“Go away! Just let me work. I’m restoring the backup of your e-mail data.”
Suddenly, Neal was hit by a thought. “Um—Beetle? When you get the e-mail, do you see it?”
“What?”
“Will you see the actual e-mail?”
“Yeah. Duh. You’re saying if I just find the messages, I shouldn’t open them?”
“Uh, yes.”
Beetlejuice and Sandy exchanged glances.
After a few minutes, Beetlejuice pushed the chair back and worked his shoulders.
“Got it?” Neal said.
“Well, no.”
“Now what?”
“Will you just let me do this? Now I’m going to run a data-recovery utility.”
Sandy sat on the sofa with her hands folded and her back stiff. Neal paced. A couple of times he thought he caught Sandy looking at him speculatively.
Finally Beetlejuice said, “It just doesn’t find them.”
“You mean we can’t tell whether the e-mails were ever sent?”
“Dude, I don’t think they ever came in.”
“But they did. I saw them!”
“Come on, Neal, man. Everybody gets times when they’re overstressed.”
“I did not imagine this!”
“Maybe that crappy boss is getting on your nerves.”
“No,” Neal said. He was not going to get mad at Beetle. After all, the man had come over here to help. Or at least he wasn’t going to show that he was mad. “Yeah—well,” he said.
“You know, Hofstra, there’s no such thing as a ghost in a machine.”
WHEN Beetle left, Neal knew it was time to be honest.
“Sandy—listen.”
“What?”
“The e-mails are talking about something I did. Four years ago, I was out at a bar with a friend. His name was Berko. We came out later—maybe midnight—and we were halfway down the block when these four guys jumped us.”
“Oh, my God!”
“They said the wanted money, and we gave them our wallets, but they started beating us anyway with crowbars, or tire irons, I don’t know. I pulled out my cell phone, but they stomped on it, and I ran.”
“And you survived.”
“Yes. But Berko didn’t. If I’d stayed there and fought back, he might have.”
“Why wouldn’t you have been killed, too?”
“Uh—I might have been.”
“Honey, it was their fault, their evil, not yours.”
“What I did was my fault—”
“Everybody has something like that in their lives. Guilt is a terrible thing to go on feeling.”
“But I am guilty.”
“These things eat away at you. I know.”
He didn’t answer.
“I’ve had personal experience with this, Neal.”
“Well, you told me about your divorce. But I don’t think that’s the same, no matter how much you may blame yourself.”
“I didn’t tell you all of it. I didn’t tell you the reason for our divorce.”
“People are allowed to have differences—”
“No! Neal, we had a daughter.”
Neal shifted uncomfortably.
“She was four years old. Patricia. We called her Tishy.”
“If it hurts you too much, don’t tell me.”
She went on anyway. “Tishy and I always went to the store together. She loved to pick out things for dinner. She had—we had the proper child safety seat in the car for her, properly installed in the backseat. She always used it. She was such a good girl. She had gotten to the age where she was very proud of fastening the seat belt herself. She’d get in and say, ‘Buckle up.’ When she was younger, she called it ‘uckle up.’ ”
Neal shifted again but didn’t say anything.
“So this Tuesday, we got in to drive to the store. She climbed into her seat and buckled up. I heard the buckle click. I heard it! But she must have pushed it and let it go. We drove down Elk Road. There’s a stop sign going the other way. A driver—a young woman with three fraternity buddies in her car—ran the sign and broadsided us. Tisha was thrown sideways into the left rear door. She died. I only had a bump on my forehead.”
Sandy had not cried until she told how little she had been injured.
“The seat belt was defective,” Neal said.
“No. She hadn’t latched it. I heard a click, but I didn’t check. I didn’t check!”
SANDY left. Neal had said he needed to be alone. He had tried to comfort her, but all the while, he was thinking, You made a careless mistake. I didn’t make a mistake.
I didn’t make a mistake. I made a decision to be cowardly. What I didn’t tell Sandy was—I could have run down the street and found a store open and called 911. But I was afraid they’d follow me. So I ducked into an alley and hid behind a bunch of trash cans until I heard them leave.
Until I heard them leave. Oh, God. Berko was dying by then. He was surely beyond help by the time I found an open liquor store and called the cops.
I am slime.
A new message appeared. It was from Earl Think. It said, You killed me.
Quickly, Neal grabbed up his iPhone and took a picture of the monitor screen. He looked at the phone screen. Nothing.
But it had been there. Really, it had. It wasn’t his imagination or the effect of a guilty conscience.
Except—what difference did it make? He was guilty whether the messages were real or the product of his self-loathing. He had done something terribly wrong and cowardly, and he had killed his friend.
And he realized he could never tell Sandy the whole truth, that he had not only run away into the alley and hidden behind those trash cans. He had waited. He could have run down the street and found a phone, but he ran and hid and waited until he heard the muggers leave. It had taken another three or four minutes for them to finish stomping Berko. If he hadn’t wanted to hide so fast, if he hadn’t been afraid they’d follow him, if he had run down the street, Berko might have lived.
Neal was crying now. He was a coward and a worthless human being.
He went into the kitchen and rummaged in a bottom cabinet until he found the vodka, which he practically never drank. Carrying the bottle by the neck, he went into the bathroom and found aspirin. Then he returned to the computer and sat in his swivel chair and took a long drink from the bottle. He started to choke, but he kept calm. After a couple of minutes, he chewed two of the aspirin, then decided to wash them down with more vodka. He waited several minutes to make sure he wasn’t going to choke again. Then he repeated the process.
In the flash of a fading brain, Neal realized, anagrams! The thing was playing with him. Coma hooy = yahoo.com. Earl think = earth-link. L. Amoco = aol.com. But it all didn’t matter.
SANDY had reached her home troubled. Neal had been devastated, whatever was happening. When she had left, his eyes were wide and his cheeks looked hollow. He was having some sort of stress-induced hallucinations.
She gave herself a couple of minutes, to see whether her nerves would quiet down. Maybe she was overreacting.
But half an hour later, she was only more worried.
All right. She picked up the phone. He hadn’t said not to call, after all.
But there was no answer. She let it ring a dozen times. Well, no answer didn’t necessarily mean he was in trouble. He quite often didn’t answer the phone if he was entering orders for work. And he sometimes turned off the phone if he was going to bed. He’d had a stressful evening, that was for sure. Maybe he figured a good night’s sleep would straighten him out.
AT Neal’s apartment, he heard the phone very distantly. He made no attempt to answer it. In fact, he couldn’t quite remember where he had left it, and it sounded funny, echoey and hollow. He drank some more vodka, took another two aspirin, and put his head down on the desk.
SANDY knew she wasn’t going to relax until she was certain Neal was all right. She picked up her keys to drive back to his place, then hesi
tated. Maybe that was going too far too fast. He could be working, and he might be annoyed if she just burst in. What she’d do first is e-mail him. If he was working, he’d get a ding that there was an incoming message. He’d be alert for one, if he was awake, because he was waiting for the phantom e-mailer. If he didn’t answer her e-mail in, say, half an hour, she’d drive over.
She went to her desk and opened her e-mail.
Hmm, there was a message for her. She’d just take a minute to check it.
She opened the e-mail. The message said,
Hi, Mommy.
In Memory of the Sibylline
By LOU KEMP
The many men so beautiful
And they all dead did lie!
And a million million slimy things
Liv’d on—and so did I.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner—Coleridge
Like a shower of fairy dust on fire, the embers from Townsend’s pipe blew across the railing and into the night, lost long before they fell into the waves.
He cupped his pipe to protect the remaining embers and to keep his hands warm. It seemed like only hours ago when the Christianna had sailed out of Cascais under a warm Portuguese sun.
A pregnant moon hung low over the sea. The waves reflected moonlight on iridescent crests that rolled by the Christianna as frothy and lacy as underskirts. Townsend gazed upward. The conflagration of stars seemed endless. Somewhere beyond them lay places the sailors of the future would travel. He’d be content to reach Alexandria and with a wee bit of luck it would be more temperate than his last visit in 1812. He nearly froze before he reached Cairo.
Although he did not hear footsteps, Townsend became aware of another presence at the rail. Townsend looked closer and saw that it was an older academic he’d met as he boarded the ship. A deep and pervading sadness seemed to weigh upon the man’s shoulders.
“Good evening, Mr. Perideaux,” Townsend said.
“A beautiful night, no?” Perideaux’s cigarette flickered in the darkness, revealing a faint sheen of perspiration decorating his brow.
Although his words seemed calm enough, it appeared that Perideaux needed to be reassured in some manner, perhaps only to hear another voice in the vastness of the night. Townsend could sympathize with that thought. The undercurrent of fear existed most tangibly when a lone ship rode the waves in the dead of night. It was long after eleven bells, and the crewmen in the rigging above were only a suggestion of movement. Or life.
“Yes, a beautiful night,” Townsend agreed.
Perideaux made no response. The man’s attention seemed transfixed some distance off the port bow as his gaze swept the sea from side to side, as if searching for something.
Under their feet, the Christianna creaked and groaned as she climbed a wave. Townsend relit his pipe. The damned thing could never stay lit for more than a few minutes. He wondered if Perideaux expected to see another ship cross their wake.
If Townsend hadn’t been watching his companion closely, he wouldn’t have seen the delicate shudder that traveled down the man. Perideaux said, “Felicity, oh, Felicity,” and he grabbed hold of the railing.
At first Townsend could perceive nothing except the inky night and the roiling waves. Then he saw the outline of a ship. Within seconds, the vessel seemed to glow and solidify. Three masts pointed to the sky, and brass rails glimmered underneath canvases that billowed, tickled by the wind. Shadows walked the deck. She floated nearly a league in the distance, without lights, without substance.
A gurgling sound came from Perideaux’s throat, and he whispered, “The Dutchman.”
Townsend heard him, but couldn’t stop watching the phantom ship that appeared to fade away until the moonlight pierced through her, and then she became distinct once again.
FROM a porthole I watched as Madagascar slipped away into the distance. Already, a hot sun reflected off the sea, obscuring the city with so much brightness that the smoke-shrouded shacks and fishing boats blended to gray, leaving just a suggestion of civilization behind the foam-capped waves.
My cabin was on the leeward deck, only a few paces from the captain’s quarters and those of the passengers. Through the portholes blew a fragrant breeze, bringing the suggestion of frying sausages and the calls of the sailors as they worked high above in the rigging and swung from spar to spar. The LeHanna was a barkentine and considered to be of good size.
I’d determined that my cabin door would not open. Presumably because it was locked. However, I had no trouble hearing footsteps on the wooden deck approach and stop just outside.
Through the porthole, I could see most of my guard in profile. The newcomer confronting him was a tall man, nearly my height, scholarly and pale.
“We’re pleased to have you aboard, Dr. Perideaux,” said the guard.
The trick to observing someone without staring and causing them to turn and stare back is to look a bit off to the side. In this instance, I watched the sky just beyond Dr. Perideaux’s large ears. There was no mistaking the steel in his voice.
“Are you? Is that why you feel it necessary to brandish a musket around my family?”
The guard replied, “I’m sorry you feel that way, sir. But I have my orders.”
“What orders? What do you have to guard? I just sent Felicity back to the cabin for her safety.”
“I’m sure your daughter will find something to do there,” the guard said.
Dr. Perideaux pointed at the cabin door. “I demand to know what is in there.”
“No one is to enter this cabin. And no one will.”
With a clatter of boots, Captain Hume arrived wearing a wide smile and insincere eyes. Perhaps Dr. Perideaux noted the captain’s eyes, for his tone did not change.
“Captain, what is in there?”
Although a short man, the captain did not shrink from the doctor’s aggressive stance, nor did he raise his voice.
“Please calm yourself. I’m sure you do not want to upset your wife.” The ship’s bell rang thirteen times for the hour, drowning out his next words. “... simple matter. We have charge of a prisoner. He is to be dropped off at Victoria Island tomorrow.”
“Why is he up here with the passengers?” Dr. Perideaux demanded.
“Why is he not kept below with the crew?”
I enjoyed Captain Hume’s slight hesitation. How would he put it? Would he tell the truth or prevaricate?
“Doctor, I have specific orders that the prisoner is not to have contact with a living soul. He has to be separated from the crew.”
The doctor stared at the captain. “Why?”
“I cannot tell you.” Captain Hume placed a hand on Perideaux’s shoulder. “Please. Keep your family away from this area. Entertain them. I believe your wife is not well?”
Dr. Perideaux rubbed his chin and frowned. “No, she is not. The baby is due shortly.”
“All the more reason for you to join her. Perhaps with a cup of tea?”
A rain shower visited the ship with the lightest touch. The LeHanna climbed the waves rhythmically, descending and rising as lovers do, hesitating to savor the moment slowly.
The last few days had marked the end of summer in Madagascar, and I’d grown tired of the food and lack of good lager. On balance, the muggy nights were warm with scents made more pungent with the heat and promise of whatever I could find in the bohemian quarters. When we reached Seville, it would be autumn, and the bougainvilleas would still bloom in veils of brilliant color. I had no intention of being dumped on Victoria Island like a rancid bag of potatoes.
The penal colony on Victoria Island offered little besides hard labor and the most notorious criminals for company. The sharks that circled the island did so knowing that there would always be another convict swimming toward the sun, tiring ... and then succumbing. I shuddered delicately and resumed my reading.
THE dulcet sound of snoring filtered through my cabin door. I arose and moved to the porthole to watch my guard as he slept. The full sun, a satisfie
d belly, and the repetitive motion of the waves had lulled him to sleep against the wall of the cabin. Or it could have been something else? Perhaps dropped into his plate of stew?
A young girl approached from the stern. She wore her red curls tied in a ribbon that matched her dress of robin’s egg blue. She was probably eight years of age, but checked over her shoulder with the furtive-ness of a well-seasoned Singapore pickpocket. If I interpreted her smile correctly, she seemed content with what she saw.
As she passed by, I said, “Hello, poppet.”
Innocent eyes widened, searching for my voice.
“Up here, my dear.” I unlocked the door. It would be a simple matter to lock it again if the guard awoke and became curious.
She stood under the porthole and squinted. “I can’t see you. Who are you?”
Such a sweet little lamb. Where was her nanny or her father or whoever keeps the unsuspecting from characters like me?
“My name is Celwyn. Would you like to come inside?”
The child hesitated but a moment before stepping over the legs of the sleeping guard.
By the time she’d opened the door, I’d moved to the far corner of the stateroom and sat behind the petite drop table common to all sea cabins. It had been a while since I’d been around a tiny person, but she would most likely be less intimidated if I was closer to her level. The child poked her head inside the door, noting my traveling trunk with its mysterious contents visible to a curious eye and finally myself. I must have passed a childlike test, for she came inside, leaving the door ajar. Perhaps she felt more afraid of her parents finding her than she was of me.
If you wonder why I did not venture forth from my unlocked cabin, it wasn’t time yet to do so. Crafting a perfect situation from raw elements is so much more entertaining than being tossed about by random acts of fate. Or shot at by pistols.
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