by Stone, Naomi
Staring at the array of floral arrangements on screen before her, she found nothing eclectic enough to fit her style. The more inventive arrangements she loved seemed too wild to suit Pete. Several of the beautiful, formal concoctions of roses, orchids, and lilies looked as if they’d be right at home in his wedding, but not at hers. What did that say about them?
Besides, they were so expensive. She didn’t want to spend so much money on a one-time event when it could make day-to-day living so much more manageable. He’d see eye-to-eye with her line of reasoning. Maybe she should talk him into a simple civil ceremony at City Hall. Their closest friends and family would be there, but they wouldn’t need all the expense and foo-foo-raw–one of Aggie’s favorite words–of flowers and music and fancy gowns.
* * * *
Kathleen left the ABM offices earlier than she’d planned. If she were going to set up a meeting with Ms. Ellis, she’d rather do as much as possible by the light of day.
The gnarly man would be easiest to find. If he didn’t actually live in the lot behind the U-Store-It where Inspired Logic had its supposed offices, he at least kept a constant watch on the place and always appeared within minutes of her own arrival there.
At three o’clock the sun still shone high over the half industrial neighborhood, but cast deep shadows between the buildings. Kathleen parked near the end of the row of storage units, at the back of the building, where an alley ran behind the neatly maintained blocky structures, facades blazoned in a broad swath of red and punctuated with rows of garage-style doors.
The breeze struck her as cool for June, but one never knew what to expect in Minnesota. She remembered one May they’d had ninety-degree temperatures one week and snow the next. What on earth possessed her to live in such a place? She should be in New York City. Just a bit more progress on her career plans here and she would be in New York City, leap-frogging Mr. Carlson to move up the ladder at corporate headquarters.
She walked casually to the alley behind the building, as if loitering while waiting for someone who visited a storage unit. Stepping around the end of the building, she found the usual scrubby growth of saplings lining the neglected tract where the alley cut between the storage facility and the grain elevators further on. The breeze clattered through the leaves and long-limbed brush, sending assorted trash, mostly wrappers from the fast food place down the road, along the rutted way.
Kathleen scanned the scrub growth, peering into its shadows. The gnarly man always seemed to emerge from those shadows. He must have made some kind of nest for himself there, of fallen branches and cardboard boxes, most likely. She wrinkled her nose. Why would a woman like Ms. Ellis, who seemed always to be dressed at the height of fashion, impeccable in her appearance, consort with such shabby creatures?
Perhaps for the same reasons she herself had come here to find him. He would do the job she had for him.
A scuffling noise off to the side drew her attention to the very party she’d come to see. No more than four feet in height, as bent and gnarled as an old tree, wrinkled and clad in rags nearly indistinguishable in color from the dusty surface of the alley, he stood completely still. He stared at her with a look as pointed as if he’d actually said, ‘Well, what do you want?’
“I need to speak to Ms. Ellis.” Kathleen put some asperity into her tone. Whatever else he might be, he was an underling and should know his place.
“Wait,” he growled, fading back into the narrow stand of saplings and brush beside the buildings. Maybe he managed to get into the building through some hole hidden behind the unkempt fringe of growth?
She’d been here before and knew better than to complain of the wait. Through whatever means, the gnarly little man could contact Ms. Ellis and set up a meeting. Probably another of those very uncomfortable midnight meetings the woman seemed to prefer.
Kathleen hugged her suit jacket closer. It seemed both colder and darker here in the shadows behind the blank walls of the storage facility.
* * * *
In a fraction of the time it would have taken to bike there as Greg Roberts, Wonder Guy made the flight to the address Eric had helped ferret out. He’d scout out the location, take a look at the place. On the face of it, Professor Stevens had a right to back up student data to a site he deemed secure, but backing it up to an off-campus server smelled fishy. A server registered to a private company? It stank like fish forgotten for weeks in the trunk of the car after summer vacation, as he knew from experience.
Having studied MapQuest’s satellite images, Greg spotted the site from the air, a set of long low storage buildings in a neighborhood near the grain elevators along Hiawatha Avenue. What kind of research company used a storage unit for its business address?
Greg did another, lower pass. A few vehicles sat in the parking lanes between buildings.
He studied the visitors to the storage units as he circled high above. A couple of college-aged guys loaded boxes off the back of a pickup truck into one unit. An older guy sat on a campstool in the opening of another unit, apparently varnishing the hull of a small motorboat. A woman in business dress stood near the back of one building, a phone pressed to her ear. A late model red Audi sat parked not far from her, beside the last unit in the row.
Nobody looked suspicious, but who’d wear ski masks and trench coats to the site of an illicit operation? He focused Wonder Guy’s telescopic vision on the numbers painted above each unit, looking for #248. Bingo, the unit with the Audi parked in front. The woman must have some connection to Professor Stevens. How was she involved?
Greg circled higher lest she glance upward. He wondered how high he’d have to go to be mistaken for some circling bird. Funny how seldom people looked up. Everyone he observed with his super enhanced vision seemed intent on his or her own purposes. Whether they varnished a boat or loaded boxes, drove along the road, stopped at the gas station or McD’s, not a single person tilted a head to look at the great blue hemisphere above. Not that he wasn’t the same way, intent on the ground below him.
Greg executed a slow roll, surveying the sky above him as well as the land below. Above, only shreds of wispy cloud marked the blue sky. What more did he expect? He rolled his shoulders, trying to shake an uncomfortable sensation of being watched. If anyone did have him under satellite or telescopic observation, he’d just have to live with it.
He should concern himself with the woman below him. Her presence at the professor’s storage unit made her a good subject for surveillance. He’d follow her, maybe pick up some clue to her identity and involvement with Professor Stevens’ scheme.
Maybe she had nothing to do with it, though. She made no move toward the storage unit. She went instead to the shadows of the alley behind the facility, lingering there for no apparent reason, where a thin line of saplings and brush grew between the narrow alley and the neighboring grain elevators.
He scanned the area from above, the cool air molding itself around his outstretched limbs as if he swam an insubstantial sea. From the woman’s stance, she might be speaking to someone hidden in the scraggly growth. Yet, not even his enhanced vision revealed anyone present.
* * * *
What now? Gloria wondered, during her evening–if she called three-thirty in the afternoon evening–drive home. She couldn’t marry Pete. They didn’t fit. Or, she might be able to fit him into her admittedly eclectic life-style, but he belonged with someone more his own style. Someone who’d complement his simple (boring), formal (staid) and unadorned (empty) life-style.
He might claim to love her, even with all the arts and crafts adorning her walls: from her historical t-shirt quilt to her macramé pillow hammock, fruit-section clocks, and experiments in Ukrainian egg-dying that resembled works of Mondrian. But face it, after a while, he’d start wincing inside, turning away, looking for his proper match in some quiet woman of simple tastes.
Gloria drove her usual route, focused on the road and responsive to the traffic, but preoccupied with how little she had in
common with Pete, which should upset her far more than it did. She and Pete were over. It left her with a sort of melancholy, as if she looked back at a half-remembered dream, but she was letting go of someone whom, yesterday, she would have said she loved. She did love Pete, in a way. He was as dear as any of her friends and coworkers. Only she ought to feel more for someone she meant to marry.
* * * *
Elysha did not sleep as humans did. She let herself slip into a dreamlike state wherein her mind wove itself among the limbs and the roots of the green lives surrounding her to absorb something of the serenity in which they grew. At least, it seemed like serenity to her. Each life ruthlessly striving to extend itself to the heights and depths it could reach, regardless of how one might strangle or overshadow another. All in a season’s work. It soothed her to dwell here where such avid life flourished.
Because she did not sleep, the sylph did not wake her when it approached, but it drew her from a restful state and woke her temper.
“Why do you disturb me?” Elysha stirred from her place in a stand of birches, applying the spell that made her eyes shine hard as green flints.
“With news I come.” The gossamer thing trembled like cobwebs in a stiff breeze. “The Hero pursues your human tool, she who has met with you at midnight times where the water flows from trap to trap.”
“That one.” Kathleen, the human woman who craved power above all. Elysha frowned. The threatened scheme still unfolded. Only one of many, it ran deep enough to strike many lives when it finally blew apart like a ripened seedpod. “You were correct to tell me. I cannot allow his interference in this plan.”
The sylph steadied in its semblance of a feminine waif made entirely of sheer veils, flickering in and out of visibility in the scant sunshine penetrating the leafy boughs above.
Elysha considered. She bent to retrieve a broken chunk of masonry wedged between the roots of an oak. “Take this.”
“It’s too heavy, Mistress.” The sylph trembled anew.
Elysha scowled. Indeed, the wispy being could no more have lifted one of the monstrosities of steel crowding the city’s roads. Ah, a stirring in the brambles alerted her. A gnarled, manlike minion approached.
“The human-who-would-be-queen seeks audience, Mistress.”
“Very good.” She almost smiled. “Return to her with this.” She extended the broken chunk of cement and brick. “Tell her to keep it with her and meet me at moonrise at the usual place.”
A set of fingers as gnarled as twigs took the stone, and tucked it in to disappear among the creature’s rags.
* * * *
Greg maintained his surveillance from such a height he’d seem like a dot in the sky if anyone looked up. A few clouds floated higher still or trailed in such thin wisps, like the veils of an exotic dancer, they obscured nothing of the land below. At least they obscured nothing to Wonder Guy’s enhanced vision.
Detective shows and novels–his primary source of instruction on crime-fighting–portrayed surveillance as a boring chore. Maybe they were right when it came to ground-based operations, sitting in a car, waiting for something to happen as minutes turned into hours, but from up here, Greg found it fascinating.
Not only did he have the thrill of flying, of surfing the air currents as if he’d been transformed to some mythic creature like a dragon or Pegasus, but this perspective afforded him views open to no ordinary pilot. Keeping half an eye on the woman who loitered behind the storage facility, he experimented with combining his telescopic and x-ray visions. He zoomed in on his subject to read the license plate on her car and focused the x-ray vision on the contents of its trunk: a rather ordinary spare tire and set of tools. It proved tricky. Overshooting brought him past an object to things on the other side. With practice, he peeked into her briefcase on the back seat of the vehicle. Unfortunately, reading the documents became something different without the spectrum of visible light. He distinguished metal–an iPhone and a manicure set–from the ghost-shapes made by pads and folders, but anything printed on the paper remained unreadable.
Maybe if he had enough time to practice he could learn to use this vision to make such fine spectroscopic distinctions. In the meanwhile, he switched his attention to the object he’d originally planned to investigate, the storage unit beside the car.
Penetrating the roof proved easier than it would have been to see through the metal of the accordion-style garage door. Even with the steel I-beams of the ceiling in the way, he recognized the boxy shapes of a pair of servers and the snaking lines of cables hooked to a ceiling fixture probably meant only to provide light to the unit. The other odd, metallic construct might have been a portable backup generator.
His attention had strayed from the woman, but when she moved, he turned back to her, surveying the scene afresh as she entered her car and maneuvered back toward the main road.
He must have missed something. He scanned the area where she’d loitered, but nothing had changed, only the same scrubby undergrowth and ragged sapling, certainly no living soul.
From this height, he easily tracked her vehicle as it headed north and merged with traffic headed downtown.
As they neared the West Bank area and St. Mary’s hospital, Greg flew with renewed caution, attentive to any sign of waning powers. He flew much higher now than he’d been before, when he’d come in too close to his birthplace hospital. Now he figured he flew high enough to be outside the radius of whatever mysterious and illogical influence the edifice had on him. He estimated the distance equaled roughly fifteen hundred feet. If he maintained an altitude of at least three thousand feet relative to St. Mary’s he should be okay, right?
His logic seemed good. At least, he passed what he estimated as five thousand feet above the hospital without incident, following his subject’s car past the area toward the outskirts of the downtown district, until she pulled into a parking area. What could the suspect woman be doing at ABM’s offices? A chill went through him. Gloria worked there.
Though he meant to stay too high to be noticed by casual observers, Greg dropped altitude, drawn to place himself between this questionable woman and anything having to do with Gloria.
Only a sudden queasy feeling of lost control, like brakes going squishy, warned him to pull up again before he plummeted thousands of feet to the unforgiving streets below.
* * * *
Gloria made good time heading home via side streets to avoid the rush hour traffic. It took her longer to get from the front door to her bedroom.
“Where’d you stay last night?” growled her father from his usual seat on the couch, in front of the usual array of empty and half-empty cans on the coffee table as the TV competed with the sound of his voice.
She’d stopped off at the house that morning, showered and dressed while he’d still been asleep in his room. No such luck now.
“I called you, remember?” She kept her tone even. “My friend died. I was too upset to come home and slept over at Aggie’s.”
“Too upset to walk from one house to the next?”
“Don’t start this, Dad.” Don’t get sucked in. Gloria fought the impulse to hunch her shoulders and kept moving, hanging her jacket in the closet. She continued through the living room as she spoke. “What would you have done if I’d started crying? I needed someone to be nice and just listen to me.”
“I always listen to you.” He wore his aggrieved expression. “You didn’t give me the chance. Think I can’t be nice to my own daughter?”
She paused at the head of the short hallway leading to the bedrooms. “Maybe you can.” Talking to him always came out wrong somehow. Gloria softened her voice. “I was too wrung out to take a chance on it.” She bit her tongue. It took so little to set him off.
“Fine thing,” he muttered. “It’s a good thing your mother isn’t here to see how her daughter acts toward her father.” He bent to pick up a can still dewy with condensation.
“Now that’s too much,” Gloria snapped, in more ways th
an one. “This isn’t about you. One of my best friends just died. I was in shock, devastated.” She’d had too much of this, too many years of walking on eggshells around this man. “I’m sorry if my grief prevented me from being here for you to poke at, or tell me how I’m not good enough for Pete or his family.”
She clenched her jaw. She hated this, hated feeling this angry and hated spewing it at the man she’d come to pity as much as she resented him. It gave her a sick feeling, not in her gut so much as in her heart.
“If it makes you happy,” she said as she turned away from him, “I think you’re right. I’m not going to fit in with Pete or his family. I’m not going to marry him.” She moved to her own room.
Her father muttered, “No, it doesn’t make me happy.”
She closed the door behind her.
* * * *
It took his whole effort to ascend again, fighting with his weakened powers as if struggling up the face of a cliff hand over hand, Finally, Greg gained enough altitude for the sense of weakness to ease, and he no longer felt in danger of winding up flattened against the pavement of the ABM parking lot.
What the hell? St. Mary’s was at least a couple miles from here. ABM might have some meaning for him, but represented nothing like his ‘planet of origin.’
Greg came in to a careful landing three long blocks away from the ABM building. Best to reconnoiter on foot from here. It would be safer, not risking a fall. It would be even safer to go as plain Greg Roberts, but he couldn’t be sure whether he’d be able to detect the influence that had weakened him just now if he switched out of his Wonder Guy guise.
The effect hadn’t seemed as strong as around St. Mary’s, where he’d been thrown so roughly from the sky before, but this incident had weakened him enough that he felt lucky to have made it safely back to terra firma.