Relentless (24 page)

“We’re half afraid of that,” I said.

   When we returned to the kitchen, Milo was sitting on a stool while Clotilda, furiously cooking at the wood-burning stove, regaled him with what she had learned about the future from that morning’s coffee grounds.

When Grim told Milo that the suitcase contained the forbidden electronics, Penny said, “I’m surprised you’d coerce your grandfather into committing a crime.”

“Now, punkin’,” Grim admonished, “I’ve been buying illegal weapons most of my life. This stuff isn’t weaponry. This is just a little favor for my only grandchild.”

Clearly embarrassed, Milo said, “It’s not that much of a crime, Mom. Besides, I’m not going to do anything wrong with the stuff.”

“What
are
you going to do with it?” I asked.

“This cool thing.”

“What thing?”

“It’s the kind of thing you can’t describe.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“It’s the kind of thing you’ve got to experience,” said Milo.

“When are we going to experience it?”

The boy shrugged. “Sometime.”

Clotilda made a pitch to keep Milo with them in lockdown. “Your house blew up, you need guns. It’s none of our business what’s going on, but obviously you’ve got some problems, and he’ll be safer here.”

“Of course, it’s your business, Mom,” Penny said. “And I gave Dad a cut-to-the-chase version while we were in the armory.” To me, she added, “Maybe we should leave Milo here.”

Before I could respond, Milo spoke in a whisper that carried like a shout: “If you don’t take me, you’ll both be killed.”

His blue eyes were even more compelling than his mother’s. He stared at me, and then at Penny.

“You need me,” he told his mother. “You don’t know why yet, but you’ll find out.”

Again he turned his attention to me. His sweet face was that of a child, but his eyes were those of a grown man who had peered into the abyss and who was not afraid to gaze into it again.

Still in that remarkable hushed voice, he said, “I’m small, I’m young—and I’m so different. You’ve always respected that difference, and you’ve always trusted it. Trust me now. There’s a reason I am the way I am, and there’s a reason I was born to you. There’s always a reason. We belong together.”

Never had the nickname Spooky been better suited to him.

“All right?” I asked Penny.

She nodded. “All right.”

When Milo smiled, I found his smile contagious.

Clotilda took one egg from a thatched-reed basket full of them and
threw it on the floor. For a moment, she studied the splatter of white, yolk, and shell. “He’s right. If you don’t take him with you, we’ll never see either of you again.”

From his perch upon the stool, Milo surveyed the ruined egg, then grinned up at his grandfather. “Grandma’s a hoot.”

“She’s a hoot and a half,” Grimbald confirmed, and beamed with great affection at his bride. “I remember when I first saw her—such a radiant vision in the woods, on her knees, arms up to the elbows in a deer carcass.”

A girlish blush suffused Clo’s face as she was swept away by this romantic memory. “After you shoot it, gutting it in the woods saves a mess at home later. But there’s always some danger that the blood smell will draw hungry critters. Your grandfather was standing in tree shadows, and when I looked up, I thought he must be a bear.”

“She moved so fast, from carcass to rifle,” Grim remembered, “that I almost became her second kill of the day.”

Both he and Clo laughed, and she said, “But then he blurts out ‘I have seen Diana, Roman goddess of the hunt and of the moon, here abroad in daylight and brighter than the sun.’”

“Grimpa really said that?” Milo asked.

“He really did. So I knew right then I either had to shoot him or marry him.”

Having heard this story countless times before, Penny was less enchanted than Milo. “We’ve got a long way to go. Better get moving. Where’s Lassie?”

“Probably in the potato bin,” Milo guessed.

“I told you, sweetness, the bin’s empty,” Clotilda reminded him. “I forgot to fill it last month, and I used up the last for these home fries.”

“That’s why she’ll be there, Grandma. It’s a cool, dark, quiet place, and it smells good. Sometimes Lassie needs cool, dark, and quiet.”

In the northwest corner of the kitchen, two bins were recessed in
the stone floor, a pair of small concrete-walled vaults, one for potatoes and the other for onions.

Clotilda, Penny, and I gathered around as Grimbald lifted the hinged wooden lid from the potato bin.

In the four-by-five-foot space, four feet below us, comfortably curled on a bed of empty potato sacks, Lassie looked up and yawned.

“The lid’s heavy. How did she get in there?” Clotilda asked.

“The usual way,” I said.

“And how is that?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

   With a destination that required a long drive, we set out from the Boom stronghold into a world of dark and rain and trouble.

I found the visit with Grim and Clo to be energizing, but the refreshment of mind and spirit faded soon after we were on the road.

Because Penny had gotten a two-hour nap at the peninsula house, she somewhat recovered from the sleep lost the previous night when Shearman Waxx Tasered us. Giving me the opportunity to have a snooze, she drove the first leg of our journey northward.

In the backseat, using a flashlight, Milo examined the items that his grandfather secured on the black market, while Lassie noisily sniffed them. He muttered excitedly to himself or perhaps to the dog.

The windshield wipers should have been as effective as the shiny pendant of a hypnotist. By the time we were on the freeway, the thrum of tires should have been a sedative.

In the best circumstances, however, I have difficulty sleeping in a
moving vehicle. Arguably the primary shaping force of my life has been a curiosity about where I am going, not in a day or a week, but a curiosity about where ultimately I might be going. The forward motion of a car stirs in me this lifelong inquisitiveness, which is as much a yearning as it is a need to know, and mile by mile I grow more restless for revelation.

Eyes closed, I said to Penny, “Sometimes I worry about Milo. At the stronghold, I realized you had a childhood like his. Homeschooled. No friends your age. Your world limited to family, a kind of isolation. What were the negatives of a childhood like that?”

“None,” she said without hesitation. “Growing up in a loving family, with parents who have a sense of humor and common sense and a sense of wonder—that’s not isolation, that’s a wonderful haven.”

I loved the sound of her voice as much as the sight of her face. Eyes closed, I couldn’t see her beauty, but I could hear it.

“More than a haven,” she said. “It’s a sanctuary, where you can decide who you are, what you think about the world, before the world
tells
you who you are and what you ought to think of it.”

“You had your talent, writing and drawing, just like Milo has a talent for … something. Don’t you wonder if less isolation and more experience in the early years might’ve made you a different artist?”

“One I wouldn’t want to be. By the time I went to art school, all I wanted was better technique. I already had my own theories of art, so those of the most opinionated professors didn’t corrupt me.”

We rode in silence. Then I said, “What a magical world it is—folks like yours, living like they do, raising a wonder like you.”

“I’m no more a wonder than anyone. And that’s what makes the world magical. Every baby’s a seed of wonder—that gets watered or it doesn’t. As a kid, I loved going down into the stronghold. It was like something out of Tolkien, a hobbit’s home.”

I opened my eyes. The bracketing hills and the six-lane highway seemed not to await illumination by the headlights but to dissolve before those beams could reveal more. The pavement, other traffic, the guardrails, the landscape deliquesced into the solvent rain, and we appeared to be rushing always toward a brink and an abyss.

“Seventy percent of people in prison were raised without a dad in the home,” she said. “I was lucky—I had a father and a half.”

When I closed my eyes, the image of the melting world stayed with me, and carried me into sleep.

In my lost-and-alone dream, I walked a deserted highway that led through featureless salt flats, and not a single cloud graced the sky, and no currents moved the air nor did a single bird move through it, and no lines divided the blacktop into lanes, and the only salient detail was the blood trail that led toward a horizon that could not be clearly discerned.

The ringing of my cell phone woke me. It was my regular phone, not the disposable.

As I fished it from my shirt pocket, Penny said, “Should you?”

I hesitated, but then took the call.

John Clitherow—author of the Waxx-savaged
Mr. Bluebird
and writer on the run—said, “Cullen, I have to tell you how my wife and daughters died.”

   “I have to tell you,” John Clitherow repeated. “I have to.” Having slumped in sleep, I sat up straighter in the passenger seat, and saw that we were on a lonely stretch of highway with few lights visible on the flanking hills. Into the phone, I said, “I’m sorry for your losses. I did some research, I know about your folks. It’s all so … it’s horrible.” The torment in his voice was thin, yet no less affecting for its thinness, just as the stropped edge of a knife is thin but cuts.

“Right after the Michigan police phoned me to say my parents’ bodies had been found—the condition, such brutality—I told them about Waxx, the review, my dead cat. They did nothing with that, Cullen.
Nothing
. Why? And then Waxx called again. He just said ‘Next?’ and hung up. He was insane—and serious. He’d said ‘doom,’ now my folks were dead. But who’s going to believe it … fast enough to save the rest of my family? Not the cops. So I took Margaret, my wife, the two girls, we ran. I wanted them someplace secure before I went to the police again. We weren’t followed. I
know
we weren’t.”

I heard him swallow hard, then swallow again.

When I glanced at Penny, she glanced at me. “Clitherow?” she asked, and I nodded.

“We drove over a hundred miles,” he continued, “no destination, getting away from where he expected to find us. It was worse than fear, Cullen, it had nothing to do with intellect or imagination, it was undiluted
fright
, raw nerves. Fear can be controlled by an act of will, but I couldn’t control what I was feeling. Then … a hundred miles made me feel better. God help me, I felt kind of safe.”

The rain grew heavier and seemed to rush at us more urgently than before. Penny adjusted the wiper speed, and the blades arced faster, thumped louder.

John said, “We stopped at this nothing motel. A room with two queen-size beds. Not the kind of place we would have stayed before— which made it seem even safer, so anonymous. Margie and I could think things through there, decide what next. Emily and Sarah, our girls, only six and seven, didn’t know their grandparents were murdered, but they were sensitive kids, they knew something was wrong.”

The previous thin edge of pain in his voice had grown sharper, past distress now, short of anguish, but cutting ever deeper as he approached the recollection of his next loss.