Kitty Goes to War (33 page)

She went to the kitchen to find some tea or a glass of water and passed the doorway to the basement.

When her grandparents lived in the house, the basement had been off-limits. She could play anywhere in the yard, read any of the books—fascinating
fairy stories and ancient histories—on the dozens of shelves in the living room, but the basement was for grown-ups. When she was old enough to think about it, she assumed that meant power tools and cleaning solvents. By the time her father moved into the house, she was out of college and never spent more than a weekend at a time there and never took much interest in the basement.

Now she assumed that the prohibition no longer applied.

A bare bulb hanging from the ceiling lit the stairs. The basement was unfinished, framework and heating ducts exposed, a second room blocked off with bare drywall. At the foot of the stairs was a workroom with a rack of tools, a table saw, and a nebulous unfinished woodworking project propped against a set of metal shelves.

In the middle of the drywall at one end of the workroom was a closed door.

Stocking-footed, robe wrapped around her T-shirt and bare legs, she crept down the stairs to that door and opened it.

It was a storage room: shelves crammed with troves of objects, crates stacked as high as the ceiling, boxes piled to create the narrow walkways of a maze through a room whose edges were lost in darkness. The air smelled dusty, with a bite of cold seeping from the cracked concrete floor.

She looked for a light switch or a cord dangling
from a ceiling bulb, but couldn’t find anything. Back in the workroom, she retrieved a flashlight, then entered the storage area, feeling like she was spelunking.

She couldn’t see much in the beam of light: the shadows and angles of boxes, tarps draped over a few corners, forming weird lurking shapes. She felt six years old again, on an adventure in her own house simply because she was sneaking around past midnight.

Passing the flashlight beam back and forth, she identified some items: a thick hammer, like a sledgehammer, on a short handle, the wood shiny from use; an old-fashioned broom, brush stalks wrapped around a dark staff; a cup made of chipped clay; a sheepskin folded on a shelf. In the flashlight’s sickly glow, the fleece looked yellow, shiny almost. No dust dulled it, even though it must have lain there for years. She ran her hand over it. It felt soft, fresh, and sent a charge up her arm, a static shock.

All the objects looked antique, archaic and out of place, but none of them looked old. On the next shelf over, she found a musical instrument, strings on a vertical frame. Not a harp, but a lyre. She plucked a string. It gave back a clear tone. She bet it was still in tune. The note seemed to echo. She shivered.

This was a museum. The stuff here must have been worth a fortune. Her grandparents might have gathered such a collection over the course of their lives. But why hadn’t anyone told Evie about it?

A stack of papers rested on the shelf by the door. Hoping it was some kind of inventory, something that might tell her what exactly all this was, she picked up the pages and leafed through them. The handwriting on them belonged to her mother, Emma. These were the loose-leaf pages she made her notes on. Emma Walker had been a travel writer, mostly articles for magazines. It was a hobby she’d maneuvered into a part-time career. Evie supposed she’d learned to write from her, though she’d taken the impulse in an entirely different direction.

Emma had been in Seattle doing research when she died.

The first page was a description of a garden. Evie couldn’t guess where or when; it didn’t have a label. It didn’t matter. The pages held her mother’s voice. Evie put them back on the shelf, where they looked out of place and lonely.

She left the room, closing the door softly, as if an infant slept inside. It was precious, wondrous. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end.

She made tea and sat at the kitchen table with a pen and sheet of paper to write longhand, which she hadn’t done in ages. It helped sometimes, making the words physical. Not much story happened. Mostly, she made lists, character sketches, snippets of description for if, when, she ever got around to writing the novel.

She was asleep with her head on the kitchen table when her father emerged for breakfast in the morning.

“Trouble sleeping?” he said, standing on the other side of the table, amused.

Stretching the kinks out of her back and neck, she rubbed her face. “Yeah. No. I don’t know, I just meant to get some tea.” She didn’t remember falling asleep; her body still felt like it was midnight.

“It was the wind blowing last night. Rattles the whole house. It kept me awake, too.” He didn’t act like it. He was already dressed for the day. He poured a glass of orange juice and drank it while he pulled his coat from the rack by the door.

She wanted to ask him about the storeroom, but realized he was getting ready to go out. “Where are you going?”

“I’ve got a Watch shift this morning.” He was on the local Citizens’ Watch, had been since her mother died. The local police didn’t have enough people to man the checkpoints and continue their usual workload. Citizens’ Watch took up the slack.

“Are you sure—I mean, are you sure you should still be doing that? I didn’t think you’d still—”

“I’m not dead yet,” he said cheerfully.

“But what if something happens?”

“Nothing’s going to happen.”

“But—”

“Evie, I plan to keep things as normal as possible for as long as I can. I like the Watch. It gets me out. I’ve got everyone in town looking out for me. I’ll be fine.”

This was like when she was in high school, with her parents standing in the kitchen listing all the reasons she shouldn’t go out after the game, with all the drunks on the road, and her insisting that she’d be
fine
.

He put the empty glass in the sink. He’d reached the door when he looked back and said, “You want to come along?”

“I should try to get some work done. I don’t want to leave Bruce hanging.”

“I’ll see you after lunch then.”

“Dad?”

He hesitated, hand on the doorknob.

“I went downstairs last night.” She let that hang for a moment, waiting for him to offer a response, wondering what he would say without her prompting him.

“Oh?” was all he said.

She wet her lips and tried again. “The storeroom—has the stuff in there ever been catalogued? Do you have any idea what all is down there? What it’s worth? You could have your own antique show.”

A slow, wry smile grew on his lips, and the look in his eye told her before he even spoke that he wasn’t going to answer her question.

“I’ll see you this afternoon,” he said, then was gone.

Figured. Though she wondered why a roomful of antiques demanded such deep, dark secrecy. Had someone in their family’s history been a master
thief? Run a pawn shop in the last century and never bothered to sell off the assets? Was a budding museum curator? At least he hadn’t gotten angry at her for invading the forbidden storeroom.

She set up her laptop in the living room, on the coffee table, and sat on the hardwood floor in her robe and stocking feet. She’d shower and change later. Who did she have to impress?

Curled up in the middle of the carpet, napping politely, Mab kept her company. When Evie got up for a glass of water or to stretch her muscles, Mab always looked at her, ears cocked, alert. When Evie relaxed, so did Mab. Evie worked up the courage to scratch the dog’s ears; Mab acknowledged the attention with a couple of thumps of her tail. Her father must have kept the stray dog for company.

Bruce had already e-mailed her sketches of the new pages. He must have been up all night, too. Once colored, the Cessna explosion was going to be spectacular. He had it covering a two-page spread.

So, what to write next. They had a formula that demanded a certain number of shots fired each issue, and she was in danger of running short. She needed a battle scene.

The crew barreled across the tundra in a stolen Jeep, racing against an execution order sent out for one of the men they were supposed to rescue. The Blackhawk was out of commission for now—sabotage in the fuel tank. The Russians were supposed to
be helping them, but someone on the inside didn’t want them to succeed. A three-way battle ensued, no one was sure who was siding with whom.

Usually, Evie wrote things like “chase scene” and “fight,” and let Bruce’s capable imagination construct the details in four-color panels that splashed across entire pages.

But something about this battle tickled her story instincts. Throw out a clue, a hook that could carry the plot to the next issue. An enemy chopper ran them down. Matchlock managed to steer them into a gully and under cover, but not before Talon saw a face he swore he knew, a man he thought he had left behind to die in the arctic years before. Talon had had to make a decision—stay to save his platoon-mate, or leave and ensure the success of the mission. Talon had abandoned him. The memory still haunted him.

And there the issue ended, centered on the expression of stark disbelief on Talon’s face.

Next issue: He’ll want to follow the enemy chopper. He’ll want to learn what had happened to his friend, how he’d survived. Tracker argues with him. Her mind is on the spy imprisoned in Siberia. On the mission. She’ll go alone if she has to, she’ll defy him—

Someone knocked on the door.

_______________________

Copyright © 2010 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC