OtherWorld

by Sarah Dreher

  They were coming up on the Ticket and Transportation Center. George took over again. “I’ll interview the kids who were on the gates yesterday. See if anyone saw your friend leave. She could still be in the World.”

  “I certainly hope so,” Stoner said with alarm.

  “I mean Walt Disney World.” She gathered up her shoulder bag. “What are you guys planning to do?”

  Stoner realized she hadn’t the slightest idea. “I’m not sure.”

  “I think we should try to figure out where she disappeared,” Gwen said. “It might be a start.”

  George nodded. “Ask the kids running the rides. If anyone saw her, they wouldn’t be likely to forget her. Not in that outfit. You want Stape to go with you for muscle?”

  Stoner looked Stape over. Muscle? Not likely. On the other hand, if someone was really after Gwen, and if they had discovered their mistake, she really could be in danger. It wouldn’t hurt to have another person there. “Probably a good idea,” she said.

  “Okay, Stape, you keep an eye on things. Better not let on you’re together, in case we can flush them out with Gwen for bait. Watch from a distance, but watch carefully. We’ll rendezvous at the Energy Exchange in Communicore East at two pm. It’ll be crowded and we won’t be noticed.”

  “Got it,” Stape said.

  The train stopped and they got out and let the crowd take them in different directions. Stape disappeared almost immediately. Very professional. She probably went along on George’s jobs frequently.

  To keep control of the situation, no doubt.

  * * *

  It seemed to be morning. At least the rumbling and banging and snorting of machinery had a quick, morning pace to it.

  Another happy day in Walt Disney World, Marylou thought. I hope, for their sake, they don’t expect me to fill out one of those evaluation forms. This is not my idea of a four-star experience.

  And, while we’re on the subject, they can damn well give me a rebate on my room for last night.

  Gingerly, she rolled onto one side, and heard the thin mattress crunch beneath her. She was going to be stiff. Would undoubtedly catch a cold from sleeping on the almost-floor. Plus she was hungry, needed to pee, and probably smelled like a basement.

  Stoner no doubt would love this arrangement. Would get off on the thrill and excitement and danger of it all. Of course, everyone who knew her agreed that Stoner McTavish was one french fry short of a Happy Meal.

  God, she really was hungry. What would it take to get room service in this place?

  There was a tentative tap-tap-tap at the door.

  Marylou sighed. As if things weren’t bad enough, Creepy-Peepy was back.

  She’d heard him in the night, sneaking in to look at her. Did he really think she was going to get up and walk out of there? In the shape she was in? She didn’t even know where she was, for God’s sake. And there was the matter of that abomination he’d brought her for dinner last night. She’d dismissed it without a taste. If he was going to spend the night prowling and peeking, the least he could have done was bring a snack.

  Tap-tap-tap.

  Why was he knocking? She was locked in. He had the key. He had no compunction about—as he so elegantly put it—“snatching” her. So why stand on ceremony now?

  “Are you awake?” he called softly.

  Marylou decided to take an attitude and refuse to answer.

  He waited a few minutes.

  “You must be awake. Aren’t you decent? Is that it?”

  Really! “Of course I’m decent!” she screeched. “I’m not the one who goes around snatching people.”

  “I mean, are you dressed?”

  “What, you think I’m skinny-dipping in the pool?”

  David cleared his throat fastidiously. “You might be using the…uh...facilities.”

  “If you mean this bucket you have placed here for my convenience,” Marylou said with all the haughty sarcasm she could muster, “no, I am not using, nor do I intend to use these facilities.”

  “It’s all right if I come in, then?”

  “Do I really have a choice?”

  He was silent for a moment. “Probably not, if you expect to eat.”

  “I expect to eat,” Marylou said. “In case no one ever told you, people die when they don’t eat. Or would you like a nice murder charge to add to your dossier?”

  “Wouldn’t matter to me,” David said as he unlocked the door and turned on the light. “I’m a professional.”

  Marylou looked him over. “Well, you don’t dress like one.”

  At least he had bothered to shave. Last night he had had a serious case of five o’clock shadow. His dark, bushy hair was still unruly, though. In one hand he held a tray covered with a napkin. He smoothed his Bermuda shorts with the other. His plaid camp shirt was freshly starched, his Nikes just scuffed enough not to look new. “In my profession, you have to blend in with the crowd.” He looked her up and down. “That’s obviously not true in your job.”

  The change in terminology, the implied condescension didn’t escape her. “Trav...” She caught herself. “Teaching is as much of a profession as snatching. Though not as well paid, I’m sure.”

  David shrugged to show he wasn’t impressed, and placed a tray on the floor beside her. “Probably paid as much as you’re worth. What do you teach?”

  “American history.” She hadn’t intended to get any deeper in conversation with him, but the nearness of breakfast made her forget herself.

  “Sounds boring.”

  “Compared to the excitement and glamour of snatching, I’m sure it is.” Well, was he going to show her what he’d brought, or was he just going to stand there and stare at her?

  He gestured to the tray. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

  “Aren’t you going to uncover it?”

  “Jesus!” He grabbed the napkin and swept it away. “You must think you’re the Queen of England.”

  Marylou stared at the tray with dismay. A tiny glass of orange juice, obviously the frozen variety, thawed and diluted. A cup of coffee so lukewarm it didn’t even steam in the dampness. And two unsugared, undecorated cake doughnuts that looked like Bess Eaton unoriginals. “This is a meal?”

  “What would you prefer, Madam?”

  “To the best of my ability to discern, we are somewhere under Walt Disney World. Obviously in commuting distance of World Showcase, where there are restaurants representative of Italy, France, and Norway. Any of which would provide you with food worth eating.”

  He laughed. “You want me to cater your breakfast?”

  “I do.” She reached for her purse. “Since your superior profession obviously doesn’t earn you enough money for decent food, you may take some of mine.” She dug a ten dollar bill from her pocket. “Coffee and pastry from France. Make sure the coffee’s hot, no cream or sugar. The pastries should be large, flaky, and filled with a rich substance. If there’s any change, get something for yourself. Learn to live.”

  David wondered what he should do. His client hadn’t given him instructions about how to deal with bad behavior. Nor had he been given free rein to deal with it as he saw fit. It created a dilemma. There were several avenues open to him. He could just walk out and let her go hungry. He could give her a good knock to establish his authority. He could ignore the whole thing. He could even kill her, he supposed, though it would be a first for him.

  He didn’t think his client would go for the killing idea. Obviously, the woman was wanted for some purpose, and that purpose had to do with the other woman, the mahogany-haired one. Some kind of extortion, probably. Maybe torture, revenge, something like that.

  “Well?” Marylou demanded, shoving the money at him impatiently. “Are you going get us breakfast, or not?”

  This woman was different from other people he’d snatched. He was accustomed to sniveling and pleading, threats and anger, you name it. His profession was a laboratory of human emotion. But he’d never encountered anyone so imperious�
��yes, that was the word, imperious.

  He decided to let it go and see where it took him. “Want any juice?” he asked as he reached for the money.

  “Naturally.”

  David nodded. “Orange okay?”

  “This is Florida, isn’t it? Of course, I want orange, but only if it’s fresh.” Marylou picked up her purse and rummaged through it. “And I’d appreciate being shown to a proper rest room. Not some unisex place with urinals and male graffiti.” She came up with a handful of tissues and stowed them down the front of her bra.

  “You going to cry?” David asked, indicating the tissues.

  “I am not. These are for the toilet. Whatever you come up with, if anything, will almost certainly be unclean and inadequately outfitted.”

  * * *

  “I’m curious,” Gwen said as they approached Earth Station. “Why didn’t you tell them about those other calls?”

  “Do you think they’re related?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That hadn’t occurred to me.” She thought it over. “But we started getting them as soon as we got in. Long before…”

  “You started getting them,” Gwen corrected. “No one else can hear them, remember?”

  The whole thing was giving her an eerie feeling. The calls, Marylou’s disappearance, the way the Audio-Animatronics moved for her and not for anyone else. She was no longer so naive that she thought the world was limited to what could be seen, touched, heard, and measured. But sometimes things were just a little too strange for her, and this might be shaping up to be one of those times.

  Inside Earth Station, with the crowd milling and the shadows like black holes after the sunlight, she felt at a total loss. They weren’t going to find Marylou by wandering all over WDW, hopping on various rides and hoping to bump into someone who might have seen her, and happened to remember her. Marylou was stashed away somewhere, probably out of the park—out of the World—and they couldn’t possibly search everywhere in a hundred-mile radius.

  She hated feeling helpless.

  So she had to do something, however futile. She couldn’t just sit and wait for the phone to ring. It would drive her over the edge. Other people might be really good at it. Like some dogs could just wait at the door for hours until you thought of them and let them in. It wasn’t a skill she’d ever developed.

  It was because she was a Capricorn, Aunt Hermione said. One of the doers and fixers of the world. Maybe.

  “I don’t know where to start,” she said to Gwen.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” Gwen said, “since our behavior is random and meaningless anyway.”

  Something occurred to her. “Maybe not so meaningless.” In fact, the more she thought about it, the more sense it made. “We were here in EPCOT when Marylou disappeared. Maybe they’ll make another move if we make ourselves visible.”

  “Now, there’s a comforting thought. What do you figure? They’ll grab you this time? Or me? Not that I mind, understand, but the thought makes me a little nervous.”

  “But we have a secret weapon.”

  “Right, the Siding Queen.” Gwen sighed. “Okay, boss, where do we go first?”

  “If I were Marylou, and had just had a fight with me, where would I go?”

  “To a restaurant.“Yeah, but which restaurant?”

  Gwen pulled out her guidebook. “We should probably think ethnic. Even under duress, Marylou would never pass up the chance for variety.” She leafed through the pages and groaned. “Stoner, every pavilion in World Showcase has a restaurant. Except the American one.”

  “Great. The one she wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.”

  “Japan, China, Norway, Mexico, England, Canada, Germany… to mention a few. What do you think?”

  “I guess we can rule out Morocco,” Stoner said, “since we had reservations there for dinner.”

  “Italy or France?”

  Stoner shook her head. “Not exotic enough. We have Italian and French restaurants in Boston.”

  “We also have Japanese, Chinese, and Mexican.”

  “I don’t think we can count Taco Belle. How many does that leave?”

  “England, Canada, Mexico, Germany, and Norway.”

  “It’s a start,” Stoner said.

  “If we split up…”

  “No! Stape couldn’t follow us both.” And she couldn’t bear the thought of not knowing where Gwen was. Not now. It was just too much.

  Gwen slipped her hand into Stoner’s. “It was just a suggestion. I really don’t want to be separated from you.”

  Out in the sun, headed for Mexico, she knew they were really only killing time. They could wander around all day and not be approached. On the other hand, maybe they could retrace Marylou’s path and get a little closer to where she was being held.

  She laughed at herself. What did she expect, that there would be a trail of cookie crumbs leading from the point of abduction to the point of incarceration? That somehow she would just know...

  Wait a minute.

  Aunt Hermione was always insisting Stoner had psychic powers, if only she weren’t too shy to use them. Maybe she could try it now. Maybe it would work. Maybe...

  “What is it?” Gwen asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You’re all riled up about something.”

  Stoner hesitated. It sounded crazy, really crazy. But if she couldn’t say crazy things to Gwen without being laughed at, who could she say them to? Wasn’t that what love was based on, being able to say things that other people might laugh at? Being safe?

  Wasn’t it?

  “Stoner?”

  “Uh...yeah, okay...I was thinking, maybe if we get near the place where Marylou was taken, we might pick up something.”

  “A lost earring?”

  “No, like...well, some sense of what happened.”

  “Oh,” Gwen said. “You mean vibrations. That’s a great idea.”

  Stoner glanced over at her. “Are you teasing me?”

  “I mean it.” She smiled. “Stoner, my dearest, you’re the only person I know who doesn’t rely on some kind of intuition. They don’t necessarily know it, but most people do it.”

  “Maybe.” She doubted it. There were a lot of people in the world—many of whom appeared regularly on “Nightline” or panel discussions of things like serial killing and the stock market—who would never, ever admit they had reached their conclusions by any but the most logical means. Reason, evidence, experimentation, the Trinity of the Twentieth Century. The intuits and psychics were relegated to the back alleys of afternoon talk shows.

  “Just because they say they don’t believe in it,” Gwen said, picking up the doubt in her voice, “doesn’t mean they don’t do it. Most people are downright fools when it comes to understanding their own motives.”

  Well, that was certainly true. Ask anyone. Ask Edith Kesselbaum, for instance. In fact, there was currently, in this very segment of Florida, an entire hotel filled with people who made a living off the fact that most people didn’t know what they were doing, or why.

  Of course, a lot of shrinks didn’t know what they were doing, either. But she supposed, or they claimed, it didn’t much matter. The important thing was that they know what their patients were doing and why. Which probably accounted for the fact that so many of them had miserable wives and delinquent children.

  “Okay,” Stoner said. “Let’s see what we can find. But you have to say if you sense something, too.”

  “Have you ever known me not to say what was on my mind?”

  “Many times.”

  “Did not.”

  “You brood about your grandmother all the time, and you never say.”

  “Do not.”

  “Do, too.”

  “Yeah,” Gwen admitted, “I do.”

  They passed over the little bridge that separated Future World from World Showcase. Humidity had turned the sun to white heat, without form or direction. A flock of flamingoes, pink as strawberry ice cream,
hung out on the grassy banks beside the backwaters of the lagoon. They grumbled a little, balancing on one leg, and now and then shook off a couple of feathers. Feathers that drifted to earth on currents of windless air. Even the flamingoes looked hot.

  “What do you think?” Gwen asked.

  “I’m not picking up anything. Are you?”

  Gwen shook her head. “Neither was nor wasn’t. I wish we’d brought a crystal. Aunt Hermione says they make a good pendulum, for finding answers.”

  “And people?”

  “Possibly.”

  They had reached the end of the bridge. Ahead of them lay gift stores, an open-air theater, the lagoon, and boat docks. The long boats chugged through muggy waters, carrying riders between the Plaza and Germany or Morocco. A double-decker bus plowed through the crowd, horn honking.

  “We have to choose,” Gwen said. “Left takes us to Mexico, Norway, and Germany. Right goes to Canada and the U.K. Any hunches?”

  Stoner looked around, hoping for inspiration, and spotted Stape chatting with the ice cream vendor on the bridge. She had a hunch there was more being discussed than today’s flavors, and that the vendor was a little more than a vendor. Security at WDW came in a variety of forms. Ice cream vendors here were clearly a different breed from the vendors at Fenway Park.

  “I have an idea,” she said. “Let’s both imagine one of those crystal-pendulums in our heads, and see what they say. If we come up with the same answer, it’s probably the right one.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Gwen said.

  Stoner closed her eyes and tried to make her mind a blank and conjure up a crystal. What she got resembled a lump of coal hanging from a fraying string in the middle of a dim cave. Well, it was better than nothing. She tried to keep herself out of it and let it swing. Slowly, the crystal began to move. Barely perceptible at first. Then a definite motion, almost as if it were caught in a draft. Gradually, the stone rotated and pointed left.

  She opened her eyes. Gwen was still concentrating. Stoner waited, not wanting to break her attunement.

  God, she thought, she’s so beautiful. Maybe she wouldn’t stop traffic, but she stops my heart. There aren’t enough words in the English language to describe all the ways I love her. Friendship, family, partnership, desire—If we’re together for a lifetime there won’t be time to explore all the ways of loving her.