by David Walton
He looked away, uncomfortable. What kind of woman did an exercise routine when her husband was dead? Was she trying to keep her figure for the next millionaire she seduced? He couldn’t look at her without thinking of her sharing his father’s bed. This had been a bad idea. He should have stayed in a hotel.
“Look,” she said. “This is your house now. I know your father meant to leave it to you. I have friends in the city, so I’m just going to stay with them for a few days, until this is all worked out. I’ve been packing up my things in boxes upstairs. I’ll have it all moved next week.”
“You don’t need to do that,” Brandon heard himself say. “There’s plenty of room here. You don’t have to leave.”
She put a hand against his face. “You’re sweet. But I think both of us will be more comfortable if I go.” She paused. “I heard about your girlfriend. I’m so sorry. Both of them, within a few days—I can’t imagine.”
He pulled away. He didn’t want her to talk about Abby. He certainly didn’t want her sympathy. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe it would be better for you to go.”
She sighed. “Let me just take a shower, and then I’ll be on my way. I’ll walk down to the train, and you’ll be rid of me.”
He winced. Maybe he’d been too harsh. “I’ll drive you to the station,” he said.
“I can walk it. It’s only a mile away.”
“I’ll drive you,” he said. “It’s the least I can do.”
While she showered, he wandered the house. Jillian hadn’t made much of a mark on the decorative style of the place. It looked much as it had when he’d lived there: the same oil paintings on the wall, the same glass figurines, the same grand piano that no one in the house knew how to play. Maybe Jillian could; he didn’t know. Though he doubted she was the musical type.
She came out dressed in white pants and a sea green top. He had to admit she looked stunning. Her beauty, though, just made him all the more angry. Why did a woman like this, who used her looks to manipulate an old man out of his money, get to live on, while an angel like Abby died young? Nothing made sense. He felt his muscles clenching again and only relaxed them with an effort. “Ready?” he said.
She had one small suitcase, which he took from her and loaded into the trunk of the Prius. The drive to the train station took only a few minutes. He parked, retrieved her suitcase from the trunk, and carried it up to the platform for her.
The platform was under construction, much of it cordoned off by striped yellow tape. Blue plywood panels blocked the skeleton of a new walkway and covered waiting area. A wooden framework marked a new concrete ramp that hadn’t been poured. A sign read, “Station still in operation. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
It was mid-afternoon on a Friday, and no one else was on the platform. With the waiting area under construction, nothing blocked the brightness of the sun. The black half-sphere of a station camera hung limply from the half-finished roof, its wires trailing free. No one was watching them. Brandon set the case down.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll see you later.” He wished he would never see her again, but he knew she would be at the funeral on Saturday and at the reading of the will on Monday.
She took a breath, like she was facing up to do something hard. “Look,” she said. “I ought to warn you.” He turned back, wary. “Your dad told me about his plans. I know what’s in the will.”
That didn’t sound good. He felt a flush of heat in his neck. “What are you saying?”
“Your father wanted you to have his money, but . . . not yet.”
“Not yet?”
“He’s giving it to me, to use on your behalf, until you turn thirty.”
Brandon couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “He gave it to you? All of it?”
“Just until you’re thirty. He said he wanted you to have some maturity before . . . he didn’t want you throwing his money away on . . .” Her expression changed, and she took a step back. Brandon realized he was looming over her.
He didn’t care. A deep fire of rage erupted into his chest. He stepped forward, closing the gap again. “On what?”
The train was coming. He could feel it vibrating through the taut muscles of his shoulders. She looked suddenly nervous. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
He moved closer, driving her back against the rail. He was shouting now. “Tell me!”
“It wasn’t right. He shouldn’t have said it.”
He grabbed her shoulders roughly, the sea green material of her shirt crumpling in his hands. “Throwing his money away on what?”
The silver and blue LIRR train shrieked as it moved toward them. He could hardly hear her over the din. “On your tramp of a girlfriend!”
If there had been some object nearby to kick or punch or break, maybe he wouldn’t have done it. He hadn’t planned it. But there was no room for thought in the blazing inferno of anger that consumed his mind. “It was him!” she said. “I didn’t say it—it was him!” But Brandon wasn’t listening. With a roar, Brandon pushed, lifted, hurled her over the rail and directly into the path of the oncoming train.
It took only a second. She didn’t even scream before the hurtling metal vehicle thundered past, taking her with it.
Brandon stared, hardly breathing, astonished at what he had just done. Had anyone seen? The platform was still empty. The inert camera still hung from the roof, its wires disconnected. The train was screeching to a halt, however, and there must be passengers on board. Had they seen him push her? Could they identify him?
He raced for the stairs, in a daze, his heart hammering in his chest, and almost tripped over her suitcase. He had carried that. His fingerprints would be on it. He snatched it up and took it with him, down the stairs two at a time, to the Prius. He hurled it into the passenger seat and climbed in after it, starting the engine.
He backed up without looking and then floored the accelerator, racing out of the parking lot and toward the highway. He turned west, toward the city, and pushed the speedometer up to eighty. His hands were shaking, and he felt lightheaded.
No one knew he had been there. He had told no one of his plans to come to Long Island. He hadn’t stopped for gas or used his credit card, not since the New Jersey Turnpike. Tyler knew he was heading home, but that could just as easily have been to his father’s other house in Manhattan.
Thinking fast, Brandon dialed an old high school friend who was now performing in shows on Broadway. “Hey, Christine,” he said. “I just got in to my dad’s place and wanted to catch one of your shows tonight. Can you get me in the door?”
She responded pleasantly, saying nothing about his father, meaning she probably hadn’t heard the news of his death. She told him yes, she could get him a seat, and it would be great if he could stay for drinks afterward. As alibis went, it was pretty flimsy, but he hoped it would at least establish an intention to stay in Manhattan rather than East Hampton. Not that it would do much good. He was an obvious suspect.
Would someone be willing to lie for him? Give him a fake alibi? No, too dangerous. The best he could do was get to the house and spend the evening seeing people. There would be a several-hour time gap between stopping for gas in New Jersey and entering Manhattan, but he would just say he had stopped for a meal and paid with cash. He took the long way, driving clear around to the other side of Manhattan so he could enter through the Lincoln Tunnel, as he should have done if that had been his destination in the first place, and finally reached his father’s house.
The final problem was getting rid of the suitcase. He found some bleach under the sink and a pair of leather gloves in his father’s coat pocket, and scrubbed the handle and the plastic rim to get rid of any fingerprints. He slid the paper tag identifying Jillian out of the tag holder and ran water over it until it turned to sludge. Unzipping the case, he looked for anything that could easily identify her—anything with a name or phone number— and found nothing. He closed it and wheeled it outside.
/> As he walked to the subway, he felt conspicuous, as if all the eyes of the neighborhood were on him. No one knew him here, though, and there was no sight more ordinary than a man walking to a station with a suitcase. He took the subway to Grand Central Station, left the case in a bathroom stall, and walked out. When it was discovered, it would join the hundreds of lost cases that were found there all the time. Without any way to contact the owner, it would sit in storage indefinitely. It would certainly never be connected to the death of a woman in East Hampton.
He took the subway to the Forty-Ninth Street station in time to walk to his friend’s theater and catch the show. He barely noticed what it was about. All he could think of was walking out to find the police waiting for him. But when he finally did leave with Christine and some of her friends, there was no one.
He saw the news story the next morning: “Woman Jumps to Her Death on LIRR Track.” The article went on to say that this was the third such suicide in as many months. There was no mention of a police investigation or suspected homicide.
Brandon drove back to Long Island the next day as planned for his father’s funeral. His mind reviewed the events of the previous afternoon constantly, trying to think of what evidence he might have left behind. He could have left a fingerprint or DNA evidence on her body, of course, but there was nothing he could do about that. He would just have to hope no evidence had survived.
The funeral was mercifully short. Brandon realized Jillian must have arranged the details. He felt suddenly annoyed that she had done so without consulting him, though of course he wouldn’t have wanted to be involved. After the service, the procession of vehicles with funeral flags followed the hearse to the cemetery, where his father’s body was interred.
When it was all finally over and he turned to go, he saw two men waiting for him. His heart started to race. This was it. He had missed something. They knew.
“Mr. Kincannon?” one of them said. He flashed a badge. “Sir, we just have a few questions.”
It was all Brandon could do not to blurt out a confession. Somehow, a voice that didn’t sound like his said, “What can I do for you?”
They were very polite. They asked how well he had known Jillian, and where he had been the day before. He answered as calmly as he could, and to his amazement, they seemed to accept his story. They were even apologetic. Each of them shook his hand in turn. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Kincannon.”
Mr. Kincannon. Of course. He was Mr. Kincannon now. Lord of the Kincannon fortune with all that it entailed. No wonder they were so polite.
He wasn’t going down for this. They would accept the suicide story and not look too closely. He had grown up with money, but he’d never really owned it, never really knew what it could do. He was untouchable. Brandon smiled. He could do anything now.
CHAPTER 11
Naomi went home to her parents’ house with no plans to return to school. She had no plans at all, except to hide away and be alone with her grief. The day of commencement came and went. A few weeks later, a diploma came in the mail, along with a letter from her advisor, saying that at his urging, the requirement for a senior project had been waived. She had been awarded her degree. She didn’t care.
The days and weeks passed interminably. Her home didn’t turn out to be the sanctuary she’d hoped for. She felt trapped there, smothered in her parents’ sadness and well-meaning compassion. They were suffering too, but in a different way. They had lost a child, a future, grandchildren that would never be. Naomi had lost the only person with whom she had ever felt fully comfortable. Her parents grieved with noise and tears and loud arguments. Naomi grieved in silence.
She didn’t want to console her parents, and she didn’t want
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to be consoled by them, either. When they were around, she found herself constantly evaluating what she should do and say. If she didn’t show grief, she felt cold and unfeeling. If she did try to show what she felt, it seemed fake, a façade she was putting on purely for display. She felt watched, and she hated to be watched. Every day was the same. She felt like time had stopped inside the little bubble that was her life. She stood motionless, trapped in a darkness that never changed while the rest of the world passed by in motion and color.
The tragedy drove her mother to religion. She started going to church, to Bible studies, to prayer meetings, and begged Naomi to come with her. The first time, Naomi went along, just to make her mother happy. It caused such a bitter argument with her father when they came home, however, that she never went again.
Her dad was angry at God, or perhaps more accurately, angry at anyone who could believe that God was good. He hated that her mom had turned to faith, and didn’t want her pressuring Naomi to go. More and more, Naomi found herself between them, trying to mediate, or else just hiding away in her room while they fought. They needed help, but she didn’t think it was the kind of help she could provide. She was too close to them. She was the daughter whose experimental tech had killed their other daughter. It made her too much of an emotional flashpoint to defuse anything.
She needed to be alone or, failing that, lost in a crowd of strangers. She loved her parents, and didn’t want them to lose her as well, but eventually, she had to leave. In the final months of school, she had received dozens of recruiting offers from software companies around the world. Without really thinking about it, she interviewed and then accepted a job at a big data analytics firm in downtown Manhattan.
She rented a one-room apartment barely larger than a closet, which felt like the perfect size. She walked streets teeming with strangers, safe in anonymity, as alone as if she were the only person alive. She threw herself into the work, sixty or seventy hours a week, excelling at the job, although the code was tedious and uninspiring. She didn’t want to be inspired. She just wanted to hide.
Although she spoke to her coworkers, she never offered any personal information, never asked about their families, never joined them after work for a drink. She developed a reputation for being talented but cold. She didn’t care. It made no difference to her what they thought.
She ate poorly, sometimes skipping breakfast and lunch altogether, and grabbing dinner most nights at a tiny Indian hole-inthe-wall near her workplace. She hated having to feed and take care of her body. In high school, she’d read a novel by Nancy Kress called Beggars in Spain, in which children were genetically designed not to need sleep. Ever since she’d read it, Naomi had resented the hours she had to waste in bed. Why did she have to turn off her mind—her self—for hours of every day just so her body could sleep? Bodies were weak and fragile. They required food and rest and could be so easily harmed. Even when they were kept safe, they eventually grew old and died. They were prisons for the mind that came with a sentence of death.
But her body wasn’t her. She felt that now more strongly than ever. She, Naomi, was something intangible, something that transcended flesh and bone. Science fiction had taught her that. With the right technology, a mind might be uploaded into a computer, allowing a person to live on without a body. Whether or not such technologies would ever be invented, it was the idea that mattered. The idea that if she were uploaded to a computer, or transplanted into a robot, or swapped into someone else’s body, the result would still be her.
She wondered about the faith her mother had found. The idea that the human mind was like software running on a machine, and thus able to be copied or transferred, far predated the invention of the computer. Christians, after all, believed the same thing, didn’t they? That a person was more than just the body they had lived in. That there was something more central, and longer lasting, than just this package of meat.
She danced around the word soul, since it felt a little too cosmic, but she supposed that was what she meant. She found it hard to accept that the laughter, the love, the beauty, the kindness, the unique thinking mind and heart that was Abby could be so easily snuffed out. If it were true, then life was a trap, a precious goblet in free
fall with no hope other than to smash on the pavement below. She was more than just a collection of muscles and blood vessels and nerves, and Abby had been, too.
In the evenings, consumed by these thoughts, she wandered along Broadway, through Times Square, losing herself in the crowds and sounds and brightly lit signs. Only when she was too tired to walk another step did she take the subway back to her apartment and fall into her bed to sleep until morning.
Her weekends she spent at the public library, patting the lions on her way through the doors, then losing herself in classic science fiction until the work week began again. She read Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love and Robert Sawyer’s Mind-scan and David Brin’s Kiln People and Robert Silverberg’s To Live Again. She contemplated immortality and personality and consciousness. But even reading wasn’t the escape it had always been before. She would read some passage or idea that caught her imagination, and she would think: I have to tell Tyler about this one. Then she would remember that Tyler was no longer around, and remember why he was no longer around, and her thoughts would spiral back into sadness.
She really had liked him, but she knew she could never see him again. It was like wearing a necklace after a bad sunburn. It didn’t matter how much you liked the necklace; it just hurt too much to keep it on. She would never be able to look at him again without thinking of Abby lying bleeding and broken in the dirt. Of course, a sunburn eventually healed. She didn’t think this pain ever would.
She continued on like that, day after day, week after week, dulling grief in monotony and busyness, until one day, she received an email from the network administrators at Penn with the subject “Account Expiration Notice”:
Dear Student:
As you are no longer enrolled or employed at the University of Pennsylvania, your computing accounts with the University of Pennsylvania are due to expire in thirty (30) days. If you plan to re-enroll during the coming year, contact our department to extend your time limit. Otherwise, please make every effort, as soon as is convenient, to migrate all personal email or data files to another system.