“I get it, but I don’t have a choice.” Jeremiah took a sip of light liquid courage, sighed, and admitted the shocking truth. “There’s a girl.”
“Of course there’s a girl. I know that.”
“How could you possibly—”
“There’s always a girl. Even during a two-year journey on a deep space old folk’s home, you managed to find a girl. Just how old is this girl?”
“I think about 200,” said Jeremiah, “give or take.”
“A 200-year-old singer?” said Appleton.
“She’s a waitress.”
“Oh, Bullfrog, tell me you haven’t forgotten the one useful piece of advice Leo gave you. Never fall in love with anyone—”
“Who works for tips. I know.”
“Given any more thought to another beer, handsome?” asked the waitress, who had walked up to the table during this exchange.
Appleton inclined his head, as if to point out exhibit A.
“Bourbon,” he said. “With a bourbon chaser.” He turned back to Jeremiah. “Jeremiah, listen very carefully: forget the girl. She sounds wonderfully mature, but there’s always another girl. If you go back on the Einstein IV, ten minutes later there’ll be a new girl.”
“Not like this one. This one is different.”
“Because she’s 200 years old?” asked Appleton.
“Because she’s different.”
“Is she ‘different’ because she hates credit? Otherwise I can’t see her interest in you surviving very long. And I don’t mean ‘hates credit’ as in ‘believes that too much credit can be bad for you,’ I mean ‘hates credit’ as in ‘I’ve always wanted to try not having enough credit to buy food to put in my mouth and chew.’”
“She’s going back to Earth to live in a lakeside house—possibly with my rival, who is basically the expression of genetic perfection. Or she thinks she is—she doesn’t know how much lakeside property costs.”
“Then what the hell are we even talking about?” said Appleton. “It’s a raw deal, Bullfrog, and I’ll miss the hell out of you, but there’s only one real option: go back and do your time on the ship. And honestly, kid, maybe working for a living wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for you.”
Jeremiah was about to suggest that, as the collective stewards of Jeremiah’s future, they could perhaps set the bar a little higher than an option that could still be, by Appleton’s own formulation, the second worst thing in the world for him, but while he was phrasing the thought he was interrupted by the arrival of Katherine, who walked up and stood at the side of their high table.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said. “I wanted to say goodbye.”
As it seemed that Jeremiah’s wits were not available for immediate response, Appleton took matters in hand himself.
“Hello, I’m Appleton,” he said, standing up and offering his hand.
“Appleton,” said Katherine. She took the huge proffered hand in both of her own, leaving plenty of room to take it with two or three more hands if she’d had them. “It’s so good to put a face to the name.” She gave an odd smile, as if at the impersonal pleasure of finding a face that lived up to the stories that had preceded it.
By this time the desperate manhunt for Jeremiah’s wits had yielded fruit.
“This is Katherine,” said Jeremiah to Appleton. “She’s the one I was telling you about.”
“Katherine,” Appleton said. “It’s a pleasure. I see that Jeremiah was telling the truth: you are different.”
Both Katherine and Appleton were now blushing slightly, equally aware that their non-traditional handshake had gone on too long, neither wanting to be the first to break contact. Jeremiah had seen such moments before, when two people of real quality encountered each other and, like two rare elements, underwent a reaction, as if in all the ways that mattered they had understood each other immediately and completely. Everything about this meeting seemed like it should have been taking place in the glow of a Christmas tree, with children running and chattering in the background, and the entire experience could not have thrilled Jeremiah more or made him more miserable.
Appleton finally took his hand back.
“Why don’t I give the two of you a minute,” he said.
“So,” said Katherine. She sat down in the seat that Appleton had left.
“So.”
“How did it go? Are you a free man or—”
Jeremiah shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” said Katherine. “What are you going to do?”
“That mostly depends on your views regarding extreme poverty and / or running away with me.”
“Jeremiah—”
“Wait, please, I need to say something.”
In fact Jeremiah needed to tell her a great many things: about how he understood she had looked into the world’s absurd heart and decided to be kind, about life and what it was and wasn’t, about how he realized now that Real Life had always been there, trying to reach his heart, and the glass hadn’t been out there somewhere but inside himself. But the words wouldn’t come, and he could feel the clock ticking.
“Isn’t there something between us, Katherine?” he said instead.
“Yes,” she said. “And in the storybook, you’re the right choice—the charming ne’er-do-well with the heart of gold. But the thing about ne’er-do-wells in real life is that they never do very well.”
If Katherine and he had been engaged in a debate team competition, this would have been about the moment that Jeremiah waved a white flag and proposed post-debate drinks at a nearby bar, but too much was at stake here to let mere logic and force of argument carry the day. While he was still gathering his thoughts for the return salvo, however, Reynolds approached the table.
“Sorry to interrupt. It’s nice to see you two young people together,” he said. “Jeremiah, I owe you an apology. Two, actually. I left you to your own devices a bit in the office—no, I did, I did—and a bit in the dark about why. You see that little girl over there?”
Reynolds did his hands-free glasses swap, and Jeremiah looked out into the hallway where Reynolds was looking and saw what appeared to be a mother with her child. The mother was wearing loose, colorful robes that looked African to him, and holding the child—who must have been approaching two years of age—upright on a beautifully fashioned rocking horse of wood. The child was rocking. When the mother saw them looking at her, she urged the child to wave to Reynolds, and then did so herself.
“The mother is Marai. She was four months pregnant when she came on board,” Reynolds said, “running from the troubles in Sierra Leone. Technically GW doesn’t hire pregnant women, but they don’t look too closely either, and once we were underway and Claudetta was born, what were they going to do, shoot her out of an airlock? Anyway, I just fell in love with the child. I became something of an unofficial grandpa. Now that we’ll be going our separate ways—they’re heading back to Sierra Leone since things have had a couple decades to calm down a bit—I wanted her to have something to remember me by, so I dusted off my old woodworking skills and built that rocking horse. That’s why I wasn’t around much.
“And then I was rude to you in the storeroom, when you caught me flatfooted with the pesticide. The last pieces of wood I found for the rocking horse were lousy with termites, and I was worried someone would get upset if they found out I was using GW materials for a personal project. I should have just told you. But all’s well that ends well. Good luck to you, young man.”
Reynolds put his hand on Jeremiah’s shoulder and shook him gently, as if testing a pylon he’d just driven.
“Anyway, Katherine,” he said, “I’ll see you on the elevator?”
“Of course, Dad. John and I will find you.”
“Ah, excellent,” said Reynolds, but he didn’t sound too pleased at the prospect of making the journey back to ground level in Battle’s company, and Jeremiah loved him for it.
“So if it wasn’t him—” Jeremiah said to himself
as Reynolds rejoined Marai and Claudetta in the hall.
“If what wasn’t him?” Katherine asked.
“Nothing,” said Jeremiah, too quickly, “just thinking out loud.”
“You mean if it wasn’t him who killed Boyle?” Katherine said. “Of course it wasn’t him. What’s wrong with you?”
“I just said it wasn’t him.”
“Which means that at some point you thought it was. Because of the pesticide he was talking about?”
“That, and his unexplained absences, and his cold manner when we examined the body. You have to admit, it was all suspicious. And then there was his access to the keycards.”
“You thought Alfred Reynolds, who took me in when my grandmother died, and who builds rocking horses for refugees from Sierra Leone in his spare time, was a murderer because he had access to an encoder for our oh-so-reliable keycards? The same keycards that stopped working for the whole ship one morning?”
“I see now how foolish that was, but to be fair, not everyone’s keycard stopped—wait,” said Jeremiah. “Of course. How could I not have seen that before?”
“Seen what?”
Jeremiah looked around and immediately found the man he was looking for sitting across the bar.
“Follow me for a second,” he said to Katherine.
* * *
Cornelius Werther was sitting alone, swirling a cloudy tumbler of scotch and staring so deeply into it that he did not even notice Jeremiah and Katherine approach.
“It was you,” Jeremiah said to him. “Wasn’t it?”
Mr. Werther jumped, and for a split second his face took on a look of panic, but almost immediately he smiled in the profoundest relief.
“Thank God,” he said. “How did you know?”
“It was the keycard,” said Jeremiah. “Everyone else’s stopped working, while you ‘lost’ yours. But you didn’t lose it at all, did you? You swapped it with Boyle’s card, so he would think his had stopped working, instead of reporting it missing. But why did the all the other passengers have problems with their cards too? Coincidence?”
“I swapped theirs with each other. As many as I could get my hands on, to throw up a kind of smokescreen.”
“But why did you do it?” asked Jeremiah. “I mean, why did you kill him?”
Werther closed his eyes for a few seconds, remembering.
“She’s a lovely woman, Elizabeth. Physically, of course, but also in her spirit. The sweetest soul you could ever hope to meet. None of this,” he added hastily, “was her idea. Make sure you tell them that.”
“Them?” asked Katherine.
“The police. He wanted to divorce her, did you know that? The way he carried on, you would have thought she had been lying in wait to ambush him with divorce papers the moment she found out about the lottery ticket. But he’d already retained a lawyer before he even bought it.”
He frowned at his drink.
“Do you think I could have a glass of water?” he asked.
Jeremiah and Katherine looked at each other. Both started to stand up at the same moment.
“No,” Mr. Werther said, waving his hand, “I’ve changed my mind again.”
He drained his scotch in one pull instead, made a face as it burned, and then continued.
“She came to my firm for advice when she found out he’d booked this trip. She had questions about what the time dilation would mean for their shared custody of the children, her right to sell the house, and so on.
“I knew right then, the first moment that I saw her, that I would do anything for her. Whatever the consequences, whatever the cost, I couldn’t permit this creature in front of me to suffer any more.
“It was insane, of course—impossible. I was old enough to be her father—her grandfather, in some parts of the country. There was no way she could possibly think of me that way. But as I worked on her case—pro bono, of course—I began to hope against hope. She found excuses to stop by—she baked things. She touched her hair when she spoke.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Mr. Werther, and he smiled ruefully. “That she was playing me. That she is still playing me. But you don’t know Elizabeth—that would have been impossible for her. And there’s no way she could have known, ahead of time, about the technicality.”
He paused to wipe his forehead with a napkin. A smudge of green ink from the bar’s logo stayed behind.
“I discovered that they weren’t really divorced, you see. It was one of those idiotic procedural things, but it opened the door to a whole host of disasters if Boyle decided he wanted to cause trouble. He could say he’d changed his mind and refuse to sign the updated papers, or re-open negotiations. Worst of all, he was about to get on this ship for 20 years—from her point of view. And if she happened to die while he was on his cruise—which was the whole point of his taking the cruise, after all—her children might get nothing. He never cared about those children. Did you ever even hear him mention once that he had children?”
Jeremiah shook his head.
“He has three. Had. So I decided: I would tell everyone—Elizabeth included—that I had been diagnosed with something. As far as she knew, I was just another of the traveling sick, putting my hopes on the future. I would spend everything I had on a ticket, and I would go on the cruise with Boyle—but only one of us would return. In the meantime Albert Einstein would have allowed Elizabeth to gain eighteen years on me, and we would make a perfectly respectable October / December romance. Not an eyebrow would be raised.
“And that’s all there is to it,” said Mr. Werther. “There aren’t many reasons to kill a man, and mine was love. You have no idea how hard it is to carry that around for two years—the intention to end a life. They say confession is good for the soul. That remains to be seen, but it is a relief. Now if you’ll excuse me, I believe I need to visit the restroom.”
“Wait,” said Katherine. “Why did you wait so long to do it? You could have killed him at any time.”
“I wanted to make sure that Elizabeth would still be alive when I returned, of course. It’s not as if I were eager to commit murder, and a lot can happen to someone in 20 years.”
“Photos from Beth’s 65th birthday party,” said Katherine, remembering. “The wave you received.”
“Yes,” Mr. Werther said. “How did you—never mind, it doesn’t matter. Thank you—thank you both. It’s not an easy thing, to kill a man, and harder to live with, even if it was the right thing to do. You have no idea what a relief it has been to tell the truth. I don’t think I’ll make it to the restroom. Remember to tell them that Elizabeth had nothing to do with it—and please tell her that when I fell asleep, I was thinking of her.”
With that, he pitched forward on the table.
32
That’s What You Do
Still Sunday (day of arrival)
Katherine, Appleton, and Jeremiah stood in the hallway, leaning against a stretch of wall next to the gray door of the space elevator’s security office. Katherine had folded her arms first. A few minutes later—unconsciously, it seemed—Appleton had followed suit. Jeremiah had fought as long as he was able, but now he too had folded his arms, feeling like the three of them were posing for the cover of their latest album, which was not how Jeremiah wanted to be feeling after what he and Katherine had just witnessed.
Occasionally a muffled shout or soft thud made it through the door. Inside the office, the elevator’s security officer was interviewing the bartender who had served Werther his fatal libation.
“The next earthbound elevator departs in TEN minutes,” Jeremiah’s favorite duo proclaimed over the station’s PA. Appleton, Katherine, and Jeremiah all looked at each other.
“That’s enough for me,” she said, “I’m leaving. John and Alfred will be waiting for me at the elevator.”
“I’d advise against it,” Appleton said. “Wait it out, answer the questions the security guy asks you, and then be on your way.”
“No,” said Kath
erine, unfolding her arms and stepping away from the wall. “I’ve had enough. I just saw a man kill himself right in front of me, and I don’t have any desire to answer that guy’s pointed questions about it. He’s not the police after all, just a squinty little security officer.”
“He did squint a lot,” Jeremiah agreed, “but Appleton has a point. The real police are bound to get involved once you’re back on the ground, and you don’t want any trouble.”
“Just tell him I had to go,” said Katherine. “Well, Jeremiah, I guess we solved the mystery after all. It didn’t feel like I hoped.”
“Me neither,” he said.
She seemed to be considering a kiss on the cheek, and for his part Jeremiah was considering throwing himself at her feet and begging her not to leave like this, but before either of them could decide one way or another on either of these courses of action, they became aware of a crowd gathering around one of the screens mounted on the wall across from them. Someone turned up the volume.
Take 5 News, a man’s deep voice announced over a thrumming bass line, all the news from the last five minutes, brought to you in just 60 seconds. Because the news never takes five—and neither do we.
“This just in,” chirped the severe blonde anchorwoman. “Wall Street darling Golden Worldlines is filing for Chapter Eleven. Its share price plummeted in after-hour markets on the news.”
“According to an unnamed source,” continued the swarthy anchorman to her right, “the cruise line’s difficulties began with the departure of one of their most frequent—and profitable—passengers, exposing what one financial analyst is calling an ‘unsound business model that is 20 years out of date.’”
“You’ll have more on this breaking story the minute we do,” promised the anchorwoman, and both smiled in horrifying unison as the shot cut away.
“This segment sponsored by Barnaby’s Wood Adhesive,” a resonant baritone informed viewers. “Nothing adheres better to wood. Nothing.”
World Enough (And Time) Page 34
