She had decided on moving the instant that the gray man disappeared. Though he seemed to have a strange attachment to - and hatred of - her son, what if he was more geographically bound than that? What if he was some kind of poltergheist? What if the strange man who had attacked them was bound to the apartment they lived in as much as to the boy she loved?
As soon as she had been reasonably certain that the man was not going to reappear in the elevator where he had left her and Kevin, she had rushed into the apartment to pack some of her and Kevin's things. She had thrown some clothes, their laptops, and a few other articles into some suitcases, then hustled them out of there as fast as she could. She was not going to be able to stay in a hotel forever, she knew, but she was darned if she was going to stay in that apartment for long after what they had just experienced. So she gave notice that she would be moving, and immediately began looking for somewhere else to move.
With her particular job, she could really move anywhere in the country, since mostly she worked at home and only rarely did a client insist on any kind of face-to-face interaction. Most of her work with her clients was done via the internet or over a phone and fax line, so she had her choice of places to live.
That first night, the night they stayed in the hotel - a small Marriott Inn that was only a few miles away from the apartment - she spent most of the night researching possible locations to live in, then decided on Boise, Idaho. The reason she decided on the small city in the middle of the barely-populated state was simple: it consistently rated in the top ten places to raise a family. She also logged into Autinet, a parental support group and news service for families with autistic children and, within minutes of posting questions about the place, discovered that there were several excellent autism treatment facilities and specialists in the Boise area. That clinched it. Lynette, the big city girl who had never left Los Angeles for more than a day or two in her life, was moving to Idaho.
But not to Boise. It turned out as soon as she started seriously looking into it that Boise was a place that was mostly inhabited, and had very few reasonably priced houses for sale. Meridian, on the other hand, had more than enough places to live in, and they were so inexpensive that she could afford a down payment on a house out of her savings and could even purchase one outright if she felt like dipping into the tidy insurance sum that Robbie had left for them.
She put a down payment on a two-bedroom house that she found using an online realtor, a nice-sounding man (she never met him but over the phone) named Tom who seemed to sincerely want to help her and Kevin find someplace suitable. She knew, of course, that that was his job - to sound concerned and sincere - and that he might in fact be no more interested in her than the average used car salesman. But in spite of this knowledge, she soon found herself enjoying his self-deprecating humor and folksy charm.
Tom made an offer for her on the house, and within only two weeks she had a house waiting for her in Meridian.
Packing was a shattering experience. Not only did packing mean she had to go back to the apartment where she and Kevin had been attacked and very nearly lost their lives, but Kevin resisted the idea of moving. He saw her packing items into the heavy-duty boxes she purchased at Staples, and immediately would either start screaming, or worse, would settle into a silence so stony and severe that it was as though she was living alone until he once more deigned to speak (or type) to her again.
No matter how much he complained, however, she was resolute. They were going to leave the apartment, and leave it quickly.
The drive to Meridian was the next hurdle that she feared. And she feared it for two reasons. First, she had never attempted to take Kevin on a road trip of any significant length before, let alone a fourteen hour marathon ride between L.A. and Meridian. She had no way of knowing how he was going to react, or if she was even going to be able to get him to ride with her in the moving truck. Almost as important, she had no way of knowing how she was going to get herself unpacked once she got to Meridian. Several friends had helped her move the larger items into her moving truck, but they would hardly be able to accompany her on her daylong trek through several states just so they could be there to help her unpack her armoire.
Luckily, at least one of the fears turned out to be fairly baseless: Kevin barely seemed to notice the trip. She made sure his laptop was fully charged the night before, and even purchased an AC/DC converter that would allow her to plug the computer into the lighter outlet in the truck, so Kevin would be able to stay on the computer all day long if he wished. The next morning, the morning of the move, she bribed him into the cab of the moving truck by promising him a Sausage McMuffin for breakfast and a Happy Meal for lunch and dinner if he came without pouting.
Kevin immediately - though without looking at her - came into the cab of the truck, and even went so far as to put on his seat belt without any fuss. There were a few moments on the trip that could have gone badly: moments when he had to go to the bathroom, which could have signaled the start of some very messy situations. But luckily there were rest stops close by at each occasion, and she was able to pull over and find a place for him to go to the bathroom within only a few minutes of his first complaints.
Other than that, Kevin spent the entirety of the day either typing on the computer, or watching DVDs on the portable DVD player she had purchased a few days before. He was instantly enamored of several of the Disney movies she had bought for him, though she noted that he preferred the softer, more mellow humor of such classics as The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh to the more melodramatic later Disney movies like Aladdin or The Little Mermaid. He cringed away from the DVD player whenever the villain arrived on scene, and she would have to pull over and comfort him, so she kept replaying the adventures of Pooh Bear and his other stuffed animal friends, over and over until she thought the next time she heard of a Blustery Day or a Smackerel of Honey she might have to scream.
Still, even though the trip went well, it ended up being longer than expected, due to the bathroom breaks and also just due to the fact that Kevin needed to get out and walk from time to time, as though he could not stand to be confined in the moving truck for too long without losing some important connection he had to the outside world.
That was wishful thinking, she knew: autistic children avoided connections; they didn't seek them out. Still, whenever they halted at a rest stop, Kevin was not happy until he had walked around the area, taking deep breaths as though inhaling energy from his surroundings.
The length of the trip, however, exacerbated her second problem. How was she going to get the beds or anything else unpacked if she was going to arrive at Meridian sometime around midnight? What was she going to do for sleep? She didn't know - it was never possible to predict - how Kevin would react to news that they were going to sleep in the moving truck. He might take the news as stolidly as a Spartan warrior, or he might throw a tantrum worthy of a sugar-crazed two year old.
So when she pulled up to her new home - a two bedroom house on a quarter acre - she was looking at the prospect of finishing the trip with more than a little trepidation. The sense of foreboding worsened as she realized that the street they lived off of was called Black Cat Lane. She wondered if that was an omen. Not that she believed in such things, particularly, any more than she followed the zodiac for her horoscopes. But there was no denying that she did have a bit of the superstitious about her.
Black Cat Lane, she thought, and sighed. Perfect. If a black cat runs in front of the truck, I'm turning around and going back.
No dark feline appeared, however, and so she was left without any excuse to turn back. Instead, she pulled into the driveway of the house, maneuvering the truck around so that it was facing backward, and then turned off the engine once she was in place.
She sat there for a long moment, listening to the sounds of Rabbit trying to get Pooh unwedged from the door of his burrow, then touched Kevin's shoulder gently. He didn't look at her, didn't look away from the brightly color
ed cartoon he was watching, but he did reach over with his own hand and touch her arm in response, so she knew he was listening.
"Kevin, honey," she said, "I have to get out and open up the house. You stay here, okay? You stay right here and don't move and I'll be right back."
Kevin barely moved, but she thought she saw his head go up and down the slightest fraction of an inch, which was as close as he ever got to a nod.
Lynette got out of the truck, and went to the front door of her new home, brandishing the key that Tom the realtor had sent her in the mail. She approached the door with no small sense of anxiety. She knew it was never a good idea to decide on a house without ever seeing it in person, but she also knew that she could hardly take Kevin back and forth multiple times with her to scout out a proper location and then make a purchase thereafter. So she was pleasantly surprised when she opened the front door and found a small but tidy front room, with track lights installed so that when she flicked the switch near the door the front room immediately lit up.
She turned to go back to the truck, thinking that maybe she could unpack a chair and set Kevin's computer up on the floor or a windowsill somewhere, but when she went back outside all thoughts of how she was going to unpack fled from her mind.
There was a man standing by the car, looking at Kevin through the window.
***
22.
***
Lynette felt her mouth open wide, and she was about to scream, then realized that the man standing beside the truck was just a stranger, not the gray man she had moved to escape from.
Just a stranger, she thought. My, how things have changed.
Out loud, she said, "Can I help you?"
The man started and turned, and Lynette couldn't help but flinch a bit.
The man wore a dark track suit, as though he had been out running, but was not breathing hard, not to mention that it was after midnight - a strange time to be out for a run. But stranger than his outfit was his face. He had light blue eyes, which seemed all the lighter when compared to the white, patchwork pattern of scars that crisscrossed his face. He was smiling, apparently at Kevin, but the smile disappeared when he saw her reaction to his appearance.
"Sorry," he said, and made a half-hearted attempt to hide his face behind his hands, then must have realized that he could hardly hold his hands to his face all night and dropped them to his side. "Sorry," he said again. "I have a face made for radio," he said with a sad laugh.
Lynette felt shame well up inside her, hot and uncomfortable. She felt like she had her mother shaking a finger at her again, something that she had not experienced for several decades. "Way to go, Lynny," she would have said. "I taught you never to judge a book by a cover, and here you are doing exactly that."
"No," she protested, though whether she was saying it in response to the man's statement or to the mental image of her mother's scolding she would have been hard-pressed to say. "It's just - I was surprised to see anyone out here so late."
"Me, too," he answered.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean I saw your truck and figured I'd stop and see who was new to the neighborhood," he said, and pointed to a nearby car, a small blue economy car that was parked across the street. He must have pulled up while Lynette was inside turning on the lights.
She looked at the man with a trace of suspicion, her Los Angeles training kicking in as she said, "So you just thought you'd stop off in the middle of the night to see if we were awake?"
"You must not be from around here," said the man, seeming to guess her thoughts. He held his hands up placatingly, then said, "I'm not a murderer or a kidnapper, just a nosy guy from a small town who saw your door open and your light on, spotted the moving truck, and thought I'd see if I could help with anything."
"At," she glanced at her watch, "half past one in the morning?"
He grinned at her. "You're from a big city, right?"
"Los Angeles," she admitted. "How did you know?"
"It shows in your face. You're worried about me, what I'm doing here, what my intentions are, and that just screams city girl."
She grinned in spite of herself. "Guilty on all counts."
"Well, sorry to disappoint you, but I'm looking for nothing more sinister than to see if you need any help moving in." He backed off another step, as though he were afraid of her, then said, "Again, I'm not a rapist or anything as exciting as that, so I don't want to get you riled up, but... you don't have anyone here to help you move in, do you?"
She should have said yes, she knew, should have said that her husband was inside turning on the gas or something else that would get rid of this strange man, but she didn't. Instead, she felt as though she should trust him, and, following her instincts, she said, "No, I don't."
"And I'm guessing that your son won't be much help, either."
She felt her hackles rise. Was this man insulting her boy? "What do you mean by that?" she said through clenched teeth.
Again the man raised his hands as though to show that he was not only unarmed, but completely incapable of harming a fly. "Nothing. Just he looks like he's around eight years old and, unless I miss my guess, he's very asleep right now."
Lynette glanced into the truck. Sure enough, Kevin's head was lolled backward, his eyes closed as Winnie the Pooh continued prancing across the screen of the DVD player on his lap. She looked back at the man and grimaced. "Sorry," she said. "Kevin's...special. Some people make fun of him."
The man started visibly. "Kevin?" he said. "His name's Kevin?"
Lynette felt her brow furrow. "Why?" she asked, suspicious once again.
"No reason," said the man. "I just...I knew a Kevin once."
This time Lynette did not believe him; felt as though he were lying to her. But before she could say anything about it, the man stuck out his hand and said, "I'm Scott, by the way."
Lynette looked at the hand for a long moment, then finally took it. "Lynette," she answered, and was more than a little surprised when the man didn't grab her and attempt to drag her over to his car and throw her in the backseat.
Instead, he let go of her hand after just a moment, turned, and said, "So you don't have anyone here, would you mind if I rounded up some help for you?"
"Why?" she asked with the slightest grin. "You got a moving company in your car?"
He grinned back at her. "Don't need one. Not in Meridian."
And before she could say another word he was gone, moving across her yard to the neighbor's house. The house beside hers was dark, only a porch light on in the gloom, but the man marched up to the front door as though he owned the place, then knocked on it hard. He knocked on it again a moment later, and then stood back as the door swung open.
"Coach Cowley?" said a voice, laced with equal parts sleepiness and surprise.
"Hey, Gil," said Scott. "Sorry to bother you so late at night, but there's a lady moving in next door to you and she doesn't have a single person to help her."
The door slammed shut without another word coming from the mysterious "Gil," but Scott came back with a satisfied expression on his face.
"What was that all about?" asked Lynette.
"That was me getting you that moving company you were talking about," answered Scott.
"One guy who slams the door in your face?"
"First of all, he only slammed the door because he was in a hurry. Second of all, he was in a hurry because he was in his boxers and not much else, so as soon as he realized that there was a woman in the area he probably wanted to get some clothes on. Third and lastly, I'm betting he's calling some people right now, and you ought to have half a dozen men over here inside of fifteen minutes to help you with your things."
"But I -" she began. Assuming that Scott was correct, she didn't really want six or seven strangers traipsing through her house and opening up her things.
Scott again held up a hand, but this time the gesture was not meant to placate her, but to silence her. "Shush, now," he said.
"I know you probably don't want a bunch of big sweaty men clomping around in your house in the middle of the night, but trust me when I say that they'll be discrete, polite, and will probably have you unpacked inside of an hour. They won't open any of your moving boxes unless you ask them to, but they probably will insist on helping you set up your bedrooms at least enough that you and..." and he paused again, as though the name he was about to utter had some special significance to him, "...Kevin can get to sleep and rest for a while. Plus, if you play your cards right you'll be awoken to the sounds of knocking at your door when their wives come over with breakfast, lunch, and dinner supplies for you."
Lynette was reeling. Was this guy for real? But before she could say anything about how unlikely that whole scenario sounded, he was moving to the back of the truck, asking over his shoulder, "Is the back locked, or just closed?" When she didn't answer, he repeated, "Do I need a key or anything to get in?" and then without waiting for a response he unlatched the back of the truck and slid the door upwards.
He whistled. "You are the most anal-retentive packer I ever did see."
Again, Lynette bristled. She hustled around to the back of the truck, where Scott was looking at all of her boxes. It was true, all of them had labels stating what was in them and where they belonged in the new house, and maybe it was also true that they had been packed according to size and weight, but she hardly thought that counted as "anal-retentive."
Again, though, she had no chance to say anything before Scott was on the move. He grabbed two boxes marked "L's bedroom," and hopped out of the back of the truck with them.
He stood motionless then, as though waiting for her to do something.
"What?" said Lynette.
"Well, you going to show me which room these belong in?" he asked with a smile. "Or do I have to just go in and figure it out for myself?"
The Meridians Page 15