Fire Will Fall (12 page)

"Be careful," I said instead.

"Of what?"

"Of Mr. Almost Professor. For one, you're contagious."

I pulled my feet off of her and put my eyes back on the page.

"And what else?" she asked. She put her hand on my knee and leaned closer, sounding deeply concerned. Something had spooked her outside.

"He's hot for you," I said, lest she think it was something worse.

She froze and then laughed. "What on earth would make you think a thing like that?"

I read a few lines before thinking of how my gut instincts could be explained. Maybe they couldn't. "He's a guy ... you're not."

"I've had teachers younger than he is," she argued.

"So?" I didn't look up, so I could keep my straight face. I felt it was important.

"So, that's absurd!"

Not unless he's gay.
Cora never had any big brothers to give her the lines on how guys think. She was a beautiful young girl. He was—

"He's a physicist." She giggled. "And on the board of this place. Surely he understands the situation with our health."

"Cora. Guys on death row get swooning girls in droves. And have you checked out Owen's fan mail? I think half of our fifteen thousand cards were from teenage girls who told him he was hot and offered their phone numbers. It doesn't matter, okay? A guy is a guy, and he's one."

"Well, you and Owen don't think of us like that," she argued.

"Well, we're extraordinary," I lied.

I kept reading, though the words weren't going in. I was suddenly aware of her warm hand on my knee. She opened her mouth to raise some other worthless argument, but my knee and I bolted away from her and her hand before I could hit the phase of thinking about where girls' hands had been known to travel. I felt her watching my back, her incomplete sentence dangling in the air.
Lesson: I can touch you, but you can't touch me.
I wasn't looking to be fair—only to get by.

Alan now mumbled to Rain in the dining room. I moved toward the door, yawning and stretching, my instincts telling me not to look too interested when I got in their line of vision.

They were coming out into the foyer together, and Alan was saying, "They're allowed to stare. It's a free country. They're just not allowed to shoot photos."

"You're
sure
it was a journalist?" Rain asked him.

"I'll go take a look around, but if it wasn't, it was some local. Rain, you have been in every magazine and newspaper in the country. I think it's perfectly normal that some locals are going to get overly curious ... to want to see you without exactly wanting to meet you."

"But you're
sure?
" she asked again.

He took her by the hands and cast me a wary glance. He decided to continue. "What members of ShadowStrike remain at large have zero interest in the four of you. They simply don't think in the terms you're suggesting. It's nothing personal and never was, though I know that's hard for you to comprehend."

We saw terrorists in our sleep after Cora was attacked in the ICU. Nobody at St. Ann's gave us pills, tried to inject us, or fooled with an IV bag unless I'd known them personally for at least two years. Alan watched Rain, and I sensed his anxiety over what she would most surely ask next. Certain things he could never answer well.

"What about what happened in the ICU to..." Rain stopped short of Cora's name. Mr. Steckerman took Rain by the hand and led her out to the porch, and I followed.

He came up with his usual answer. "That was the weirdest move in the halls of terror that American Intelligence has ever seen. You have to think of this in the same terms as a bombing in an Israeli marketplace. Terrorists don't typically enter hospitals to finish off victims that they only managed to maim. It's not about that."

He had answered like this over and over, each time with equal patience, as if he'd never answered the question before. Dr. Hollis had told him something about the value of repetition in curing trauma. Problem: Rain could be equally repetitive.

"So, why did they do it this time?" she asked again.

"Because they were still close by. Because they thought it would be easy. But we were right there. It wasn't easy, was it? The guy who made the attempt on Cora's life is in jail forever, and they won't try it again."

"So ... where are they now?"

Yesterday, his answer might have been "Barcelona or somewhere. Don't worry about it." Today I knew that would be a lie. I studied the tops of the trees, waiting with interest to hear how he would answer. Alan's generally not a liar, in spite of the secrecy of his job.

"Can I just say that we know where they are?"

Her eyes flew to him. Mine, too.

"
They're
the ones being watched. Not you."

Great answer. Still, he shifted the subject just a little more to drive her farther from that fear. "But I would appreciate it if you didn't wander around the woods by yourself for a while, just until we're sure that all the journalists are following our requests. You don't want to see a picture of yourself on the cover of some supermarket rag, of a private moment with your friends, right?"

She laughed finally. It wasn't loud. "If I find somebody, can I kick some butt?"

"No, you may not."

He hadn't laughed yet, but she threw her arms around him anyway. "I just get turned around sometimes. Like when I'm with Cora. She's still a little jumpy. Daddy, when can I have my car out here?"

"Soon, I hope," he said evasively, but I knew he was afraid of her taking off, coming back late, and missing a dose of something while she was with friends from Trinity. I was afraid of her driving while getting into a crying jag and deciding it would be best to drive off a bridge or smack a tree. "As for Cora, give her time in the fresh air. For both of you, I assume you'll go to sleep from here on in without me sitting between your beds and reading the newspaper."

She had to think about it for a minute, and didn't bother unwrapping herself from him. "That behavior was for St. Ann's. Out here, we're good."

He unlaced her arms to look at her. "That's good, too. Because you know the deal. I can come out here every day. I'm still a dad. But I can't live out here. I can't even be out here more than I'm home. I
am
a target, which doesn't put my life in any more danger than it ever has. But that's one of the reasons I agreed to send you out here. It's not good for you to be around me all the time. Not this spring or summer."

Rain had been hearing her dad was a target since she was a little girl, so that part didn't hit her terribly hard. She looked over at the trees and back at her feet.

"I think I'll go look at the bay until lunch is ready. Mrs. Starn said that by noon the mist is usually burned off and you can see the islands. And besides. There aren't as many trees over there." Her laugh was driven by some courage. "Wanna come, Cora?"

Cora had silently come up behind me, and when I turned, she was watching the woods. It seemed her biggest problem was going to be fear of spooks—that and how she followed me around like a puppy dog when I let it happen.

I took her by the arm and urged her toward Rain. "Go," I said.

But she stiffened. "I'd like to, but I've got this blog, and it's getting all these hits, and I should post something for people to read."

She turned back inside, and if I didn't know her well, I would have said that it wasn't an excuse. Rain followed her but reappeared a moment later with a pair of field glasses I'd seen on one of the shelves in the parlor. She took off toward the beach.

"I'll go check the woods," Alan said.

"Can I come? See how USIC guys search a property?" I asked with a plastic smile.

"Believe me, it's about as boring as watching paint dry," he said. "Welcome to real life, which is not the world of
Law and Order.
Besides, I wish you'd keep an eye on Rain. She's restless. I don't want her to get an idea that a swim in May would solve everything."

Rain was an excuse, too. He didn't want me anywhere near his job. Between him and Cora, I felt abused by endless bullshit, and I went to find Rain just because Owen was still coming out of his Headache from Hell, and if I had to hear him imply one more time that the next life would be cooler than this one, I'd get a headache myself.

When I reached her, Rain was already sitting on the sandy beach, looking through a pair of ancient field glasses that I'd seen on one of the shelves in the parlor.

"Those things really work?" I asked.

"Perfectly," she mumbled, "if you don't jerk them around too quickly."

She studied the mist, and I doubt she could see through it with the field glasses, because she finally dropped them with a sigh.

"It feels good to face into the sun," she said as I sat down beside her, bored out of my tree. My mind diverted to medical intrigue.

"Sun produces vitamin D, which we desperately need. S'probably why it feels good."

"Maybe I'll come to this side of the house more often," she said. "The woods are creepy."

"We shouldn't come out here without sunblock," I told her, and she grabbed my hand and dragged it into her lap absently.

"Your mind just won't stop working, will it? You can't get out of medic mode."

"If there were some other mode, like counterintelligence mode, I would get into that."

She had no response other than the one she'd always given, so she changed the subject, raising the glasses again. "Islands are still misty. What's on the other side?"

She was asking which barrier island lay directly across the bay. You could now see the houses, whitewashed in sun. It was a warm day, one of the July-come-early days my mom always had loved. We get a few in May. Rain and I both had on T-shirts, and we weren't cold. I'd have felt fine in shorts. The bay was a strip of blue, but it was deceiving, we'd been told last night. The houses we were looking at were about six miles across the bay, though they looked like two.

"Brigantine?" I guessed.

"Nah. We're farther north than that. It's bigger. There's a city over there."

"How do you know?" I asked, as the visibility was only about two blocks in, and all that lined the horizon were houses.

"Because Daddy said that's one reason why he's afraid to let me have my car keys out here. He said 'the city' on the other side would be too tempting, and I'd end up on road trips when I should be resting up. God, I can't wait to get my real life back."

She watched through the breeze while I beat one fist on the sand, indenting a small, smooth hole to ward off feelings of panic, of missing the bustle of St. Ann's, and remembering something my mother had once said about retirement funds. She'd never had one, and I used to harp on her about that.

"I don't ever want to retire," Mom had said. "I've seen too many people look forward to it, and with six months of nothing to do, they drop dead. I call it death by inertia. That's not the way I want to go."

She had gone the way she wanted to—the way I wanted to, but in another seventy years at least. I wasn't sure Alan—or the nurses and doctors at St. Ann's—really understood the concept of death by inertia. Americans are so into leisure time. They bank their lives on getting twenty years of it, and come retirement, a lot of them do drop dead.
I could drop dead this summer...

Rain spoke up. And if there are ever times when I believe in Owen's God, it's at a moment like this, when I could panic or get depressed, and some great distraction appears out of the blue.

Or in this case, it was out of the white
onto
the blue. The mist had been clearing little by little since I looked out the window this morning. It had been cottony white over the bay then, and now it was more blue than white. And with a long gust of wind, it cleared enough that I could see what city lay on the other side. I knew it was Griffith's Landing, because of the giant Ferris wheel that suddenly materialized. That Ferris wheel was on half the brochures about the Jersey Shore. I think my game of eenie-meenie-minie-moe between Asbury Park, Griffith's Landing, or Wildwood had just ended. If we were just behind Griffith's Landing, that might put Asbury Park too far to the north and Wildwood too far to the south to be within driving distance of a lab near Astor College.

"Oh god, I wish I was there," Rain said, watching the huge wheel through the field glasses. "Can you see that? It's going around. It's the weekend. The Icon Pier has the best roller coasters anywhere."

My body went a little rigid as my head got full of ideas. Fortunately, I'm pretty good at multitasking, so I continued on in my calm tone. "It's probably a good thing you're not there, Rain. A roller coaster could give you a hemorrhage."

"Oh, shut up." She dropped the field glasses into my lap and stood up. "Do you have to be such a downer?"

"Sorry, but—"

"Oh, you and Daddy. I can't sit here and look at the Icon Pier. I'm going to go look in the spooky woods again. If I find a journalist, at least I'll have an excuse to kick some ass."

She stalked off, and I hoped she was kidding.

I raised the field glasses and watched the cars flowing down Ocean Boulevard into Griffith. The boulevard juts northward toward our property, making the piece I saw only about a mile off. I didn't have a clear view, but enough that I could catch a glimpse of a black Taurus and know what I was seeing. Alan had just said he was going back to Trinity Falls. If I saw his Taurus on the causeway into Griffith, I could take it as a nod that Alan, too, was thinking it could be the next Zone of the Unthinkable.

I didn't see his car, not after watching for a full fifteen minutes. But I'm not easily put off. I figured,
well, if he's not there, then he can't run into me there.

My car was out in the back of the former visitors' parking lot, where I'd left it four days ago when I followed Alan out here to look the place over. Having learned of the limo from Alan while here, I rode back with him. I could have a look around Griffith, and I could even take Rain, though it would probably torture her more than help her. I decided I shouldn't remind her that I have a car until I was ready for her to start nagging me every ten seconds to go somewhere.