“So what are you going to do with her?” Ginny asked.
I shrugged.
“Beats the heck out of me,” I said.
Ginny, Shadow, and I were in the living room of Ginny’s townhouse in Astor City. It was the day after we had rescued Clara. We had left Clara upstairs in Ginny’s bed. She was still unconscious. Before we had brought her to Ginny’s the night before, we had taken her to a discreet doctor I knew who owed me a favor and could keep his mouth shut. The doctor had checked Clara out. He said she had been pumped full of a powerful sedative, but that she would eventually wake up on her own without any ill effects. He also said that though Clara was slightly malnourished and in need of some solid food, she was otherwise healthy.
I had taken Clara to that doctor because I had not wanted to take Clara to the hospital. If I had, they would want to know how I was related to Clara. When they found out I was not her father, they would want to contact her parents and probably the police. I did not want either the Bartons or the police to know I had Clara. As I had told Shadow days before, I was concerned about the cops holding Clara responsible for the subway explosion in D.C. And, though Clara’s mother was my client, if I told her I had Clara, she might tell her husband. As I had just said to Ginny, he was the one who had handed Clara over to the MLF. Given half a chance, he might do so again. The MLF no doubt wanted Clara back as she featured prominently in their future terrorist plans.
Before taking Clara to Ginny’s, I had asked Shadow if we could go to her place instead.
“No one knows where I live,” she said. “And I’m going to keep it that way. I’m a mercenary. I’ve made a ton of enemies over the years, all of whom would be delighted to know where I live so they can put a slug into my brain one fine evening.” Shadow had shaken her head. “Three people can keep a secret only if two of them are dead. Clara and you would make that magical three. So, if I told you where I live, I’d have to kill you.” I thought she had been kidding, but one could never be too sure with Shadow.
I did not want to take Clara to my office or my condo as the MLF would surely look for her there. So instead, Shadow, Clara and I had spent the night at Ginny’s.
Before the two of them met, I was a little leery of how Shadow and Ginny would hit it off. Shadow was a beautiful woman after all. Though there was of course nothing romantic going on between me and Shadow, Ginny did not know that. I wondered if the green-eyed monster would rear its ugly head in Ginny’s eyes when she met Shadow. I need not have worried, though. The two women hit it off immediately, and were instantly as thick as thieves. While I ate and listened, they had had a long conversation about the constitutionality of the Hero Act of 1945 using a bunch of legal terms I barely understood. I would have thought Shadow would not have understood them either if I had not witnessed her bandying them about like she was a constitutional law professor. I was rapidly coming to realize there were even more sides to Shadow than met the eye.
The two women also had had a long conversation about modern fashion. They used a bunch of terms talking about it I did not understand at all. I had been on firmer ground when they had been exploring the intricacies of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.
The fact Shadow liked Ginny was affirmation that my own affection for Ginny was not misplaced. Shadow did not like very many people. I was not entirely convinced she liked me.
Having Clara at Ginny’s place was a short-term solution to a long-term problem, though. I had no right to impose on Ginny long-term. Plus, I did not want to put her in danger by keeping Clara there a second longer than I needed to.
“Does Clara have some extended family who can take her in?” Ginny asked after I said I could not take her back to her parents.
“Not that I know of,” I said. “I suppose I could ask the guidance counselor at her school if she has some relatives.” I thought about that for a moment. Then I shook my head. “Taking Clara to relatives won’t work, either. There’s no guarantee they wouldn’t turn right around and hand Clara over to her parents. Or worse, the cops. Plus, what if the MLF gets wind of where she is? They will take her back for sure.”
The expression on Shadow’s face caught my eye. Her normally placid face looked torn, as if she was wrestling with a decision.
“I know where we can take Clara,” Shadow finally said. “I’m still not willing to reveal where I live in the city, but I have a place down in Virginia out in the woods. I vacation there from time to time. I generate electric power there through solar and wind, and there is not a land telephone line. I own the property through a dummy corporation. The place is completely off the grid. We can take Clara there and hide her from the MLF until we come up with a better idea.”
I was surprised. “You sure you trust us to know the location of your vacation house?” I asked.
“I’ll burn the place to the ground and start over somewhere fresh once you leave,” Shadow said. As usual, I could not tell whether or not she was kidding. “Besides, as you pointed out, where else can we take her?”
“You two can’t just take Clara out of state and keep her for God knows how long,” Ginny insisted. “If I were her mother, I would be losing my mind with worry. I know what you said about her father, but you have to take her back to her parents. At the very least you have to tell her mother you have Clara.”
“I’m not going back there,” a voice behind me said.
I twisted in my seat to see Clara standing in the middle of the stairs. She was clutching the railing with both of her bony hands. Our backs had all been to the stairs. Since I was apparently incapable of sensing her with my powers, who knew how long she had been standing there listening to us?
“I’m not going back to my parents,” Clara said again firmly. Her pale face was both stubborn and fierce. “If you take me back there, I’ll kill Dad for what he did to me. I hate him.” Her eyes were wet. Tears started to drip down her face. “I’ve already killed a bunch of people because of him. What’s one more?”
“But honey, they’re your parents,” Ginny said.
Clara’s thin face grew even more determined.
“I’m not going back there,” she insisted again.
I looked over at Shadow. She shrugged.
“Out of the mouths of babes,” she said.
CHAPTER 23
The next day Shadow, Clara, and I piled into my car and headed towards Rockbridge County, Virginia. The county was a little over four hours away from Astor City. Although I had never been to Rockbridge County before, I knew Lexington was its county seat. I only knew that because Lexington was home to both the Virginia Military Institute and Washington and Lee University. Stonewall Jackson had once taught at VMI, and George Patton had been a student there before he transferred to and later graduated from West Point. General Robert E. Lee was the president of Washington and Lee University after the Civil War. If that part of Virginia had been good enough for those luminaries, I guessed it would be good enough for me.
Maybe I would pick up some moonshine and boiled peanuts as well as reacquire my childhood Southern accent while I was down there. I had offered to bring Ginny back the Southern delicacy known as chitterlings when I returned from my stay in Virginia. She declined when I explained they were pig intestines. I was surprised. I had come to think of Ginny as an adventurous eater. She had me in her mouth often enough.
The day before Clara, Shadow and I hit the road for Virginia, I had explained to Clara how she had come to be with us. I told her that her mother had hired me to locate her and what Shadow and I had gone through to locate and rescue her. I told her everything: my confrontation with her father, Shadow and I torturing Hacker, Shadow and I invading the MLF headquarters, me shooting Blaster, the whole nine yards. They were things a normal thirteen-year-old girl probably should not hear about. Clara was not a normal girl, though. She was a Metahuman with a powerful ability who needed to understand the stakes involved. I wanted to impress upon her what we had done to rescue her, and the things the
MLF would no doubt do to get her back.
It was not merely that, though. I told Clara everything because I thought she could handle it. Her school guidance counselor had told me Clara was no dummy, and my initial interactions with her confirmed it. She was a tough girl who had been through a lot, and I thought she deserved the straight scoop on what had happened thus far instead a sanitized, fairy tale version of it all.
Clara had already refused to return to her parents. When I laid out to her what our limited options were, she had agreed to let me and Shadow take her to Shadow’s vacation home in Virginia. I had emphasized to Clara we would not take her anywhere unless she consented to it. We were not the Pied Piper and the MLF.
I drove. Clara sat in the passenger seat. Shadow was in the back. Periodically I would glance at Shadow in the rear-view mirror. I would always see her looking straight ahead with that thousand-yard stare she had, looking at nothing and everything at the same time. I wondered what she spent the ride thinking about. Perhaps she was thinking back on the discussion she and Ginny had about the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment and the ramifications it had on the Hero Act. Or, perhaps she was reviewing the most efficient way to disembowel a man with a butter knife. God only—and Shadow—knew.
“Having the Pied Piper control you is kind of like this,” Clara said at one point on the drive south.
“Kind of like what?” I asked.
“Being a passenger in a car,” she said. “You can see and hear everything going on, but the Piper Piper is behind the wheel driving. As much as you want to, you can’t stop him from taking you where he wants to go. You can’t stop him from doing what he wants to do.”
Clara fell quiet. After a while, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her wipe her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt. I knew she was thinking about the Dupont Circle explosion.
“The things he made you do, they weren’t your fault Clara,” I said softly.
“I know they weren’t,” she said. She sniffled a bit. She was crying and trying to hide it. “But that doesn’t change the fact a bunch of people were killed and hurt because of me.”
I wanted to argue with her, but I could not. Nothing I could say would make her feel better. Clara had learned being a Meta was not the idealized fantasy of putting on a colorful costume and mask and going out to beat up bad guys while the public cheered. Being a Meta was like being a normal person, just on a larger scale: messy, confusing, sometimes wonderful, sometimes scary, often dangerous, and always unpredictable. All Metas who used their powers learned that lesson eventually. Clara had learned the lesson sooner than most.
I changed the subject slightly.
“How exactly does the Piped Piper take control of someone?” I asked. “Does he have to be close to you, can he do it from a distance, how long does his control last, that sort of thing? I hate to dredge up bad memories, but the information might be useful one day.”
“It’s okay,” Clara said. “I don’t mind talking about it. Anything to help keep him from doing what he did to me to someone else.” Clara let out a long breath before starting.
“The Pied Piper can sense children in his vicinity and his power gives him a vague idea of where they are. To take control of you, the Piper Piper has to get close to you and look you in the eyes. Once he does that, he has total control of you and can control you remotely since once he takes control, he can see what you see, hear what you hear, and smell what you smell.”
“What’s the range of his powers?” I asked.
Clara shook her head.
“I don’t know, exactly. He can control you from pretty far away. He was blocks away when he made me explode in Dupont Circle. But, there are limits. A mile? Maybe two? I’m not sure of the distance. I do know, though, his control fades after a while. He has no control over me now, for example.”
“Thank God for that. I recently got the car detailed. I’d hate to see it blow up. Me too, for that matter,” I said. Clara smiled for the first time since I had met her. It was quick, and made her look her age. Then it faded, and she was back to looking older than she was.
“He would have to get close to me and look me in the eyes to take control of me again,” she said.
“Shadow and I will do our best to make sure that doesn’t happen,” I said.
“Thank God for that,” Clara said. Then her smile flashed again. I liked her smile. I hoped to see more of it. She was only thirteen and she should have been smiling early and often to thoughts of friends, boys, and whatever the heck else thirteen-year-old girls thought about. But unfortunately, Clara face’s tended to be the serious face of a girl who had seen and done too much. Oh well. You had to play the cards you were dealt, even if the deal was a shitty one.
Eventually, once we were well into Virginia and in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Shadow had me turn off of Interstate 81 and onto US 11. From there she directed me onto a secondary road, and then onto a series of dirt roads that snaked their way through woods. It was not long before I was so turned around I would have had a tough time finding my way back to the interstate on my own. I almost asked Shadow if she was taking me somewhere to kill me. I did not ask, though. I was afraid of what the answer might be.
“Shadow, you’re going to have to buy me some new shocks,” I said after we jolted over yet another tree root half buried in the dirt road. “My poor car was not designed for traipsing through the wilderness. It’s a city slicker. It’s not nearly as tough as I am.”
“We’re almost there,” Shadow assured me.
And then, suddenly, we were there. At Shadow’s direction, I turned right, and parked next to a large sports utility vehicle which was protected with a car cover. We got out of the car. We were on top of a small hill. Directly ahead of us were steps carved into the hillside and buttressed with thick pieces of wood. The steps led to a sprawling wood, glass and brick cabin which looked like it had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built by Donald Trump. Further down the hill from the cabin was a large stream, the moving surface of which gleamed and glinted in the pre-twilight sun. Beyond the stream swelled hills and gently sloping mountains. The land between the cabin and the stream had been cleared, and I had no doubt the view from the cabin was spectacular. The whole scene was like something out of a postcard.
“This is the vacation house you told us about?” I asked Shadow incredulously. “When you said you had a cabin in the woods, I was envisioning a one room log cabin with a dirty floor. This place is fantastic.”
“Thanks,” Shadow said. She looked pleased. “I designed and built it myself. I even cleared the property on my own.”
“You did?” I said.
I took another look around. Wow! I looked at Clara. Her eyes were wide with wonder. I looked back at Shadow.
“Remember when I asked if you wanted to be my sidekick?” I asked her.
Shadow nodded.
“How would you feel about taking me and Clara on as sidekicks instead?”
CHAPTER 24
It was late afternoon by the time we arrived at Shadow’s cabin, and both Clara and I were tired. Perhaps Shadow was too, but if she was, she would never have admitted it. Shadow and I got our bags out of the car. Clara had nothing but the clothes on her back we had washed at Ginny’s and a jacket I had lent her that fit her like a cloak. Clara’s clothing situation was something we would have to remedy.
The interior of the cabin was as impressive as the exterior. In addition to the typical rooms found in a home, there was a library, a glass enclosed sunroom overlooking the stream down the hill, and a hidden weapons room that was a militia’s wet dream come true. Like a kid showing off her toys, Shadow showed me the things she had squirreled away in there, which included more of the technology like the bug she had planted on Bonebreaker. Bonebreaker must have found and destroyed that bug as we had lost the signal to it the day we rescued Clara.
Shadow made us a dinner composed mainly of canned foods as there was no fresh food in the house. She had a lo
cal man come by periodically when she was not there to maintain the place, but it was not part of his job to keep fresh food on the premises as Shadow never knew when she might be using the cabin. She promised to go grocery shopping the next day.
There were two bedrooms in the place. Shadow took one, Clara the other. I was to sleep on the couch in the living room, which was right outside of Clara’s room. After sitting on the couch for the first time, I did not mind the sleeping arrangements. The couch felt like it had been made out of angels’ wings. It was far softer and more comfortable than my bed at home. As I luxuriated on it, I thought I would be tempted to strap it to the roof of my car and take it home with me when I returned to Astor City.
After Shadow and Clara went to their rooms, I stripped off my clothes and put on shorts and a tee shirt. Before I turned in for the night, I put a small loaded pistol with the safety on under my pillow. I put a larger caliber handgun on the coffee table in front of the couch, also with the safety on. I normally did not engage the safeties on my guns, but I normally was not around children. If the MLF or a bear found us, I was prepared. Readiness was all. I was tempted to also strap a machete to my thigh, but that seemed like overkill.
I stared up at the vaulted ceiling of the cabin for a long time, unable to sleep. Though I had grown up in the country, I had spent my entire adult life in cities. I was used to being lulled to sleep by the sounds and pulses of city life. Astor City never completely slept. The cabin, on the other hand, was quiet. Too quiet. It was still winter, and even the insects and animals in the surrounding woods were mostly quiet. The silence was deafening.
After a while, the silence was broken by a recurring sound coming from the direction of Clara’s room. The sound was faint. Had the silence not been so total and absolute, I probably would not have heard it.
I reached for the gun on the coffee table. I disengaged the safety. I got to my feet, and padded over to Clara’s door. I sensed no one on the other side. Nonetheless, I put my hand on the knob of the closed door and opened it quietly.
Superhero Detective Series (Book 2): The Missing Exploding Girl Page 15