The Meridians (22 page)

"But I -" she began. Assuming that Scott was correct, she didn't really want six or seven strangers traipsing through her house and opening up her things.

Scott again held up a hand, but this time the gesture was not meant to placate her, but to silence her. "Shush, now," he said. "I know you probably don't want a bunch of big sweaty men clomping around in your house in the middle of the night, but trust me when I say that they'll be discrete, polite, and will probably have you unpacked inside of an hour. They won't open any of your moving boxes unless you ask them to, but they probably
will
insist on helping you set up your bedrooms at least enough that you and..." and he paused again, as though the name he was about to utter had some special significance to him, "...Kevin can get to sleep and rest for a while. Plus, if you play your cards right you'll be awoken to the sounds of knocking at your door when their wives come over with breakfast, lunch, and dinner supplies for you."

Lynette was reeling. Was this guy for real? But before she could say anything about how unlikely that whole scenario sounded, he was moving to the back of the truck, asking over his shoulder, "Is the back locked, or just closed?" When she didn't answer, he repeated, "Do I need a key or anything to get in?" and then without waiting for a response he unlatched the back of the truck and slid the door upwards.

He whistled. "You are the most anal-retentive packer I ever did see."

Again, Lynette bristled. She hustled around to the back of the truck, where Scott was looking at all of her boxes. It was true, all of them had labels stating what was in them and where they belonged in the new house, and maybe it was also true that they had been packed according to size and weight, but she hardly thought that counted as "anal-retentive."

Again, though, she had no chance to say anything before Scott was on the move. He grabbed two boxes marked "L's bedroom," and hopped out of the back of the truck with them.

He stood motionless then, as though waiting for her to do something.

"What?" said Lynette.

"Well, you going to show me which room these belong in?" he asked with a smile. "Or do I have to just go in and figure it out for myself?"

Lynette led him inside without another word, only stopping to check that Kevin was still asleep and not likely to wake up and find himself alone. She took him into the master bedroom, and he gently set the boxes on the floor.

Before they had even left the house, a large man, built like a sleepy oak tree but with a kind and open face, was already inside, holding two more boxes from the back of Lynette's van.

"I'm Gil, ma'am," he said, and nodded as though he would have preferred to tip his hat at her only his hands were full and plus he didn't have a hat to tip. "Your neighbor." He looked at the boxes in his hands. "Hope you don't mind that I helped myself to a few of your things; figured I'd get started while waiting for the others to arrive."

"Others?" said Lynette, her voice a surprised whisper.

"Sure," said Gil. "You don't think I'm going to move you in all by myself do you?" He winked at her to show that he was joking, then moved on past her into the living room, to put his boxes down.

Lynette swiveled to face Scott, who was watching her with an amused smile on his face.

"How did you know that everyone would just jump out of bed and rush on over to help?" she asked.

Scott grinned even more widely. "Because that's pretty much what happened when I moved here myself," he said.

Then he walked past her out into the night. Lynette followed and watched as he handed Gil two more boxes, then took two more for himself before hurrying past her into the house. She started to follow, but Gil swiveled and stood in her way, blocking her entrance. "Why don't you just go ahead and sit down with that boy of yours and watch over him?" said the big man.

Lynette started to protest, but something in the man's face stopped her. Nothing threatening, she did not feel in any danger, but at the same time she felt sure just looking at him that he was not about to let her in the house holding any boxes or doing much of any work. And truth be told, she
was
exhausted, and she didn't want Kevin waking up alone, even for a moment.

So she turned and moved back to the truck. She reached for the driver's side door, then started as another hand reached out to open it. She spun around, expecting to see Scott, but instead saw another man, one who looked so much like Gil that it was clear the two must be brothers. "I'm Brad," said the man without preamble. "I hear there's a moving job needs doing."

She nodded, utterly speechless, and pointed at the back of the van. Brad moved off and grabbed some boxes, joining another man who had also pulled up in the intervening time, and both of them grabbed several boxes and moved quickly into the house, working as efficiently as ants on an anthill.

Where am I? she couldn't help but thinking, feeling as though she had taken a wrong turn and instead of going to Meridian had somehow found her way into a Norman Rockwell painting.

Scott was at her elbow the next moment, helping her into the truck and, as though he had again heard her thoughts, he said, "Welcome to Idaho." Then he closed the door, pantomimed to her that she should get some sleep, and moved with the other men to the back of the truck to keep moving her things into the house.

Lynette watched the men - it turned out that fourteen showed up, not just six - move things into her house for a time, but in spite of all her intentions she felt her eyes growing heavier and heavier, and then, at last, she could no longer fight what she was feeling.

She slept, and dreamed of a pair of light blue eyes, and a scarred face. But in the dream the scars seemed as natural as could be, and she hardly noticed them. She smiled in her sleep, and reached out to hold Kevin's hand without waking.

***

23.

***

Scott kept trembling.

Kevin. The boy's name was Kevin.

In the time since the mysterious notes had first appeared; the time since he had first heard the gray man utter Kevin's name, Scott had been on the lookout for someone - anyone - with that name. But not one person so named had come into his life.

Until now.

He put down the box he was carrying and pulled something out of his pocket. It was a piece of paper that he had been carrying with him for almost a month now, and it said little:

1292 McGlinchey

May 5, 1:30 am

be there

They were the four things that the old man - not the gray man, but the blue-eyed visitor with the devastating shoulder lock - had told him. An address, a date, and a time...and instructions to be at the address at that date and time

Scott almost hadn't followed the old man's instructions, almost hadn't bothered to come. He had gotten in the car and out of it again no fewer than half a dozen times before he finally drove the three or four miles from his house to this one, cursing himself for a fool each and every time.

But he did it.

Because of what the old man had said. About Scott no longer loving Amy. About Scott no longer being the kind of person
she
would love. It was almost more than he could bear, the thought that his wife would have turned a blind eye to him had he met her for the first time on the day he met the old man. And the reason it was so painful a thought was because he knew that the old man was right. He
had
turned into someone that Amy would not have been attracted to in the slightest.

So upon waking from whatever sedative the old man had given him - a light one, for he awoke in his own chair only about fifteen minutes later, still in first period - he had written down the date and time and address that were still bouncing around in his head like marbles in some kind of psychic pinball machine. He didn't know then if he was going to go or not, but he did know that something had to change. He could no longer live his life exclusively for the purpose of maintaining the memories of his wife and son, for in so doing he had lost in himself the very qualities that made them love him. He realized that he had turned his life into a mausoleum, a pyramid: into any of a number of tombs that were designed solely to honor the spirits of the dead, but in so doing transformed themselves into places where other humans were vaguely unwelcome to visit.

So Scott wrote the address, date, and time down...and then, after six or seven false starts, he came.

And met Lynette.

The edges of the paper in Scott's hands curled, for he clenched his hands unconsciously into fists upon thinking of the woman. She had affected him as no one else had -

(
since Amy
)

- in eight years, and more. Her eyes had appeared to him as almost luminous in the moonlight, as limpid pools in which he would not drown, but could instead come to drink, and be revitalized. Her smile - when she smiled, for she had been understandably nervous at his appearance - made him feel new inside, in a way that only one other woman had ever been able to accomplish.

And then there was Kevin.

The boy had been asleep when Scott finally drove up and saw the moving truck and got out to check the vehicle to see if he could surmise the reason that John Doe had wanted him here, now. But something about the sleeping boy had arrested him, had so utterly stopped him in his tracks that he was still standing there, motionless, staring at the boy when the child's mother had come out of her house and asked what he was doing and who he was.

He realized a moment after seeing the boy what it was - he was the same age as Chad had been. And not only the same age, but eerily similar in appearance. Though he got the impression from speaking to Lynette that appearance was where the similarities began and ended - that Kevin was a special child, perhaps mentally disabled, certainly operating under special needs that Chad had not been burdened with.

And then there was the fact of his name. Scott had very nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard the boy's name, and had been hard-pressed to recover from his amazement in such a way as to avoid freaking Lynette out to the point that she would have taken her son inside the new home, locked the door, and gone looking to see if the previous owners had by any chance left some deadly weapon - like a firearm or a thermonuclear warhead - behind.

Then there was the matter of how he had dealt with helping Lynette. It was true that Meridian was without doubt one of the friendliest places in the known universe, but even for the inhabitants of this friendly place, knocking on someone's door at one-thirty and asking for moving help was pushing it. In fact, if it hadn't been Gil next door to her, Scott might not have gotten away with it. The fact that Gil was a man whose heart was as big as his bearlike body was the only saving grace that kept the moving party, well, moving.

But still, the whole time that Scott had been setting up help for Lynette, he had felt strange. Like he was a cock in the hen coop, strutting and preening and generally showing off his plumage. He was showing off Meridian, it was true, but he was aware that he was also showing Lynette that he was someone that could get stuff done. And then he had insisted she wait in the truck, that she rest with her son, like he was not only a guardian angel but a knight-errant from another age, a man of such deep chivalry that the very thought of a woman picking up a moving box was deeply anathema to him. Not that he thought her incapable of moving anything - indeed, the fact that she had arrived alone at one thirty in the morning spoke highly of the fact that she was self-confident enough to pull off the move solo. But he wanted her to know that he was ready, willing, and able to help out in any way necessary.

He was, quite simply, showing off. And that fact made him uncomfortable as did anything else in that strange night, because he had not shown off in years. And doing so made him feel more than a little guilty, as though he were cheating on Amy in his mind.

Only the resounding rebuke of the old man that had stung him so strongly that the wound still lay open in his mind had kept him from turning around and avoiding the whole night, avoiding Lynette, avoiding...
Kevin
.

The words of the note that Scott had found in his deserted apartment in Los Angeles over seven years ago kept playing over and over in his mind. "I'm still here, and I'm coming for you and Kevin."

In the intervening years, Scott had not only not encountered anyone named Kevin, but had actually been able to convince himself that the note itself was a figment of his then-overwrought imagination. After all, it had come in the middle of his last days at the LAPD, a time immediately following the deaths of his wife and child and his own hospitalization and subsequent painful recuperation.

So who could tell if the entire episode when he found the note had really happened. Even the note was gone, having been thrown away by Scott immediately after being found by him.

And so he was able to relegate the missive and its threatening words to a mostly-unused portion of his memory, like a locked room in the house of his heart, a room that he rarely acknowledged and never visited.