What We Saw at Night (17 page)

“Yes,” I said. “Just recently.”

“You know, there is no one hundred percent safe kind of birth control. Using two forms is—”

“Mom’s a nurse,” I interrupted. “I could write a book.”

Dr. Andrew sighed. “I hope it’s a committed relationship, because you’re a good person, Allie. I’ll leave this issue in your mother’s hands.” He opened the examination door room.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I’m going to pass you onto a family practice doctor for this part of your cares now.”

I said, “Okay.” But then I jumped off the exam table.
Blondie had just passed by the open door, wearing a white lab coat. His hair was shorter and the streak looked newly foiled, thicker than before.

“What’s wrong, Allie?” Dr. Andrew laid his warm fingers on my wrists, his eyes intent with concern.

“I thought I saw someone.…” My voice was barely a whisper. “A doctor who passed by. Who’s that?”

Dr. Andrew poked his head out. “Tim!” he called, waving. Blondie entered the examination room. “Tim, this is Allie Kim. She rules the nights of Iron Harbor. Allie, this is my son, Dr. Tim Tabor.”

Blondie extended his hand. Knowing that mine would feel like a claw of ice, I took it and gave it the sturdiest shake I could.

“Allie, hullo,” he said cheerfully.

I forced a sickly smile, my brain a kaleidoscope of awful memories, my pulse thudding loud enough so that I could hear the dull beat in my ears and wondered if he could, too. My eyes roved over every inch of his face. There was something different about it: the chin was square, and the wrinkles around his eyes more pronounced, but the eyes were the same. “You have an accent!” I finally said.

“All those years as a phony Brit.” He grinned crookedly at Dr. Andrew. “It’ll go away, at least for me. For my wife and our sons, not so much.”

Dr. Andrew placed his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Tim just got back from London. He was doing a research fellowship in surgical skin procedures. Now he’s here in the urbane town of Iron Harbor. Not much like London, huh Tim?”

“It’s home, Dad,” he said. He gave me a big, genial smile—with no hint that he’d ever seen me before. “You’ll have to excuse me. Nice to meet you, Allie.”

“Me, too—you, as well,” I stammered. I had never fainted, but I recognized the strange sensations I was having as the precursor to some kind of blackout. “Dr. Andrew, I need to lie back down for a moment.”

He peered down at me, his eyes narrow. “Are you eating well, Allie? Dieting too much?” He frowned. “Could you be pregnant?”

“It’s nothing,” I said. I squeezed my eyes shut until the vertigo evaporated. “Really, I’m fine. I’m not exactly sexually active enough to be pregnant.”

“It only takes once.”

“I’ve heard that. Let’s change the subject. You must be happy to have your son home.”

“Two down, one to go,” said Dr. Andrew. “My son Marcus is still in college. Undergrad. He won’t be a doctor though, like Drew and Tim. He’s studying journalism. I know he’ll write about all this. He’s bitten with the bug to translate the world of science. I think he’s having a pretty good time over in New Haven, too.” Typical of Dr. Andrew that he wouldn’t say the obvious school in New Haven: Yale. “Tim was in London a long time, almost six years. We only saw the little guy once. Now Tim and Drew are running around looking for land so Tim can build a house.”

I forced myself to focus on the conversation. “Didn’t he look around when he got here?”

“He just got here two weeks ago, Allie.”

“That’s all?” I almost shouted the words.

“You sound surprised. All they’ve been doing is getting used to life in Iron Harbor. You know, seeing my dad, who’s just thrilled, and Drew taking Tim fishing, like when they were kids, and we had the old boathouse.… My wife won’t let the grandbabies out of her sight.”

My spine stiffened. “Two weeks ago? Did he visit a lot before?”

“Not really. It was hard on all of us. Started work yesterday. I told him to take some time but that’s not the Tabor style.” He offered a faint, proud smile.

I fell back against the cushions and the crumpled white sanitary sheet. Should I ask Dr. Andrew for the name of a counselor? People with XP have a lot of psychological issues. Maybe this was a neurological issue. Maybe my brain was shrinking up.

Juliet was right.

I had seen her having an innocent conversation with our doctor’s son, also a doctor, who’d been in England when we saw Blondie in the apartment last spring. How Juliet knew Tim Tabor was a mystery to me. Why she was in a car with him in Duluth was even more of a mystery to me. Why she thought I was nuts was now, however, perfectly obvious. I
had
hallucinated the second “murder” scene.

But no. Of course I hadn’t. Besides, what accounted for … everything else? And how could I have had a hallucination of someone I’d never seen before?

“Listen,” Dr. Andrew said. “I’ll have you see Dr. Bonnie Sommers Olson for your gynecological care, instead of Gina. She’s just as nice. I’ll set it up for next week, okay?” He lowered his voice. “You are going to confide in your mother, though.”

I nodded. “Absolutely.”

As soon as he left, I texted Rob and Juliet.

2Nite The Cabin, 10
.

“I KNOW WHO he is,” I told Juliet that night. “Not just that he exists. I met him.”

She stood with her back to me in the clearing in front of the deserted cabin, watching two loons crisscross the flat lake. The very arrogance of her pose, her tiny shrug, seemed to dismiss me.
So what? Big deal!
Rob’s Jeep came bumping up the track and he parked next to my mother’s minivan. He swung out quickly and kissed me hard.

“So it’s official,” Juliet said. “You two, I mean.”

“Yes,” Rob said for the both of us. “What, are you pissed?”

“No.”

“Juliet, you told me that’s all you ever really wanted.” He squeezed my hand. “For Allie and me to be happy together. Let’s just get this all out in the open, okay?”

“Yes!” she exclaimed, her voice harsh. “I did! Congratulations!”

I swallowed, not wanting to think about the conversation that Juliet and Rob must have had about me. “Juliet, please just answer me. Answer all of us. We all owe each other that much, right?”

“Answer
what
?” she asked.

“Why are you involved with somebody who is first, married, and second, a doctor—”

“A doctor?” she interrupted. I could see that Juliet was honestly baffled, which only frightened me more. “Who’s a doctor?”

“I was at the clinic today for my checkup. I saw him. I saw the blond streak on the back of his head. He was wearing a white coat. His name is Tim. Tim Tabor, Dr. Andrew’s oldest son … not that I’m telling you anything you don’t know.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know Tim Tabor.” She hesitated. “I know Dr. Andrew has a son, or two or three, and that one is a doctor.”

Rob let me go. He sat down hard on the ground, thrashed with bewilderment. “What the hell is going on here?”

“Juliet,” I said. “Pull the band of your jeans down.”

Her eyes glittered in the night. “You’re the one sleeping with Rob, dude. Not me. I only bare skin for—”

“She has a tat,” I interrupted. “Two initials right above her hip bone. And I know it has something to do with this guy.”

“You say,” Juliet whispered and smirked.

“What are you so scared of, Juliet?” Rob demanded.

“Show me.”

“Rob, come on.”

“Show me!” he shouted, jumping to his feet. “I know you’re lying, and I know Allie is telling the truth! I’ve seen the tattoo, Juliet! You think I haven’t? Enough! I’ve seen the initials G.T. in weird calligraphy. I’m sick of protecting you. It’s the world that ought to be afraid of you, Juliet, not the other way around.”

“If you only knew, Rob,” Juliet said. “I wish I could scare the world.” She turned her back to us again.

“Forget it,” Rob muttered. “Let’s just get out of here.” He reached for me, but I stepped towards her.

Juliet waved me off. She let out a deep, long sigh. “I promise I will find out what’s happened,” she said, her old, defeated persona taking over. “I can’t tell you more than I know. I have never met Tim Tabor, and I swear to God on that. The guy you saw at the Fire Festival, who was driving the car that night, is a friend.”

“A friend?” I said.

“He’s not bad. He’s made some bad decisions.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “You sound like an abused wife. Next, you’ll say that I don’t understand him the way you do.”

“You don’t! But this has gone way further than I thought it would. I wanted to scare him a little, let him know that I was on to him. I knew he was seeing other women.” Juliet spoke as if she were talking to herself.

“But the guy’s, like … old,” Rob said.

Juliet stomped from the cover of the trees out into the moonlight. It splashed down around her body like spilled silver. “So what? Don’t you ever just want to shake up our lives? Scream? Grab someone by the throat? Make people see us? Does it matter who sees us? When they see us, we’re real. When I skied, everyone knew who I was. I wasn’t this … thing, this
creature
. Oh, the children of the midnight sun! The moon children!” She clasped her hands under her chin and batted her eyes in a parody of innocent bliss. “Poetry! How tragically lovely. What we really are is the human equivalent of cockroaches, scuttling around in the dark. Aren’t you tired of that?”

I backed away. “Not as tired as you are. There are things inside me that matter more than what idiots think.”

Juliet smiled sadly. “Idiots like Rob?”

“Screw you.” I resisted the urge to slap her.

“Yes, screw me, and goody for you two sweet things. The only thing inside me is the night. The freedom to do whatever I please. I want to live with that freedom inside me every moment.”

“No one lives like that, Juliet,” Rob said. “Movie stars have bad breath. Models have learning disabilities. Athletes have athlete’s foot. Nobody is free the way you dream.”

She shook her head. “You’re wrong, Rob. I was that free when I skied. I was that free when we started Parkour. But it wears off. I’m a drunk, like Gideon. I have to keep chasing that high.” Juliet lurched forward and grabbed the arm I’d
broken, squeezing hard. “I can’t find something that lasts.

That’s why I have to do this.”

“Juliet, don’t run,” I said.

She let go and took a step back. Her eyes narrowed. “Have you told anyone?”

“No one. I just told Rob, here. Right now.”

“Told me what?” he demanded.

“Juliet wants to leave … she says G.T. is her ticket out of here.” I threw my hands up, hopelessly, towards the starry night sky. “She used to say G.T. meant ‘Great and Terrible.’ It’s what they called her when she was on the ski team. But now I’m pretty sure it means something else.”

She nodded. “You’re right, Allie. It does. There’s a network of the night. There are whole underground cities lived at night. In Europe. Even here. It’s not like I’d go to Florida and sizzle on a beach.”

“Who’s been selling you this crap?”

“People,” Juliet hissed. “
Real
people. People who’ve been outside this shitty little shitbox hole of a town.”

“Prove to me that this guy didn’t kill Nicola,” I said. “Then at least I’ll know that someone isn’t taking advantage of you. Prove to me that the girls I saw in that apartment are alive.”

“I don’t know what you saw, Allie. Okay? But I will try to find out! I’m only human. And as for Doctor Who, it’s not the same guy. It’s some kind of crazy coincidence. It doesn’t fit together. Give me a few days to find out. Just a few days.”

I stepped over to Rob and looped my arm in his. “If you agree to one thing.”

“What one thing?”

“Whatever I say,” I told her. “Otherwise, I rat. I tell your father, your mother, my mother,
Rob’s
mother, Dr. Andrew
and everyone else I know until somebody believes me or locks you up.”

Juliet shifted on her feet. “What else can I do?” she asked.

“You can come back to us,” I said. “We’ll be a Tribe. We’ll be three.” I looked at Rob and he pressed his lips together, and then he nodded. “For now. Not a couple and a third wheel. We’ll be the
tres compadres
, like we were before. Just don’t take off.”

Juliet took a long breath and seemed to consider her options. “I promise. But, Allie. What are we going to do for the next three days?”

“We’ll trace,” said Rob. “We’ll boulder.”

“Exactly,” I agreed.

A FEW HOURS later, we were slick with sweat and spent. They’d taken me up to Superior Sanctuary, and I understood now why they’d fallen in love with it.

I also understood something else: Rob had only tagged along with Juliet and made those Dark Stars videos because he was as creeped out as I was by what had happened in Duluth. He wanted clues. And if doing Parkour with Juliet was the only way to get those clues, then that’s what he’d do.

You walk up Mount Everest. It is only for the strong, but most of it is walking. You are miserable, cold, oxygen-deprived and in Hell, possibly delirious and frostbitten, and you end up at the height at which planes fly. But not much of the experience is actually “climbing.” Climbing a mountain is grabbing onto one part of the mountain and then trying to hoist yourself up to the next handhold or footrest. It means having technical skill, using your boots for traction and an ice pick for leverage—and yes, a rope tied to a trusted friend, so you don’t fall.

Bouldering isn’t entirely like climbing. It’s based more on instinct, on grit and strength. You can boulder up a sheer slab: the side of a city building, a highway pylon, or a wall in your house, if you’re Rob.

For weeks, Rob had been practicing, so he could do Parkour with Juliet, to get some kind of insight into what was going on with her. Not that he’d ever, ever admit that to me. The closest I got to a confession was an offhand comment he tossed out as we all headed home in our respective rides to beat the sunrise.

“It’s worth giving you up for a little while to keep you forever,” he said, in front of Juliet, so she would hear.

As I learned much later, the same never held true for Juliet. We’d given her up a long time ago. And I didn’t need a few days to find out what was going on. I found out almost everything I needed to know the following night.