Sweet Water

by Lena North

  “Jinx,” Danny started, but I was on a roll and kept talking.

  “And I know it’s not about money, Danny. I know. But I have no other way of returning what you've all given me, so when Mrs. C said to donate what I could… then I did.”

  “Ji –”

  “When I came here I had two friends,” I cut him off, and he clamped his mouth shut, so I went on, “I was sick and tired, and had no life. Everything was messed up, and it was mostly in my head, but I didn’t know that.”

  I waited until he nodded in acknowledgment of my statement.

  “Yesterday, I put on make-up and tried on shoes with a group of women who treated me as if I was just like them. We giggled about men and sang along to songs even when we didn’t know the lyrics. Then I walked into a party with the woman who’s become like a grandmother to me, in a beautiful dress, feeling like I was a part of something. And don’t think I didn’t notice that both you and Anetta were checking to make sure everything was okay when I was talking to Wilder.”

  His face softened, and I smiled a little, put my hand on his knee and leaned forward.

  “I donated what I could, like everyone else, and I’m not taking it back.”

  “You’re surprisingly stupid sometimes, Jinx,” was his reply, and he didn’t give me any chance to comment on this, not that I planned to. “I hear what you’re saying, and I disagree with just about everything but okay. We’ll keep the money. Everyone will be grateful.”

  Shit.

  “You can’t tell anyone,” I snapped, whipped out my phone and when a familiar voice answered, I said, “Boz, hey. If anyone asks, you donated a wad of cash at the party last night, okay?” Bo started laughing, and I closed the call.

  Then I smirked.

  “Does Dante know?” Danny asked slowly.

  I was unsure if he referred to the income from my patents or my donation, but since Dante had no clue of either, I shook my head.

  “You should probably tell him,” he said.

  “Hm,” I said which I felt was sufficiently neutral.

  I decided that our conversation was over and got to my feet, patted Danny on his shoulder and murmured, “The school needs upgrades, Danny. The building is old and could use a facelift, and a few new computers wouldn’t hurt.” He nodded but I’d decided there was another thing the school needed, so I spoke quickly, “A few of the teachers need to go to Prosper, for more training. If the donations from yesterday won’t cover that, then I will.”

  His brows went up on his forehead, and I squeezed his shoulder.

  “They need to learn how to educate kids with special needs, Danny.”

  He understood then, and I could tell that he was about to say something that I feared was a protest, so I kept talking, “You can’t stop me from doing it and you shouldn’t. Happy deserves it, and –”

  “Hey,” he murmured, and I closed my mouth. “When you have kids of your own then you’ll find out that there is nothing you won’t do for them. You’ll gladly compromise on every principle you’ve lived by your whole life to give them what they need. So, Jinx, I’ll swallow my pride, and if the ridiculous pile of money you put in that envelope isn’t enough, then I’ll let you know.”

  I’d gotten exactly what I wanted, so I smiled at his dismayed face.

  “You’re a good dad,” I told him.

  Then Kit called out from the garden gate, so I gave Danny’s shoulder another squeeze and left.

  Dante was meeting with Wilder and Hawker to discuss security, and God knows what else, but he’d promised that they wouldn’t make any high-handed decisions about me, so I had declined to participate. Instead, I’d decided to spend the afternoon in the lab with Kit, and then we’d all have dinner together before they left.

  I’d spent the morning with Wilder, walking along the beach and talking about what had happened in the past few weeks. We’d had lunch with Mrs. C, and that had been incredibly uncomfortable, but by the end of the meal they had thawed up enough to smile tensely at each other as we parted. I thought it was a huge step forward, and figured that eventually, they’d both learn to accept the other woman’s part in my life, even if they never grew close.

  Kit had apparently spent the morning working on a new security system in the lab. Daniele’s electrician had reconnected the cut power cables, but I hadn’t been entirely comfortable with that solution, so I was happy to see what Kit had done. It looked the same, but inside the white boxes, the content had been completely replaced. He’d brought new locks and a few other gadgets as well, and connected it all.

  “Look,” he said, sounding almost like Alejandro did when he showed me his wooden trucks. “If you press the panic button then all locks go into shut-down mode. You need the main key, the code to the alarm, and an approved fingerprint to open it.”

  I looked at the small pad that he’d put on the side of the box. If you didn’t know how he’d connected it all, you would never guess that the small attachment was a fingerprint reader. Clever, I thought.

  “I’ve put my thumbprint in the system, and here,” he pulled my hand up and pressed my thumb on it, “now yours is registered too. If someone breaks in, then pressing the panic button on the way out will lock the perp in the house.”

  “Not really,” I mumbled.

  “What?”

  “They could open a window and climb out.”

  His jaw fell, and I started chuckling.

  “Well, shit,” he said sourly.

  “It’s a good system, Kit. Really. We’ll put locks on the windows too and then it’ll delay anyone for a while. It won’t stop them,” I smirked at him, “But it might buy enough time to catch them.”

  “Huh,” he muttered, and I could see that he started to think about other options such as metal bars across the windows which I really didn’t want, so I changed the topic.

  “Can we spend some time on the data analysis?” I asked, eager to share some of my findings.

  Kit seemed reluctant, but I pushed him away from the security panel and into one of the smaller offices, and then we looked at the work I’d done so far, what he had completed, and planned for the next steps.

  Nothing about the crystal made sense. The energy levels went up and down in a pattern we couldn’t figure out, and there were random spikes of energy that went so high I wondered why they hadn’t burned a hole in the titanium box we’d placed it in.

  “It looks like a heart attack,” I murmured.

  “What?” Kit asked and stretched his back with a groan.

  Something was nagging at the back of my mind, but it kept slipping away, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. I leaned back and started sifting through all the data again, and thought that I got a few good ideas to investigate.

  “Hey, nerd crew!” Mac was at the door, and he was waving impatiently for us to come. “Dinner!” he called out and disappeared.

  We closed down the equipment, and then we walked back to have a long and noisy dinner at the restaurant, together with Wilder and the others.

  The alarm in the lab went off just a few minutes after they left, so there was a line of motorcycles parked in front of the house when we got there. They’d made a quick detour and were already in the process of checking the premises when we arrived.

  Nothing was out of the ordinary, and the alarm had been activated when they checked it, so after a walk-through, it was decided that something had gone wrong in the installation and an alarm had been sent out by mistake. Kit and I tested the system and checked the basic set up, but couldn’t find anything wrong. I wasn’t happy and tried to get the others to look around for signs of intruders. I was sure we hadn’t done anything wrong and kept telling Kit that we hadn’t, but he just shrugged.

  “Don’t sweat about it,” Hawker said. “Can you check it tomorrow?” he asked Kit and me, obviously eager to leave. It was getting dark, and they had a few hours on the roads, so I figured it was understandable. His girlfriend was also pregnant, and I assumed that he wanted
to get home to her, which was even more understandable, even kind of sweet.

  “I’m sure we haven’t done anything wrong, Hawker, but sure… we could leave it as it is and investigate tomorrow” I replied reluctantly. “Though, I still think we should –”

  “Let’s go,” Hawker interrupted, and they started to get on their bikes.

  “Dad,” Wilder said, looking at me.

  “What,” Hawker barked, clearly annoyed.

  I shook my head slightly at Wilder, communicating that she should drop it. If Hawker wanted to leave, then they’d move out and her getting into a fight with him wouldn’t change anything.

  She ignored this and said doggedly, “If Jinx says she hasn’t done anything wrong, then the alarm works.” Mac immediately started to get off his bike again, and I could see Miller moving to the side.

  “Well, it obviously doesn’t work because there are no signs of intruders and the alarm still went off,” Hawker stated.

  “It could have been a malfunction,” Kit said, and I jerked around to look at him.

  There were no malfunctions. I knew it, and I could see in Kit’s eyes that he knew it too, but it was clear that he wanted to leave. He had seemed weirdly on edge through the afternoon, and he’d walked off a few times to type messages on his phone. He didn’t elaborate and simply moved over to his bike and swung a leg over it, carefully keeping his eyes away from mine. I wondered what was going on with him and decided again that I needed to talk to Mary.

  “Good enough for me,” Hawker muttered, and started his bike, effectively blocking any further conversation with the sounds from his engine.

  Then he motioned with his hand, indicating that they were to get ready. Wilder gave me a long look and made a face, but got up behind Mac. Miller rolled up next to Hawker and said something that I couldn’t hear, but I saw how he got a headshake so whatever he wanted to do was apparently rejected. I sighed as their taillights disappeared in the distance.

  It took twenty minutes and then the alarm went off again. Dante, Danny and a few of the men from the village went with me to the lab, and I talked to Wilder on the way over. They’d stopped when Kit told them about the alarm, but we agreed that they’d stay where they were until we’d checked it out.

  The alarm was activated when we got to the house, and there were no signs of anyone trying to get into the house. We did a thorough search, but it was dark, so it was hard to see if anyone had left any traces outside. Finally, we decided that there was nothing to be done.

  “There’s something wrong with the system,” Hawker decreed over the phone, and I had no proof I could use to contradict him, so I just reiterated that we’d not made any mistakes, but we’d leave it and check again in the morning.

  I didn’t like it, though. There was a strange feeling of apprehension churning in my stomach, and as we prepared to leave the house, I moved my eyes toward the bushes surrounding it. I couldn’t see anything unusual, but I still kept glancing over my shoulder as we moved out. Joe was with us, and I thought he behaved strange, staying close to my side but walking slightly behind me in a way he’d not done before. Dante just snorted when I told him.

  “That dog never leaves your side, Nellie, and it’s late so if he’s lagging behind it’s because he’s tired.”

  “Okay,” I murmured and glanced over my shoulder again.

  An hour later the alarm woke me up, and I jolted out of bed. As I got dressed, I got a text from Kit, telling me to not bother, and that it was probably the same as the previous two. I replied that it probably was, but we’d take a quick look all the same. Then I called Dante, and a few minutes later he and Danny was walking with me through the darkness. I’d tried to leave Joe behind, but he’d pressed out through the door, and since it was the middle of the night I didn’t want to shout at him to come back, so he was with us.

  The house was dark, and just like the previous two times, there were no signs of anyone entering. I punched in the code to the alarm, and we went inside, quickly walking through the offices and then entering the room with the big basin containing the crystal.

  “I must have been wrong,” I sighed when nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. “Something’s wrong with the alarm, so let’s –”

  I stopped speaking when I saw shadows moving outside the patio doors. Dante and Danny saw them too and closed in on me, but I ran to the entrance and locked the door. I thought about hitting the panic button, but I wasn’t sure if they’d managed to disable that together with the other alarm somehow, and I didn’t want to be locked into the house. I could open it with my fingerprint, but it would take time, and I didn’t know what the men wanted or if we’d need to make a hasty escape. Instead, I set the regular alarm off again, only to have it shut down on me and then activate immediately. I set it off a few more times, hoping that Kit would know and think that it was strange enough to convince Hawker to turn around.

  “Jiminella Sweetwater!” a voice called from the outside, and I froze. “There is no signal going to your friends anymore so stop trying. They also won’t come back after the previous false alarms.”

  I stood completely still, waiting for the man to continue. Dante came up next to me and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “We should go into one of the offices, they could easily fire a shot at any of us through the windows here.”

  “Bulletproof,” I murmured and clarified when I saw his brows go up. “We made Danny install bulletproof windows.”

  “We want the recipe and this time you will give it to us,” the voice shouted from the outside.

  It took me a few seconds to understand what they were talking about, and then my knees buckled. Was this what they had been after all this time? The first years I’d thought it was simply my brain they were interested in, and then I’d been so sure it was extensions to the inventions I’d come up with.

  Dante held me up and walked me back into the pool room.

  “Oh shit, it’s you,” Daniele murmured. “It isn’t something in the lab they want. It’s you.”

  I opened and closed my mouth a few times, still reeling from the shock. Images of Happy and Alejandro passed through my mind. Anetta’s happy eyes. How the village depended on Dante to hold everything together. Mrs. C. I had brought this upon them all.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered and turned toward Dante, not quite looking into his eyes. “I threw it all away, and I didn’t tell anyone,” I whispered.

  “What?” he replied.

  “I don’t know how they could know, Dante. I set it all up when I was just a kid and didn’t tell –”

  I stopped speaking because I’d realized how the men outside knew.

  “Nellie, talk to us,” Dante pushed, and reached out a hand toward me.

  I sidestepped because I had to tell him in a way that I could control better than if he picked it out of my head.

  “I was just a kid,” I repeated slowly, swallowed, and went on, “It was quite simple really. I based it on a few things from Mom’s kitchen and a synthesized version of…” I trailed off and sighed. “Never mind. It was like a fertilizer on ecstasy. It made the plants in our garden grow like crazy, and I was so proud...”

  I trailed off again and closed my eyes. Dante put a hand under my chin and pushed until I faced him. His face was gentle, and then he smiled. I tried to smile back, but it was wobbly.

  “Adding just a little bit of toothpaste and cinnamon would make it into an explosive like no other. You could blow up most of Prosper with less than a cup of it,” I whispered.

  “Jesus,” Danny muttered.

  “You told your parents,” Dante said calmly, although his face had hardened.

  “Um,” I mumbled, not wanting him to dislike my parents more than he already did.

  “Of course you did, Nellie. You said it yourself. You were just a kid, and you were proud.”

  “Yes,” I confirmed. “I warned Mom and Dad about it, said they had to be careful so it wouldn’t become a bomb. Dad was wo
rried, but I’ve told him a million times that it was a mistake and that I haven’t been able to reproduce it again. I didn’t write it down.”

  “They told someone about it,” he stated.

  “No one else knows, so, yes. They must have.”

  I wasn’t happy about this fact, but they had been proud too, and they hadn’t known what the best thing to do would be for a child like me. Then the timing hit me. I’d been ten. Not long after I’d shown them the pretty pink liquid, my parents had been contacted to have my intelligence tested. That had been the first time they took me to –”

  My thoughts were interrupted by thumps from the roof, and we looked up at the two big windows in the ceiling.

  “Bulletproof?” Dante asked.

  “Shit. No,” Danny muttered and pulled out his phone. “Shit,” he repeated, more forcefully, “I can’t get a signal.”

  Dante checked his phone, and his face hardened. Then he checked mine, and a string of quiet, ugly words echoed eerily in the big room. I stretched my hand out, and when he gave me my phone, I started looking through all settings. We’d never had any issues with coverage in or around Marshes and the nervous feeling in my belly from before came back in a rush.

  “They’re using a scrambler,” I whispered.

  “What?” Dante barked, but I didn’t respond.

  I had moved toward the patio doors and was looking at the movements outside. There seemed to be a group of men, all dressed in dark clothes. Their heads were covered in baklavas and the only thing I could see where blurry man shaped shades.