Threshold

by G. M. Ford

  When things went wrong, as they always did, she told herself that they happened because she was too nice to people, and just a bit too pure inside for a malevolent planet such as this one.

  Occasionally, the truth flitted by like an arrow in the night, and she saw, for the briefest instant, that what she really was was scared. That all the disasters in her life were a result of her terror of conflict. That she made the same mistakes over and over because, as far as she was concerned, anything was better than the grating of souls.

  Cassie heaved a massive sigh, and for the umpteenth time in her life, stepped off into the void. “Okay,” she said. “You’re right, honey. A girl ought to be able to go to school with her sister. We’ll march in there and tell them there’s been a change of plans.”

  TRAVIS . . . that’s all it said. Little white patch on his black Relentless Technology shirt. First name . . . last name . . . who knew? Just Travis.

  “We’d need a court order,” Travis said. “And the only way that can happen is if everyone involved is appointed an officer of the court.”

  Royster didn’t want to hear it. “We ought to be able to claim exigent circumstances,” he countered. “Who knows what kind of danger my daughters might be in? That woman’s a danger to herself and others. If that’s not exigent circumstances, I don’t know what is.”

  Travis was shaking his head. “Without a gun pointed directly at somebody’s head, exigent just doesn’t float with the courts. The fact that you think there might be danger isn’t sufficient reason. Legal precedent is quite clear on that matter.”

  “Don’t tell me what you can’t do,” Royster bellowed. He banged the desk with his hand. “I want action. I want my daughters returned to me, and I want that woman and anyone who helped her prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” He threw an angry hand into the air. “If I wanted excuses I’d still have those other assholes working for me.”

  “As I said . . . for that sort of an operation, we’d need to be appointed officers of the court. A judge can—”

  Royster cut him off. “Any judge?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll make some calls,” Royster said.

  “We picked something up from the Women’s Transition Center website. Looks like the daughter may have another coma patient on the line.” Travis shuffled a few papers.

  “Harold Thurmond,” he read. “Some kind of Hollywood hotshot, with a twenty-seven-year-old daughter in a vegetative state. Says here he rented an air ambulance and flew her up from Southern California, day before yesterday. Supposedly cost him a cool seventy grand. She’s at The Colton Clinic, room thirty-seven. I figure we’ll put a team on the father, see if that doesn’t give us a line on Grace Pressman. He’s staying at the downtown Hyatt. He ought to be easy to pick up there.”

  Someone rapped three times on the office door.

  “Yeah,” Royster grunted.

  The door eased open. A young man poked his head tentatively into the breach.

  “Mr. Travis,” he said.

  “What is it Mark?” Before he could answer, Travis gestured toward the desk and said, “Mark, this is Mr. Royster. Mr. Royster, this is Mark Loftus, one of our IT specialists.”

  Edwin Royster didn’t bother to look up. The kid began to stammer.

  “I . . . um, we got a rather strange flag on our school registration sweep, a little while ago. I’m not sure—”

  “Is there some point to this?” Royster demanded.

  “Well sir, we’ve been scanning for two girls, aged six and eight, looking for new registrations. And . . . this morning . . . we got a flag from someplace called Hardwig Elementary School. Had a new girl aged eight register this morning. Teresa Miles. The interesting part is that she’d just registered at Garden City Elementary School, in Garden County, the day before.”

  “Which means what?” Royster snapped.

  “Those two schools are less than a mile apart. Different school districts, different counties, but real close to each other. If you were looking to hide . . .”

  Royster stopped fiddling with his Rolodex and looked up.

  Travis rose from his chair. “I’ll get an intervention team on the way,” he said.

  Quiet day at Memorial Hospital. Mickey Dolan stepped off the elevator to an empty hallway. The sound of his shoes on the polished floor accompanied him down to the nurses’ station, where he found Nurse Prentiss standing over a sink in the far corner of the room, wearing a pair of elbow-high rubber gloves.

  “Ah,” Pamela Prentiss said, upon catching sight of him, “the long arm of the law hath returned.”

  “Beware the nurse in rubber gloves,” Mickey intoned.

  She crooked an eyebrow. “You’d love every minute of it,” she promised with an unabashed twinkle in her eye.

  Mickey laughed out loud. “I came to get Joseph’s things,” he said.

  “And here I was thinking you just couldn’t stay away from me.”

  “That too,” Mickey said.

  “Hang on while I clean up a little, and I’ll find them for you.”

  She disappeared, leaving Dolan to settle into the dull underlying hospital hum. The PA system whispered for Dr. Brennan to please call obstetrics, and then went silent.

  Prentiss returned swinging an oversized Ziploc bag between her thumb and forefinger. “We wanted to return these,” she said. “Turns out we don’t have a current address on file for the father, and neither of them is answering the phone numbers we have on them.”

  “Nasty divorce,” Mickey said. “People tend to change everything.”

  “I remember it well,” Prentiss said.

  “Yeah . . . me too.”

  Mickey reached out and took the bag. Looked like the shirt Joseph had been wearing the day Mickey had visited his room. Pair of slippers. Pair of jeans. Socks. Some loose change and a white smartphone nestled down at the bottom.

  “The dad’s staying over at the Vantage,” Mickey said. “I’ll take them over.”

  “What do you do when you’re not saving the world?” she asked.

  “Not a hell of a lot,” Mickey said.

  “You ought to stop by some afternoon. I get off at six.”

  Would have been better if he’d just smiled and thanked her for her offer, but something inside of him was closer to the edge than Mickey had realized.

  “I seem to be a little off my feed lately,” he blurted. “Lately, I divide the world into two kinds of women. Those to whom I’d be prepared to be an enormous disappointment, and those to whom I wouldn’t.”

  “Like you said, Sergeant, nasty divorces tend to change everything.” She reached out and bopped him gently on the arm. “You regain your sanity, you be sure to look me up,” she said with a grin, and then turned and strode off down the hall.

  “Nurse Prentiss,” Mickey called after her.

  She turned his way. Put her hands on her hips, and tilted her head.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I needed that.”

  The Hotel Vantage was a remnant of an earlier age, the age of railroad tycoons, robber barons, and dry goods fortunes. The expansive mahogany-paneled lobby was a hodgepodge of leather settees, ancient Morris chairs, and overgrown potted plants. Looked like Teddy Roosevelt might pop out from behind a palmetto at any moment.

  “He was such a happy little kid,” Paul Reeves was saying. “Always had a smile on his face. Just like . . . you know . . . like a regular kid.”

  Grace leaned over the tea table and put a comforting hand on his arm.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I feel like . . .”

  “No, no,” Paul Reeves began. “You did everything you could.”

  “I feel like I should have left him where he was. It was all just so chaotic.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. There was . . .” He seemed to be sorting it out for the
first time. “Back when he had his accident . . . right before that . . . something had changed about him.” He brought his hands to his head and began to massage his temples. “I know adolescents are . . . you know . . . they’re moody. But it was more than that. He just didn’t seem to be happy anymore. Always looked uncomfortable. He and Roberta were always at each other’s throats. It was . . .” He stopped himself.

  “She certainly didn’t seem overjoyed to have him back.”

  The minute it was out of her mouth, she regretted saying something so thoughtless and unkind. Bad enough he’d lost his son without her bringing up that creepy crap.

  Mr. Reeves sighed and then rolled his eyes. “Truth is . . . I don’t think Roberta was cut out for parenthood. It was always very hard for her. Not something she took to naturally. She always struggled.”

  Grace knew the feeling. She’d long ago been forced to face the fact that her mother was about as nurturing as a saw blade. For Eve, it was always about the cause. Always the need to recoup what had been lost at the hands of the system. At the hands of men. The single-minded pursuit of her personal version of justice. Or at least that’s what she’d say if you pressed her about it. Personally, Grace had always had her doubts.

  Always seemed to her something internal drove Eve. Something left undone, rather than something done to her. As if she had a wound that was never going to heal, so she figured she might as well pick at the scab for a living.

  Paul Reeves hailed an old-fashioned black-tied, white-shirted waiter, who wandered over and refreshed both cups of coffee. When he’d gone, Grace leaned closer to Reeves.

  “You know that diary you gave me?”

  He nodded as he sipped coffee.

  “You know what happened to it?” Grace asked.

  He shook his head, swallowed, and set the cup back in the saucer.

  “I thought you had it,” he said.

  “I left it for Joseph. Seemed like it was important to him.”

  Paul Reeves sat back in the chair. His lips were as thin as a pencil line.

  “Guess he won’t be needing it now,” he said.

  Cassie was making an effort not to be a total embarrassment. She’d parked the car half a block west of the Hardwig Elementary School, gotten out and waited on the grass for the bell to ring. Hard as she tried, however, it seemed as if some unknown form of gravity kept pulling her, one step at a time, closer to the school’s front door.

  By the time the dismissal bell split the air, she was very nearly trampled by the wave of children bursting out into the hazy afternoon sunshine.

  Maddy and Tessa were near the back of the pack. Tessa was talking excitedly to an Asian girl in a black jumper and red knee socks as they came out the door. Maddy lagged behind, looking serious.

  Cassie forced herself to stand still and let the girls come to her, rather than rushing in like a mother hen. That always embarrassed Maddy no end. As the girls approached, she turned and started down the sidewalk toward the car. She held out her hands. Tessa took one. Maddy ignored her.

  “How was your day?” she asked Tessa.

  “It was fun,” Tessa said. “I met a girl named—”

  “Mama,” Maddy interrupted.

  Cassie held out a restraining hand. “What was the girl’s name?” she asked Tessa.

  “Mama,” Maddy said again, tugging on Cassie’s dress.

  Cassie stopped walking and turned toward Maddy. She took a deep breath and collected her temper. It was bad enough that she was going to have to tell Gus what she’d done. What she didn’t need at that moment was Maddy driving her crazy.

  “Maddy,” she said. “I was talking to your sister.”

  Maddy pointed to the corner where Fulton Avenue ran into Van Dyke Boulevard.

  “Why is that man taking pictures of us?” she asked.

  Cassie felt herself go numb. Told herself that no matter what, she shouldn’t look in that direction, and then, as she knew she would, did precisely that. A dark blue Mercedes was sitting along the curb with the motor running. The passenger had climbed out of the car and was using the roof to steady his hands as he aimed a big black telephoto lens in their direction. She imagined the machine-gun snapping of the lens and suddenly felt sick to her stomach. Her throat was frozen. Her tongue seemed as big as her shoe. With great difficulty, she swallowed twice and croaked out, “Come on girls . . . hurry.”

  Mickey Dolan flopped his detective’s ID onto the Hotel Vantage’s registration desk. The clerk was a sexy young woman about twenty-five. Bettie Page clone, poured into a black pencil skirt. Black bangs and lipstick red enough to glow in the dark.

  “Would you check and see if Paul Reeves is in for me?” he asked.

  The clerk’s deep brown eyes went back and forth between the gold shield and Dolan’s face a couple of times before she used a long, fiery fingernail to point at something back over Mickey’s shoulder.

  Mickey craned his neck and swept his eyes slowly over the area. His gaze came to a slot-machine stop on the back of Grace Pressman’s head. She was seated at a low table, drinking coffee with a middle-aged man, who, Mickey figured, had to be Paul Reeves.

  He quickly turned back to the desk clerk. Held his forefinger up to his lips, in the classic “be quiet” pose. She nodded her deep understanding.

  Mickey kept his face averted as he made his way to the far corner of the lobby and found a chair. He had to lean to his right in order to see Grace, which meant she didn’t have a direct line of sight to him either. No way she could walk out any of the exits without Dolan seeing.

  Some childish remnant in him wanted to make the wiseguy move. Wanted to amble over and hand Joseph’s personal effects to his father, throw Grace’s amazed face a curt nod, and then sphinx it out the door, to everyone’s full-blown amazement. But no. That wouldn’t do.

  The woman nobody could find was right here in front of him, for the second time in as many days. Last time had been a complete bust. He’d ended up looking like a horse’s ass. Not looking for an encore, Mickey grabbed a copy of Architectural Digest, slid down into the chair and waited, all hunched and furtive, like a spy in one of those old black-and-white movies.

  The rental car’s rear bumper rocked the car behind it hard enough to set off the alarm. Cassie was still arm-wrestling with the transmission lever when the other car’s security system began to whoop-whoop, splitting the afternoon air with its urgent electronic whoops, the sound of which scattered Cassie Royster’s attention span like windblown leaves.

  Confused, Cassie threw a quick glance over her left shoulder. Over to the arching row of sycamores where the Mercedes was parked. The windows were tinted so dark she could barely make out their silhouettes. The photographer had gotten back into the car. The whooping alarm poked at her consciousness like an accusing finger. She felt her lip begin to quiver. A sob tried to leap from her throat, but she forced herself to swallow it, then dropped the car into drive and hand-over-handed the steering wheel to the left for all she was worth.

  They clipped the copper-colored Honda on the way out of the parking space, but she didn’t have time to think about it, because, as they angled out onto North Walnut Street, they were greeted by the screech of sliding tires, followed by the folded metal thump of two modern motor vehicles mashing into one another. Something tinkled to the ground. Two horns began to blow harmony. Cassie put the pedal to the metal. The car roared and leaped forward.

  “Mama!” Tessa screeched at a pitch available only to girls her age.

  “Hang on,” Cassie grunted, as they fishtailed out into the street.

  The car roared up Walnut Street. Cassie began to chant, “Oh my God . . . Oh my God,” as they rocketed away from the school.

  When she threw her eyes up to the mirror, the Mercedes was right behind, not making the slightest attempt to be furtive. She began to sob and claw at her purse.

>   “Get my phone,” Cassie shouted.

  Maddy pulled the purse into her lap and began to feel around inside for the phone. The tires screeched as Cassie slid the car around the corner, carrying way too much speed for the car’s suspension. Halfway through the turn, the car began to drift, banging up over the curb, onto the manicured grass strip that separated the sidewalk from the street. A rooster tail of topsoil and powdered turf rose into the air like a flora fountain as they peeled through the landscaping at warp speed.

  In the second before the car thought about rolling over onto its side, the tires somehow found purchase, sending them drifting back toward the street, banging down over the curb with a sickening crunch. The car wiggled its ass twice, righted itself, and then went roaring off down the street.

  “Call Gus,” Cassie yelled to Maddy, who was still trying to locate the phone with one hand while white-knuckling the door handle with the other. “Come on, honey,” Cassie pleaded.

  And then Maddy had the phone in her hand. She pushed the “Home” button, scrolled down to the Gs and aimed her finger at “Gus,” in the split second before her mother locked up the brakes to keep from rear-ending a mail truck.

  Tessa began to whimper.

  “I’m going to take some time off,” Paul Reeves said. “I’ve got a bunch of vacation days coming to me. I’m going somewhere warm for a while and see if I can’t make some sense of all this.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Grace agreed. “Theoretically, anyway. The sun and I don’t get along so well. Five minutes outside and I look like a lobster.”

  “Joseph’s like that,” he said. “Really fair. We had to be careful . . .” He let it trickle off into silence. “Was like that,” he corrected.

  In the front pocket of her jeans, Grace’s phone began to buzz against her thigh. Six vibrations and then it stopped. Then started again and buzzed another half a dozen times, before she fished it out and checked the caller ID. UNKNOWN.

  She held up the phone and looked over at Paul Reeves. Talking on the phone in front of other people had always seemed rude to her, as if the person you were with just wasn’t enough for you. “Do you mind?” she asked.