by T. L. Hines
In the room, Nathan jumped on his bed as if it were a trampoline, even executing a leg tuck and roll. Ron laughed. ‘‘Don’t let your mom see you doing that. She’ll be scared you’re going to break the bed. Or your neck.’’
‘‘Nah, she don’t mind,’’ Nathan said.
‘‘Oh, really? Well, why don’t we just call her in and ask her?’’ Ron turned and looked her direction. She jumped back a step and immediately tried to think of a good excuse why she was eavesdropping. Ron cupped his hands to his mouth and acted as if he was about to call out. Nathan squealed, then leaped to his feet and covered Ron’s mouth.
Ron laughed, a good long laugh that came from deep inside, and Nathan joined in. He hadn’t seen her at all, it seemed.
Nathan fell back on his pillow, letting his head bounce a few times in comic exaggeration. ‘‘You gonna read me a story, Dad?’’
‘‘Sure, we’ll read a story. You pick.’’ Nathan scooted to the bookcase at the end of his bed, picked out a book, then rolled over and handed it to Ron. Ron opened the book but paused. ‘‘But before the story in this book, I want to tell you a story about me,’’ Ron said.
This was it; Rachel knew this was it. Ron was going to tell Nathan something about his past. She didn’t feel comfortable watching, but she didn’t move, either. She could listen, couldn’t she? God would give her something.
‘‘Okay, Daddy.’’
‘‘I wanted to tell you about the best present I ever got in my whole life.’’
Nathan’s eyes saucered; talk of presents was always a good thing. ‘‘The best present ever?’’ he asked breathlessly. ‘‘What was it?’’
‘‘It was this great picture of a hand.’’ Ron held out his hand, tracing around the fingers with the index finger of his other hand. ‘‘It had all these colors on it, and it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’’
Nathan smiled. ‘‘My hand, Daddy?’’
Ron nodded as he bent to kiss him. ‘‘Your hand.’’
Rachel realized at once she had been wrong, and her radar went to zero. Ron hadn’t told a story and made himself cry. He had told a story and made her cry. She swiped a few tears from her cheek and backed down the hallway as quietly as she could. God had indeed given her something in that scene: a reassurance Ron wasn’t a monster, but a man.
Trouble was, she wasn’t sure that was the answer she’d wanted. It was the far more difficult answer.
In the kitchen she poured another cup of coffee and brought it into the living room. Ron would be out any minute, and she wanted to say something to him. What, she didn’t know. But she knew she wanted to say something.
As she sat down, she abruptly thought of a scene from the movie Alien. Why she’d thought of it, she had no idea, but there it was. When she’d seen it as a kid, the opening scenes had bothered her— more, in fact, than anything in the rest of the movie. In those scenes, the ship’s crew started waking from a deep sleep. In their little rocket-shaped pods, the astronauts looked dead; the pod doors blocked out air, keeping them preserved. When the pod doors opened and the crew slowly began waking, Rachel had started getting a headache from the tension. She hadn’t paid attention to the rest of the movie, because she’d simply sat immobile, breathing deeply. The thought of those closed doors had cramped her lungs, and she’d needed air.
The thoughts came together. Ron was one of those crew members. He’d been in deep sleep for a long time, and he was waking up. And just like in the movie, it was painful to watch.
Ron walked into the living room, interrupting her reverie. She stood, felt awkward. Sat again. She picked up her coffee, took a sip, gave him a weak smile.
‘‘Won’t be long ’til he’s out,’’ Ron offered.
‘‘Lots of excitement. Your coming over was a special treat for him.’’
‘‘Well,’’ he said, ‘‘I’ve had my share of excitement lately, too.’’
‘‘You’ll have to tell me about it sometime,’’ she said.
‘‘I promise.’’
He walked to the door and opened it. ‘‘Don’t take this wrong or anything,’’ Rachel found herself blurting before he could leave, ‘‘but you seem different.’’
He stopped, his hand on the door handle. ‘‘Different how?’’
‘‘I don’t know. Like a different person.’’
He smiled. ‘‘Maybe I am,’’ he said. After the door clicked shut behind him, she closed her eyes and listened. His car door creaked open and shut; then the car started and moved out of the driveway. A few seconds later the sound of the car receded into the distance.
Her prayers had worked: God was helping her see Ron as an actual, honest-to-goodness person.
She just hoped there wasn’t an alien inside him.
30
TESTING
The guy who ran the polygraph machine (What would he be called? Polygraph Technician? Lie Detector Administrator?) sat at the end of the table. He looked something like Mr. Clean to Jude, mostly because of the bald head. Jude was about to take a lie detector test from Mr. Clean. There was a joke in that somewhere, but Jude couldn’t think of one; he was getting too nervous.
Jude tried not to concentrate on the wires and paraphernalia. Electrodes sprouted from various parts of his body, including his temples. A blood pressure cuff gripped his right arm. And the actual polygraph machine itself was enormous: when Mr. Clean sat down behind it, Jude could see just eyes and the top of a bald, shiny pate.
Maybe this was a mistake. Jude hadn’t done anything wrong, sure, but that didn’t mean he’d come through the test unscathed. Just sitting here was nerve wracking enough, and the electrodes were beginning to itch. With his left hand he reached up to scratch. Wires popped off and hung limply.
Jude gave a weak apology. Mr. Clean said nothing. Instead he stopped jotting notes on his clipboard, stood, and reattached the wires, this time to Jude’s arm. When he sat down again, he checked a few readouts on his Frankenstein machine, marked something with a black marker, and finally looked at Jude. Jude, the Laboratory Rat.
‘‘Okay, Mr. Gress. I’ll ask a series of questions, and you’ll just answer yes or no.’’
Jude tried a smile, but he was sure it came across as more of a grimace.
‘‘Let’s start with the date, then. Is today September twenty-eighth?’’
First question, and he didn’t know the answer. Jude Allman, once upon a time, had been good with dates. Ron Gress, on the other hand, never had much use for them. When you didn’t keep a busy social calendar filled with charity events and social soirees, you had no need to worry about such things.
‘‘Um, I don’t know,’’ Jude said truthfully. ‘‘Is today September twenty-eighth?’’
‘‘Yes,’’ Mr. Clean assured him.
‘‘Then yes,’’ Jude said. Mr. Clean made another mark on the readout. ‘‘Did I get that one right?’’ Jude asked. He needed a little humor, a bit of levity.
Mr. Clean didn’t chuckle. He looked at Jude, his mouth unyielding and straight as a razor.
Okay, so much for humor. It wasn’t working for Jude, either; he felt more like throwing up than smiling.
‘‘Are you thirty-two years old?’’
Jude took a breath. ‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘Is your name Ron Gress?’’
He answered automatically. ‘‘Yes,’’ he said, then realized that wasn’t the total truth. ‘‘Um, no,’’ he added quickly.
The technician arched an eyebrow at him, then looked down at his readouts again. ‘‘Do you have a son named Nathan Sanders?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘Do you know a man named Kenneth Sohler?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘And have you had any contact with Kenneth Sohler in the last twenty-four hours?’’
Jude paused. Where was this going? ‘‘The last time I had contact with Mr. Sohler, it was a bedpost making contact with his head.’’ This test was beginning to make him a bit
angry.
‘‘Yes or no, Mr. Gress.’’
‘‘No.’’
‘‘And do you know where Mr. Sohler is now?’’
‘‘No, I don’t. Do you?’’
‘‘Have you and Mr. Sohler been kidnapping children, Mr. Gress?’’
Jude blinked a few times, felt as though he’d just stepped out of a nice warm shower only to have a bucket of ice poured on him. Did Mr. Clean ask if he’d been kidnapping kids? The kidnapper—Sohler— wait, wait. Jude recalled the television interview, and Odum saying they were looking for the owner of the house. Maybe Sohler really was missing, and maybe the police really did think he had something to do with the abductions.
Crazy, yes. But not over-the-top crazy, not beyond the realm of possibility. The kids would say he’d rescued them, wouldn’t they? And the police would confirm what the kids said with Sohler’s story and injuries. If Sohler were missing, he’d be the key link to exonerating Jude.
He tried to swallow the dry medicinal taste in his mouth. It wasn’t copper, but it worried him just the same. He felt his body collapsing in on itself, as if his bones were gone and he was just a balloon of skin filled with leaking helium. (Dad sitting over my bed.) An image of his father flashed into his mind for a brief moment, (over my bed) but it was gone in a white-hot instant. Other flashes danced before his eyes like a disastrous fireworks show—not flashes of memories but flashes of his mind misfiring. It was the brain’s equivalent of Does Not Compute, and Jude struggled to reboot. He couldn’t grasp how things had taken such a wrong turn. Tell me if you’ve been kidnapping kids, Mr. Gress—or whatever your real name is. Child abductors like to change their names and use aliases, you know. What are you really hiding?
Then his eyesight cleared, and what he saw wasn’t a black cloud of pity for himself. His mind turned red, red as rage, red as blood. Jude bolted from the table, popping electrodes away from his body as he stood. This evidently wasn’t what Mr. Clean had expected; he recoiled.
Jude turned to the one-way mirror behind him. One of the electrodes— or maybe it was the blood pressure cuff—valiantly fought to stay connected. He heard the sound of the giant machine sliding across the table, trying to follow him. It fell to the floor, a final fitting sound for the world crashing down around him.
‘‘Hey, what the—’’ Mr. Clean began, but Jude wasn’t looking at the technician anymore. He was looking at his own reflection in the one-way mirror, picturing Chief Odum on the other side.
‘‘I think you and I need to talk, Chief Odum,’’ Jude said. ‘‘Now.’’
Same setup, different room. Jude sat across from Odum again, only instead of a white table, it was now Odum’s desk—a large steel desk that looked like a leftover from the 1950s.
Jude simmered. He was a suspect, and it made him mad to think anyone would accuse him of mistreating kids, locking them up the way Sohler . . . He shuddered, pushing the thought from his mind. In the meantime, he was sitting here, about to play some more cat-and-mouse with Chief Odum. If he was right, Sohler was missing; so why wasn’t Odum out there looking for the guy? He had to be the kidnapper everyone was talking about in the news.
Jude cleared his throat. ‘‘Based on your tester’s questions, I’m guessing Sohler’s gone.’’
Odum sat quietly, rocked back in his chair. After a few moments of silence, he spoke. ‘‘You’re guessing right.’’
‘‘You lost him.’’ A jab, trying to make Odum wince a bit.
Instead, Odum smiled bitterly. ‘‘I did at that, Mr. Gress. Had him under twenty-four-hour watch, waiting for the discharge orders.’’ Odum leaned back in his chair, seemed to consider his next words carefully. ‘‘Somebody else, though, had other ideas. Early morning hours, night before last—say about three in the morning—someone got the drop on Officer Barber, knocked him out, I’m guessing. Barber never got a look at the guy, or if he did, he can’t remember. A concussion has a way of scrambling the brain for a while. Anyway, I LAZARUS thought that person might be you, in to spring your friend from the hospital.’’ Odum smacked his lips, looked at the ceiling. ‘‘Of course, you understand.’’
‘‘He’s not my friend, I told you that.’’
Odum shrugged.
‘‘So he’s been loose for—what?—a whole day?’’ Jude said.
‘‘Little more than that.’’
‘‘And you didn’t bring me in for questioning until last night.’’
Odum nodded. ‘‘We were keeping an eye on you. Thought you might be making a move, going to meet him somewhere.’’
Jude shuddered. For a few years he’d had the growing feeling he was being watched, monitored, followed. He’d been healing recently, realizing it was paranoia. Ironically, now that he’d shaken that feeling, he really was being followed.
‘‘Why haven’t I heard anything about it? Seems like it would have been all over the news by now.’’
‘‘Seems like it, doesn’t it?’’ Odum flashed another bitter grin. ‘‘One benefit to having a small police force, a close-knit police force.’’
Jude felt his anger rising. ‘‘But shouldn’t you be looking for him?’’
Odum closed his eyes. ‘‘I’m working on it, Mr. Gress. The entire Red Lodge police force is working on it. And then some. Feds have punched their dance card, too.’’
Jude felt the exhaustion radiating off Odum and backed off, letting his anger subside. He shook his head, trying to loosen the jumbled thoughts fastening themselves to his skull. No way he was going to figure it all out right now. Oddly, he found himself wishing Kristina were here. She would have some ideas, say something to help.
‘‘Sorry about your equipment,’’ Jude said, a mild peace offering extended to Odum.
Odum shrugged. ‘‘Polygraph results make good toilet paper, and that’s about it. Machine wasn’t even downloading data. Just an old trick to get people sweating.’’
‘‘Well, it worked.’’
‘‘Partly. I still don’t have a lot of answers I’m looking for. Some of them from you.’’
‘‘Do we really have to go into this right now?’’
Odum wiped at a line of sweat trickling down his forehead. ‘‘Sitting here trying to go toe-to-toe with me isn’t going to do much. One, you’ll lose the match—I’ve got the gun, I’ve got the badge. Two, we’ll waste a lot of time.’’
‘‘Okay, okay.’’ Jude sighed.
‘‘So who are you, really, Mr. Gress?’’
Time to trot out the lie he’d been rehearsing since last night. ‘‘My real name is Kevin Burkhart,’’ he said, pulling out the name of his childhood friend from Bingham, Nebraska.
Odum scratched down the name. ‘‘And why are you using an assumed name, Mr., uh, Burkhart?’’
‘‘I made a few bad business decisions, ended up going broke. Bankrupt, actually. So it made sense for me to just start over. New life, new place, all that.’’
‘‘And you decided to start over as a janitor?’’
‘‘Something about good, honest work, Chief Odum. Cleans the soul.’’
Odum smiled. ‘‘That it does. And where was it you made these bad business decisions?’’
‘‘I worked in Iowa for a while, but things went bad when I went back home to Nebraska. Little town named Bingham.’’
Odum’s eyes narrowed for a few seconds, and Jude could tell he was sifting through his memory banks. After a few seconds, a smile. ‘‘Bingham . . . that resurrection fella was from there, right?’’
Jude nodded. ‘‘Jude Allman. Yeah, I used to hear that all the time.’’
‘‘So did you know him, that Jude Allman guy?’’
Jude returned Odum’s smile. ‘‘Doesn’t everybody?’’
31
TREMBLING
Frank was all smiles when Jude showed up at work. ‘‘Ron, me boy,’’ he said through crooked yellow teeth when Jude walked into his office, ‘‘thought you were gonna be gone for a while. But it’s nice to have you back.
’’
Jude glanced at the clock. Just after noon—the polygraph test and conversation with Odum had taken his whole morning. ‘‘Yeah,’’ he said. ‘‘Felt better than expected, so I thought I might as well come in for a bit this afternoon. Give you a hand.’’
He looked at Frank and tried a smile. It was a good thing Frank was a janitor, because he wouldn’t be able to fall back on modeling. Frank never combed his hair (or if he did, the hair ignored the comb entirely), his complexion was pockmarked, and he was about seventy pounds on the high side of husky. But the worst part was the teeth. Frank could easily have inspired the Billy Bob novelty teeth so popular in gag stores.
Still, even though Frank looked a lot like a beast, Jude thought of him as mostly harmless. Frank thought he was a comedian and always spewed odd little phrases—sticking in a ‘‘me boy’’ after everyone’s name when he hailed them being one of the more curious ones—but he was all right.
Jude started to dig into the closet for a dust broom. ‘‘Thought I’d clean the gym. That okay?’’
‘‘You want to clean the gym, I’m not gonna melt your ice cream about it.’’ Frank looked at the clock on the wall. ‘‘You takin’ some time off got me to thinking, anyway. I’ll cut out this afternoon, take off tomorrow, too. I—’’ He paused, and Jude stopped to look at him. He could tell Frank was thinking hard about something; best to encourage him a bit so he didn’t blow a gasket.
‘‘You what, Frank?’’
‘‘Well, I got some special things going on. You maybe ought to see my basement sometime. You and your boy. Love to show him sometime.’’ Frank licked his lips, his eyes glossing over.
Jude thought for a moment. He was pretty sure Frank was harmless, but he was also pretty sure he didn’t want to head over to Frank’s for tea and crumpets anytime soon. Some things were better left unknown. ‘‘Um . . . okay, Frank. I’d like that.’’ A lie, but what harm could it do?
The glassy pallor disappeared from Frank’s eyes, and Jude saw the slow gears of Frank’s brain engage again as he pushed aside a partly finished crossword puzzle and stood. ‘‘Well now, Ron, me boy,’’ he said. ‘‘You’d best get to that gym. And I’d best get home and get started.’’