brick. I tried, but I’m not good yet. And I can’t stay long anyway. I don’t know the sleep-change. I need to move and breathe and feed myself like you.”
He sighed. He sank into the chair next to the table. “I was afraid of that.”
He took another sip of the water, studied his hand, then studied the small cabin. Then he got up and went to the window again, peering out the curtain.
“No one,” he said. “We’re okay for now.”
“I know,” she said, even though she didn’t. She wanted him to figure out how to help her. She was becoming more and more afraid he would just throw her out now that he knew most of her secrets.
He put his hand in the box, near her skin but not touching it. “You turned the color of the brick this afternoon,” he said. “Can you turn the same color as me?”
She looked at him as hard as he had looked at her. Then she let out a little sigh.
“Yes,” she said.
“You sounded hesitant,” he said.
“I can’t do blue eyes,” she said. “Yours aren’t.”
He smiled suddenly, as if he hadn’t expected that. “You’re right. Mine aren’t. Anything else human you can’t do?”
“I can’t be a grown one,” she said. “I have to ‘roughly correspond.’ ”
She said those last two words carefully. They were Daddy’s words. Before she had only known the concept, not how to express it. She used to point to things, things she wanted to be for more than an hour, more than a day.
He would shake his head. Sometimes he would laugh. She loved it when her daddy laughed.
Younglin, he’d say, they have to roughly correspond.
Mostly she wanted to be a grown one. Humans, more than the people, treated their young ones very differently. But she didn’t have enough years to be a grown one. She couldn’t pretend it, couldn’t even get the size right.
That problem translated to other living things as well. She could be a sapling, but not a tree. A kitten, but not a cat.
Someday, she would roughly correspond. But she wouldn’t know when until she changed to human form, and that form was a grown one.
“You’re a girl,” Jess Taylor said, “or they wouldn’t call you Sarah. What age do you roughly correspond to?”
“Ten,” she said because that’s what Momma said when she took her to the school two years before. Even though her learning had grown and her grades had advanced, she hadn’t changed, not like her classmates.
So she’d asked Daddy about that, and he’d said, Roughly, younglin. Roughly correspond. We age differently than they do. Slower; I think.
But he didn’t know. There was so much they didn’t know. So much that they didn’t understand.
Then he left and no one knew, and Momma hated the questions.
“Ten,” Jess Taylor said, and nodded, almost pleased. “Ten might work.”
“For what?” she asked, the words catching in her newly formed mouth.
“For keeping you alive, child,” he said, and tapped the edge of the box as he stood. “For keeping you alive.”
NOW
By the time Becca got home, she was too tired to chase rumors. She took a shower, which didn’t get that smell out of her nose. Her tiny house was an oven, despite the heat pump she’d wasted the last of her divorce settlement money on, and she actually had to turn on the good old-fashioned swamp cooler she couldn’t bring herself to get rid of.
Theoretically, the desert cooled at night, but lately the coolness had come without benefit of a breeze. She started with the air conditioner, which was nearly as old as she was, and by midnight shut it down, shoved a fan in the window, and hoped for the best.
She couldn’t sleep. Worries about herself, about Chase, about the appropriateness of the investigation had her pacing. The mentions Chase had made over dinner about rumors concerning the End of the World had her worried as well.
Hope had once been called the Hope of the West. Founded just after the Civil War by philanthropists and political idealists, Hope was supposed to be a refuge for displaced former slaves as well as immigrants who weren’t wanted in larger cities, and even Chinese families, so long as they remained in their own enclave at the edge of town.
The founders of Hope put ads in all the major newspapers, promising land and jobs to people no one else wanted. Hope also promised full equality to blacks and immigrants, although “immigrants” did not include the Chinese, who wouldn’t be allowed to vote or hold office. Hope was notable in its Chinese relations, though, for allowing entire families to live there, so long as they kept to themselves. Most states only tolerated Chinese males.
The experiment didn’t last. The United States barred Chinese immigration in the early part of the twentieth century, and then the state of Oregon itself started enforcing the discrimination built into its constitution, attempting to bodily throw Hope’s blacks out of the state. The entire town prevented that, letting the blacks stay as long as the city (and county) promised not to let them hold elected office or take state jobs.
Still, Hope was something of a legend in the state, a place where people could be perceived as nothing more than a set of skills. Where, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., people could be judged by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin.
That was Hope’s legacy, and the reason for its name. Hope’s children got spoonfed this history from the moment they walked into Hope Elementary, and heard about it all the way to graduation from Hope High.
So the idea of a massacre, any massacre, particularly one that someone remembered and tried to hide, went against everything Hope stood for. People didn’t die here, not in large groups. Hell, they didn’t die in small ones.
Becca got out of bed, grabbed her lightest robe—which Chase had bought her for one of their anniversaries—and headed for the couch, the television, and late-night talk shows. Maybe some blathering would shut down her brain.
Because all this thinking about a possible massacre—even one nearly a hundred years old—upset her more than she wanted to admit.
THEN
They waited until it was full dark before she grew herself back to human. It took a long time.
Jess Taylor’s cabin had three rooms and a windowless room he called a storage room. It scared her. It was like the box, only bigger, and it was in the middle of all three rooms—like it took a part off the corners of them and made its own little space.
She had never seen anything like that. He said he kept things in there, but there wasn’t much, a few boxes pushed against a corner, and some jars filled with jam.
All three walls had hangers for lanterns. He hung one before he brought her into the room. He kept it on low, so it wouldn’t bum too much kerosene and stink up the place—or start a fire. (At least, she hoped it wouldn’t start a fire; she’d seen too much fire this day.)
He took the box off the table, talking to her the whole time, mostly nonsense stuff like humans did with babies, stuff about how it would be okay, and the room might be close, but it would do, no one could see in, they would be safe.
She wasn’t sure about safe. She wasn’t sure about trusting Jess Taylor anymore, but she had to. She didn’t know what other choice sh
e had.
He set her box on top of the other boxes, then propped the door partly open with one of the jars.
“I’ll let you just change now,” he said, like she was going to put on a dress. “Let me know when you’re done.”
“No!” she said, as loud as she could, which wasn’t very loud, considering. She didn’t have the body behind the sound, and she didn’t know she needed it until just now.
That scared her, too.
She finally realized how truly helpless she was.
“You have to stay,” she said.
He sighed, keeping one hand on the door. “I’m sure it’s private. We—folks like me—we let each other be private.”
“I got to see you,” she said.
“I’ll be just outside the door,” he said.
“To change,” she said. “I got to see you to change. I can’t do it without an example.”
He frowned. “I can’t... change . . . like you. I can’t show you how.”
She shook her head. “To look at. I need to see what I’m changing into.”
And even then it might not work.
His head bowed, and his arm dropped. “I’m not sure I want to be here for that.”
She wasn’t sure she could do it without him. In the past, Momma or Daddy had always helped her. They had always found a way to get her through the difficult parts, like making the fingers different lengths or remembering to grow hair.
“How about I stand just outside the door with my back to you?” he asked. “Would that help?”
“Can you tell me if I get it wrong?” she asked.
He bowed his head even more, but he finally said, “I guess I could. Wait one moment, all right?”
She was scared. She knew that just as he left the room. If he hadn’t propped open the door, she would’ve been even more scared. She couldn’t see him at all.
Then he came back, carrying a sheet. “I don’t have girl clothes. We’ll have to find some for you. Can you put this on?” Modesty, Daddy called it.
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