“So, about Penelope,” she said, “I have two things to say. First, be careful of her, Roland. As a practicing liar I understand her need, though not her reasons. But be careful with her, too. She seems both brave and breakable. You can build her up or tear her down. You have more influence on her than you might realize.”
A long silence. An owl hooting from across the pond. A strong half-moon dangling light on the water. Justine in a rowboat on that pond, floppy hat, brown arms. What to remember? What to forget?
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you all. I value your advice, whether I take it or not.”
“We care,” said Liz.
“Hope I didn’t overstep,” said Dick. “About Justine.”
Violet undaintily blew her nose into a napkin, made a fist around it. “I’ll now be quiet for as long as I can. I’m trying to teach myself not to talk so much. Obviously.”
She smiled as if embarrassed, and sighed. “It’s harder than it sounds, because so many things really deserve to be said. Is that just me? Even before that night I was an incessant talker. Melinda Day could carry on without a comma. Brandon was the first guy who actually listened to what she said. She was used to male attention, being reasonably attractive and very much a man fan. But she noted that few men could listen to her closely for more than just part of one date. Let alone a lifetime. Not that I was sizing up every guy as a possible mate, but to be perfectly honest, I was. Rafael came the closest, junior year of high school. What a sweetie. He’d really hang in there. Hour after hour of me. But around eleven, if it was a date night and not a school night, he’d fall asleep wherever we happened to be. Unless he was driving. He had a red Soul — the car. Kept it really shiny. But if he was a passenger in my car, or if we were watching videos at one of our houses, or hanging with friends — there’d go Rafael, nodding off with that little smile on his face. But Brandon? He could listen all night. And not only that, he was a beautiful man. Naturally, I wanted to write our own wedding vows, and he said, Great, Mel, but they can’t be longer than Infinite Jest. And then when I started actually writing them, you’d never believe it but... oh, heck, sorry, sorry, sorry, you guys! I’ll stop now. I will stop right now!”
She sighed hugely. “Just one more thing. I totally promise. Please call me Melinda. I have to start somewhere.”
She looked back over her shoulder. Everyone else looked there, too.
No bullets. No building and no thirty-second-story window.
Just the man in the moon looking down with that odd half-face of his, like he’s eyeing you from around a corner, either groaning or smiling, hard to say.
One by one, the Irregulars and I stood and gathered behind Melinda. She rose and we closed around her. A circle of awkward embraces, a cross between a football huddle and a group hug, Triunfo running around us, hoping to join in.
No words, just this strange new thing between us, silent and strong.
I sat in an Adirondack chair down by the shore of the big pond, let the night cool around me. No breeze, the water black with a wobble of silver pointing straight up at the moon. I hadn’t expected the Irregulars to lecture me, but it felt good to be cared about. To have things in the open.
Saw my phone come to life, figured something from a wasp-cam, but it was a text.
Penelope
(760) 555-5555
Thanks for being here today
and listening to Daley. She
is so sweet and bright and I
hope that you understand her.
I’ve prayed long and hard that
you can find her very soon. I
have this black feeling surrounding
me, and it’s getting closer and
tighter. I feel slightly more
optimistic when you are around.
11:48 PM
I thought about that for a minute or two.
She is sweet and bright and
I’m trying my best to locate
her. Reggie owns a mansion
in Mexico that sounds much
like the Mansion on the Sand.
I don’t think he is in control
of Daley right now. I will
find her and you will get some
peace.
11:50 PM
Hope you had a good day.
Hope the Irregulars are well.
Hope deferred makes a heart sick,
but a longing fulfilled is a
tree of life. Says that right
in the good old Bible. I feel
better to have stopped running.
Good night, Roland Ford PI,
one of the last good guys.
11:51 PM
33
The next morning, Burt and I sat in a rented white Taurus, parked off Old Highway 101, just outside the north gate of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. A white Taurus is as anonymous as a vehicle can be, and we didn’t want to draw so much as a second glance from SNR Security, which knew me as the big guy they’d whaled on outside of Paradise Date Farm, and knew Burt as the little guy who’d showed up a few days later to wash the windows.
I had my phone propped up in the cup holder, waiting for live streams from the wasp-cams. They were quiet. Paradise had been eerily peaceful since Donald and Glassen had donned their radiation suits in order to do who knew what in their hidden lab.
“I didn’t know you’d studied in Finland, Burt.”
“After Italy and before Japan.”
“As a college student?”
“Not exactly,” Burt said. “I was in college, but I’d been recruited to do a student-officer program. They didn’t call it that.”
“CIA?”
“Their Special Activities Division, SAD, sponsored by JSOC. I never knew which acronym was ordering me around. Wonderful years. Young and not a care in the world. I got a college degree out of it. Biology with an emphasis in ornithology. Finland was part of that. Olkiluoto had half of Finland’s nuclear power plants and they were trying to figure out where all the radioactive waste would be stored, like we are now. They finally decided on an island.”
With these few sentences, Burt Short told me more about his past than he had in the last three years combined.
I lifted my binoculars, balanced my arms on the Taurus’s steering wheel, and took a long look at the power plant. It wavered in the late-morning heat, magnified and flattened by the powerful field glasses. The employee parking lot was sparsely occupied. I’d read that there were only a handful of employees here now compared to the days when the plant was producing. And most of those employees were security subcontractors — the friendly professionals at SNR.
They weren’t hard to spot. Silver SNR vehicles had the best parking slots, up near the entry/exit hut. Where, I could see, a uniformed armed guard awaited a woman now approaching. Middle-aged, a dark suit, white blouse, and black running shoes. She raised her neck badge to a scanner on a stand, then passed through a tall, steel-ribbed turnstile and entered a concrete hut. Through the open security door, pausing to use the wall-mounted hand geometry reader. She stepped to the guard, who scanned a dosimeter up and down her torso. They talked and nodded and smiled, as if continuing some running gag. A moment later, she stepped through another heavily barred carousel and into the plant.
“More people set off those scanners after getting X-rays from their doctor than from exposure in the plants I worked at,” said Burt. “You’d be surprised what they hit you with in a CT scan or dental X-rays.”
I watched the woman leave the hut and continue down a wide steep ramp leading to the Security Processing Facility building, a large structure at the north end of the station. Through the binoculars I scanned the concrete building, with its vehicle barriers set proactively out front, its steel double doors, the delay barriers topped with gleaming rolls of concertina wire, the anti-grenade-screen windows, and thousands of slender spikes sprouting from almost every surface of the roof on which a bird could land. In spite of the spikes, I noted three pigeons crowded into a bare corner of the security building.