I still knew her number from the long weeks of trial prep. I pressed the digits in, lingered over the last one, then felt it depress. I closed my eyes.
“Hello,” came the milky voice. It set off a firestorm inside me. I tried and failed to ignore the image of her coming out of the shadows outside my room, grabbing me and brushing her lips across mine. I looked at Sarah and encouraged myself to focus.
“Hello,” I managed.
A pause.
“Jeremy… is that you?”
It was disturbing how much power she still had over me. Deep breaths…
“Yeah. It’s me.”
Another pause.
“I was just thinking about you,” she purred into the phone. I could picture her, curled up by the window, legs tucked under, her long hair in a ponytail slung over her shoulder; those fire-blue eyes. “I want to see you.”
I bet you do.
“Daphne, I need you to listen to me.”
“Come on, why talk on the phone? I miss you.” Her voice was melodic. “I want to see you.”
“Listen to me. The situation has changed.”
I repeated Miles’s words exactly. We’d protected ourselves. We wanted to meet. No details. No fear. My voice was confident, firm.
This time there was a longer pause on the line. I heard voices in the background. Then Daphne spoke to me. All the purring and silkiness was gone. Her voice was all business now. I listened to what she said and nodded. Miles and Sarah looked on, eyes wide. Apparently, Miles was just as surprised as I was that his words hadn’t led to hysterical giggles on Daphne’s end. Glad I didn’t know that before I’d spoken them. “I understand,” I said, and hung up the phone.
I realized I hadn’t breathed in a while. I exhaled and rubbed my eyes.
“Well?” Miles said.
“They want to meet us tonight.”
“Really? Where?”
I smiled wearily and made a face that said, Where else?
“In my room.”
I’ve never been on the victim’s end of a burglary, but I was pretty sure this was how it felt. I hadn’t been back to my dorm since coming out the hatch under my bed. Everything was in the exact same place, but it all felt different, foreign and contaminated. My Albert Einstein poster-the one that says “Do not worry about your troubles in mathematics, I assure you mine are still greater”-used to be cute (a little juvenile for law school, maybe, but a concession to the fact that I never had a college dorm room to decorate with clichéd posters). Now Mr. Einstein’s face, larger than life on my wall, looked sinister, as if the benign genius in his eyes had slipped into lunacy while I was out. The troll dolls in a line along my desk used to guard my computer; now they struck me more like a druid assembly, here to hack at our shins with tiny adorable axes.
When we arrived, the door was still locked, but of course I expected to see Daphne waiting for us on my bed anyway. Locked doors had never been a problem before. But the room was empty and eerily silent. The only relief from the darkness was the moon shining through the blinds, splashing old Albert in silver light.
I flipped on the fluorescents, and the shadows vanished and the room became much, much closer to normal. I forced myself to sit in my old chair, a nice leather one that rotated and complemented the Stickley furniture. It felt the same, creaked in all the same places.
Sarah sat on my bed. There was one other chair in the room, wooden, yellow, and surprisingly uncomfortable. I bought it at a thrift store for seven dollars, the last chair from a long-gone kitchen table. Miles tried it, said oomph, and joined Sarah on the bed.
We left that chair open and waited.
No one spoke.
My mind started messing with me again. Were they standing us up? Did they think we were bluffing? Was this a trap? Why the hell did we come?
How many times was I going to lower my fists and show my neck?
How many more times would I get away with it?
I was about to curse Miles for… for something… (not fixing the mess I’d created?)…
And then I heard it:
Three knocks-slow, soft, and polite.
30
Two questions: first, who opens the door in a situation like this? And second, is there a cannon with a lit fuse on the other side? As any good lawyer would tell you, the answer to one question might affect your answer to the other.
I gave a last hopeful glance at Miles and Sarah, then stood up and went to the door.
Through the peephole, the man didn’t look like a murderer. He was neatly dressed, in a plain and somewhat worn gray suit. In his left hand was a battered briefcase. His hair was a little ruffled, but he had a tidy mustache, thinner than a drug lord’s and thicker than a magician’s.
When I opened the door, he held out his hand.
“You must be Jeremy,” he said in a tired voice.
I sat in my leather chair and left the wooden one open for him.
He sat hard and cringed, popped off the chair, and sort of half-stood and put a hand on his flank. He let out a little groan.
“Bad back,” he said apologetically. “Just give me a second.”
The man seemed like he was in real pain. He sort of hovered, half-standing, half-sitting, with his eyes closed. He kept one hand on his lower back; his lips moved like he was counting slowly to wait out the spasm. I shot Miles and Sarah a look. Miles shrugged. Sarah cocked her head. The doctor in her couldn’t resist.
“Have you tried a lumbar pillow?” she asked him.
He turned his head to her, still crouching, and half-opened his eyes.
“I heard they don’t work.”
“Actually, they’re great,” she told him. “Takes the pressure off your lower back.”
“Well, you are the neurosurgeon in the room,” he said, trying to smile but still wincing.
“Listen, just take this one,” I said and stood away from my chair.
“Thank you, much obliged,” he said and walked, still bent, to my chair, grimacing with each step. He settled down slowly into the chair, then let out a big sigh. “Very kind of you,” he said.
I went to the wood chair and sat. The angle of the back against the seat was preposterous-an angle unknown to human spines in the history of sitting-and the wood planks jabbed into me. I accidentally let out an oh.
The man in the suit smiled sheepishly.
He was sitting in my chair!
The negotiation was off to a great start.
He looked around the room, soaking it in. He smiled at my Einstein poster. He shook his head at the stack of books on my desk. “I don’t miss school,” he chuckled, in a way that suggested he did miss it, a little.
“We don’t want to play games,” I said to him.
“Good, good.”
He smiled pleasantly.
The man picked up one of the troll dolls from my desk and turned it over in his hands. “My sister used to collect these. She had ones for different countries. I remember, she had a whole cabinet full of them.” He smiled at the memory. “Shall we get started?”
This guy was messing with me!
“Yeah, let’s get started.”
I handed him one of our packages.
The man took it. He pulled out the paper and read it slowly, taking his time. It contained every single thing we knew about the V &D: facts and rumors, puzzles and solutions, maps of tunnels, the location of their temple, lists of names. His face was passive, perfectly unreadable. Not blank-just mild. He might’ve been flipping through Reader’s Digest, waiting for a haircut. When he was done, he handed it back to me.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay what?”
He didn’t reply. He just sat there patiently with a polite smile, hands folded in his lap.
He sat there until I couldn’t stand it.
“We want protection. We want you to promise you’ll leave us alone. Me, Sarah, Miles, Chance. That’s it. We have copies of this all over the place. If anything happens to us, they go out-newspapers, internet, you name it. If we’re okay, they never see the light of day. We don’t care about the V &D. All we want to do is live our lives. That’s it. That’s all we want.”