* * *
“What happened to you?” Susan asked me, her eyes wide.
I gave her the short version. “But the main thing is that Burn liked me! We got on like old pals. He thought the cartoons were hilarious.”
“He’s a disturbing little person, isn’t he?”
“Most assuredly.”
She gathered her things and we left via a back hallway that emptied out near the receptionist’s desk. Susan was wearing some shimmery blue dress thing and a pair of running shoes. I wanted to grope her, and did, in the elevator. She kissed me.
“Tim,” she said.
“Oh God. What now?”
“Am I that transparent? I intercepted another memo.”
“Where do you find these things?” I asked her. “Do they just cc you every time they print out a secret communiqué?”
“Recycling bin,” she said. “The intern leaves copies of everything in there. I think she secretly has it in for everybody.” She detached herself from me. “Tim, the lawyers figured out a way around your contract. It’s just a matter of choice now: you or Dorn.”
“Well, I wowed the chief,” I said, feeling my heart sink.
“That does count for a lot. For everything, in fact.”
“Except money.”
She shrugged. “Except money. But Ray’s an old softie. His heart and his head. It’s a toss-up, as far as I can see.”
“Well, no use worrying.”
“No.”
I pulled her back toward me. “So the plan?”
“Ah! The plan! You’re a Friday visitor, so you’ve never known the pleasures of the Delicious Duck Wednesday specials.”
“And I will now?” I said.
“You certainly shall,” she answered, and that did make things a lot better.
thirty-one
That Saturday I woke to find Pierce sitting on the couch, playing solitaire with a deck of naked-girl playing cards. He had a look of controlled boredom on his face, as if forcing himself to act like a normal person while he weathered a particularly trying inner squall. I got myself some cereal and sat on the easy chair, facing him.
“You’re home,” I said.
He carefully did not look up from his card game. “Gilly’s coming.”
“Here? Really?”
“She’s picking me up. We’re going to go to Philly.”
“Philly!”
He nodded, then pulled from his pocket the worn-out warehouse key. I hadn’t seen it since I found it in the safety deposit box. “We’re going to find what it’s to.”
I tried to conceal my excitement. I hadn’t forgotten the key, but I’d filed away semipermanently the curiosity connected with it, sure that Pierce would never get around to finding the warehouse. I asked him how they were going to look for it.
“Gilly has a plan,” he said. It seemed that the two of them had spent much of the previous weekend poring square-eyed over the Yellow Pages and a street map of Philadelphia, marking with colored sticky dots the locations of every self-storage warehouse in the city. They were going to go and look for the right place in her car.
“But there have to be dozens of warehouses,” I said.
“Two hundred fourteen.”
“You’re going to go to two hundred fourteen warehouses in one day?”
He shook his head. “That’s where Gilly’s plan comes in,” he said, his eyes gleaming. Apparently Pierce had some sort of aura that Gillian could detect surrounding his person, as did everyone. People related to a person were said to share elements of that person’s aura, and it was possible to sense a person’s presence from his possessions or from items that were once his. It seemed that Gillian planned to go to each warehouse, ascertain if any Pierce-related aura was hovering about, and decide to inquire about the key based on that determination. As Pierce described the plan to me, in the same pained, earnest voice he might have used to tell me about a ball game or a television program, I began to feel like the world had vanished around me while I slept and been replaced with another one which, though similar, differed in certain subtle, disturbing ways.
“Aura?” I said. “Really?”
“Oh, yeah. You’ve got one, Mom, Mal, everybody.” He said that two hundred fourteen was too many warehouses even to drive by, but that Gillian would be able to sense the correct general area by a method of “emotional triangulation” she had devised herself. It involved a hand mirror and a candle, among other less palpable elements. “It’s some sort of witchy thing,” Pierce said. “I don’t totally understand it.”
My cereal had gone a bit soggy listening to this, so I took a few contemplative bites and considered the plan.
“Not to take the wind out of your sails,” I said. “But it sounds a little wonky to me.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, well…”
“Do you believe in that stuff?”
He pursed his lips, thinking. “I believe in her,” he said finally.
“Well, okay, good.”
“She thinks I need to go find the place. She says it’s like there’s a little part of Dad that isn’t fully dead, but wants to be, and I have to go put it to rest.”
“Can she talk to the dead?” I asked.
He looked shocked. “Of course not!” he said, turning back to his game. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
* * *
I was standing in the yard watering the bushes when a little red Ford Fiesta with an ankh painted on the hood pulled in behind the Caddy. Gillian Millstone tore herself from the car and ran across the yard to me like a four-year-old. She was wearing short shorts and knee boots and a University of Massachusetts sweat shirt. “Hi!” she yelled, and threw her arms around me with such force that I dropped the hose. I thought at first she had mistaken me for my brother, but then she said my name and that she was happy to see me, and I decided she was just an extremely friendly kind of person.
“You look happy today,” she said.
“I sort of am.” It was true. Fall was a week from beginning, and, for better or worse, my stint as a cartoon journeyman was coming to a close. In a few weeks everything would be different. Even considering the vast gulf between the best-case and worst-case scenarios, this prospect gladdened me, and when Gillian untangled her skinny body from mine I felt a little twinge of regret.
“It’s good to see the old place again.”
“I thought you’d never been here,” I said.
“I’ve driven by,” she said. “I get good vibes from it, anyhow.”
I nodded, thinking about the warehouse plan. “I wish I could say the same. So, Gillian.”
“Yeah.”
“This plan of yours. Do you think it’s going to work? I mean, you can actually detect…auras?”
She smiled at me, and I saw in her face a surprising intelligence — calculating, though not in a bad way. What was the chance of picking out the place at random? What was the chance of your parents getting killed in a plane crash? I got the idea Gillian had the numbers. “A little,” she said. “I’m better at detecting your brother.”
“How so?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “He wants to believe we’ll find it. But not too much. Know what I mean?”
I picked up the hose, which had soaked my shoes. I didn’t know what to make of Gillian’s forthright willingness to confide in me. “Hmm,” I said.
* * *
They packed the car with their tools: water bottles, lunchmeat sandwiches, fruit. I peered into the back and saw a few mysterious items: a black wooden box with a brass latch, and some pentagonal doodads made of string and sticks.
“Well,” I said. “Good luck. What’ll you do when you find it?”
Pierce cleared his throat. “Well, nothing at first. I’ll need a little while to think about it.”