"All it would need is a crooked lawyer who could be trusted," Michelle said.
The implication was inescapable. "Vanessa has known Garsten for years," Corfe mumbled woodenly. "She introduced him to Eric. He was Jack's law partner—her first husband."
Michelle nodded. Her face was grave; her voice became very somber. "Exactly. And look what happened to Jack," she said.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was getting late, and everybody was hungry. A few blocks away was a diner called Chancey's, that Michelle sometimes used for lunch. She locked up the office, and the three of them left the building together. Since the evening traffic had eased, they decided to take her car, which was in a basement parking slot. They found a table free in a secluded corner, and after they had ordered, Corfe was able to vent some of the feelings that had been smoldering earlier.
"Look, I don't know if this is the way to be talking in front of Kevin, but it's something I have to get out. To tell you the truth, I've had my doubts about Vanessa for a long time. But I've always kept them to myself because . . ." he waved a hand vaguely, "well, you know how it is. When there's families and friends involved, you don't go saying things that could start all kinds of bad feelings."
"I think we're a bit past the point where much of that matters now, Doug," Kevin said. He hadn't contributed very much to the talk since they left Michelle's office. He was still in a state of self-induced nervous anesthesia, not reacting to what it all meant until his mental shock absorbers had dulled the impact.
"What kind of doubts did you have?" Michelle asked Corfe. "From how far back?"
"All along—ever since I knew them both at Microbotics. She never struck me as the right kind of woman for Eric. . . . Or should I say Eric was never the right kind of man for her?"
"How do you mean?"
Corfe gulped down a swig of coffee and made a face. "She has always struck me as a social climber—you know, a taste for the high life, needing to be seen with the right people. That was what was wrong with Jack. He was okay for her in the early days: made enough bread to get started on, had some good connections. . . ." Corfe shrugged. "But once she got established on her own feet as a scientist, he didn't have the right image any more."
"And Eric did?" Michelle sounded surprised.
"In those days, yes—the way she saw it, anyhow. And you can understand why. He was head of research, with lots of awards and published papers—the corporation's rising scientific star. Vice presidency and a place on the Board within the next few years for sure. So Jack becomes history, and she signs up on a new ticket to ride high with Eric."
Michelle picked at her salad and nodded that it made sense now. "Instead of which, he picks a fight and walks out on their chance to join the rich and famous. But that's Eric all over. I saw a glimpse of it when I was talking to him on Saturday." She bit her lip but was unable to suppress a half smile. "I get the feeling that might have been when Vanessa started discovering the real Eric for the first time."
"I think you might be right," Corfe said. "And . . ." he turned to Kevin, "again, no offense, Kev . . . I think that deep down inside she's never forgiven him for it."
"And now she's about to change partners again," Michelle mused between bites.
"Martin Payne, yeah. CEO of the company; a million in checking before he's forty; grease line into City Hall; yachts, mansions, tuxedos, and diamonds. That's Vanessa's world all right."
Michelle thought distantly about that. "So how far back do you think it might go, this thing with Payne?" she asked. "Is it something comparatively recent—since she found out that Eric's always going to spend more time in worlds that he creates inside his than he will in executive jets, for instance? Or could it go all the way back to when they were at Microbotics? Could she have been an insider for Payne all along? . . . Is it possible, even, that she married Eric in the first place for no other reason?" Corfe could only shake his head.
What Kevin couldn't understand as he listened was that nobody was talking about doing anything. He felt he wanted to stand up and bang the table and stop it all by shouting at them: Don't you understand? These people kill! They killed this guy Jack, and now they're going to kill my dad, and maybe me too! What are we going to DO?
But in real life people didn't do things like that, not in a restaurant. So he sat. He chafed and fretted. And he said nothing.
He was finally able to make his point when they were in the car, on their way back to where Corfe had parked the van. Michelle's response only confused and frustrated Kevin further.
"Of course I understand your feelings," she said. "But there isn't any case for having anyone arrested. If mere suspicion were grounds enough, ninety percent of the country would be locked up. The only hard evidence we've got of anything is that Vanessa visited the president of a company she used to work for. Sorry, Kevin, but that's hardly a crime."
"And that's it? You mean that's all anyone can do? We wait till my dad gets shot, then we file a complaint?" Kevin was incredulous.
"We don't know for sure that they had anything to do with what happened to Jack," Michelle said. "We might be making it up in our heads. It could have been a heart attack, exactly as it seems. I'll talk to the coroner's office and the city police this week and see if I can get more details. If there are grounds for suspecting foul play, it would help our case a lot."
"But—but what about the alteration to Dad's will that they're going to fake?" Kevin protested, leaning forward from the rear seat. "What did Payne call it, a codicil? It's right there, on the tape."
"What codicil? Show it to me. And the tape doesn't say anything about Eric's will. It doesn't even mention Eric. It could be Vanessa talking about changing her own will to leave her jewelry to Batcat. Now, show me a piece of paper with Eric's signature on it, and with him there to say it's a fake, and you've got my attention. But short of something like that, we're just going to have to work at it a piece at a time, the hard way. That's how the real world is."
"Well, surely . . ." Kevin looked from one side to the other, as if the answer might be written in neon somewhere outside the windows. "We have to at least warn him. Don't you want me to tell him about this when I get back . . . or can Doug come inside and tell him?"
Michelle eased the car to a halt behind the van. "I don't think so, not tonight," she said. "It would be too much of a risky thing to discuss in the house with Vanessa there. Besides, I'd really like to have more to go on than there is right now before bringing it up with Eric. In the meantime, it's essential that he continue to act naturally." She turned in the driver's seat and looked back. "I know it's a serious business, Kevin, but let's try not to panic. After all, there's no indication that anything's likely to happen soon."
Michelle left for her apartment shortly afterward. Kevin and Corfe, in the van, drove back to I-5 and turned south.
By this time, Kevin was feeling subdued. His reaction earlier had been more of a reflex. Only now was a real awareness of the truth beginning to seep through in diluted doses that his emotions could handle. It was like watching layers of scenery being carried off the stage at the end of the performance, progressively revealing the reality that had been there all along. If what Michelle was saying was right, it meant that the woman who had eaten meals with him, taken him on trips, helped plan his school schedule, shared his home—whom he had come to look to as the nearest he would ever have to a natural mother—had all the time, calculatingly, been part of a collusion that intended to kill his father and steal his—Kevin's—inheritance. He suspected from the absence of any really violent reaction that the true enormity of it had not percolated through fully, even yet. Even so, he tried to detach a part of his mind to see if it could observe the rest and tell him how he felt about what had.
The most unbelievable part was not being able to do anything. This feeling of apparent helplessness was something he couldn't accept. He felt like a rabbit in a cage with a snake, having no option but to let it pick its time. How could such
a situation come about? With all the ritual and ceremony and rules and procedures that adults heaped upon the world, how could something as basic as being able to demonstrate that a murder was probably being planned not trigger some kind of preventive action automatically?
And until something did happen, was he supposed to magically have the insight to know what to say, how to deal with all the situations that might conceivably develop domestically in the house? He felt like a psychic dowser who was supposed to know how to avoid buried mines—except he'd never claimed to anyone that he was psychic.
Eric and Vanessa were both home when Kevin got back. He found Vanessa in the den, composing something on the computer screen. She was deep in thought, and didn't become aware of him at once when he appeared in the passage outside the room. He stood, studying her through the open doorway, almost as if he should have expected to see some kind of alteration about her, some kind of visible change. But there were no horns poking through the dark hair, suddenly; no hump between her shoulders, fangs sprouting from her upper jaw. She looked, as always, calm, dispassionate, utterly composed and in control. Other words tumbled in his mind like clothes in a dryer: resolute; capable; indefatigable, undeflectable. A Terminator locked onto its goal.
She looked up suddenly. "Oh, Kevin! You're back. I didn't hear the van come in."
"I walked up the driveway. Doug took the van on to his place to unload the stuff that we got. He'll stop by in the morning and pick up his car." He was conscious of her bright, uncannily reflective eyes interrogating him silently, giving him the spooky feeling that it was futile to think he could conceal anything that had transpired. She knew. It was written plainly. She could read everything straight out of his mind.
"What did you get?" she asked him instead.
"Some wood, a door, and some bits and pieces for a room he's remodeling—hinges, screws, and stuff." Kevin noticed Vanessa's briefcase to one side, along with some folders and the slide carousel box that had been in the hallway on Friday. He didn't see the plastic bag that had been aboard the yacht. Just to prove that she could read his mind, Vanessa said, "Oh yes, I found something when I got to the seminar that looked as if it might be yours—something electronic, wrapped in plastic. It must have got mixed up with my things when we were loading the car."
"Oh yes." Kevin did a good job of feigning surprise. "It's Taki's. He was looking for it on Friday."
"I put it in one of those boxes of yours in the trunk of the Jaguar. Are you ever going to remove them?"
"Have you got the keys? I'll get them now."
"Oh, do it tomorrow sometime. Taki called, by the way. I told him you'd be back later. Can you call him back?"
"Sure. Was it about the relay?"
"Is that what it is? I don't know. He didn't say." Vanessa's eyes had strayed back to the screen and began scanning over what she had written. "Have you eaten? There are some cold cuts in the kitchen. Or there's the last of a stew that Harriet made that needs finishing."
"I had something with Doug in town . . . thanks. You, er, look busy. I'll let you get on with it. Where's Dad?"
"Downstairs, I'd presume. Yes, I do have a lot to do. Goodnight, in case I don't see you again."
" 'Night."
Kevin turned from the doorway and made his way down to the lab at the rear, trying to tell himself that this wasn't really happening. He'd read somewhere about lucid dreaming, that was so real you couldn't tell the difference from being awake—he'd even experienced it himself a couple of times. Sometimes he had "woken" up from such a state only to find out later that he wasn't awake at all, and then gone through it again and ended up with no idea if he was really awake now, or what was going on. But if this was a dream, then so must everything else have been all the way back to thinking he'd been in a mec on Payne's yacht. What yacht? Who was Payne? How did he know they existed? Neither of them had figured in his life before a few days ago, when everything had seemed so serene. Maybe they weren't real, then, and life was still serene. And maybe the stories about DNC were true, and this was what it did to you inside your head. Probably just as likely.
Eric was hunched on a stool at one end of the large bench, studying some graphs in a molecular circuitry catalog and comparing numbers with the content of an e-mail item showing on a screen. He looked over as Kevin came in from the stairs. "Ah, so you're back. What happened to Doug? Did he go straight on home?"
"Yes. He's got some stuff to unload. He'll pick up his car in the morning."
Eric looked him over briefly through his spectacles. "So, did you have a good time?"
"Well, I guess it was . . . something different. We ate out too."
"Fine. I talked to Patti Jukes just before I left. She told me about the mec that you were almost flying today. It sounds as if you've almost got it licked. That's terrific."
Suddenly everything seemed almost normal again. "A microprogrammed transmission is definitely the way to go," Kevin said. "The trouble is it gives coarse control-tuning. I think we're going to have to learn to fly. It doesn't look like something that'll precode easily into an algorithm."
"Well, if gnat-size brains can get the hang of it, I'm sure you will too, in time. I've got some papers on insect simulations that you ought to read. One of them has a good section on wing dynamics that might help you get the microprogram right. I'll dig them up tomorrow."
Eric's innocence as he sat there talking about mecs and flight dynamics, his utter unawareness of all that had been said that night, was affecting Kevin. It seemed to symbolize the whole pattern of Eric's life. He wanted to reach out, put an arm around his shoulder, and tell him to be careful because Kevin cared; and so did Doug, and Michelle, and they'd all be looking out for him, and everything would be okay. He wanted to spend more time with Eric, do all the things they kept promising each other they would do, and usually ended up putting off. People were always saying that time went faster as you got older. Kevin wondered if he was beginning to experience it already.
"Maybe we could look at it together this weekend," he said.
"I have to go to this thing at Barrow's Pass," Eric reminded him.
"Oh, that's right. I'd forgotten. What's happening there? Tell me again."
"It's a sort of conference on basic physics. I'll be playing Giordano Bruno to the Bishops of Relativity again."
That was an aspect of Eric's interests that Kevin had never gotten involved in, although he knew it had been Eric's prime subject when he was an academic physicist. All Kevin knew was that according to Eric, most of the experimental "proofs" cited in the text books were derivable from classical physics and said nothing exclusive about Relativity at all. That was something he'd have to sit down and find out more about, he kept telling himself—and putting off.
"When will you be leaving?" Kevin asked.
"It's the holiday weekend, and I know I have to be there on Saturday. So either in the morning, or maybe Friday evening. I'll need to check the schedule again before I—" A phone on a shelf by where Kevin was standing rang. Kevin picked it up.
"Hello?"
"Knock-knock."
Sigh. "Hi, Taki. Okay, who's there?"
"Winnie Thupp."
"Winnie Thupp who?"
"And Tigger too! Ho-ho. I take it you're back."
"No, actually I'm an aural hallucination. Mom says you called earlier. I was going to call you back. What's up?"
"The opposite of down. No, seriously, about flying mecs. Have you still got the ones that you were going to take to the lab today, or did you leave them there?"
"I've got them with me, in my bag. Why?"
"Oh, good. Can you bring them with you to school tomorrow? I think I might have figured out a better way of structuring the microprograms. If you come over to my place after school, we could try it out on them."
"Sounds good. I was just talking about that with my dad. He's got some papers on insect simulations that he says we ought to look at. Oh, wait a minute—I think they're at the firm." Kevin lo
oked across at Eric. "Taki wants me to go on to his place tomorrow after school. I can't get those papers before then, can I?—the one that talks about wing dynamics, anyhow."
"I could fax it to Taki's," Eric offered.
"Dad says he'll fax it to us at your place."
"Okay. That settles that, then. Where were you tonight?"
"Oh, I went for a ride into town with Doug to pick up some stuff. We ate at a restaurant, saw a lot of traffic, highways, buildings, bridges. You know—the breathtaking, unfolding, urban extravaganza. Oh, and I've got your relay. It's in the trunk of Mom's car."
"Great. Maybe you can let me have that too. Okay, well, it's late. See you tomorrow."
"Be good, Taki."
"That's what everyone keeps telling me. I tried it. It's overrated."
Kevin smiled tiredly into the receiver. "Goodnight, anyhow." He hung up.
Eric was studying the screen again, bringing up another piece of e-mail. Despite what had been said earlier, Kevin was tempted to tell him all about what had been said that night; then he'd be able to stop worrying, and Eric would know as much as all of them. They were alone. Vanessa wouldn't come down to the lab now. . . .
But as he began mentally rehearsing how he might go about it, all of a sudden he found he was just too weary. The seeping in his brain had built up to a saturation that would need a night of sleep to absorb. It occurred to him then that if the entirety of the adult world was paralyzed, then he might have to be the one to do something. Just at the moment, precisely what was far from obvious. But in the morning a lot might seem clearer.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Kevin was up uncharacteristically early the next morning. He had finished breakfast before Eric was halfway through his eggs and hash, ready to escape the trapped feeling that he anticipated might seize him when Vanessa came in.
Bug Park Page 15
