by Chris Jordan
Helen beams. We’re in the library, her domain, and a hushed murmuring comes from the children’s reading nook, where a book is about to be ‘talked’ by one of the volunteers for the Every Day Reads program.
The daily book talk is Noah’s favorite part of a visit to the library. If I close my eyes I can almost hear him among the eager children, struggling to keep his voice down. It hurts, but no more than usual. I haven’t gotten used to the pain, but have come to expect it as a constant presence in my life. The fact that someone is finally following up on my suspicions has helped immensely-I’m no longer quite so alone.
“What’s he like?” Helen wants to know.
I shrug. “Kind of retro, I guess. Fortysomething. Get this-his hobby is visiting diners.”
“Diners? Are you serious?”
“As serious as pie à la mode. He loves those funky old roadside diners, what can I say?”
“Okay, a diner maven. What else? I heard he was really tall. Basketball player tall.”
“More like football player tall. Hey,” I ask suddenly, “what do you mean you heard? What did you hear?”
Helen smiles, her gray eyes alight with mischief. “Troy’s dispatcher has a five-year-old,” she explains, nodding at the reading nook. “That’s all she had, a physical description. Tall and yummy. Her words, not mine.”
Yummy. Sorry, but I don’t think of Shane that way. Any more than you’d be assessing the yummy factor when a fireman is carrying you out of a burning building. Later, maybe, after you’re safe.
I’m a long way from safe. Safe will be when I have my little boy back, then I can decide whether or not Randall Shane is yummy. Until then, all that matters is, is he willing to run into a fire?
“You said he doesn’t care about the money,” Helen prompts.
“Doesn’t appear to. Won’t take a penny until he’s convinced he can help me find Noah. If that’s part of a con, it’s a really good one. Plus, I think for him finding missing children is more of a life mission than a way to make a living. What happened, he lost his wife and daughter in a road accident.”
“Oh my god.”
“Which explains his sleep disorder,” I add.
“Excuse me?”
“Just before he left, the big guy finally revealed some of the gory details. How he and his wife and daughter had been coming back from Washington, D.C. How Shane was nodding off so his wife took over driving on the Jersey Turnpike, and that’s when they got hit by a truck whose driver was asleep at the wheel of his big rig. Car crushed, Shane the only survivor, waking up to find them both gone, his life forever changed. Sleep and death are now associated in his mind, hence his aversion to normal sleep. Or that’s what the shrinks have told him.”
“What a terrible thing,” says Helen, her eyes glistening.
“Yeah,” I agree. “You want to know an even more terrible thing? He tells me that, and my first reaction is to be glad it happened, because if it didn’t, he wouldn’t be helping me now. Isn’t that awful?”
Helen pats my hand. “No, my dear, it’s not awful. It’s human. We’re all human. Even your big, yummy knight in shining armor is human.”
“Not too human, I hope,” I say.
Home again, home again, where I’m not quite bouncing off the walls. Brain humming with all the recent facts and details…The bomber’s expensive new wheels, provided by person or persons unknown. The mysterious disappearance of the supposedly matching tissue samples. From a lab owned, however distantly, by Jedediah’s father. Whose famous book was found in the bomber’s wretched trailer. All of it more or less confirming my gut, that the whole terrible siege of the school had been a smoke screen-a literal one in those final moments-for whisking Noah away.
But why? For what purpose? What Arthur Conklin might want with a grandson he’d never met? Can’t bear thinking about that. Was it possible that the old man never knew the boy existed until Jed died? Was it the plane crash that set off a chain of events that turned me into the madwoman of Humble, wandering the streets in search of her lost son?
Possible, yes. From everything my late husband alluded to, his father would not be constrained by what we mere mortals consider right or moral, good or bad. What he wants he takes. No apologies. No consideration for the normal attachments of parent and child.
Okay, maybe the old man really doesn’t have a conscience. But even so why go to the enormous, complicated trouble of making it look like Noah was dead? Why not just kidnap him? Why go all Tarantino on it? Conklin had to be getting old, late seventies at least-maybe he thinks his grandchild is destined to take his place. But why not make contact? See if they could draw me into the fold? Make me a true believer? Surely they don’t think a ten-year-old boy can run their empire? And even if they do, why not go to court, seeking custody? With all their high-powered lawyers, no doubt they could find a way to make me look like an incompetent mother if they tried hard enough.
Calm down. Think clearly. There has to be something else. More going on than a man simply wanting to take control of the last of his estranged family by any means possible. Some madness at the root of the old man’s cult, some crazy thing they believe. Something I don’t get because I don’t understand-don’t want to understand-the philosophy or religion or whatever it is that made him such a selfish, greedy monster to drive a truly decent man like Jedediah from his heart.
Really, it’s more than I can stand to think about, because if I think about that I’ll start obsessing on where Noah is this very instant, what they’ve done to him, are doing to him. And that way lies insanity. So I fire up my iMac-Jed preferred that operating system for some reason-and resume my search for Irene Delancey, the teacher Noah had such a crush on.
I shouldn’t blame her for quitting, but I do. No doubt some of it was guilt on her part. She was the only teacher in the school to lose one of her students, and it couldn’t have been easy, dealing with the boy’s bereft mother. Not that I ever blamed her for what happened. She said he was there when she gathered up the kids and led them out through the smoke and that somehow he vanished between the seats and the exit door, and I believed her. It was panicked and crazy in there, losing track of a child in the blinding smoke would have been so easy. But in those first few days after the blast, when I saw quite a bit of her and the other children, she seemed to have withdrawn, tightened up somehow. She avoided looking me in the eye, as if one look would pass on the madness of grief. As if she didn’t dare make contact, couldn’t bear to deal with the raw emotions, or with me.
And then she was gone. Resigned: trauma and stress. No forwarding address left with the school district. No word left with her fellow teachers, or any of the parents, including me. She and her husband just packed up and split. Through various search engines I’d been able to find a few references to Michael Delancey, a day trader who worked from his home office. Until their move to Humble he’d been employed by a Wall Street firm, belonged to a couple of professional organizations, and since Irene wasn’t popping up anywhere new, I’d been concentrating on the husband. My assumption being that he’d keep in contact with his investment banker cronies. So far no joy there-most of my inquiries were ignored, a few were downright rude because the recipient assumed I was a phisher, trolling for salable numbers, bank accounts and so on. One flaming response had accused me of being some “puffy geek in his pajamas, pretending to be a bereaved parent so he can steal someone else’s hard-earned money” and threatened to report me to the FBI. I responded by begging him to report me, hoping the FBI would take an interest. That’s before I found Randall Shane mentioned on a missing-kid Web site-a mom raving about how he’d done the impossible-and located his phone number in the White Pages. Before things finally began looking up.
I don’t blame Irene Delancey for what happened, truly I don’t, but I do have a few questions. Some of the kids in Noah’s class seem to think he’d slipped beneath the seats and wasn’t with the group when she led them out through the smoke. If so, why didn’t s
he mention that to me or the various detectives investigating the crime scene? Was she ashamed, guilty, what? Or did she witness something that frightened her even more than a crazed, gun-waving lunatic? Something going down that made her want to run away and forget she’d ever been here?
That kind of question. But first I had to find her. She didn’t strike me as the type who would be comfortable or even capable of changing her identity-not like Jedediah, for instance-so some trace of her had to be out there somewhere. New vehicular registration, new phone number, new credit application, something. Trouble is, it’s only been six weeks and some of this stuff takes months to get on a database, so for now Irene Delancey is a phantom, there but not there.
Still, it gives me something to do, a project I can handle on my own. A point of focus that insulates me from the anxiety of waiting on Randall Shane. Who says he’ll be back in a day, two at the most.
I really and truly believe him, I do, I do. If Noah can be found, he’ll find him. Cling to that. Own it.
When the phone trills, cell not the landline, I’m sure it’s Shane.
“Yes?”
“Haley Corbin?” asks an unfamiliar voice.
“Yes, who is this?”
“Um, I’m, ah, not sure I should give you my name,” says a young male, practically stammering. “But it’s about your kid. What I saw.”
He has all of my attention.
3. Two And A Half Wows
Shane waits on the curb, eyeballing the traffic on Route 29 in Fairfax City, Virginia. On the lookout for a Diamond cab conveying his late lunch date from the district. Late and getting later every minute that passes. Probably gridlock in the capitol, road construction, maybe even a presidential motorcade. If he had a lick of sense he’d have skipped the nostalgia trip and arranged to meet closer to where she worked. Some trendy latte café or maybe the Willard, she always liked the Willard.
“Hey, handsome, looking for a good time?”
Shane jerks around, finds her standing behind him, grinning.
“Cabbie made a wrong turn,” she says. “So I walked a block or two.”
“Maggie! My God, what happened!”
Maggie Drew, ten years his senior, lifts her fragile, damaged hands and executes a pirouette, showing off her slender legs. “Amazing, huh? Look, Ma, no canes. No limp. No pain.”
Shane stares and stammers. He’s never seen her so healthy, so mobile. “It’s…it’s a miracle,” he says, believing it.
She giggles. “Oh yeah. I crawled the last mile at Lourdes.”
“No,” he says, fighting to contain his astonishment.
“Okay, ya got me. It wasn’t Lourdes. It’s a miracle of modern medicine.”
“What happened?”
“Buy me lunch, I’ll tell you all about it.”
She links arms, a bit awkward because of the difference in height, and he walks her to the diner. She remarks that it has been years, and it has. Too long. Back when he’d been active with the Bureau, he and Maggie Drew had been a pair. She, limping around on two canes, determinedly cheerful; Shane, a devotee of her brilliant mind, her caustic sense of humor, her insights into human behavior. Maggie a civvie, Shane an SA without portfolio, drifting from one posting to another, a bit of a lone wolf. Maggie joked about being his work spouse, but jokes aside, there was some truth to it, their mutual affection and comfort level, how they looked out for each other.
Now, and he finds this hard to believe, a decade has passed and Maggie Drew has to be in her fifties, except she has somehow gotten a youthful glow that makes her look younger than she did in the bad old days when her body was racked with rheumatoid arthritis.
They take a booth, Maggie looking around, remembering. “Hasn’t changed a bit,” she says. “The first time you took me here? We were working the Branch Davidians, just before it all went south, which had me a bit distracted, so that’s my excuse for a brain malfunction. I thought you were taking me to some romantic little restaurant away from the big city, maybe you had a motel in mind.”
Shane blushes.
“You haven’t changed, either,” she says. “Still blushing like a stoplight at the merest hint of flirtation. Don’t worry, I was planning to let you down easy. Compete with that gorgeous wife of yours? Never entered my little brain. And I got over it quick when I saw this joint. Don’t get me wrong, I love the old 29, but romantic it ain’t.”
29 Diner, a landmark of sorts, dates from the late 1940s and clings to the past with attitude. Or, with attitude and a righteous royal cheeseburger and a ten-buck T-bone. Back in the day, when the job got to him he’d trek out here, have a milk shake. It calmed him down-his own personal Prozac. And he shared it with Maggie.
“So how’d you do it?” he asks, staring at her healthy self. “Join a rejuvenation cult?”
Her smile is impish, secretive. “We need more of those, but no. I did it the old-fashioned way. I found me a new doc, he’s a bit of a stud, actually, and he put me on a new drug. A TNF blocker. Tried ’em before, but this is a new version and this time it worked. I skin-pop the stuff every two weeks and so far the RA is in deep remission. It doesn’t hurt to sit, it doesn’t hurt to walk, it doesn’t hurt to be alive. Can’t do anything about the joint damage to my hands, but other than that, I’m good to go.”
“Oh, Maggie.”
“Don’t you dare cry on me, Randall.”
Nobody calls him Randall. He grins, eyes glistening. “I’m so happy for you.”
“It’s amazing, it really is,” she says eagerly, her pixie features lighting up. “I had no idea what it was like, walking down the street without my sticks. The weird thing is, sometimes I even miss them. You know, when I want to club a baby seal or whatever.”
That gets Shane laughing, and something that has been tight around his heart for years lets go. “Wow,” he says, hand on his chest. “I’m getting a contact high.”
“There’s only one cure for that,” says Maggie, lifting her menu. “A Cheeseburger Royal.”
They order, eat, reminisce, catch up. An hour passes and Shane is having so much fun he doesn’t want to spoil the reunion by bringing up current business. She knows this, of course, has anticipated his hesitation, and apparently finds it endearing, or at least familiar. She waits until he fingers up the last crumb of piecrust, then leans in, her voice low and seductive.
“Still no motel, huh?” she says, batting her long lashes. “The only reason you call is to pick my brains. Some girls would consider that an insult.”
“I love your brains,” he says. “Is that so wrong?”
“Relax, Randall. I got the goods for you. Everything you ever wanted to know about the Rulers and were afraid to ask.”
“Dazzle me.”
Maggie Drew never reads from notes. She’s always had an uncanny ability to absorb and retain pretty much anything she reads. Retain, evaluate, reason through, she’s able to sift through the chaff, locate the kernels of truth, and explain it all in a way that makes sense to the big bosses and also, generously, to lowly SAs looking for guidance. Which is how she and Shane first crossed paths.
“How much do you know?” she asks. Not an idle question.
“The very basics. Guy writes a self-help book, makes a mint. The book turns into a cult. He makes even more money. He becomes an eccentric recluse. Howard Hughes without the airplanes.”
“Cute.”
“Got it from People magazine. An old issue.”
“It would be old,” she says. “The Arthur Conklin organization has ongoing lawsuits with every popular magazine, most tabloids, network and cable news organizations, and poor little Wikipedia. Basically if you publish a word about him that isn’t from an official Conklin Institute PR release, you’ll be sued. God forbid if you say something critical about him or the Rulers or what they believe in. Repeat a rumor, mention an allegation that can’t be substantiated in court, libel lawyers descend from the heavens like intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuking your ass into bankruptcy.�
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“Which explains why I can’t find anything solid on the Net.”
“Yep.”
“And why I need to consult with the foremost cult expert in America.”
“You flatter me,” she says, obviously pleased. “Although it happens to be true. There are young pups nipping at my heels, but I’ve forgotten more than they know.”
“And you don’t forget anything.”
She shrugs, admitting it. “What can I say? Understand, for the last few years my department has been focusing on the international side. Mostly suicide bomber cults. Not much focus on the domestic cults, unless they happen to utter a chant to Allah. I just got back from Birmingham, England. I’m writing a paper on how Islamists persuade native-born lager louts to don very fashionable explosive vests and blow themselves to bits. On loan to MI5, more or less. So I haven’t had a look at the Rulers recently.”
“Whatever you’ve got.”
“Okay. Let’s start with the basic history. In 1969 Arthur Conklin is a forty-five-year-old professor of entomology at UC Berkeley, married to a former student twenty years his junior. Nice for him. His special interest is bees. He’s widely published on hive behavior. A tenured professor, well respected in his field, but something happens-there was a lot of radical stuff going down that year at Berkeley, chaotic behavior he took exception to, he’s a pretty conservative guy, is Professor Conklin-and he resigned from his professorship and severed all ties with the university. He and his wife-they have no children-move to a rural area of Colorado, where they live in a remote cabin in the mountains while he writes his famous book.”
“They have no children?”
“Not then. After the book is published his wife gets pregnant and they have one child, a boy. Bit of a miracle baby because Professor Conklin has a very low sperm count, result of a fever when he was a child. They name the miracle baby Arthur J. Conklin. Different middle name so he’s not a junior.”