Authors: G.M. Ford
“On me,” Helen announced as they slid through the door. “You got the movie. I’ll get the ice cream.”
Ken didn’t argue. Instead, he sidled over to the only empty table and took a seat. The table was a mess. A deconstructed newspaper not only covered the table but was stuck to the surface here and there by what appeared to be ice cream residue. Ken couldn’t deal with that kind of clutter. While Helen waited in line, he borrowed a wet rag from the busboy, wiped the table, and then began reorganizing the newspaper. By the time he had it reassembled, Helen was on her way to the table with a pair of ice cream cups, Cherry Garcia for her, vanilla for him. Ken spooned ice cream into his mouth as Helen got settled in her seat. He pointed down at the blaring newspaper headline. hope found?
“What about this whole missing-guy thing?” Ken said. Helen was nodding. “I only caught part of it this morning, so what? . . . The FBI has found this guy or something?”
“No,” Ken said. “A confidential FBI source says they recently ran a set of prints through their system and the prints came up as his.”
“After all these years?”
“Could be the prints are that old, too.”
“Do they know where he is?”
“No,” Ken said. “Just that his prints showed up.”
“Remind me about this Hope guy,” she said around a mouthful of Cherry Garcia.
“You remember . . . the astronaut . . . guy was scheduled to blast off on the Venture mission. Went missing the night before the scheduled liftoff. Big to-do over whether they were going to postpone the mission . . . then they decided to replace him . . . thing takes off okay, completes the mission in space . . .”
She poked the air with her ice-cream spoon. “. . . and then the ship burns up in the atmosphere during reentry.”
“Killing everybody on board,” Ken finished. “And, as far as I know, nobody’s ever seen or heard from Adrian Hope again.”
“Isn’t he supposed to have been in some way . . . involved?”
Ken waved a disgusted hand. “All that’s just conspiracy theory. All those TV shows and the stuff in the magazines . . . that’s somebody making a buck. It’s all bunk. Nobody’s ever proved anything one way or another.”
“You never know,” she teased in a singsong voice.
“If anybody knew anything, they’d have sold it to the media by now.”
With the matter seemingly settled, they went back to the serious business of spooning ice cream into their mouths. Halfway through his nearest scoop, Ken turned the paper over. A gray inset box below the fold caught his attention. The headline asked: gill the source?
According to staff reporter Wayne Fontana, unconfirmed sources within the FBI were now reporting that the fingerprints in question had been submitted for analysis by none other than Queen Anne County district attorney Bruce Gill, whose office was, at this time, refusing comment on the matter.
Ken swiveled the paper Helen’s way. He pointed to the beginning of the insert. Helen leaned forward. Her spoon stopped halfway to her mouth. She pulled the paper closer, read, then reread the article. She set her ice-cream cup on the table and looked up at Ken. “No way,” she said.
“Be a hell of a coincidence.”
“That’s crazy.”
“And the state never fingerprinted him?”
She made a rude noise with her lips. “Are you kidding? Fingerprints cost money. The state doesn’t spend money on retards.”
“The timing’s right. He’s been missing for nearly seven years.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said.
Ken turned the paper back his way, put his index finger down at the bottom of the original article, and then started turning pages. He picked up the paper and held it close to his face. A moment later, he folded the paper into quarters and again turned it Helen’s way. The picture was of a well-built young man holding a basketball. Late twenties maybe. Nobody Helen had ever seen before. The caption read: Adrian Hope. She looked at the hands. Her breath caught in her throat.
“Do you suppose?” she whispered.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here,” Ken cautioned.
“You’re right,” she conceded. “This isn’t something we want to go off half-cocked about.”
“No kidding.”
They ate slowly, passing the newspaper back and forth as they spooned away.
Ken left a two-dollar tip. They sidestepped their way through the crowded shop, back to the sidewalk, where they crossed Landon, walked half a block, and started downhill toward Arbor Street.
They walked arm in arm in silence along the sun-dappled sidewalk. Helen wondered whether the silence was for the possibility of Paul turning out to be this Adrian Hope or something in the feel of the moment that merely discouraged dialogue.
They jaywalked across Arbor Street, stepping up over the high granite curbstones at just about the spot where Paul Hardy had been struck by the car. Inwardly, Helen winced and kept her eyes in front of her.
Three strides before turning up the front walk, the sound of shoes slapping on pavement pulled her attention toward the street. Middle-aged and dumpy, he moved in their direction with uncommon speed and grace. He had his hand extended the whole time.
“Irving Jaynes,” he said as he approached. Energy seemed to ooze from his pores. He gave off the feeling he could sell iceboxes to Eskimos. Baffled, Helen took his hand in hers. His hand was hard. His grip suggested strength. “Helen Willis,” she said. She used her free hand to gesture toward Ken. “This is my friend Ken Suzuki.” Ken favored the stranger with the smallest of nods.
“Just bought the house across the street,” he said, pointing at the seedy Tudor mansion which had been for sale for the past six months or so. “Just wanted to introduce myself to the neighbors.”
Helen’s breeding took over. She went all gracious and nice, welcoming him to the neighborhood, getting in her pitch for Harmony House. After exchanging pleasantries, she gave him several verbal cues to suggest the conversation was coming to an end. He didn’t, however, get the message. He kept talking. How much he loved the city and the weather, his renovation plans for the new house. It went on and on until Ken began to tighten his grip on her arm. She extended her hand again, intending to shake her way out of the conversation. With a mischievous look in his eye, Jaynes bent at the waist and kissed the back of her hand.
“My great pleasure,” he said.
They stood rooted on the spot, watching as their new neighbor hurried across Arbor Street and disappeared into the house.
“What kind of crap was that?” Ken asked when he was gone.
“What crap?”
“That hand-kissing stuff?”
“I thought it was elegant,” she said.
Ken’s face looked like he had a bad taste in his mouth. Helen stifled a grin. He was jealous. No doubt about it. She had the urge to giggle but suppressed that, too.
Took forty minutes before the Pakistani doctor shuffled out from behind closed doors. The nurse at the desk pointed him toward Randy, who was sitting on the only bench inside the Trauma center. Randy would have met him halfway except he was handcuffed to the bench. The doctor sat down next to him. He ran his liquid brown eyes over Randy’s face, but remained silent. If he noticed the blood all over the front of Randy’s shirt, he didn’t let on. He put a hand on Randy’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “There was nothing we could do.”
Randy turned away. He rested his throbbing head on his cuffed wrist. The doctor started to speak, but Randy waved him off with his free hand. A minute passed before Randy heard the sound of the man’s shuffling feet fading in the distance. A deep sob escaped Randy’s chest. And then another, as they came more frequently, until he could hardly breathe. Took another few minutes to gain some measure of control over himself. He wiped his face with his free arm.
The cop wandered over. “I called for a unit to take you downtown,” he said. He waited, but Randy stared off into space. “I don’t know what’s going on here, mister, but I’m sorry for your loss,” he added. “A boy that age . . . it’s just not right.”
Randy broke out crying again, this time letting himself go; his shoulders shook as sorrow took charge of him, racking his body with spasms of grief. His head felt as if someone were pounding nails into his forehead. His stomach rolled once and then again.
“I need to use the john,” Randy said.
“We’ll have a car here in an—” “I think I’m going to be sick,” he said. Dropping his head down onto his manacled hand. Shielding the cop’s view with his body, he stuck a finger down his throat. He dry-heaved several times. Did it again until he felt bile in his throat.
The desk nurse looked up from the pile of charts in front of her. She wagged a finger his way, opened her mouth to speak, but it was too late. The contents of Randy’s stomach landed on the floor between his feet.
“No . . . no . . . no,” the nurse chanted. “We can’t be having that in here.”
She was on her feet now, moving out from behind the desk with the speed and grace of a woman half her age and a third her size. An orderly poked his head into the nurses’ station. She pinned him in place with a thick brown finger. “Get a mop and a bucket,” she commanded.
“I was just—” the guy stammered.
“I don’t care what you was ‘justing’ . . . you find a mop and a bucket and you get yourself back here and get this cleaned up.”
She used the same finger on the cop. “Take him in there,” she said pointing to a door labeled staff only.
The cop approached Randy from the side, careful to keep his well-shined shoes away from the puddle of puke shimmering on the floor. First he unlocked the cuff from the arm of the bench, then changed his mind and decided he didn’t want his cuffs puked on either, removing them from Randy’s wrist and stuffing them into the black leather case attached to the back of his belt. He helped Randy maneuver around the mess and escorted him over to the restroom. He followed Randy in the door and stood with his arms folded across his chest, standing sentry as Randy braced himself, bent low over the sink, and puked again. His dedication to duty lasted until Randy splashed water over his face, dried himself with a paper towel, and then began to undo his trousers.
“Sorry,” Randy said sheepishly. “But I gotta . . .”
The cop winced. He crossed the room and tried the other door. Satisfied it was locked from the other side, he headed for the hall.
“I’ll be right outside,” he said, stepping out and closing the door firmly behind himself. Randy waited a beat, then holding his pants up with one hand, he used the other to push the “lock” button in the center of the handle.
He rebuttoned his pants and looked around. A rubber glove dispenser was attached to the wall. Three holes: small, medium, and large. A disposal container for needles and other sharp objects. Directions for how to properly wash one’s hands. The cabinet along the far wall was filled with supplies: gauze, syringes, a blood-pressure cuff, tongue depressors, more gloves, a pair of scissors, several pairs of green scrubs, little green slippers, a stethoscope. He grabbed the scissors and a couple of tongue depressors from the shelf and dropped to one knee in front of the other door. He inserted the sharp end of the scissors into the doorjamb, pushing hard, trying to get some purchase on the steel bolt. No luck. He tried again. No.
The door to the hall began to rattle. “You okay in there,” the cop wanted to know.
“Not feeling too good,” Randy said.
“Let’s go,” the cop said. “Your ride’s here.”
“Tell ’em to hang on.”
“Let’s go, buddy. Squeeze it off.”
Randy tried the scissors again. This time the bolt moved. He tried to increase the pressure but slipped and lost his leverage. The bolt snapped back into place.
The cop rattled the door hard this time. “Let’s go.”
Randy wiggled the blade back and forth, hoping to make some sort of dent in the bolt, something the point could get hold of. The bolt moved again. This time Randy got his shoulder behind it; he watched as the bolt moved, millimeter by millimeter, until he could force the tongue depressor in the space between the end of the bolt and the doorjamb. The cop kicked the outside door. “Let’s go.”
“Gimme a break, man,” Randy wheezed.
Randy grabbed the knob with his free hand and pulled the door open. He stuck his head out into a deserted custodial corridor, scrambled to his feet, and took off running, all the way to the end of the space, to the green exit sign and the stairs.
Bruce Gill lifted his chin, looked in the mirror, and made a final adjustment to his tie. He turned toward Kirsten.
“Looks great,” she said on cue.
He smiled, took a deep breath, and asked, “You ready?”
“Backgrounds are us,” she said with a sneer.
He pulled open the door and then stood aside so Kirsten could precede him into the Queen Anne County press room. The roar of conversation rose considerably as they crossed the front of the room and mounted the dais.
The place was jammed. CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, FOX, the BBC, the local affiliates, a hundred people packed into a room designed to hold twenty. From the look of it, another hundred were outside in the hall. The lectern was a forest of microphones as Bruce Gill gripped the wooden edges and gazed confidently out over the assembled multitude. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began.
The roar of conversation dimmed as if it were on a switch. “I’d like to say a few words and then, time permitting, answer a limited number of questions.” The cameras began to whir.
“In the course of a separate and ongoing investigation, my office made a routine request for a fingerprint identification from IAFIS”—he spelled out the letters—“. . . which, as most of you are aware, is the FBI’s national fingerprint database.” The roar began to rise. “Much to our surprise, the fingerprints were identified as those of one Adrian Hope. As you are also aware, Mr. Hope has been missing since December fourteenth, 1999, when he disappeared from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on the night before he was scheduled to captain the space shuttle Venture on a mission of scientific experimentation.”