Dead Man's Switch (5 page)

Everyone laughed at that. Ella, with her long blonde hair, had a beauty that shone with the faintest curve of a smile. Everyone knew that Mack was the one who fell deep into the pool of love and thrashed like crazy to hold his head above the water until Ella rescued him.

That was part of family history. How Ella had tamed Mackenzie, replacing his wildness with something much more satisfying, a union of souls.

King's birth had, as each of his parents told him constantly, completed their world. All they'd needed was a small house on an island where the three of them could form a perfect nest of contentment as King grew from toddler to small boy to the man he was becoming.

At King's birth, Ella had suggested they name their son William Mackenzie, a reversal of Mack's name, Mackenzie William. Naturally,
Mack liked the thought of someone in his image but not his clone. Then Ella had pulled a small trick on her adoring and doting husband by suggesting the addition of a second and unique middle name, Lyon. Mack often said the infant's full name of William Lyon Mackenzie King was almost longer than the baby himself.

With Ella's customary sly sense of humor, she didn't ever reveal the reason for suggesting Lyon. No, she waited and fully enjoyed the moment when, years later, someone pointed out a strange coincidence. Just shy of King's ninth birthday, King and Mack finally learned that there had been another William Lyon Mackenzie King. A Canadian, just like his mother Ella. But unlike her, this Canadian was a long-dead prime minister. Ella had found a way to make their family uniquely Canadian while living on the American side of the border.

King, who had looked up photos of the other William Lyon Mackenzie King, had been okay with the Canadian part because he, like everybody, loved Ella. It was the part about sharing the name of an old man with no hair who looked like a bulldog that had no appeal to him.

On the other hand, what was really cool was seeing a movie about King Mufasa and Queen Sarabi and their son Simba. Yes,
The Lion King
. Or
The Lyon King
, the movie in his mind, in which he naturally played a center role.

So about the time he learned he'd been saddled with a name to honor a fusty old politician long put into a grave, King rejected his link to a prime minister by pronouncing himself the Lyon King, and he did it with such consistency that others on the island had given up fighting it.

Life as the Lyon King had been wonderful. He and Mack made no secret that they were the two biggest members of the Ella King fan club, and they kept her on a pedestal, where her bright light filled their home.

Then ten days earlier, while Mack and Ella were in Seattle, Ella collapsed without warning on a sidewalk outside a Starbucks. Physicians still couldn't explain why. All they knew was that nothing could seem to bring her out of a coma. And no one could guess when she might recover. Or if she would.

With her in a coma, the light in King's home had been extinguished. The nest destroyed. No metaphor could come close to describing the
misery and dejection Mack and King were enduring while Ella hovered between life and death. And both Mack and the Lyon King were helpless to do anything about it.

In a small workshop behind King's house, Ella had a pottery wheel and paints and a kiln. She made coffee cups and bowls and vases and jugs and earned a living selling most of them online. She was proud of her independence, but she insisted on handling all kitchen duty as well because she took joy in taking care of her two men.

But as King walked into the house at supper time, Blake's iPhone in his back pocket, there was no smell of sizzling sausage to greet him. No singing in the kitchen.

The kitchen felt dusty now. King and Mack just made sandwiches whenever they were hungry. Since the coma, they had not sat down once for a meal together. The house was silent because the only thing that mattered, the only thing that was worth discussing, was too painful to mention. The silence was an unbearable reminder that the family had been reduced to the two of them.

Ella also had a thing for cuckoo clocks. Her collection was scattered throughout the house. Little clocks. Big clocks. When the house finally began to sound like a ticking time bomb, Mack had begged Ella to keep only three clocks wound.

But now even the clocks were silent. When Ella entered the coma, King and Mack let the clocks go quiet. They didn't need cheerful reminders on the hour that Ella was not around to enjoy the carved wooden creatures that sprang out.

King needed food. He threw a slice of bread on a plate, slapped some presliced cheese and luncheon meats on it, squirted it with mayo, and covered it with another slice of bread. And yes, he drank milk straight from the carton. He'd always done that when Ella was around, mainly because of her indignant squeal whenever she caught him. Now he drank from the carton because it took less effort than getting a cup from the dirty dishes in the sink and rinsing it.

When Mack walked into the house, King was standing at the sink, staring out the window and thinking about Ella and wondering what criminal act Mack had committed and letting the depression slowly sink down on him as the night slowly fell on the view outside.

“Hey,” Mack said to King. “Good to see you back in time for curfew.”

Curfew. This echoed in King's mind.
“Trust no authorities. They will hunt you too.”
Was that the reason for curfew? Something that Blake had found? That involved Mack?

“Hey,” King said in reply without moving. King didn't know if he could keep his face neutral if he turned. He worried that Mack would see that King had betrayed him, that King no longer thought Mack was nearly perfect, that King could no longer trust the father he had once worshipped and adored just as they both worshipped and adored Ella.

King waited for Mack to ask about why King had been kicked out of the homeschool writing class. When nothing came, King wondered if Raimer had decided not to report anything to the warden. That made sense. King had been defiant, but making it an issue would raise a lot of other issues that Raimer might not like.

“Hungry?” Mack said.

“Already ate,” King answered. With Ella at the hospital, scheduling decent meals didn't matter much in the King household.

“Good,” Mack said.

Just down the road, at their neighbors' house, a dog named Patches began to bark. Patches didn't need a reason to bark. Or if Patches needed a reason, it was beyond any human ability to comprehend. Before Ella had gone into a coma, hearing Patches would prompt King or Mack to make up something, the stupider the better.

“A butterfly must have drifted into Patches' airspace.”

“Patches just released some gas and doesn't know it was his.”

But now, King and Mack just let the dog bark without comment. None of the old rituals mattered anymore.

Ella was ALONE. Mack wouldn't let King visit.

King smelled wood dust on Mack, even across the space that separated them. It was only the space of the small kitchen, but it felt like
opposite sides of the universe. Wood dust. That was Mack's escape. Mack worked the day shift at the prison, and at night, he liked working with wood, making delicate pieces of furniture. His wood shop shared a common wall with Ella's clay room.

King heard the sound of the fridge opening. He knew what Mack would do. Throw bread on a plate, slap presliced cheese and luncheon meat with mayo on the first slice, and add a second slice to hold it in place. The only difference in their routine was that Mack drank his milk from a cup. That's because Mack couldn't take the entire carton back to the wood shop. Which explained the dirty dishes in the sink.

“Tomorrow?” King asked without looking back at his father. He'd only see what never changed. A broad shouldered man with a dark beard filled with wood dust. Square face. Square head. Eyes that could focus like lasers. Except now they seemed dull because of what had happened to Ella.

Mack knew what King was asking about—a chance to go off the island and visit Ella at the hospital.

“Won't work,” Mack said. “Maybe a few days from now.”

King had only been off the island once since the coma. He'd spent three hours at the hospital, holding Ella's soft hands, whispering to her as he begged her to wake up. After that, Mack had kept both of them prisoners on the island, relying on doctor's reports to see if anything had changed.

“This is unfair, Mack,” King said. “I should be able to see her. What if...”

King couldn't finish the sentence.
What if she dies?

King didn't get a response. He heard his father's footsteps leave the kitchen and knew that, like every other night since Ella had entered the coma, Mack was escaping back to the construction of pieces of furniture.

Until the email from Blake Watt, King had believed that Ella was the entire reason for Mack's withdrawal from family life and any real conversation with King. Now King had no choice but to wonder if it was something different.

“Trust no authorities. They will hunt you too.”

CHAPTER 9

“I got nothing,” Johnson said. “I thought about it all night. Well, except when I was asleep. But I was thinking about it when I fell asleep. And it was the first thing I thought of when I woke up. And I thought about it all morning. Still nothing. He did not give me the password. Any password.”

King and Johnson sat on reclining chairs on the front porch of King's house. The view might have given them a sweep of the open farmland that had been cut into the trees on the island. Except for the drizzle.

The overhang protected them from the moisture, and the breeze wasn't strong enough to blow the drizzle across their faces. The beads of water were so light that it seemed more like fog than light rain, but the gurgling of drain pipes gave proof that the water did not remain suspended in the air.

An empty rocking chair was farther down the porch. This was where Ella would sit on days like this, wrapped in a blanket, hands curled around a tea mug, smile on her face. She loved the coziness and tranquility of this kind of afternoon.

King used to love them too. Until The Coma. Now he hated anything like this that reminded him she was gone. He hated the island.

So he was glad to be frustrated. It took his mind off the empty rocking chair.

“That's impossible,” King told Johnson. “Somehow, Watt gave you the password to the iPhone.”

“I don't have it,” Johnson said.

“He went to a lot of work to set everything up so far. He found a way to beat the infrared sensors in the forbidden zone so he could hide the iPhone and mark the tree. Set up a way to get me a message after he drowned. Made sure the sensors wouldn't detect me either. No way after all of that would he be wrong about you and the password.”

“Nothing,” Johnson said. “Absolutely, flat-out nothing.”

King hit the power button at the top of the iPhone. The home screen lit up, showing the four empty boxes. There were 10,000 possible passwords between 0000 and 9999—except for the two wrong guesses King had put into the phone the day before. Only two chances left. Two more possible passwords to enter before all the data was wiped.

Maybe he should just get it over with. Try two more random passwords. Ensure the data was wiped. Then this whole situation would be out of his hands. He wouldn't be able to do a thing after that to learn whether something crazy and insane bad was happening at night.

But the clock was ticking. All of yesterday, last night, and this morning had passed since he'd found the iPhone. Easily half of the 72-hour deadline that Watt's email had threatened until a new set of emails went out into the world to show that King's father was a horrible criminal involved in a crazy and insane bad thing that was supposedly happening at night.

King wanted to think the key word was “supposedly.” However, the argument that he'd just used on Johnson was too powerful. No way Watt would have set all of this up if something wasn't happening. For crying out loud, there was the simple fact that Watt had been worried enough to put in a dead man's switch. And then the horrible truth that Watt's worries had come true when he drowned.

Something
was
happening. And King needed Johnson to come up with more than just “I got nothing.”