Enough of the science, already!
Okay, I admit it. I am a bit of an obsessive. I’ve read all there is in the library, and I still want to know more. You see, the third question relates directly to me:
‘When?’
I probably share the same mutation. I haven’t had the test yet, because who wants to know that there is a loaded gun pointed at your head?
The way I see it, I’ve got about twenty-five years. Mom didn’t start acting funny until she was in her early forties, so I’ve got a period of grace before it kicks in. That’s a quarter of a century. A lot can happen in that time. Advances in medicine could make gene therapy a reality. Maybe a cure could be made from my own stem cells. Anything can be done if you put your mind to it.
Ticking away, those guanine and cytosine nucleotides are biding their time until they explode. They’re so smug, guanine and cytosine, they think they haven’t got a worry in the world. Well – wait till they get a load of me!
I’m not going to hang around for the bad stuff to happen. I’m not going to be like my mom. She was ignorant of the enemy inside her. That’s the difference between us – I’m nothing like my mom. I’m going to study that damn mutation, and I’m going to kill it.
I can’t allow myself to be anything like Eileen.
Molly told me that Eileen had a gift, and that she turned her back on it. She was scared of what she was. But I am Scout – not cutesy Scout, but tough Scout. Even if I cannot stop the disease, I’m not going to waste the time I’ve been given.
If I have the same gift as Eileen, I’m going to use it.
Molly’s card lay on the kitchen table. It didn’t take much to pick it up.
Chapter 4
When Molly told me that she was bringing her son to watch Eileen, I thought he might be a tousle-haired eleven-year-old, all freckles and shuffling feet. She assured me that he volunteered at Mercy, so would be able to cope with Eileen for a couple of hours. I was doubtful, until I saw the six-foot senior walking up the path from the cruiser.
“Mike Forrester?” The name popped out of my mouth as soon as I opened the door and saw the high-school jock standing on the porch.
“He kept his father’s name,” explained Molly, her son towering over her.
Everyone knew Mike – or ‘Woody’ – as he played right wing in the varsity soccer team. He clearly had no idea who I was. Though we were the same age, I had been a year ahead and so we’d shared no classes. We had passed in the corridor, and stood in the same lunch queue, but to Mike I would have been invisible.
Molly must have had some real dirt on Mike, because blackmail was the only explanation for his presence on my doorstep.
“Hi,” he said, ducking his head as he stepped into the living room. “Are you Scout?”
“Uh-huh,” was about all I could say. Most girls would have swooned at the thought that Woody knew their name.
“And this is your mom?” he asked, spotting Eileen amidst the clutter.
Those same girls would rather have thrown themselves into a live volcano than introduce their parents to a soccer star, but here was ‘Woody’ Forrester crouched down in front of Eileen. That she was dressed in a bathrobe and slippers hardly added to my already stellar embarrassment.
Eileen lit up like a bulb.
“Hello Eileen,” said Mike, taking hold of her hand. “You like Depeche Mode?”
Eileen nodded along to Flash FM, not answering his question but mesmerised by his face.
“How does he know that shit?” I whispered to Molly.
“I’ve been subjecting the boy to my taste in music since he was a child,” she explained.
It turned out that Mike had been working with old folk at the hospital, so knew his way around those whose minds had long since fled. I don’t know why he bothered with the voluntary work, because he didn’t need to bolster his college application. His sporting achievements were enough to get him into the school of his choice. Maybe he worked at Mercy just to complete his all-round sainthood.
When they printed the yearbook, Mike would qualify for ‘The Most Likely To…’ category. You could take your choice about what to fill in after that, because Mike had it all.
*
Molly drove across the Upper Vermillion. The bridge had been built when the creek was a wide river. Despite the recent deluge, the water was no more than a trickle through the centre supports.
“I don’t know whether I can do this,” I said.
“You want to go back?” she asked. Though she was in uniform, and we were in the cruiser, this was an unofficial journey. I was a minor, and there was no parent to give approval of my involvement in police business.
“No, it’s not that,” I explained. “It’s just that I don’t know whether I can follow anyone else’s trail.”
“You’ve never done it before? Not even once?”
“No. I thought it was something I only had with my mom, so I never tried it with anyone else. It might only work between us, like an invisible bond – mom to daughter. I’ve been picking up after her all my life, so maybe it’s a trick I learnt.”
“There’s no pressure, Scout,” she said. “You’re just trying to help out, that’s all. If you see anything, a scrap of a trail or a smidge of a track, well, that’ll be better than we’ve got up until now.”
We came upon a green that was as startling as it was artificial. The Rolling Hills Golf City, which was not a city at all but a community built around eighteen holes, kept watered despite the drought. The gates swung open at the sight of the police cruiser, and we slipped into quiet streets lined with ranch-style houses. The only traffic was a golf buggy.
The homes were arranged along gentle curves, each private from the other, and each with a view of that startling green fairway. Sprinklers threw diamond arcs into the sunlight, and unlike Brighton Avenue no one needed to park on the street because every house had at least three garages.
I couldn’t see how a child could go missing amidst all this perfection.
“It happened ten days ago,” explained Molly. “The Franklin girl—”
“Don’t tell me her name,” I said. “I don’t want to know her name.”
This trip was freaking me out enough as it was without having to think of a real child. A little girl who practised dance moves with her friends.
“Okay,” said Molly, treading carefully. “But there’re details that you’re going to find upsetting. Is that alright?”
“Yeah, it’s fine. I just don’t want to know her name.”
“Sure. The… Franklin girl… was asleep when it happened. She was taken from her bed.”
“Taken?”
“I know that sounds unlikely. But in Rolling Hills the security is all at the front. It’s for show. Out back, there’s nothing but a chain-link fence and then the dunes. The house backs right onto it, so we reckon that she had been watched for some time before the abduction.”
“You found tracks?”
“The dogs followed something into the sand, but lost it.”
“And I’m supposed to do better?”
Chapter 5
The girl’s father had the look of a man who had not been sleeping; the stubble on his chin was grey in contrast to his dyed black hair. As rumpled as he was, the house was perfect. If a child lived here, she was the tidiest girl in history.
He didn’t look at me with disbelief. I would have expected that, because a police sergeant calling in the help of a seventeen-year-old girl was similar to drafting in a water douser. If he had dismissed me that would have been preferable to what happened. The father looked at me with hope. His lambent eyes followed me, and when he smiled it was like a dog begging for a bone.
“Shall we go upstairs?” Molly asked.
I nodded mutely. Anything to get away from the father.
The bedro
om, of course, was pink. Ponies trotted across the wall, and stuffed toys were lined up against the pillows. Molly told me that they believed the kidnapper had come in through the window. I walked over, and could see how a man could climb the loggia overlooking the pool and step onto the flat roof of the triple garage. After that, it would be simple to shimmy up a pipe onto the sloping roof that led to the window.
It had been unseasonably hot just two weeks before, a late Indian summer, and the girl had kept the window open. The abductor had taken his chance and snatched her.
He would have been stealthy to avoid making a sound. And then there was the return journey. Not easy with a struggling child in his grip.
Did he drug her, I wondered, to make it easier?
*
I shucked off my Nikes and socks and planted my feet on the polished floor. I waited for something to come – an impression, a feeling – but all I saw was my own reflection in the dark wood.
“I can’t feel anything,” I said.
Molly opened the window, and I peered out, running my fingers along the ledge. A fine layer of dust clung to my skin.
“What about now?” she asked.
“Not sure.”
I pulled up a chair, climbed onto the window ledge and swung my feet onto the shingles.
“Hey!” warned Molly. “Watch yourself!”
“I’m cool,” I said, and stood up on the roof.
“Don’t go any further!”
But I didn’t listen. I stepped across the roof, leaning for balance against the slope, bare feet finding an easy grip on the rough surface.
Molly peered anxiously from the window.
“What about now?” she asked. “Can you see anything?”
My feet played along the ridgeline, but found nothing but sharp edges. I waited for something to come. Then I waited some more.
All I felt was like a stupid kid, standing without shoes on someone else’s roof.
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “There’s nothing.”
“We found some scuff marks on the shingle. He’d taken a ladder from the side of the garage.”
“I’m sure, Molly. But I can’t see anything. It’s no good, I’m not the person you think I am. I’ve got this special link to my mom, but to nobody else.”
“You can take all the time you want.”
“I don’t need any more time,” I said, angry with myself. “I’ve seen what I need to, and I can’t help.”
I swung myself back through the window, humiliated by my failure. Molly watched as I sat on the edge of the bed and loosened the laces in my trainers. And then it came to me, with one foot on the ground and one foot about to slip into a sock.
A feeling.
It wasn’t a physical trail, because the room had been thoroughly cleaned, and a laundered counterpane was pulled drum-tight across a bed that had never been slept in.
But I could feel – sleepiness and confusion.
Molly was speaking to me, but I didn’t hear what she was saying. Instead, I found myself engulfed by the experience of a little girl who had been led from the room.
“She didn’t leave by the window,” I said, throwing the sock to one side.
“Sorry?”
Molly was suddenly alert. She had been speaking sympathetically, suggesting that we go home and maybe try again another day. Now the breath caught in her throat.
“She left by the door,” I said, leaping to my feet.
It would have been easier to follow the trail ten days ago. There might still have been physical evidence of the girl’s passing – a trainer kicked to one side, the pile of a rug trodden in just such a way, the rumple of the bedclothes. With none of that to help me, I had to follow the emotion.
It was a weak trail because, contrary to what I expected, the girl was not frightened. Of that, there was only one explanation -
“She knew who took her,” I told Molly.
We stepped into the corridor and onto the open-tread stairs.
“She didn’t like these stairs,” I reported. Molly hung back, not wanting to disturb my flow. “She was scared of falling through.”
My feet slid over polished oak.
The girl had taken the steps one at a time, careful to hold onto the rail. Whoever was with her had lost patience and scooped her into the air. But the girl wasn’t scared. Instead – she yelped with joy.
That was fun!
The father was standing in the middle of the open-plan living space, watching as I floated down the stairs. I was reliving his daughter’s final moments in the house. The father wanted to know more, but Molly hurried down the stairs to hold him back. I was only dimly aware of the sergeant whispering to him as I followed the trail to the front door.
The Franklin girl left the house this way, not over the roof. She was warm, and felt no apprehension. She was so comfortable that she did what any child would do.
She fell asleep.
I opened the front door and stepped onto the manicured path. The girl’s trail evaporated into the air. She had fallen asleep, all feeling gone.
I panicked. I did not want to lose what progress I had already made, so I dug deeper, searching for the person that held her.
I had perfected a technique of looking for those signs when I was seven years old. Eileen had left me to try on a new pair of trainers in Foot Locker, and sailed out, all memory of her daughter having vanished. By the time I scrambled back into my battered Nikes, she was gone.
So I tracked her.
It wasn’t so hard, because Eileen had left a disturbance in her wake. I found that I could see a reflection of her passing in the faces of those around me. They had just seen a distracted woman dressed in harlequin colours. A couple of teens were laughing about it.
I found her on the lower level. Eileen was in Stride-Rite, asking after a size 13 in the same Air Pegasus I had been looking at in Foot Locker.
“There you are, Scout!” she said, in an exasperated tone as if it were me who had wandered off and not her.
From then on, I learned to tag after her.
But outside that house in Rolling Hills there was nothing to follow. The area had been trampled flat by an army of cops and CSI. Compared to that, following Mom in a shopping mall was a cinch.
Someone had stood on the threshold, a gently snoring child on their shoulder. I could sense only the shadow of a feeling. An outline trace, but no emotion. There was not excitement, or fear. Only the cold purpose of someone who had planned this action for some time.
Clinging to this thinnest of traces, I found myself on the rear terrace, staring at a flight of steps leading to a locked door beneath the house.
“What’s in here?” I asked.
“It’s the fallout shelter,” answered Molly.
“Sorry?”
“This whole development was built by a survivalist nut. Every house has a nuclear fallout shelter. Most people use ‘em for something else. We searched this one, but you want to go in?”
*
The father unlocked the door. A boiler had been fitted in the far corner, and a flame growled behind a small glass window. Every other inch of the room was crowded with golfing gear. Golf bags and sets of irons; netting to catch the balls; and a life-size cut-out of the father sporting a hideous golf sweater.
“I was a golf pro,” the father explained. “Now I’m a coach. One-to-one tuition, that sort of thing. That’s why we moved to Rolling Hills. Some goddamn great idea that was.”
I didn’t say anything. He wasn’t of interest to me. His words were like white noise, getting in the way of what I was trying to grasp.
But the girl’s trail slipped out of my fingers.
I cursed. Foully.
“Scout?” asked Molly. “You okay?”
“I thought I had it.”
/> “In here?” she asked. “We searched in here.”
“It wasn’t a trail. It was more of a hint. The shadow of a rumour. Now it’s gone.”
The father was hanging on my every word, mouth-breathing, his body rigid with expectation. Those damn puppy eyes searched my face.
“I’m sorry, Mr Franklin,” I said. “I can’t help you.”
*
When we returned to the front of the house, it was Molly’s turn to curse. A Chevy Suburban was pulling up, the name of a local cable TV station stencilled on its wing. While the father had called on Molly for extra help, the mother had been appearing on an afternoon chat show, talking about her missing daughter.
“Scout,” hissed Molly, “get in the cruiser.”
A woman, power-dressed like a realtor, tore out of the SUV and intercepted us on the lawn. I ran for the car. From inside, I could hear the woman’s strident voice.
“What’s going on, Sergeant?” she demanded. “Have you found a lead?”
“Just a house call, Mrs Franklin, to see how you are all getting on.”
A cameraman was hefting equipment from the tailgate of the Suburban.
“And who’s that girl?” Mrs Franklin asked, nodding dismissively at me. “She just come along to gawp?”
“No, nothing like that.”
Mrs Franklin called over to her husband.
“Eric, you know about this?”
“It was just a courtesy call,” he replied. “They’ve got no news.”
He looked terrified. And then it came to me – the father knew. He suspected his wife. That was why he arranged for Molly and me to visit when Mrs Franklin was at WXRK-TV.
The cameraman had the Sony on his shoulder, and a female reporter strode towards us, a microphone in her hand. Just as the cameraman swung his lens towards me, I slunk in my seat.
“Are there any developments, Officer?” asked the reporter, sticking her microphone under Molly’s chin.
I tried to hide out of view of the camera, but the mother was staring at me through the windshield.
SCOUT Page 3