by JJ Pike
“You work with Alice?” said Jo. Good, so she was going to take the lead.
Aggie felt her shoulders unknot one notch. Not so as they came down from around her ears, but enough so they didn’t feel like they were going to pop off.
Michael nodded. “I’ve worked with her for years. We’re colleagues.”
If this Michael Rayton was letting himself into their house and eating their food—wow, he had their best china and napkins out, he’d really gone to town—then he’d better know Mom more than just to say “hi” in the corridor.
“Have you seen her?” The question burbled up and out of her before she could stop it.
Michael wiped his mouth. “Not since the buildings went down.”
“Was she inside?”
“No, no,” he said. “She was with us over by the fire engines. We were evacuated in time.”
“Where is she, then?” Aggie couldn’t keep the frustration out of her voice. “She should be back by now. Or she could have called.”
Michael shrugged. “I haven’t seen anyone else from the firm for hours. We scattered when the secondary collapse began. I thought she wouldn’t mind if I came here.”
He was right, Mom probably wouldn’t mind.
“We had such a good time at your barbecue earlier this summer. And, to be honest, I thought your dad would be here. And you, of course.”
Aggie knew not to tell him they’d moved up to the cabin. That wasn’t what they did.
“Was that the last time you saw Alice?” said Jo. “By the fire engines?”
Michael nodded. “Why don’t you take a load off.” He gestured to the chairs. Like it was his house and he was in control.
“Thanks,” said Jo. Not what Aggie expected. Why wasn’t she interrogating him? Or was she going to draw him out later, make him spill, get him to incriminate himself?
But seriously, could Jo sit down and eat a meal with him? She was one smooth operator. The parm smelled good; thick and sticky with just the right amount of breadcrumbs. Couldn’t do any harm to have one helping. She marched to the kitchen, got a couple of bowls, handed one to Jo, and took a seat. “We don’t use the good china except on Christmas Day.” She reached across the table and grabbed the serving spoon, scooping out a helping for herself and another for Jo.
Jo sat at the end of the table rather than beside her. Weird, but anyway. Whatever. She was sussing the guy out in her own way. Aggie was out to sea. She needed food to ground her. She and Jo would compare notes later and she’d probably find out there was some master plan all along. She was too tired and cranky to try to read every line in Jo’s face.
“Tell me how you know Mom.”
“We work—worked—on MELT together.”
“How come I haven’t heard much about you?”
Michael laughed. “I can’t answer that one. That’s a question for Alice.”
It didn’t sit right. She felt the unease writhe in her stomach. Dad might have that one dodgy friend from way back when, but Mom was careful who she let into her life.
The parm was possibly the most delicious thing she’d ever eaten. It tasted like home and family and Dad laughing at the stove and Mom coming home late and Midge begging to stay up late to watch another episode of—what had they last watched as a family?—Star Trek, Next Generation.
She shoveled it down. Perhaps it would take the unease away. Nope. It was still there. She was going to have to crack open the ice cream. Unless he’d eaten it all. “How long have you been here?”
“I got out as fast as I could,” said Michael. “I could see things weren’t going to get better. I’m guessing I was one of the first to get out of Manhattan.”
He hadn’t answered the question. What was it about him that made her so itchy?
“I borrowed Paul’s room,” he said.
Oh, Paul was not going to like that. He was a stickler for tidy and orderly. A stranger sleeping in his bed would wig him out.
“I thought that was more respectful than taking your parents’ room.” His smile was too smiley. “He was on 38th Street last time I saw him.”
“Wait, what? You saw Paul?” Aggie’s heart flipped. Had he seen Dad, too? She couldn’t form the words. She was in danger of bawling again. She took a forkful of eggplant parm and let him do the talking.
“He was in a fire rig,” said Michael.
No mention of Dad. It was like a sucker punch. She chewed and chewed, unable to swallow.
“We both got kitted out, then went our separate ways.”
How had he not told them that right away? Why hadn’t he stayed with Paul? What had Paul said? Why wasn’t Jo drilling into him for more information? It was too much. Aggie squinted at him, trying to read between the lines the way Jo said you were meant to when you were looking for clues. She had no idea what she was supposed to do. She didn’t want to compromise Jo’s “investigation” if there even was such a thing, but she wanted to know ALL THE THINGS. It was her family, for crying out loud. She should be allowed to ask questions. She snuck another a look at Jo, but couldn’t tell whether she was thinking, annoyed, or had indigestion.
“Concentrate on what’s in front of you.” Dad would be practical in this minute. He’d find a way around the problem rather than crashing into it like a Mac truck on adrenalin, which was what she wanted to do. She collected Jo’s dish and her own and bussed them. On her way back into the dining room, something snagged in her peripheral vision. She stepped back into the corridor. The desk drawer was open. Not all the way, but enough that she could see the papers in there were a mess. Another no-no. Dad would never have allowed that to happen. Everything in its place. It was like a family motto.
“Did you look at our stuff?” There was no way not to have that sound like an accusation, but she didn’t care. The guy was a creepy creeper and Jo should just arrest him right now.
“Nope,” said Michael. “I came. I ate, I slept, I ate again. Mostly I watched TV to see if I could get caught up on what’s going on down in the city.”
Aggie was busting to investigate. She needed to know if he’d been rummaging through their stuff. She looked at Jo as pointedly as she dared, but Jo didn’t meet her gaze. How to go at this another way? Maybe he’d been other places in the house. She could take herself out of the dining room equation and search the house. That was a good plan. Jo would have the room to do whatever it was she needed to do, while she was doing her part to nail the guy to the wall. “I’ll be right back. Call of nature,” she said.
Jo picked up the conversation with Michael. Sounded like an ordinary, grown-up, boring kind of exchange. Where are you from? What do you do? How do you know the Everlees? Do you like living around here? That nonsense. How she could get “intel” from that kind of talk was a total mystery.
She moved from room to room as quickly and quietly as she could. The place felt off, messed with, infected. Drawers weren’t right, papers had been shuffled and replaced, but it was the safe that was the dead giveaway.
“Jo!” she shouted. “Come here, please.”
Jo and Michael were in the study in seconds.
Aggie threw an accusatory look at Michael. “You’re going to tell me you didn’t do this?”
“I did not. And I resent the fact that you think I did.”
“Was it like that when you got here?” Perhaps there’d been a robbery. A real robbery by someone who knew they’d gone away. It could happen.
“I’ve never been in this room before now,” he said.
Aggie wished she had her own forensic team, like Dexter. They’d be in there, dusting for prints, finding partials, looking them up in the national database. Jo surely had friends who could do that. “Would you leave us a minute?”
Michael threw up his hands and stomped off to the dining room as if she’d done something wrong. She hadn’t. She was displaying what Mom called “an abundance of caution.” She was within her rights to demand he explain himself. He was guilty of breaking and entering, if nothin
g else.
“Can your people run prints?”
Jo laughed. “No can do.”
“I think he’s lying.”
“Could be. But he’s a person of interest and I don’t want him to do a runner. Keep him sweet, keep him talking, don’t let on that we suspect anything. I need to let my people know I’ve located him and find out where they want him. Until then, we play it cool.”
She didn’t like this “spy stuff” after all. Too much hedging and round-about stuff. She wanted to ask him, straight up, what he was doing there, but Jo wasn’t going to allow it. “What do I do about him going through our stuff? It would be weird if I didn’t say anything.”
“How much damage is there?”
They looked at the safe together. The hinges had taken a beating, but it hadn’t been opened. Unless it had been opened and closed again. What did Mom and Dad keep in there? Nothing that a stranger would want: their birth certificates, the deeds to the house and the car. What else had they said was important to lock up? She sat back on her heels. They had money. Dad always kept a lot of cash to hand. But no one else knew that. Though, it was a safe and safes were usually used for money and jewelry and important papers.
“Do you know the combination?”
Aggie shook her head. She knew where a boatload of cash was in the cabin. Ugh. She hadn’t thought of that before now. All that cash hidden in long lockboxes under the floorboards in Mom and Dad’s bedroom had to be in the embers of the fire. They’d been throwing water on the flattened house for hours. Would the steel drawers stand up to the onslaught of heat and water?
“Maybe what we should do is take it with us,” said Jo.
“To the cabin?”
“If there’s anything in the house that’s important to your folks, we should collect it now. I don’t know when we’re going to be back.”
“But we’re still going to go look for Floofy?”
“We’re still going to find Floofyface, yes.”
It took them a little under six hours to scour the house and collect all the papers, valuables, and mementos Aggie said they couldn’t do without. She was too old for her teddy, but she wasn’t going to leave him behind. He’d been everywhere with her. When the pads on his feet wore through, Mom had sewn him new feet, which was practically unheard of: Mom doing a regular “mom” thing.
Michael–the-potential-saboteur pitched in, carrying things down to the truck even though she didn’t ask him to. She watched him out the window, hoping to catch him snooping or taking off or doing something fishy, but she never did. He offered himself up as her loading-carrying donkey without a word of complaint.
With the truck loaded, she wanted to shake him and be on their way. They didn’t have that much daylight left. Finding an alpaca in the dark wasn’t her idea of a good time.
She held out her hand. “Thanks, then. We’re off.”
“I’ll follow in my truck,” he said.
Aggie was trapped. He’d only been helpful. She couldn’t prove he was the one who’d tried to get into the safe, or that he’d stolen anything other than eggplant parm. And he was apparently a friend of her mother’s. Jim had turned Arthur away. She should do the same with Michael. The cabin was their safe place. “We’re on a mission.”
“Cool.” He flashed his too-flashy smile at her again. He was too chummy. He wasn’t her pal and she had a deep sense he wasn’t her mom’s friend either. Mom would have told her if she had a friend. That was right. Mom never mentioned anyone she was “friends” with. Only colleagues. She didn’t get close to people outside the family. It wasn’t her thing. Work was work and home was home and she didn’t mix those things or complicate her life with people who could turn on her at any moment. Aggie felt 100% justified in her mistrust of Michael Rayton. If he’d said he was a colleague, alarm bells might not have gone off in her head. But he was so insistent that the two of them were buddies. That was what was off.
“It’s going to be hard work. We’re going into the State Forest.”
Michael shrugged, waiting.
The silence made her say more than she wanted to. “Our alpaca has gone missing. We’re going to find her.”
“I am the alpaca whisperer,” he said.
That was too far. She turned and walked away. He wasn’t going to leave them alone. Let him come and get chomped by mosquitoes and slimed up to his armpits in swamp goo.
Jo tried to talk her down as they drove out towards the last place they’d seen Floofy. She was all “operational this” and “caution that” and “bigger picture blah-blah-blah.” The man was a creep. They shouldn’t allow him into their lives. Aggie blocked Jo out and searched the tree line, desperate for a familiar fluffy face.
Turned out, Floofy was less than a mile away from the house. She hadn’t gone far. She skittered and clicked, her long legs taking her out of reach. At least she wasn’t shrieking or spitting. It was going to be fine.
“Come on, good girl. You know me.” Aggie used her soft voice. “Look what I’ve got for you.” She dug into her food baggie and held out an apple, hoping that would draw her in.
Floofy snuffed the air, but didn’t come close.
Aggie threw her the apple. Floofy lowered her head to the treat, eyes on the crew trying to capture her, ate it, and backed up again.
“Give me one,” said Michael.
What a loser. He was going to roll out some “alpaca whisperer” routine. She wasn’t buying it. She handed him a carrot. Let him embarrass himself.
He dropped his shoulders and lowered his head, approaching Floofy from the side. He broke off a piece of carrot and threw it, gently, at her feet. She gobbled it down, but didn’t move away. Michael made himself as small as possible but stretched his arm out, treat in hand. As she was chomping down on the carrot, he reached under her chin and picked up her leash. He handed her back to Aggie with a smile. “Animals like me,” he said. “I’ve always been lucky that way.”
“Silly goose,” said Aggie. “What have you been doing while we were gone, eh?”
“How are we getting her back home?” said Jo.
“I’ll bring her,” said Michael. “I can hook up the trailer to my vehicle, no problem.”
Aggie couldn’t see a way out. Michael Rayton had wormed himself into their lives and secured an invitation to the cabin and Jo had done nothing to stop him. At least she could count on one thing: Jim was going to be mad as a beaver after a storm.
Chapter 23
The jets buzzed the southern tip of Manhattan again, sleek and fast, then swooped back towards the clouds and were gone. They’d been at it for hours, coming in low and loud, then retreating to wherever it was they were based. The recon mission—because what else could it be?—it wasn’t a rescue attempt and did nothing to improve the situation on the ground.
Desperate humans were hurling themselves into the churning waters of the East River. As soon as a boat drew near a hundred people threw themselves into the water, swimming over each other, hanging off the sides of boats that were made for eight to ten, max. They kept piling in and piling on while the small boats did their best to get them to safety.
Paul couldn’t jump because Angelina couldn’t jump. She was semi-conscious, but there was no way she could swim. He wasn’t even sure if her fish-skin dressings could withstand the water.
He had already removed the broken hula hoop, checked her for cuts and scrapes, found no new lesions, and wrapped her as well as he could against the elements. But she was fading and he was out of pain meds. She was dehydrated, whimpering and whispering, and curling her hands into fists. She needed medical attention. Hours ago.
He and the Professor and Fran had regrouped and come to an unspoken agreement that they would stick together, all of them edging further and further away from the Ferry Terminal, hoping to get ahead of the crowd. But their every step was dogged by people with the same idea.
“I don’t know that we’re going to get out of here by boat,” said Paul.
“Is there any other way?” said Christine.
A man in his mid-30s, chinos, dressy shirt, tie, jacket, elbowed his way forward. He was met with grunts and the occasional “back off” or “what the hell…” But for the most part people were concentrating on the boats and merely swore at his rudeness after he’d passed. That there was one stand-out selfish a-hole wasn’t a surprise. The surprise was that there weren’t more. He was making headway, too, until he elbowed the wrong person.
Chino-man did his thing: elbow high, over the shoulder of the person in front of him, pressing down until they buckled and let him through. But, finally, there was that one shoulder that simply did not give.