The Summer We Lost Alice (18 page)

Heather reached over and took his arm. She did it so nonchalantly, he hardly noticed at first. "On the other hand," she said, "you've been reminded of that incident hundreds of times, haven't you, over the years? Do you get a nosebleed every time somebody mentions
Meddersville or Alice? What was different about this time?"

"Well, it came totally out of the blue."

"And?"

"And nothing.
That's it."

"Hm."

"I don't like the way you said that. Something about it implied incredulity. With a hint of disdain."

"It's just that—I don't want to make this about me, but it does seem oddly coincidental, doesn't it, that it happens when I'm in the audience?"

"You'd left."

"I got as far as the lobby. I was watching the monitor."

"What are you getting at?"

"Like I said, maybe it doesn't have anything to do with me. Maybe it was Alice who socked you in the nose."

It would be just like Alice to sock him in the nose from behind the veil.

"Why would she do that?" he said.

"Maybe she was trying to get your attention. Or send you a message."

"And that message would be—"

"I don't know. Follow your nose?"

Ethan's cell phone rang. He was prepared to ignore it but saw that the call came from Suzette. She'd left them at the hospital and he'd forgotten to call to update her on his diagnosis.

"Suze," he said.

"Okay, you're not dead of a brain
hemorrhage, I don't have to go job-hunting tomorrow. Good to know."

"Sorry. Heather and I went to dinner and I drank too much."

"She still with you?"

"Right here."
He smiled at Heather and she squeezed his arm.

"You might want to take a few steps away."

Ethan extricated himself from Heather's arm. He held up a finger as he removed himself. "Go," he said into the phone.

"I was reviewing the footage from that night the Skeptics infiltrated the show."

"I thought you erased that episode."

"Found it on the backup server." Actually, she'd been playing her private DVD at home for her latest boyfriend and laughing uproariously. She'd never seen so much flop sweat in her life as poured out of Ethan's collar that afternoon. The stains under his arms grew like an animated portrayal of the Black Death overwhelming Europe.

"I had a hunch or a memory or something and went looking for it."

"Uh-huh."

"Guess who was in the audience. Wearing a blonde wig and librarian glasses."

"Oh, crap."

"Thought you should know."

"Thanks."

"Hey, your job is my job."

Ethan glanced at Heather. He smiled
. She returned his smile a little hesitantly. Did she know they were talking about her? "Erase that show, Suze. Really this time."

"Got it," she said.

Ethan clicked off his phone and pocketed it. He walked back to Heather. She looked at him with worry that seemed genuine until he put it behind librarian glasses.

"Do you have to go?" she said.

"Yeah."

They had a short walk back to the studio. Heather again took his arm and he let her. Maybe he was too quick to have Suzette erase that show. He'd always been attracted to women in glasses.
Why, Miss Jones—

"This will probably seem hilarious in the morning," she said.
"Spirit possession, messages from beyond the grave. No offense, but it's pure hokum, right? You've never actually spoken to anyone beyond the veil?"

"You don't really expect me to answer that, do you?" It suddenly occurred to him that he'd already called his audience delusional. Oh, man. If she'd recorded that comment somehow, he could kiss prime time good
-bye.

"Why not?
Oh. I get it. I'm not wearing a wire, if that's what you're getting at."

"And how would I know that?"

She stopped and looked him squarely in the face. She placed her hand behind his head, drew him close and kissed him.

"Feeling a strong spiritual connection?" he said when they broke for air. She shook her head.

"There's nothing spiritual about it," she said.

Ethan found himself wondering if she had her blonde wig in her purse.

* * *

"This wasn't my first time, you know," she said. The bed looked like a battle had been waged under its sheets. She straightened the top sheet and drew it up over her lap.

"No kidding," Ethan said.

He wasn't feeling proud of himself. He'd let the wrong head do his thinking and now he was feeling a keen need to be alone.
He should have gone straight to the internet and Googled "Willy Proost" and "Meddersville" to get some background info. He would've if Heather hadn't come up behind him and bitten him on the ear. Now here he was, wrapped in a nest of sheets with a woman who could bring his whole show crumbling down with a few well-chosen keystrokes. At least she hadn't been wearing a wire—his search had been exhaustive.

"I mean, it wasn't the first time I've been to your show," Heather said.

"Oh?"

"I was on about a year ago. I'm not surprised you don't recognize me. It was during my blonde period, before my LASIK."

"We didn't speak. I'd have remembered."

"I wasn't chosen. You had your hands full that night. Apparently the Skeptics Society had packed the house."

"You weren't one of them?"

"Not officially. I figured you for a carnival act. I was just hoping to be proven wrong."

"You would've been disappointed."

"That night, maybe.
Maybe it was too soon, before the boy in Kansas went missing. Before Alice decided she had to do something to draw your attention. I mean, it can't all be an act. Something drew you to this whole business. You're smart, perceptive. You could do a lot of other things. But you chose—this. You must have heard a calling."

Ethan made a noncommittal noise. Heather lifted the sheet over her lap.

"Look. No recorder."

Ethan sighed. Despite himself, he felt a stirring in his groin. He looked away.

"Everything you just said would have meant so much more a couple of hours ago."

She gathered the sheet tightly around her. "I see," she said.

"No, I mean before Suzette called. Before she told me you'd been on the show with the Skeptics, wearing a blonde wig and glasses. Before that call, I'd have thought you were being honest with me. Now, it makes me think you know you got caught."

"It wasn't a wig.
Peroxide."

"You're deflecting."

"So what are you saying? You think this is all a setup for some big exposé?"

"I don't know. Is it?"

She held him in a hard stare.

"I should go," she said.

She threw the covers back. She swung her legs out of the bed and marched the few steps to the bathroom. Ethan heard water running. She yelled at him over the roar of the water.

"I don't know what I expected. The charm always evaporates once you guys get what you want. I don't know why I thought you'd be any different from any other third-rate TV star with a big ego and a little—" She fell silent.

Long minutes passed.

Ethan began to wonder if he should knock on the door. What if she was slicing her wrists in there? He got up and pulled on his pants.

"Heather?" he said.

He was walking toward the bathroom when she emerged wrapped in a towel. Her face held a sheepish expression that made her look like a kid.

"I didn't mean any of those terrible things," she said. "Shoot, I practically dragged you up here by the hair. And I ... I had quite a good time, actually. Why are you staring at me like that?"

I had quite a good time, actually.

"My God," he said, "you sound just like Alice."

* * *

"It's a convincing act."

They sat half-dressed in front of Ethan's computer. He had told her that he was feeling guilty for not looking into the boy's disappearance earlier, expecting her to use that as her exit cue
. Instead she'd pulled on a shirt and a pair of panties and said, "Let's do it." He was printing out news articles when she brought up his act again.

"I mean, it's hard to believe that you're making everything up and then somehow it all fits. Don't you ever get a gut instinct or a hunch or something?"

"It isn't that hard. People aren't all that different. I shotgun. I play the odds. Once I've scored a few hits, all I do is tell them what they want to hear."

"Always?"

"Always, always, always. Anything else, they'd run me out of town on a rail."

"You've never believed in immortal souls, not even one tiny bit?"

"Hoped. But believed? No, not really. My disbelief has been shaken, though, I'll admit that."

"You're losing your faith in skepticism."

"Ha."

"Maybe you're the crazy one. Not believing—it makes this whole Alice business that much harder to explain."

"When people don't understand a thing, they make something up. The sun is a fiery chariot, a coyote dropped the stars in the sky. If some aboriginal with less scientific knowledge than a modern third-grader said it a few thousand years ago, it must be true."

"Give me that old time religion."

"Exactly. The thing we fear most is the unknown, so everything must have an explanation, even if you have to make one up. The biggest unknown of all is death. The most inconceivable truth is that the universe could go on without us, so we lie to ourselves about that, too."

He sent one more article to the printer and sat back, waiting for it to emerge.

"That's enough," he said. "It's all a tablespoon of fact and a ton of speculation. This boy, Willy Proost, disappeared on a school hike. He's presumed dead but nobody's found a body. It fits the pattern from twenty-five years ago, but that doesn't prove anything. Any missing kid case would fit that pattern. Ultimately, there's no indication that it has anything to do with Alice's disappearance."

"You sound relieved."

"I've got to admit, it had crossed my mind to fly out and see what was going on. Not that there's anything I could do, but still, if there was some connection to Alice—"

"There's a connection," Heather said.

"Oh, yeah? What's that?"

She pointed to his nose. He was raising a finger to it when he felt the trickle head down his upper lip and into his mouth. He grabbed a pair of boxers from the floor on his way to the bathroom. He held them to his face as the levee in his nose broke and blood poured forth in a thick, dark stream.

* * *

Heather went home to pack. ("You don't really imagine that you're going without me,
do you?")

Ethan poured himself a
scotch. He dropped into the deepest chair he owned. Its cushions closed around him. He swished the liquor in his glass and mused on the speed with which reality changed direction and the ferocity with which it whisked you away, like an easy chair bolted to a railroad train. One minute you're an overpaid television star boffing a beautiful young sycophant, the next you're spouting blood from your facial orifices, then you're on your way, sycophant in tow (or was it the other way around?), to the one place on God's Green Earth you'd planned never to set foot again.

He
checked Aunt Flo's phone number against the listing he had for his cousin Catherine Marini in Meddersville. They were the same. That fit a recollection he had about Catherine and her kids moving in with Flo after the divorce. Something about a drinking problem, too, almost losing the kids.

What were their names, anyway
, the kids'? Oh, well, the names would come if he didn't think about them too hard. His followers would call it "psychic" but he knew it was only his subconscious mind working out a connection to information he'd forgotten that he knew.

He thought about calling
to give them a heads-up about his visit, but it was far too late. He'd call tomorrow, before he left.

He made an airline reservation that would fly him (all right,
them
) from Los Angeles, through Denver, to Mid-Continent Airport. He reserved a car in Wichita that he would drive to Meddersville.

He called Suzette at home to tell her he'd be out of town for a week or so. They taped the shows back to back and didn't have any studio time scheduled for another month, so that was no problem. He left the message on her voice mail, which suited him perfectly. He didn't want to answer any questions about Heather.

He filled the kitchen sink with water, gave it a squirt of dish soap, and deposited his boxers to soak. He pulled out a suitcase and started packing.

He figured he'd be in
Meddersville by Sunday afternoon, back at long last with Catherine and Flo. He would finally meet the kids.