Elsewhere, page 22
“Were they prisoners in their own house? Were they . . . were they dead in there?”
He shook his head. “I believe that’s unlikely.”
“Unlikely? But maybe they were? Maybe they were dead in there?”
Indicating the other rocking chair, Ed said, “Have a seat, dear. Try to calm down.”
“I saw a man shot to death. Maybe Jeffy and Amity are dead. Dead again! I’m not going to calm down for the rest of my life.”
“Not if you don’t make the effort,” Ed said.
She paced to the head of the porch steps. She turned and stared at him. “There’s a whole side to you I didn’t know. Shooting people, indifferent to Jeffy and Amity . . .”
“I’m not indifferent, Michelle. I just think in multiverse terms, and you aren’t quite there yet. Even if Jeffy and Amity are dead in that house, all hope is not lost, because they’re alive in other worlds.”
In silence, she stared out at Shadow Canyon Lane. Finally she said, “Are you dead in that world?”
“Obviously not.”
“Why obviously?”
“If Falkirk had already killed me, he wouldn’t have reacted as he did when he opened the door. He thought he was looking at the Ed Harkenbach of that world.”
“And where is that Ed?”
“In hiding somewhere, no longer in the tent beyond the end of the lane, possibly far away from Suavidad Beach. I suspect the John Falkirk of that world isn’t looking for that Ed anymore. I think he and his men must have been in the bungalow waiting for Jeffrey and Amity to come home.”
“Why waiting for them and not the other you?”
“I have a theory.”
Finally she came to the second rocking chair and settled into it. “Tell me.”
68
Of all the houses that Amity had been inside, she liked Duke Pellafino’s place better than any other except the bungalow in which she and her father lived. The furniture wasn’t dirty or tattered or anything, but it was all comfortable and looked lived-in, so you didn’t have to be afraid of putting your feet up.
The hotelman had shelves and shelves of books and a collection of bronze dogs, and there were lots of photographs of the real dogs that had been his companions. In every room was what appeared to be a brand-new dog bed, as if he must be getting ready to bring a puppy into his life after his heart healed from his most recent loss.
Instead of a table and chairs and sideboard, the dining room contained nothing but a black-lacquered Steinway and a bench and a dog bed. Since Duke never married and lived alone, Amity supposed he must be the one who played the piano just for himself and his pooch. That was a little sad, but also nice, and it was funny to imagine those big hands finding any kind of music in a piano.
Because Duke had said they should make themselves at home, and because they were supposed to powwow over breakfast when he arrived from work, she and Daddy were in the kitchen. She set the table, and her father cracked eggs into a bowl for omelets, and she grated cheese, and he chopped up a green pepper, and during everything they did, they kept glancing at each other to be sure that they were both still here. He asked her if she was all right, and she said she was, and then she asked him if he was all right, and he said, “Yeah, sure.” But she was thinking—and he probably was, too—that maybe nothing would ever be all right again.
Repeatedly, she looked at the windows, expecting to see another Good Boy capering on the patio or a bug-form robot clambering over the ivy-covered wall between properties. If there were a trillion times a gajillion worlds, all somehow existing side by side or even in the same place but invisible to one another, you had to wonder if sometimes things leaked from one universe to others.
The key to everything lay on the counter near the sink. After Earth 1.77, Amity doubted that her father would ever agree to use the thing again. Somewhere a version of Michelle was alone and in need of them, just as they were in need of her, but between them and her were monsters, really and truly.
69
The once pale moon shaded to yellow as it lowered toward the horizon, and a few morning birds began to twitter in the trees, in anticipation of a dawn not yet hatched.
A queer disorientation troubled Michelle, as if she’d had too much to drink, which she hadn’t, as if the porch were yawing like the deck of a ship, which it wasn’t, as if she were dreaming of being awake, though she was so wide-eyed she might not ever sleep again.
Opining from his rocking chair, Ed Harkenbach said, “Here’s what I think. The me in that world is even more terrified of porting than I am, a great deal more terrified. He’s unable to use the key even to escape Falkirk. But the me in that world still can’t bring himself to destroy the remaining key.”
“Why not?” Michelle asked. “Why not, if he won’t use it?”
“Pride. Ego. Considering that he’s me, I know him pretty well.”
“You don’t seem prideful to me.”
“I hide it under eccentricity and charm. However, considering the success of the Everett Highways project, I regard myself the equal of Einstein, but without the big white mustache.”
“Well, it’s not a bad sort of pride if maybe you are.”
“No maybe about it. Anyway, I’ll never destroy the key I’ve got in this world, even if the day comes when I’m too afraid to use it again. I think that day did come for that other me. I think he had a relationship with Jeffrey akin to the friendship I have with you. I think he gave the key to Jeffrey for safekeeping, then fled Suavidad Beach. Though I know me well in whatever version I exist, I don’t know your husband. Would he be tempted to use the key?”
She thought of Jeffy’s love of fantasy, of worlds that could never be. Furthermore, he was an armchair adventurer who dreamed of real adventure but was too much of a homebody actually to go to the jungles of Borneo or the slopes of Mount Everest.
“He’d be tempted,” she said. “But he’d never put Amity at risk. He’s a dreamer, but he has a strong sense of responsibility.”
“Then perhaps he didn’t choose to use it. Maybe for some reason he was forced to use it. Whatever the case, I think Falkirk learned Jeffrey had it, and he was looking for him when we showed up.”
Pink glow in the east, quickly intensifying to coral.
The first morning color in the sky was a symbol of hope, a reminder that in spite of the evil that worked relentlessly from pole to pole, the world spent the night turning inexorably toward light.
That was something Jeffy told her when one day it seemed to Michelle that her music career had been stillborn long before she realized it wasn’t breathing. That had been nine years earlier, when he and Amity still had two years to live before they would be taken out by a drunk in an Escalade. She’d mocked his optimism by calling him Pollyanna’s more cheerful brother, and by noting that during the day, the world turned inexorably toward darkness.
She wanted to believe—she did believe—that in spite of such moments of contention, she was different enough from the other self-absorbed version of herself that she would never have walked out on them in this world, had they lived. In this timeline as in that one, she was more ambitious than Jeffy; or she’d thought so until, during the years after the loss of him and Amity, she came to understand that he was no less ambitious than she, that their dreams were just not of the same variety. She strove for fame and wealth, certain they would bring happiness. Jeffy strove for happiness directly and found it in whatever the world brought him to his liking—Bakelite radios, Art Deco posters, fantasy novels, a wife, a child.
Now as the sky brimmed with color, as the world began again its long turn toward another night, she was filled with the wonder of a multiverse in which every time someone went off the rails to ruin, there was a reality in which she remained on the tracks. Tragedy was not the end of hope, but the birthing ground of a new hope, and you didn’t have to be Pollyanna’s more cheerful sister to grasp that truth and be inspired by it.
“We have to help them,” she declared, thrusting up from the rocking chair.
“Help whom,” Ed asked, pretending ignorance but smiling slyly.
“They can’t live in that world anymore, not when the
government—the shadow state—will be hunting them forever. We have to find them and bring them back here.”
Ed got to his feet. “That’s not exactly what I had in mind.”
“What did you have in mind, Mr. Einstein without the big white mustache?”
“Well,” he said, “it’s moot if we can’t rescue them from that world. First things first.”
“Let’s go, then.” She grabbed him by the arm. “Take us back there. Take us now.”
“Patience, dear. Falkirk is dead in that world, but the agents with him on the operation are alive and spoiling for a fight. We need to take a few minutes to modify our appearance. Then we don’t dare port from this bungalow to that one and right into their arms. You’ll drive us into town, we’ll port from someplace there and see what we can find, what we can do.”
“But if Falkirk and all his men can’t find them in that world, how can we?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said as he opened her front door and motioned her inside, “but trust in the Ed factor.”
“What’s the Ed factor?”
“Things tend to happen around me.”
70
After Duke Pellafino’s shift ended, his subordinate, Andy Taylor, took over the hotel’s morning security operations, which included finding the vagrant who had invaded the hotel and spray-painted some hallway cameras and then apparently squirreled himself away somewhere.
Alone in his basement office, before leaving for the day, Duke picked up the phone and called Phil Esterhaus, chief of the Suavidad Beach Police Department. Phil was a current cop whose nickname was “Clint” because he resembled Eastwood from the Dirty Harry films, and Duke was a former cop. They both liked dogs, baseball, and jazz, so their friendship had been pretty much inevitable. Phil rose early to go for a long run shortly after first light every morning, and Duke often joined him.
“I just tied on my running shoes,” Phil said. “Meet you on the beach?”
“Not this morning, amigo. I’ve got a tough question for you that maybe you can’t answer.”
“Hey, I’m so good at tough questions I could win a fortune on Jeopardy. Hit me with it.”
“The thing is, maybe you can’t answer it for jurisdictional reasons or maybe an unofficial gag order.”
“Try me anyway.”
“There’s a fed in town named John Falkirk.”
“That egg-sucking snake.”
“So you’re not enjoined from talking about him.”
“I wouldn’t care if I was, that arrogant piece of shit.”
“Listen, I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“What’re they going to do to me—undercut me when the president nominates me for attorney general? Hell, I’m a small-town cop, all I want to be is a small-town cop, and I’ll be reelected until I’m senile because the people here love me.”
“And why shouldn’t they?”
“Exactly. I’m adorable.”
Duke said, “Falkirk is in town with a team.”
“Twenty other domestic black-op assholes with a collective IQ of eighty, National Security Agency credentials, but if they’re the best the NSA has to offer, even Belgium could take us in like a one-week war. Twenty! Plus choppers and drones and military ordnance out the ass.”
“They’re after a guy named Harkenbach.”
“What—are these goons staying at your hotel and bragging at the bar each night?”
“I have my sources. I’ll tell you later. I don’t want to hold you up from your Chariots of Fire moment on the beach.”
“This Harkenbach guy is some kind of rogue scientist.”
“There can be such a thing as a rogue scientist?” Duke asked.
“Falkirk says Harkenbach sold national security secrets to a foreign power. But that sleazeball lies even when he doesn’t say anything.”
“You think Harkenbach is really in town?”
“Maybe not now. But seems he was hiding out, doing a hobo thing at the deep end of Shadow Canyon. Falkirk and his clown posse are running some kind of operation up there—we don’t know what. We’re told to stay out, so we stay out, because after all we’re just one step up from mall cops and we have great respect for our brothers and sisters in all the fabulous bureaus of federal law enforcement.”
“You are damn confident of reelection.”
“Ellen and I are grooming Phil Junior to run for mayor on the illustrious Esterhaus name like thirty years from now. So tell me, why’re you interested in Falkirk and Harkenbach?”
“I have some friends who’ve gotten caught up in this through no fault of their own. They live on Shadow Canyon Lane, and Falkirk has some stupid idea that they befriended this Harkenbach.”
“Is there something I can do?”
“Maybe, maybe not, I’m thinking about it. Listen, let’s you, Ellen, and me have dinner tomorrow night. We’ll discuss it then.”
“Who’s paying?”
“Do you ever pay?”
“Neither do you when it’s at the hotel.”
“Every job has its perks. You get to wear that cool trooper hat,” Duke said, and he hung up.
71
At Ed’s direction, Michelle quickly hacked off his glorious white mane with scissors and shaved the stubble with her electric razor until his noggin was as smooth as her legs. Strangely, his bald head seemed half again as large as when he’d had hair, so he resembled a 1950s sci-fi movie’s idea of what an evolved human being of immense intelligence would look like if he traveled back in time from ten thousand years in the future.
He took off his bow tie and adjusted his shirt collar. “There. My own mother wouldn’t recognize me.”
“Well, I guess if she was blind,” Michelle said.
“Trust me, during my time as a fugitive, I’ve learned that the best disguises require not an entire makeover but merely one or two strategic changes.”
Ed oversaw Michelle’s makeover by having her tie her hair in a ponytail and wear a baseball cap. He also insisted that she change out of her pullover sweater into a baggier blue sweatshirt that had belonged to Jeffy. She’d saved it all these years because she had given it to him as a birthday gift and he’d especially liked the words imprinted on the chest—Frodo Lives! The sleeves extended past her fingertips, and even after she rolled them up, she looked like a lost waif searching for her mom, rather than a woman in search of her lost daughter.
“My own mother wouldn’t recognize you,” Ed declared.
“Your mother never knew me.”
“Exactly.”
With Ed in the front passenger seat, whistling a tune that he identified as from Mozart’s concerto K. 453, Michelle drove her Ford Explorer into town and slotted it in an automated two-story parking structure a block off Pacific Coast Highway. She fed a few dollar bills into the permit machine and placed the printout prominently on the dashboard. If when they ported back to this timeline they needed to make a quick getaway, she didn’t want to discover that her SUV had been towed.
In an alleyway alongside the building, Ed dared to take the key to everything from his coat and activate it. This early in the day, when most people would not head to work for another hour or two and when tourists were still sleeping off the previous night’s excesses, the chance was slim that someone would happen on them in the instant when they vanished from this sad timeline where Jeffy and Amity had died seven years ago.
The onshore flow was scented with cinnamon and warm pastry dough from a bakery just opening for the day. The breeze chased scraps of litter along the alley and rolled before it a ball of red yarn. Such was Michelle’s state of mind that the unraveling scarlet filament, so vivid against the blacktop, seemed to be an ominous symbol, a thin spill of blood or a lit fuse burning toward her.
“Where do we go when we get there?” she asked.
“Are there people in town who were friends with you and Jeffy back in the day, people that he might have remained friends with in that world, after you walked out on him and Amity?”
“Not me. I never did. That was the other Michelle. Yeah, I can think of a few friends from then who’re still in this town and maybe still in the one we’re going to. Jeffy was true blue. He never gave up on anyone.”
“Then we’ll check them out and hope that he and your girl have gone into hiding at one of their houses.”
He pressed Return, and after passing through a blizzard of light, they arrived in the world where there was hope, however fragile, of a family reunion.
72
No sooner had Duke spoken one last time with Andy Taylor and left the hotel than his cell phone rang. He paused at the crosswalk on the west side of the highway and took the call as light morning traffic grumbled past.
Chief Phil Esterhaus said, “I’m not even to the beach yet to start my run, I get a call about Falkirk. He was shot five times.”
“Dead?”
“No. He was wearing Kevlar. Four rounds were stopped, but one took him in the left thigh. He’s in the hospital, no doubt making the entire staff wish they’d never pursued a career in medicine. You know who shot him?”
“Not me.”
