Sandra sighed. She told Katie, quickly, about what had happened to the ambulance at the community center. For all she knew, all island emergency vehicles had been brought down by the infected cars.
Sandra clasped her hands on her daughter’s shoulders. “I want to help him. We’ll try to think of something. But right now, right this second, we have to find Archie.”
Katie bit her lip, then nodded. “I know.”
“You still have your phone?”
“Yeah, but whenever I tried to call you it never went through.”
“I lost my phone. I’ve been using Lisa Carver’s.” Sandra paused. “She’s dead.”
“Shit,” Katie said. “I mean, yeah, I’m sorry she’s dead, but shit, I saw that name come up on my phone and ignored it.”
“I’m going to Archie’s friends’. You stay here in case he comes back. If he does, call me. If I find him, I’ll call you.”
Katie looked unconvinced. “I don’t want you going out there.”
Sandra managed a smile, put her palm to her daughter’s cheek. “We’ve both survived this long.”
Sandra got Katie to tell her where, exactly, Archie’s friends lived. She told her how to find Rory’s house, that it was the one with the salmon-colored interlock brick driveway.
“You be careful,” she told Katie.
“I’m home,” she said. “Nothing bad can happen to me here.”
Sandra got to Rory’s house on foot without encountering any more Arrivals. She swung open the white picket gate and ran up the stone path to the front door, glancing briefly at the open carport beside the house. She saw a couple of old lawn mowers, gardening tools, a rusted tricycle, and something much larger under a tarp that barely registered as she rang the bell.
Sandra could hear a dead bolt turning and a chain being slid from its mount before the door opened an inch. A thin woman in shorts and a red T-shirt peered out worriedly, as though she feared the cars had figured out how to pretend to be Jehovah’s Witnesses.
When she saw it was an actual person, she opened the door wider and said, “Yeah?”
“I’m Sandra Montrose,” she said. “Archie’s mom. He and Rory are friends. Is he here? Please tell me he’s—”
The door suddenly opened wider and Rory was standing there.
“Your boy’s not here,” Rory’s mom said.
Sandra looked at Rory. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” Rory said.
“He was with you and Nick this morning, right?”
Rory nodded hesitantly.
“So where did you three go?” Sandra said, her voice rising. “Where’s Archie?”
“Okay, so, like, we did all go to the mall,” Rory said.
“And?”
“The cars started going crazy, and there were, like, hundreds of them, and they got into the mall, and they were running people down and—”
“God, no,” Sandra said. “But you all got out?”
Rory shrugged. “I did. I don’t know about them. We kinda got split up. I thought maybe they got out, too, so I came back here. I haven’t heard anything from the other guys.”
Sandra looked into the eyes of the boy’s mother, who shrugged. “I don’t know what to say,” she said.
Sandra looked away, and that was when she noticed, for the second time, the large item in the garage covered with the tarp.
“What is that?” she asked.
Rory’s mom had to step out of the house to see what Sandra was referring to. The boy came out behind her. It was Rory who answered her question.
“That’s my dad’s motorcycle.” He swelled briefly with pride. “It’s a Harley.”
Sandra asked, “There gas in it?”
The boy shrugged. “Probably. He was out on it before they made everyone just drive Arrivals.”
Sandra looked at his mother. “Key,” she said.
The woman stiffened. “I don’t think my husband would want—”
Sandra put her face within three inches of the woman’s. “I’m not asking,” she said.
Forty-Two
Joe Bridgeman wasn’t having much luck. Not that he expected to.
Using the password he already knew, he was into Lisa Carver’s computer and well into the Arrival network — an elaborate program that showed where every active Arrival was, where it had been, and how it was communicating with all the other little Arrivals — but he could not find a way to counteract or disable the virus, or simply shut the entire system down.
Why couldn’t Lisa Carver have installed a big red STOP button he could just click on?
But he could see the virus working its magic, insinuating itself into the system, branching out in all directions, a tsunami overwhelming a coastal village. There was nothing he wanted more than to pull the plug on all of it, given his role in facilitating the madness. If his arrangement with Brandon Kyle ever became known, he’d like to be able to say that at least he’d tried to undo the damage.
Good thing Massachusetts no longer had a death penalty. Joe thought if he were ever convicted for his misdeeds, trying to make things right might prompt a jury to show compassion: five life sentences instead of ten, say. There was a comforting thought.
But suppose he did get away with it? What if no one ever learned about his deal with Kyle, or that he killed Ruskin? Nothing to worry about, right?
Wrong.
Joe’s thoughts turned to Kyle. He wished there were a way to talk to the man, right now, face-to-face. But he’d had a plan to get off the island, and was probably long gone by now. Joe wanted to tell him Ruskin was dead, and how that development presented an opportunity. If the authorities ever did suspect Kyle, Joe could say that before Ruskin died, he confessed to sabotaging the Arrival system because of his hatred for Lisa Carver.
And wouldn’t that give Joe some badly needed leverage over Kyle? As things stood now, Kyle held the advantage. What was it he had said in their meeting, when the discussion turned to the death of Adam Montrose?
“But the timing is a bit curious.”
At first, it struck Joe as impossible that Kyle’s investigators could have found out what he had done. Or, more accurately, what he had failed to do.
Whoever Kyle had hired was good, very good. The first red flag had to be that Joe was going out with the widow of the man whose roadside death he’d investigated. That, in itself, was hardly incriminating, but if it had led Kyle’s people to dig a little deeper...
Joe knew there’d been a witness.
He hadn’t worried about it too much at the time. Really, what could that woman, watching from the porch of a house fifty yards away, have actually seen? It was old Agnes Barlow, pushing eighty if she was a day, who once managed a bakery on the island. Made Whoopie Pies to die for, Joe could attest. These days she used a walker to get around. She’d heard the crash, and called it in, but never ventured out into the night to see the accident up close. She’d have seen the flashing lights of his car when he got to the scene. And eventually, she’d have observed the ambulance’s arrival.
It had made him a little nervous when he encountered her, hobbling her way out of the pharmacy, two days later. Spotted him and said, “Oh, Chief, it sure did take the ambulance a long time to get there the other night, didn’t it?”
Think fast.
“Got there as fast as they could,” he said. “They were on another call.”
That seemed to satisfy old Agnes and off she went.
Kyle’s people must have found her, talked to her. Okay, he could have done more. But the way Joe saw it was, the guy was going to die, anyway. Wouldn’t have mattered if he’d called the ambulance the moment he got there.
Probably.
Joe knew the truck as soon as he’d come upon it. He knew Adam Montrose, and he certainly knew who his wife was.