Connor was a lot of things at the moment. Positive wasn’t really one of them. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be. He really, really wanted to be. He kind of wanted to go back to that “everything is going to be okay” kind of vibe he had had right after he had managed to stop the merger with the Walshes. It had been nice to have that whole weight of the world on his shoulders thing take a backseat for a bit. If nothing else, then it had reenergized him. He was probably going to have to survive on that for a while. It didn’t look as if there was a whole lot that was going to fall into place without some judicious pushing in the near future.
It wasn’t as if everything was bleak or anything like that. As a matter of fact, there was one thing that was really great. They not only knew where Lia was (thanks to Will Walsh of all people); they had also reestablished communication with her (again thanks to Will Walsh, so much for Mr. I don’t want to be involved). That was great. He had been going slowly crazy trying to figure out just where Meredyth had stashed her (not to mention that he had built up enough guilt over Lia being in the middle of everything that it would probably require more years than he had left to eradicate it all).
He had one go to item when he was looking for something to help keep his thoughts in the positive zone these days. He tried to keep his focus on how happy Kyle seemed to be of late. He had wondered if the boy even knew that he had been bouncing from room to room. He likely did not. Connor decided that he would keep that particular observation to himself. What teenage boy wanted to be described as “bouncy?” It was nice to see the kid acting like he had just received a long awaited Christmas present. He wouldn’t want to deflate that by letting out an unwelcome appellation for his behavior.
Somebody should be getting unmitigated joy out of the deal. Connor’s own pleasure at finally knowing with certainty that Lia was, in fact, okay was being mitigated by a number of details -- not the least of which was the fact that she was still shut up in that place that Meredyth had shunted her off to where she had to resort to stealth (and Anna’s ingenuity) to communicate with anyone on the outside. He was being a little melodramatic. He knew that. It wasn’t like they were going to find her and be able to just bring her home where they could all be together in Anna’s and Kyle’s apartment.
He shook that thought off as quickly as it hit him. He couldn’t think like that. He needed to stay focused on the reality of the situation. The four of them weren’t going to be playing happy families -- even though there had been days when it felt like that was what they were doing. There had been days (back before he had gotten Lia on Meredyth’s formal remove and block list) when the four of them had been sitting over pizza or tacos or spaghetti or one of those other nice normal meals that his family had somehow never gotten around to and talked and shared about their days, and he had gotten just a little peek at what normal was supposed to look like. He had nearly forgotten. The closest he had ever gotten to that before had been back in the day hanging out at the Lawsons’ with Meredyth and Lia.
It had been a bright spot of the last few months that he had been able to spend so much time in the McKees’ apartment. It was one of the advantages of no longer being an official employee of Ridley Resources. His schedule was suddenly extremely flexible, and he found himself restless when he tried to stay away from Anna and Kyle. It wasn’t like he didn’t have work to do. He did. He had a multitude of things to do when it came to his perpetual battle against the evil forces of evil. Kyle had started that one. It was the best finish he could come up with to a sentence when under the pressure of being on the receiving end of one of Anna’s glares. The original words he was headed toward using were not nearly so polite. (Connor couldn’t blame him; it had been immediately after they realized that Lia had gone missing.)
He had the comic book to keep turning out to keep him busy as well. He couldn’t give up working on that. He had a commitment to keep with it, and he needed the mental break it gave him to channel what he was thinking onto the paper. The problem with the comic book was that it was flexible both in when he worked on it and in where he did the working. It made it all too easy to pack up his desk and haul everything over to Anna’s. He couldn’t blame her if she was heartily sick of having him around, but he was willing to be selfish enough that he wasn’t going to stop coming until she actually told him to get out of her space. He was taking advantage. She wasn’t going to do that. She knew he was upset about Lia, and she wasn’t the type to kick him when he was down (unless it was to get him back in gear, he figured she would do that quickly enough).
Days had turned into weeks with weeks turning into months. Without any of them seeming to know quite how it had happened, he had a work table next to Anna’s desk. It hadn’t even registered until one day when he had actually been in his own apartment trying to work and realized that he couldn’t -- all of his stuff had migrated to the apartment across town.
It was too easy to get sucked in to the McKees’ world. They didn’t just live in their apartment. Their apartment was lived in; it was a home in all of the best ways that the word could be used, and it was inexplicably (or maybe not so inexplicably) attractive to people who didn’t have that for themselves. It had pulled him in, and it had pulled in Lia. That was the thought that had sent him scrambling away from the McKees in the middle of the summer. It was his fault that Lia was wherever she was, and he shouldn’t be enjoying the hominess of being around Anna and Kyle when she was cut off from it.
That had lasted all of six days before Anna had shown up on his doorstep (that was a first) and demanded that he stop sulking and do something useful. She had insisted that if nothing else, then it wasn’t fair for him to ditch Kyle when he needed reassurance that they were doing everything that they could to figure out where Lia was. He hadn’t had an argument to offer in response to that (which was likely why Anna had chosen to use it). The work table had become officially his.
Thus, he had been situated in a front row seat for the emotional roller coaster that Kyle had been riding. It wasn’t that the kid had been displaying any overt signs that something was wrong with him. Anyone who didn’t know the situation (or hadn’t known Kyle well to begin with) wouldn’t have noticed anything other than what might be explained away as the normal moodiness that could be attributed to any standard teenager -- particularly one dealing with the uncertainty and pressure that sometimes came along with being a senior. Kyle hid it all well, but it couldn’t be hidden from someone who knew him as well as Anna did (or someone who was spending as much time in his presence as Connor was).
He had tried to talk it over with Anna, but she had merely shaken her head at him and told him not to push the boy into talking. It felt like cowardice to admit that he was relieved at her suggestion, but it was what it was. What could he say, after all, except to apologize for having upended Kyle’s life and dragging Lia into whatever it was that Meredyth had done with her? He had tried that, and he had been blown off (not unexpectedly because what words of apology could ever make up for something like that). He answered Kyle’s questions when he had them, provided reassurance when it sounded like that was what he was looking for, and stayed out of it when it seemed like his words weren’t wanted.
His questions were never aggravated or challenging. They were civil and thoughtful and sometimes brought to mind possibilities that Connor had never even considered. Whatever answer he received (or didn’t receive) was never greeted harshly. He always took whatever was or was not there and went off to ponder the implications before returning later with some sort of a follow up that displayed just how much time he was spending focusing on the whole Walsh/Lawson/Ridley situation instead of doing all the things that seniors in high school were supposed to be doing. That was one more fault to place at Connor’s feet.
It all ended with Kyle still being Kyle but having a vaguely brooding air about him. For Anna, it was a reason to keep a careful (but nonobtrusive) eye on him. For Connor, it was
another reason to feel how badly he had miscalculated everything. For a gaggle of underclassmen girls, it was a reason to follow the teen around mooning over him. Connor would never in a million years pretend to understand the minds of fourteen and fifteen year old girls and what it was about “brooding” that so many of them seemed to find attractive. Under other circumstances, it would have been amusing to watch. The Kyle that he thought he knew (and Anna had confirmed it for him) had been a fairly average guy during his school career in the amount of friends and attention he had garnered. He hadn’t been treading the line of social outcast, but he hadn’t been uber popular either.
Now, he was dealing with an unprecedented amount of attention from a group of girls who were not yet mature enough to realize that their attentions were not welcome. Their parents (and Anna) had raised him to be polite, but that wasn’t exactly serving him well as he tried to extricate himself from the slew of phone calls and sudden influx of browsing customers at his after school job. The closest Connor had ever seen Kyle to snapping during this whole process was on the day that he had slammed the door of the apartment on his way in and muttered about “little brats trying to hang out in our spot” on his way to locking himself in his room. Connor didn’t hear anything but music that was far too loud coming from that direction for the next hour. When Anna had gotten home, Kyle had emerged and said nothing about it. Connor didn’t find it necessary to comment, and he had gotten one mouthed “thank you” from the teen as he nodded his head in Anna’s direction once when her back was turned.
In the days since they had all been able to talk to Lia, that brooding Kyle had disappeared. He had been replaced with the one who smiled and laughed and hummed to himself as he came in the door in the evenings. When he needed to think of something positive, the current display of pleasantness that was Kyle was what Connor called to mind. It helped to keep something happy in sight when he was bogged down in the midst of the whole big picture that didn’t look so great.
The original information that Lia had sent to Anna had appeared (at first) to be so garbled that it made no sense. It was massive to start with -- Anna’s printer had run for ages. It resembled nothing more than some stream of consciousness prose that ran on for page after page after page with no apparent rhyme or reason. It had actually given him a headache the first time he had tried to read through the stack of printer paper that Anna had handed to him. He had been lost as to where he should begin to try to untangle it all.
He had stuck with it anyway (what else was he supposed to do; Lia wouldn’t have created the monstrosity of a composition unless she thought it was something that he needed). Then, he had noticed the emphasis. Every so often, a word was bolded or underlined in the middle of a paragraph (if you could even call them paragraphs, it felt as if Lia had been so desperate to type as quickly as she could that all forms of structure had been tossed out of the window and left behind in the dust). He discovered that if he focused in on those items that were bold or underlined and worked out from there, then the piece began to resolve itself into something understandable.
He was finally getting what she was saying (it had certainly taken him long enough). Then, he had remembered that he wasn’t working on this alone. He had been turning to share this new insight with Anna when he noticed that she was in the process of taking a highlighter to her share of the pile of papers. She had looked up at him and grinned.
“Have you caught on to the pattern?” She had asked him before returning to using the highlighter at a furious speed. He considered pointing out to her that it didn’t make anything stand out by highlighting it if you ended up highlighting the whole page, but he refrained. He was sure whatever organizational system she was using made sense to her.
“I think I have,” he had told her. She had looked up again briefly, and he had taken the opportunity to grin back at her. It had been nice to just smile over something together, but the moment was quickly over. They didn’t have time to linger over it. They had both dived in with their new understanding. The seeming nonsense had quickly become a detailed, carefully plotted web tying seemingly unrelated events together into a picture of how they connected and why they were important. It was well done, it was amazingly helpful, but it was troubling to see what she had determined.
He hadn’t noticed nearly any of the things that Lia was bringing to his attention. That bothered him (as he was certain that it should). What had he been doing all these months that he had missed that all of this was going on in the background? Obviously, he hadn’t been doing anything as constructive as what Lia had been.
Meredyth (and Wyatt for that matter) had gone strangely quiet (or so Connor had thought at the time) after their engagement party. There were any number of perfectly reasonable, not immediately threatening reasons that that could have happened. The two of them might be so busy preparing for the “social event of the season” that they had temporarily allowed other things to fall by the wayside. “Things,” in this instance, being more specifically defined as plotting any means by which they could reconfigure the world into a mold of their own design which sounded only very slightly less melodramatic than referring to it as “schemes for world domination” in his head. He didn’t really know why it was that he was seeking to avoid melodrama; it was accurate for the situation. He should probably stick with using Kyle’s “evil forces of evil.” It was simpler (and it flowed off the tongue better).
It might also be worth mentioning that the words “social event of the season” had not originated anywhere near the inside of Connor’s head. He had gotten them from one of the newspaper clippings that his mother had taken it upon herself to send to him. Actually, it was after about the fifth time that the words had been used to describe the “much anticipated” Lawson/Walsh wedding (he actually found himself registering surprise that there were such a variety of print sources that covered social gossip in their city) that the words had begun to stick. It was his own fault, really, for reading them in the first place, but he had ample motivation to do so.
First, there was the fact that there was always the off chance of there being some mention of Lia coming home for some of the prewedding activities. He technically had Will around to tell him if something like that occurred, but the truth was that he hated being dependent on Will for that type of information. It wasn’t that he wasn’t grateful. He was. There was just this weird vibe that Will gave off whenever Lia was mentioned that he couldn’t quite peg down.
If it had been flat out blame, then he would have understood (and concurred with the other man’s assessment). It wasn’t. There was something else there almost as if Will wasn’t sure what he himself was thinking about the whole situation. What did he know? People were not his strong suit. He had tried asking Anna, and she had told him not to worry about it because Will was just getting his “bearings” and trying to “peg him down.” He didn’t even know what “peg him down” was supposed to mean in that situation. What was there for him to figure out? He wanted to stop Meredyth, and there were times he messed it all up (spectacularly so) -- that was the beginning and end of the story. There was no mystery there. He was a straight forward, simple guy like that.
Second, there was the fact that his mother invariably questioned him over whether or not he had received and perused all of the clippings. Yes, she did use the word “perused” tucked right next to her comments about how nice it was to still be able to keep up with news about “old friends” even if said “old friends” were being “forever marginalized” by “some people.” Yeah, subtlety and his mother were not the best of friends these days. It made him feel better to be able to fight back a little by calmly (and honestly) replying that why yes he had received and perused them the other day, and he hoped the weather wouldn’t turn out to be a problem. Then, he just stepped back and watched his mother seethe at his lack of further reaction. He wasn’t sure why she kept trying, but she seemed determined to co
ntinue. He wasn’t going to waste time worrying about her motivations. His parents had never pulled any punches over the fact that they were squarely on the Meredyth Lawson cheerleading squad.
As to the matter of the wedding causing a lack of attention on the couple’s part to other issues, that might have been possible. There was a hefty emphasis on the word might in that sentence. It was a maybe. If it were two people who were not Meredyth and Wyatt, that was. He held little hope that getting married would cause any distraction on Meredyth’s part. Meredyth and distraction from goals were two concepts that did not go together. They were mutually exclusive entities. They did not merge. That was all there was to that. As for Wyatt, well, did Wyatt Walsh strike anybody as the type of guy who would get so caught up in the wonders and sentimentality of wedding planning that he lost all sense of ambition? He didn’t think so. If such believers did exist, then Connor was not among their ranks.
There was also the possibility that the fall through of the merger between RR and WIS had been such a blow to their plans that Meredyth and Wyatt had retreated for a time to do some metaphorical licking of their wounds and some practical recalibration of their course of action. He actually sort of bought that one. He could see that happening; he did see that happening. It was part of what had had him so light hearted in the immediate aftermath of his success with the RR board. It had been a feeling that instead of everything marching steadily onward, he actually had time. There had been breathing room. He had expected breathing room (he had not, as Anna had once said in frustration, been expecting the two of them to take up knitting, but he had expected there to be a little down time while they changed course).
The problem was that the down time that might have occurred as a part of those circumstances seemed to be continuing for far too long. They should have made a move by now. It had been making him progressively more nervous that he couldn’t see that they had. It wasn’t as though Wyatt was a patient man, and it wasn’t as though Meredyth wouldn’t be looking at Connor’s blocking of the merger as an excuse to swat him like an annoying fly at the first clear shot she was handed. Why was it that months later there was nothing?
The information that Lia had provided them with partially answered that question. It wasn’t that there was nothing going on; it was just that everything that the two of them (mostly Meredyth) were doing was being completed in small little increments (and were further items that didn’t seem to have any sort of relevance to any sort of plan that the two of them might have been concocting). Introductions between previously unacquainted persons and arranged tours of seemingly random businesses all appeared very haphazard unless, of course, you had knowledge of all of them occurring in a relatively short amount of time and were looking for potential connections -- which, apparently, Lia had been.
He shuddered to think about how much time she had to have spent piecing it all together. It told him a lot about what her days at the new school were probably like. It was the closest thing to a picture of her circumstances that he had. It wasn’t like she had bothered to be forthcoming on that topic herself.
While Lia had become a quality source of information for all things Meredyth related (Connor was starting to suspect that the girl had somehow managed to get a look at a whole lot of files that Meredyth should have known better than to leave sitting around), she was suspiciously quiet when it came to all things directly related to her. Her answers to questions about her were never any statements that Connor found satisfactory. When she was asked how she was, she was “fine.” When she was asked what her school was like, school was “just school.” Then, she would quickly redirect. Had he reminded Anna that the head of such and such subcommittee’s daughter had mentioned that they had taken an unexpected trip over Christmas vacation to such and such a place where so and so happened to be? There was no getting anywhere with her. It was a little infuriating to tell the truth. There was something more going on with her than she was letting on, but she wasn’t budging. Besides, it was a little difficult to press for information via e-mails and instant messages. It wasn’t like he had her in person where he could actually make a point of calling her out on her evasions. She, invariably, had to go (she never specified where it was that she was supposed to be going) if he got too persistent about details.
She didn’t trust him. That was the only explanation that made any sense. He couldn’t really blame her. He hadn’t exactly proven himself trustworthy in his care of her so far. That she wasn’t saying anything to Anna he figured was simply because she didn’t believe that Anna wouldn’t tell him. He was very sure that she had told Kyle whatever it was. This assertion was based entirely on observations of Kyle himself. There were times when he would catch Kyle looking at him intently as if he was pondering broaching some topic with him. He always seemed to shake off the moment, and he never actually brought himself to say anything. He couldn’t blame Kyle for not trusting him either. He wasn’t always willing to trust his own judgment on a lot of things at the moment.
The way he figured it his track record wasn’t anything to brag about. Just look at Lia. Further, he had been all caught up in Lia (and his own feelings which shouldn’t be getting in the way of getting done what he needed to be getting done) and waiting for some sort of gesture of retaliation from Meredyth that he had missed seeing all the potentially problematic little moves that she was making. Granted, some of them weren’t things that he was in any position to have seen, but Lia (sixteen year old trapped in a boarding school Lia) had somehow managed to find out about them. He would have tried to get out of her how it was that she had done that (surely not every girl at her school made a habit of divulging random family information to the new girl), but it seemed to be one of the topics that she was stepping gingerly around.
He could have been (he should have been) focusing more on Meredyth lately. He had been working with Anna on some smaller projects (mostly involving her using Glimpse to run some crime patterns and him happening to be in the right place at the right time to make some phone calls), but that was going to have to fall by the wayside for now.
Meredyth was the big threat (or at least she was the one that he was in a position to do something about), and he needed to put the majority of his efforts into blocking the threat that she presented.
He spent more and more time reviewing everything Lia had supplied him with (adding to it with his own research now that he knew the basics of what he was looking for). Something had been bugging him for a few days (like he was missing some important detail) when it hit him. He thought that he might be seeing things when the thought first occurred to him when he was trying to figure out how Meredyth was choosing the people with whom she was choosing to court alliances (if alliances was even an acceptable word for what Meredyth was doing, he doubted she was clueing people in on her long range plans). Some of them seemed random picks that were working out strangely well. He had been pondering what sources of information that she might have been using when the eeriness of the accuracy of some of them started to seem wrongly familiar -- very, very wrongly familiar.
That was not possible. It shouldn’t be possible, but the thought wouldn’t leave him alone. He kept watching Anna and waiting for her to say something that would confirm or deny what he was thinking. He was hoping that her lack of a similar reaction to his was a denial, but he couldn’t take any chances. He took some notes, set up some parameters, and presented the packet to Anna with a request that she run it and see what it spat back.
He hadn’t wanted any extra spectators around in case the news was what he feared. He made sure that Will wasn’t planning on stopping by (he was often very random in when he chose to show up). He had convinced Kyle that he really wanted to go catch a basketball game with his friends to get him out of the apartment before Anna came home. Kyle had given him a look that clearly stated that he knew that Connor was trying to get him out of the way. Connor had merely told him that it
wasn’t about Lia, and the teen had agreed to go. Connor was grateful for the lack of argument. He was a little (okay a lot) nerve wracked by the news he was waiting for -- he tried to tell himself that he was seeing things that weren’t there, but he wasn’t having much luck convincing himself.
Any remaining illusions that he was wrong disappeared the instant he saw Anna’s face after she opened the door. She didn’t even stop to check whether or not Kyle was present.
“You knew?” She demanded sounding breathless as if she had run all the way up the steps. She probably had.
“I didn’t know,” he countered as he steered her toward a chair. She looked like she needed to sit. He, for that matter, felt rather like he needed to sit. That was not what he had wanted to hear. “I just suspected. I was really, really hoping that I was wrong.”
“Of course you were hoping that you were wrong!” Anna exclaimed as her head sank into her hands. She sounded like she might be starting to hyperventilate. He couldn’t have that. He knelt down in front of her and guided her head up so that she was looking at him.
“Hey, hey,” he told her making sure that she was making eye contact with him. “You need to breathe. Can you do that for me? Focus on breathing for a minute. Nice slow, deep ones, okay?”
She gave him a look like she was doubting the status of his sanity, but she followed his directions. When he was satisfied with the sound of the results, he let go of her and sat back on his heels.
“Connor?” She sounded a little bit lost. “How?”
“I have no idea,” he responded. “I guess it doesn’t much matter how. We just need to deal with it now that we know.”
“Deal with it? Connor, it’s not like we can unopen that box. She has it. She’s using it.” She stressed.
“I know she is. We’ll just have to figure out a way around that,” he took in her disbelieving look. “Hey, she may have it, but she doesn’t have you. We’re still a step ahead of her. I need you to focus on details for me. What’s your best estimate?”
He found himself pleased that he didn’t have to elaborate on the question. She understood exactly what he meant.
She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes as she answered him. The answer came so quickly that he knew that despite her shock and near panic she had already been thinking things through and been ready for the questions that she knew he would have for her. That was his girl (although the fact that he had had that thought slipped his notice at the time).
“Early version,” she told him. “Just bare bones really. Not overly functional without some extensive work.” She opened her eyes and met his. “That’s just me guessing. I don’t know for sure. Some of that stuff that Lia sent that looked like it didn’t belong; those were the places where I think she was trying out information that turned out to be wrong. I’m extrapolating data here from incomplete sources, but the percentages look like an early version being worked on by someone who doesn’t understand just how much information that you have to feed in to get something approaching accurate back out. It’s getting better though. There’s a definite progression. They’re refining it.”
She bit her lip for a moment before an expression came across her face that was nothing short of angry. “What I really think?” She demanded, and Connor nodded his head in response.
“She’s got someone, probably a fair few someones, taking it to pieces and trying to figure out how it all comes together so they can build it to completion.”
That made sense. There was only one thing left to ask. “How long?”
“That depends on how good they are.”
Volume Three
Glimpse: The Complete Trilogy Page 35