by Melody Clark
“You’re certain?” Andrew asked.
“As certain as I can be,” Tad said. “He had another minor heart attack last night. And he’s not been out of his bed unaided since day before yesterday.”
“How long does he have?”
“Maybe days. A week. Not sure,” Tad said, rubbing at his forehead.
“And there’s nothing to be done?” Eddie asked.
“Nothing but heroic measures he has expressly forbidden,” Tad said. “All we can do is wait. He’s not ready to go over the side yet, but he’s not far away.”
“I’m sorry,” Eddie said, noticing Tad’s motions of discomfort. “But what’s wrong with you?”
“Me? Oh, nothing. I just have Bambi’s fucking friend Thumper embedded in my skull.”
“Translation?”
“I mean my fucking head hurts,” Tad croaked back at Edward in a voice very much like a bullfrog. He abandoned all attempts at standing by stumbling toward another library chair that he filled like a badly collapsed tent. “I think it’s a delayed Raven hangover. Maybe. Or maybe my brain is giving birth. And mentioning the Raven puts me in the utterly humiliating position of apologizing to you, Edward, out of my own compunction.”
“Do tell,” Eddie said, smiling a little.
“You won’t get many of these from me, so enjoy it. Here it is – I apologize. I admit I’m a colossal jackass. I owe you an apology so vast I could never hope to deliver all of it.”
“Is this the whole life review or just the Raven? Either way, forget it,” Edward said, chuckling a little. “No big deal.”
“Fuck off – it took me hours to muster the courage for this, so allow me to finish. I’m supposed to oversee your sobriety and I transformed into a big drunken sod. And a childish one on top of it. I have never been so emotionally needy in public. I swear it.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Eddie said.
Tad grimaced hard. “Yes, well, I can only hope my patients don’t get wind of my behavior.”
“I guess we should sit on the mass mailers Edward and I drew up then,” Andrew said.
Edward removed from his table space a bottle of Ibuprofen. He slid it across to Tad. “For your headache. It might help your attitude, too.”
“Oh, what is this miracle?” Tad asked, plucking up the bottle. “Yes, being a doctor, I would never have thought of this remedy by myself. Thank you so –”
Eddie grinned at the continued sarcastic redress as he turned toward his laptop to see a mail icon flashing. He clicked on it, expecting something benign, but what he saw fairly leapt off the screen at him.
It read: You will have only yourself to blame for what has happened.
“What the hell does that mean?” Eddie asked himself.
“What does what mean?” Tad asked, seeming to sense something different in Edward.
As if in reply, Thomas quickly filled the library door with a concerned expression that caused all three of them to look toward him at once.
“Croftdon Industries owns a small computer conversion company Dad purchased a decade ago,” Thomas said. “It’s in Delft near the Zuid. I’ve only been there once or twice on my way to Rotterdam when we work with Dutch companies. This morning, it burned to the ground. It’s a massive place, too. Most of it sublet.” Thomas looked toward Edward. “They believe it was arson.”
“So, that’s what that meant,” Eddie said, turning his laptop toward Thomas for him to read. “Of course, it’s from Wendell.”
“We should send that message to the police,” Tad said.
“There’s no point,” Andrew replied. “It probably came from a fake forwarder.”
“The authorities will finish their investigation and get back to us,” Thomas said. “Happily, no one was hurt and it was insured, but it will mean downtime for the workers there.”
Edward sat back in his chair again, staring with focus at the laptop screen. “We need to retaliate.”
“That may only make things worse,” Tad said.
“I don’t think so,” Edward said, shaking his head. “Wendell is a bully. He only understands threats. Everything else he takes as weakness. We have to do something that won’t transform us into bullies in turn, but that will shove him back to where he should be.”
“What are you thinking of?” Thomas asked.
Edward looked over at Andrew. “I’m thinking the riptide program.”
“To bring it down?” Andrew asked.
“Yes,” Eddie said.
“Anyone care to translate for an old man?” Thomas asked.
“Riptide is something I embedded in the cloud hosting I built for Bakunin,” Eddie replied. “It was a script I wrote when I was a kid. An act of rebellion as a cool concept. What it does is pull down the whole cloud host – whether for a minute or forever.”
“I thought all the Bakunin files were destroyed,” Thomas said.
“Just the SAGE scripting and any of my related files were destroyed. The rest of his business interests and his own files are archived in the cloud server. This is mine, too, but it underlies the entire archive, which is a repository for his whole business.”
“Don’t they have backups?” Tad asked.
Eddie grinned with a bit of guilty pride. “Yes, but I built the system. It occurred to me, when we put up his cloud servers, where all the corporate data is kept, I needed to protect myself. That’s the one I can target, since it’s significantly at risk. That’s what I meant about the spidering. It was all my work, so I saw it as an act of rebellion, to give myself a vehicle of revenge in case Wendell, well, kicked me out.”
Andrew shook his head at the thought. “You were afraid of that?”
“Are you joking? Always. Ever since Jennifer died.”
Andrew nodded. “Wouldn’t he retaliate?”
“Probably,” Edward said. “But if we don’t do something, we look like we’re backing down.”
“Something,” Thomas said, breaking his long silence, “but only just. Yank it down but only for a short while. It’ll be a show of strength.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Eddie said.
Thomas nodded as if decisively. “How long would it take to setup this riptide thing?”
Eddie reached across to his mouse and moved the cursor to an icon. He clicked on it. “There. It’s done. In about an hour, Wendell will not be happy. The next move he’ll make is what concerns me.”
“Says the man who is too cowardly to sit down at the board with me,” Tad replied.
“Tad, Dad,” James said, now standing, breathing hard, in the library door, “the sound you guys wanted me to listen for just went off.”
“We’ll be back in a moment,” Tad said quickly before shooting out the door and into the hall, followed closely by Thomas.
“You know,” Andrew said, as they were alone in the room, “you should just play him and be done with it.”
Eddie shook his head. “But it would never be done. If he won, he’d keep gloating about it and never give me a rematch. If I won, he would harass me incessantly until I gave him a rematch. However, if I hold off playing him because he won’t let me lose to him –”
“Then you win without winning. Jesus, that’s diabolically clever. My God, you are the Toad’s Toad!” Andrew said, laughing.
Eddie nodded. “I thought we had established that already.”
“I know, but it’s a revelation worth celebrating all over again,” Andrew replied.
“Eddie,” James said, suddenly at the doorway. The mood in the room markedly shifted toward the dark with the sound of his voice. “Dad and Granddad say they need to speak with you immediately.”
Edward entered the room slowly. It felt like a thousand presences stared back at him from the dark, as his father turned toward him to beckon him inside. A light burned from the bedside table. It reflected in the glass of every large picture in the room, giving
the illusion of numerous points of light on a black backdrop. Thomas sat to one side of the old man in bed – an empty chair lay on the other. In the corner, Tad watched steadily from an armchair.
The old man’s pale skin seemed shiny under the light, as if aging flesh had finally worn down to opacity. His eyelids had slipped closed, forced open as Edward sat down at his bedside.
“You wanted to talk to me?” Eddie asked.
The old man coughed out a laugh. “Yes, Edward. It seems I’m dying on the day of the dead – how pedestrian.”
“I’m sorry,” Eddie said.
“Don’t be,” he said with great effort. “I’ve served my time in this debtors’ prison called life. I am glad we got to know each other though. Please, come, sit.”
Eddie nodded with a lack of certainty. He suddenly flinched a little as the old man grasped hold of his hand. John wheezed out with careful breaths, “I told you my clearest memory of Addie was her death. I fear your last memory of me will be this.”
Edward stared down at the cold touch of John Croftdon’s hand. “What do you mean?”
“There are two things, Edward, one to do directly with your childhood. Another with Jennifer Bakunin, which Dad will address first,” Thomas said softly. “We couldn’t tell you before now for various reasons, but Dad wishes to tell you himself so it has to be now.”
“What is it?” Edward asked again, looking from Thomas back to John.
The old man drew a deep, sustaining breath with great effort. He slowly asked, “What do you know of your adopted mother’s death?”
Edward shrugged a little. “She died from breast cancer.”
“She had breast cancer,” John said. “But there was no autopsy. She was under doctor’s care. Was cremated immediately. No one questioned it. Wendell’s father always suspected something far worse had occurred.”
“What do you mean?” Eddie asked again, his question now more purposive than ever.
Thomas looked at Eddie directly. He said clearly and calmly, “Eddie, Wendell’s father suspected that Wendell murdered your adopted mother. I’m sorry, son.”
Edward felt his legs go cold all the way to the ground. The chill snaked its way up his spine until he had to tilt backward in the chair just to steady himself. He recalled the words he had just heard, trying to imagine how he might have misunderstood them.
Eddie gathered his thoughts for a moment. His next words came out as little more than a whisper. “I don’t doubt he’s capable of it. But why is it you think that?”
“In the year before her death,” John said, with greater effort, “Jennifer grew more suspicious of Wendell. She investigated. She was primarily concerned with his focus on you. Of his insistence on molding you into an agent for his revenge. She told Thomas of her concerns. Do you remember when Thomas came to see you?”
“Yes,” Eddie said, “clearly.”
“That was why. I’m sad to say Wendell’s father helped hide you in Texas. That was the beginning of the end of my friendship with him. As soon as we knew you were in Texas, I began to sever ties.”
Edward’s hand slipped around his wrist, feeling for the ghost of a long-ago piece of twine, attached to a phantom balloon. “You’re saying my adopted mother died to protect me?”
“Yes, Eddie,” the old man said, looking at him steadily, “I’m afraid I am.”
Edward took in the words slowly. Then he looked over at Thomas, sitting across the old man’s bed from him. “And you knew I was in Texas?”
Thomas, visibly self-chastened, nodded. He inhaled deeply before speaking. “That is how the Status Associates man knew me. That’s what I feared you would learn with your experiment. I have never told you this, for fear it would hurt you. But we have always known where and how you were. He followed you for us from a young age.”
“You knew what was going on, but you didn’t pull me out of there?” Edward asked softly.
Thomas quieted his voice further. “I’m afraid so. Forgive me, son, but I feared what he would do to the rest of our family.”
After a moment, Eddie nodded. The flicker of memory passed through his mind. He remembered pain and fear and loneliness. But he measured it against the risk. Finally, he said, “That was wise. You had to think of the family you knew first.”
A dry laugh struggled out of the old man on his deathbed. It filtered through his lips with a painful, struggling breath. “Your father was so afraid you would hate him if you knew that. I knew you’re too much like him. For what it is worth, I told him you would say his decision was the right one.”
“It was.”
Thomas exhaled in audible relief, settling backward into his chair. “Thank you, Eddie. That is a burden I am very happy to be relieved of.”
“As my oldest grandson, to assist your father, I will tell you I want no final services. I have written down my wishes, but I want no feigned laments or polite words for the dead,” John Croftdon went on. “I will speak with each of the boys, but I want no death bed vigil. This will be the last time I will speak with the two of you. My place in your lives is soon to be in the past.”
“But, Dad, there is much to discuss,” Thomas said.
“There always is,” John said, his voice raspy to raise above a whisper. “I’ve been a wretched parent to you, Thomas. I’ll not have you pretend otherwise. I don’t merit your grief. You are a much better father than I ever was. Show that by setting the example and leaving me to the ages. Edward, please assist your father.”
Eddie stood to walk back around the bed and place an encouraging hand on Thomas’s shoulder. Thomas clearly had to force himself out of his own chair, while Edward reached around him to open the door. He pushed at his shoulder gently to urge Thomas to walk through it. Edward positioned himself to block his father’s view, so he couldn’t rethink the choice.
Eddie turned back once toward the old man. “Can I get you anything?”
“Just my sacred solitude, my boy,” the old man whispered, “But before that, please send in Andrew.”
“Okay,” Eddie said, pausing to ponder if he should, if he would, say the words rolling around his tongue in strong deliberation. Such a simple thing to say. Could he say it genuinely? Not really. But did it really matter? It would be selfish to refrain from saying it, if it might give an old man comfort. And John Croftdon had already told him so many things he needed to know. So finally he just said, “Goodnight, Granddad.”
The old man’s face lit up for a moment, a smile flickering across his lips and melting away just as Eddie shut the door.
Thomas stood there in the middle of the hall, as if caught between disbelief and a stunned confusion. He touched the wall nearest him, like he was seeking the solace of solidness. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“I’m sorry,” Eddie said. “Is there anything I can do to help you? Phone calls to make?”
“No, I have to make those phone calls,” Thomas said. “It’s best I make them from my office.”
“Go on and do what you have to do, Dad,” Eddie said. “I’ll hold down the fort here.”
Thomas smiled over at him. “I know you will. I promise I won’t be long.”
There wasn’t a lot for Edward to do but watch the grim procession of Croftdons into the room. One by one, they had been called to the presence. Andrew went first, followed by James and Wilse, all walking in somber and walking away morose. Tad, as physician, maintained his death room vigil.
Eddie moved his laptop to the end of the library table by the door, keeping an ear toward the hallway. He worked on silently, watching for activity in the hall, listening for the telephone, and trying to keep his mind relatively on his work. He troubled at a sequence of code for SAGE2 when another email icon flashed up on screen. He clicked it.
It read: Is that really the best you can do?
Edward typed in reply: You’ll know when that happens.
Then Eddie added: They tell me you murdered Mom.
The reply appeared quickly: You believe my worst enemies?
Eddie answered: You have created your worst enemy. Me.
With that, Eddie exited his email.
The door to John Croftdon’s room opened slowly. Tad walked out, looking as weary as Edward had ever seen him. He shut the door behind him and walked down the hall for an interlude of minutes.
After awhile, Tad drifted into the library and sank into the library chair nearest Edward.
“He’s gone?” Edward asked, without needing to.
Tad nodded. “Right on schedule, too. As orderly and chillingly pro forma as his entire frodding life, the old bastard.”
Eddie shrugged a little. “Maybe he had reasons for being like he was.”
“Please!” Tad said, shaking his head.
“Well, he did a lot to mend fences,” Eddie replied.
