‘No,’ said Jones. ‘I think that reflex is attached to anticipation. I don’t have that. But I don’t laugh. I know a lot of jokes. I remember every joke anyone tells me. I remember everything anyone tells me. I have an eidetic memory. It’s one of the things that allows me to function. Someone tells someone else a lie and they laugh. I know that’s how it works. But it doesn’t work for me. If I know the joke, I know what’s going to happen. If I don’t know the joke, I often don’t know it’s a joke. It’s just – nonsense. It confuses me.’
Bree remembered, suddenly, the way her own daughter had been when she was five or six. That was when they’d been living in Washington, again, in the long narrow apartment with the air-con unit in the window at the end of the hallway that made all that noise.
Bree remembered Cass saying two things, the two things connecting up. First was when she had overheard Bree talking to Al, when they were still talking, and Al had said something that had made Bree laugh. A joke, not one of his dirty ones. Bree had been a couple beers in, probably laughing harder than whatever Al had said deserved.
‘What, Mommy? What?’ Bree had repeated the joke, but Cass had just looked confused. Did that really happen? Why not? Why did you say it did?
That phase lasted months – a curiosity about jokes, matched with a total failure to understand them. They seemed to be everywhere. Suddenly her schoolmates were all telling these jokes and Cass would bring them home, wondering, almost to the point of tears.
Cass – prim with indignation, hands behind her back in the blue dress, toe of the red shoe pivoting on the linoleum. ‘No, Mommy. That’s not true. No. That’s a lie.’
The problem was that Cass didn’t understand the difference between a joke and a lie – and Bree, though she knew there was one, had not been able to explain it to her daughter. She had not, come to that, even been able to explain it to her own satisfaction.
Later, when Cass started to lie in earnest, the thing recurred from the other end. ‘Did you do your homework?’ ‘Did you study for the test?’ ‘How was school?’ These routine questions would be answered yes, and yes, and lovely thank you, Mommy. It was only when the teachers called to ask why Cass had failed the test, why she’d come to school without her homework, why she’d bitten another child so hard she’d drawn blood, and Bree confronted her, that she’d protest, ‘I was joking! It was a joke!’
‘Cassie, did you take Mommy’s keys, honey?’
‘No, Mommy, I promise. Daddy took them.’
And Cass would have a blazing row with Al. And then the keys would show up, in Hampton Bear’s bear house in the corner of Cass’s room.
‘I was joking, Mommy! I was joking!’ she would shriek as Bree, especially if it was late in the evening, smacked the backs of her legs red. Long time gone.
‘What’s the matter?’ Jones said.
‘Nothing,’ said Bree. ‘Bit of my Slim Jim went the wrong way.’ She coughed and thumped her chest and wiped her eyes on her sleeve and went into the glove compartment and came out again.
‘OK, Jones,’ she said. ‘Irish knock knock joke. You say knock knock.’
‘Knock knock.’
‘Who’s there?’
‘Mister.’
‘No, it’s -’ she started. Jeepers he was hopeless. Then she realised he was, earnestly, trying. That made her feel…
‘OK, Jones,’ she said. ‘Don’t bother. Just drive.’ Trying, she thought.
The light was going down ahead of them, spreading out over the sky. It was cloudy in that direction. They drove on through Birmingham without stopping, at Bree’s suggestion, and got takeout from a Wendy’s on the outskirts, also at Bree’s suggestion. Jones ordered what Bree ordered, which was one fewer burger than she would have liked. Bree liked Wendy’s. The hot foil wrappings felt classier than Mickey D’s, and she liked the way the burgers were square even though the buns were mostly round. She liked that you could nibble the corners off, salty and greasy and chewy and hot.
They ate leaning back against the doors of the car where it was parked in the lot. The restaurant was light and the light spilled into a kids’ play area with a slide in the shape of an elephant and a see-saw anchored to the PlayCrete by a spring. It had a smiling plastic Wendy face, with ginger bangs and braids, atop the central boss. Wendy’s eyes were dark.
Bree felt tearful. She slurped her big orange soda. Jones, on the other side of the car, smoked gratefully, and the drift of the smoke smelled good.
As they drove, afterwards, Bree stopped trying to establish what went on in Jones’s head. That was Jones’s business, she reckoned. She liked him.
They drove on from the Wendy’s and kept going to Tupelo, where when Bree saw the illuminated vertical beacon of a Motel 6 glowing she asked Jones to pull in and they decided to stop for the night. They would contact Red Queen in the morning. Bree wondered what had happened about the disappearing case – the one he’d had at the airport and then hadn’t had.
They booked two adjacent rooms, both for cash. Jones helped Bree with her small travelling bag, put it in her room for her then came out to the walkway. It was round ten thirty, maybe eleven.
‘Jones,’ she said. ‘Sleep well.’
‘Yes. Thank you. You sleep well also.’
There was a moment of neither moving. Jones seemed to be looking for a cue.
She stood opposite him a minute, and thought of hugging him and then laughed aloud, a little nervously, and turned round and went into her room before she had time to register his quizzical expression.
Bree lay on her back on her bed in her clothes and looked at the ceiling. She thought of Cass. It was some time before she went to sleep. She wasn’t aware of falling asleep at all. But she woke still in her clothes and with the lights on, where she had been lying earlier, with a disoriented feeling. That meant she had been asleep. The clock on the wall said it was 2 a.m. She could hear a noise.
Cheap thin motel walls, she thought, as her startlement abated and she got a sense of where she was. Barely more than partitions. It would be some couple going at it. But the noise wasn’t the grunt and huff of sex, not even the stagy wailing some women seemed to put on when they found themselves in motel rooms with thin walls next to Bree when she was trying to sleep.
It was the high, animal, keening sound of someone in distress. Bree rolled her feet onto the ground and reached into her bag for the small, light handgun she carried and had never had to fire. She knew that this was a serious job. If this thing was as powerful as she understood it to be, she knew the DEI would not be the only people looking for it; they probably weren’t even the only government agency looking for it. There were interests at work in it that would use violence. Red Queen had as much as told her so.
She sat with the gun in her two hands, getting her breathing steady, listening. The sound rose and fell, came and went. It wasn’t the sound of someone being hurt. It was the sound of crying: the jagged hee-hawing of someone winded by grief. It was coming through the wall separating her room from Jones’s. It sounded too high to be a grown man’s voice.
Bree got up, rolled on the outsides of her feet to her door, and slowly turned the handle. Outside the air was still muggy. There was a dirty yellow halogen light illuminating the porch, and mosquitoes blatting against it. She eased the door behind her closed – a soft click, and a moment of panic before she remembered her key card was safe in her pocket – and she could no longer hear the bellow of the air conditioner.
She took a couple of steps down to Jones’s door. It was closed. The sound was coming through the thin plywood. She kept the gun in her right hand, but let it fall down behind her thigh. She knocked, softly, with the knuckles of her left hand on the door.
The sound stopped, abruptly. She stood breathing there for a minute, then knocked again.