Vanessa

by David Howells

Chapter 3 – ALLIANCES

  Private Jed Patterson’s eyes were black coals of hate. When alive, he had been a true bummer; a name that he had helped to make a part of the language that his descendents, if he had lived long enough to HAVE descendents, would speak as common slang. The creak of the leather of fifty-three sets of reins and saddles echoed in the dryness of his soul. “That devil-bitch died once at my hand and, if it takes five hundred years, she will die again.” That a dead woman could not die again was not something he could realize in his madness.

  “Allen, in the next two hours you will hear things difficult to accept. I ask you to keep an open mind. My proofs will come in proper order and you may choose to accept them or not. Ask questions and be critical, but not cynical. Think you can handle that?”

  Ground rules, easy enough so far. “Cake,” accompanied his best student-to-teacher smile. It worked on full professors, but not this time. Ryan’s eyes narrowed.

  “Save the fake fronts for the tassel hats. You don’t know what’s at stake. Now, get ready. Eyes, once opened, can never be shut again.”

  “What’s up your butt?” Allen thought. Aloud, “OK sir. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

  “That’s better. Let’s climb your family tree now, shall we?” Allen took the mini-disc (MiDi) out of his pocket. Ryan dropped it into a MiDi entry port. Both sat behind Gustav’s desk, which had what appeared to be a glass top. The top was really a liquid crystal thin-screen. It was a personal wide-screen, used for comparative views, similar to what Allen had seen in college, but pricier. With this one, the screen could remain flat on the desk and appear as a glass top, or be raised up for easier reading. On one side of the screen, Allen’s disc booted up and showed the logo of the research firm that did the historical documentation. That it was a tree wasn’t so clever. That it showed a progressive change in foliage from spring to winter was really eye catching.

  “Interesting, Allen. I’m not familiar with that group.”

  “Oh? Well, watch this.” Allen used the finger pad like a pro. The image magnified until you could see one twig of the tree fill the screen, while the progression of seasons continued. Allen tapped again, changing it to a different kind of leaf each cycle. There were leaves of ginkgo, maple, dogwood, oak, birch and so on. Another change and the tree returned to the original full view, but began slowly rotating.

  “Nice, Allen, but we ought to get a move on.”

  “(Nice? What does it take to impress you?) In a second. Check this out, first.”

  Allen activated the ‘Use’ function, and the tree slowly backed further from the screen. It slowly became obvious that it was a hand that the tree had rooted into. Further and further back the perspective went until a new image took place. The tree’s seasonal changes had stopped in full autumn colors. There was something that looked like Aladdin’s genie holding a bonsai tree. The genie and tree were surrounded by a border of, logs?

  “Ryan, the Albany Heraldry Corporation contracted RPI to do the programming on their product about twelve years ago. It became a joint senior and faculty project, attracting the best and brightest from several departments. AHC loved the results, including the Graphic Arts Department’s work on the logo. Beefed up versions of this logo were distributed by AHC to schools all over the world to be used in their Earth Science classes. Now, when you get that many mental wizards together, funny things begin to happen. What does that logo suggest to you?”

  Ryan really hadn’t planned on being sidetracked, but it was early yet and this was helping him connect with the young man. “OK. The genie is a wish giver and he’s holding the family tree people want to know about. The changes of seasons indicate time passing and the logs, I suppose, represent previous generations to that tree.”

  “On target!” said Allen. Ryan smiled. “That’s just what the senior class project wanted AHC to believe.” Ryan stopped smiling. “This was voted the best class prank on record. Part one; it’s a genie, right?”

  “Uh, right.”

  “It’s surrounded by logs, right?”

  “Ditto.” Where was this leading?

  “In heraldry, which is what this company majored in, ‘O’ in a name represents where you are from. Here you have: Genie O’Logs.”

  “Owwww!”

  “That’s just the beginning. Put the cursor on the tree and hit ALT-P.”

  Ryan did so and a little word balloon popped up saying, “Gee I’m A Tree”.

  “Oh no, not ‘geometry’?”

  “The math department insisted on that one. ‘P’ in alt-P stood for pun. Do the same thing on the genie’s hand.”

  Ryan did as told and there was a pop up expansion window that showed a root system, but the roots were oddly shaped, they were, “Lord, no. Square roots?”

  “Awful, isn’t it? Now, put the cursor on the tree again and hit ALT-S-R.”

  Ryan did, fascinated with the scope and audacity of RPI students. The leaves dropped and the branches of the tree folded in to cover itself. The genie’s cheeks turned red. “Let me guess. S.R. stands for Sally Rand?”

  That took Allen by surprise. Ryan appeared to know a little about a lot of things. Ryan hid a smirk. He remembered Sally better than Allen might think. More important, Allen seemed to have almost as much of a variety of interests as he did.

  “Very impressive. But we have to get going. Pull up your father’s file please, Allen.” The menu popped up on the screen, giving images and dates, information categories, time lines, and lineage links. “Do you have an image of him when he was your age?”

  “Yeah, coming up in a sec. Hold on.”

  Rachel could see the screen also, and by now she had mastered the audio device. When Carl’s young face popped up, she took in a breath. Though Ryan’s words had forewarned her, Rachel’s connection to Carl still ran deep after all these years.

  “I met with your father in this same room when he was twenty- one. That meeting was recorded. Are you alright with seeing it?” Two people a room apart swallowed.

  “I think so, sir.”

  “My son called him ‘sir’? Twice?”

  Ryan touched a screen pad and a prepared video with muted sound came on next to the still of Carl Hawthorn. Allen’s eyes zeroed in on his father first, as did Rachel’s. The wife and mother saw the ‘larger picture’ first. A few moments later, the son’s eyes likewise opened wider. There was Ryan, looking little different than he did now. Plastic surgery? Hormone protocol?

  “Please, don’t say anything yet. Allow me?” A nod from Allen and then Ryan reached over to the screen pad Allen had used. Practiced fingers affected a change of picture.

  Allen identified the screen’s occupants. “That’s Grandfather Maxwell and Grandmother Abigail Hawthorn.” Ryan tapped in another change on the screen. “That’s their wedding portrait. They married young, in their early 20’s.”

  Another adjustment, this time on the other pad that held Ryan’s collection of images and sounds. The other half of Gustav’s desk screen showed a live outdoors scene on a porch. There were three people talking.

  “Crap on a cupcake! It’s a computer trick, isn’t it? CGI? It can’t be, it...” Allen’s voice trailed off. In the next room, at his mother’s feet, a puddle of coffee spread unnoticed on the floor. Grandfather Maxwell and Grandmother Abigail were there. Allen had never seen this footage (an old term no longer appropriate but still in use). It wasn’t hard to recognize his grandparents. It was even easier to recognize Ryan, since he looked almost the same on the screen as he did sitting a few feet away.

  Ryan loved to win. This success had to be capped with a clever bit of irony, not realizing that he would soon have to ‘eat’ those words. “More cake, Allen?”

  Mrs. Annie Edwards, mother, housekeeper, farmer and wife to Col. Archibald Edwards walked her porch. She kept a close eye, from a distance, on how her help kept things. She watched like a hawk to make s
ure all the weeds were pulled, the flowers were watered and, if things weren’t done just so, Annie would give them a heaping helping of her mind. Not that they ever listened. “Hard to get good help nowadays.”

  Annie looked down at her old dress, taking a moment to tuck in that part that was torn, again. She kept her best dresses tucked away for when Archibald returned. It wouldn’t do to have him come home to an old ragamuffin, would it? Yep, she would be looking fine for her man when he came home. She looked to the north. “Please come home, dearest husband.”

  The house was two-storied. Archibald’s father had it built strong with timber and stone. It had a fine barn for the best team of draft horses in the county. She thought that the buildings must be better built than most in the county, given how many people came to look at them.

  “He is a Colonel in the Georgia Regulars, you know,” she might tell some of her visitors. They didn’t seem to listen much to her. The help knew a lot, though, and sometimes she would listen with the rest. She liked to hear her name spoken, respectful like.

  Gustav walked up the steps to his door. Marianne heard his familiar step on the five wooden front steps and tapped a prepared command on her desk unit that sent a message to another screen; “Rachel, hit your F1 key. We mothers stick together.”

  Rachel was startled from the display’s main feature by the scrolled message. It was her turn to hear the mental ‘click’, which dovetailed with the opening of the office door and Gustav’s greeting to his secretary. A quick tap on the keypad and the screen dropped one single person and the side views (and the scrolling message) in favor of a full screen front view of Allen. Rachel didn’t make a habit of fast friendships, but in this case, an exception might be called for.

  “So, how’s Mrs. Gladstone doing?”

  “Fine, Mr. Mendelssohn. You will find all items needing your attention on your back desk or comp screen.” Rachel did a quick coffee clean-up, poured half a cup, sat back down and started tapping her left foot in time with what seemed a good C and W beat.

  “Birds of a feather are we,” she thought, “...mother birds. Allen is my chick; Gustav and Ryan are hers. Interesting.” Marianne’s hand was fitting that friendship glove better all the time.

  Marianne watched Gustav stroll off to the viewing room and murmured, “Gustav, old friend, kind employer and all-round professional good guy, In Your Face!”

  “Yes, yes, I’m fine,” Rachel said, putting down the magazine she had grabbed (randomly opened to ‘theater arts’). She had been meaning to order that periodical. “Your secretary has taken very good care of me. Would you please tell her how grateful I am?”

  “I’m sure she will be pleased to hear that. Marianne is invaluable to me. She runs this place like she was triple cloned. You know, you kind of remind me of her. I wouldn’t be surprised if you two have a lot in common.” He excused himself and went off to the back room desk to catch up on his own never-ending paperwork. Most of it wasn’t done on paper anymore, but old terms die hard.

  “Is it a sin,” Angel thought, “...to get a snicker out of knowing a secret and playing innocent?”

  “No, honored adversary,” said Cat. “As long as it’s not malicious, it’s catnip.” Angel didn’t quite understand and Referee decided that there were more important things to attend to at the moment. Referee demanded Rachel herself had to take center stage now.

  “If what he says is true, then did Ryan manipulate things after Carl died to arrange our dependency on him, just for this meeting? There had better be an incredibly good explanation for this, and I don’t think he’s going to come up with one.” She was wrong.

  Alan’s stammering could be heard in Rachel’s current cubby hole. “Are you telling me that you know, knew, my grandparents and, that when you knew them, when they were just married, you were the same age you are now, or at least looked like it?” Allen wondered if what he just said made sense. “Are you a time traveler or just skinny-dipping in the fountain of youth? Sir, what gives?”

  The eyes of age sized up the heart of youth. He had watched Allen grow up since infancy, from a distance. You can get a skeleton sense about someone by observation, even from a distance, and Ryan had good senses. Face-to-facing was adding flesh to the skeleton and the resulting picture pleased Ryan.

  “Do you have data on Grandmother Abigail and her parents?” Allen pulled up the next tier of relations and found Obediah and Carol Fitzgalen. He hadn’t looked back this far before. “Now, please look up the parents of Obediah Fitzgalen.” A couple of taps, then Allen stopped tapping, and breathing. This was too much. It was a trick, a game, a con. The screen showed...him. “Allen, my full name is Ryan David Fitzgalen. I am your great, great grandfather.”

  “Luke, I am your great, great grandfather. Trust your feelings. Well, 0h Be One Anole, shall I call rent-a-shrink? You just blew his mind.”

  Rachel heard Ryan’s words and saw the look on her son’s face. She didn’t need to see the screen, though she wanted to. Her mind raced, “Ryan is Carl’s great grandfather? How can this be? This is too unreal. Should I put a stop to this?”

  Once again, scrolled words along the bottom of the screen caught her eye. “It’s true. Don’t interfere. All will be well. I’m on your side.”

  Major Covington went over everything he had tried in the past. The horses wouldn’t stop; trying to dismount caused obscene pain due to their cursed ‘bonding’ to the saddles. They could direct their steeds for a little while, veering north or south, but eventually their mounts returned to her control. He had, more than once, confronted Private Patterson, but knew madness when he saw it. Even tried shooting the bastard once, only to find that his sidepiece was useless. His saber had slightly better results. It earned him a minor wince by the Private, then more of that obnoxious insane laughter. Might as well be armed with a toy pistol and an ostrich feather. He was a military commander with loyal soldiers denied ability to command or take needed action. Satan had a sense of the ironic.

  Ryan spoke. “World War II was a global obscenity. As happens with such nation-state wickedness, the incentive to gain technological supremacy was tremendous. The advances in rockets, telemetry, communications and aviation were astounding, all bought with megatons of blood, terror, and waste. The age of the atom was a Phoenix born from the ashes of innocent families. Great advances, out of trial and error, were made in emergency medicine and surgery. All this, you know. You may also guess that some things were not made public, either because they posed too great a security risk if known, or because the failure was demoralizing or embarrassing.

  “I was posted at a quiet project, studying how to utilize high intensity magnetic fields to create an infiltrating stealth craft. We found that radar waves, the detection system at the time, could be bent with a strong magnetic field. Kind of like the extreme gravity from a black hole will bend the light of a star behind it so that we see the optical illusion of a twin star. Our goal was to sufficiently bend the radar waves around a craft so that it created an invisible void. We had made progress using an unmanned vessel and it had come time to use a manned one. In peacetime, they would have done animal studies first. This wasn’t peacetime and time was of the essence. I volunteered. How else could a Seaman, First Class, move up two grades with a day’s worth of minor work?

  “I motored an old tug out beyond the main islands. I had to be out of sight, but within radar range of the USS Shaw (DD373), a destroyer still under repair eight months after the original bombing on December 7th, 1941. On a signal from the Shaw, I fired up the magnets and kept track of everything from mental acuity to vitals to bladder control. The test was slated for one hour and the boat had to be steered in a non-predicted pattern. I was hooked up to an EKG so that, if there were any heart problems, the magnets would automatically stop and a chopper could drop in a medic.

  “As far as I knew things were going fine. An earlier test showed the Sha
w could receive a signal from the stealth craft, but no one realized that the stealth craft’s magnetic protection from radar also protected it from receiving radio messages. It took them a little while to catch on to that, and the last thing I recall was wondering why I hadn’t heard from them. They got nervous and started looking for me, but it was a big ocean and a radar-invisible craft. Search craft were limited because the war was in full swing and this was supposed to be a quiet operation. They found me, unconscious but alive, two days later. The boat had run out of diesel, which then turned off the stealth device. Luckily, the boat had been traveling in a big circle, since I wasn’t able to change the course and the wheel was lashed. That kept me from winding up in Australia or Antarctica.

  “I was sent to the Naval Hospital in Oahu, you know, where Pearl Harbor is? The ringing I had in my ears since I was a kid was gone. That was the first thing I noticed on wakening. Never gave it half a thought before that, but you notice when something you take for granted goes away. Noises and smells told me I was in a hospital bed even before I tried my eyes out. When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was an IV bag. They had put it in to re-hydrate me at first, later to feed me. Looking to the right, I saw I was in a small room with three other bunks, all unoccupied. My eyes swept left and saw someone standing there, quietly. The window behind him told me that it was night, the quiet hinted at a late hour. He just stood there and I just looked, like either of us was waiting for the other to break the ice. His nametag, pinned to a full-length white lab coat, read “Dr. Joseph G. Morrison”.

  “How do yon feel?”

  “Funny, Doc. Fine, but funny. Different. What happened?”

  “You were out for two days, brought back and have been unconscious for the last 24 hours. You’ve been re-hydrated and checked out from top to bottom. Outside that door are an orderly and a nurse talking. Pull that cord tied to the bed railing and a bell will ring. They will come right in. There are a lot of people who want to talk to you. You re fine and can call them in any time. Keep conversations short at first and pace yourself. Find out all about what’s happened to you and how it has changed you. Use what you learn. There are many who need you and you are the only one who can help them. ”

  “I couldn’t make heads or tails of what he was talking about. Dr. Morrison mixed in the sensible with the non-sensible, which made the non-sensible sound even crazier. When I get confused or upset, I get hungry. I pulled the cord and, sure enough, the orderly and the nurse came right in. The nurse said nothing, but started taking my vital signs. While she worked, the orderly started right in asking questions. I held up my hand and told him, “I gotta take it slow. Doctor’s orders.”

  “The nurse stopped what she was doing and asked, “What doctor?” I told her, and then turned to Dr. Morrison, but he was gone. I looked back at the nurse and she stared at me like I was mentally unbalanced. “Dr. Morrison who?”

  “I said, “No, Dr. Joseph G. Morrison. Older guy, about fifty or so, full head of gray hair, small mustache, about five foot ten, black, ballpark hundred and sixty pounds. He was just here talking to me, told me to pull the chain. He told me that guards and a nurse would come in, and, well, here you are. I’m hungry. Got any food?” The orderly asked who the doctor was. Guess he was new to the place.

  The nurse said in a flat voice, staring at me, “He was the chief ship doctor of the USS Arizona when the Japanese struck. He didn’t survive the attack.”

  There didn’t seem to be time to fix lunch for her children. No matter, she would get to it later. “They seem happy enough playing for now. I’ll do it soon.” Annie tried to recall what they had for breakfast this morning... and couldn’t.

  Mother and son leaned back at the same time. It was a lot to take in. By itself, the story would be a recounting of hysterics, or delusion. His past experience with Carl had taught Ryan to take the process in measured increments. Two hours was enough to build the basics. Then, if Allen wanted to continue, he was Ryan’s man. If he didn’t, then it was back to hearing Gustav gripe. However, there was an old saying. The older Ryan got, the more he felt that old sayings got old by being valid.

  “Allen, the mind will absorb what the butt will endure. We’ve been at it for fifty minutes. Let’s take ten and stretch.”

  “Stay tuned for the next episode of Hospital Soap Opera! Will handsome young Ryan get Nurse Megaboob’s phone number? Join us next time...”

  “Enough!”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Leg fell asleep. Sorry. Come on, Marianne has something waiting to snack on and your mother probably wants to see you in person. Remember your agreement on confidentiality. After you.”

  “Ryan.”

  Ryan hung back. “Allen, you go on ahead. I’ll be right there, have to tie my shoe.”

  “In case you’re interested, Rachel switched jacks. She heard everything. ”

  “Shit, Vanessa, why didn’t you tell me earlier! Damn! Uh oh... Is she listening now?” Ryan whispered that last sentence.

  “Calm down, Love. She’s taken off the earpiece. You and Gustav had good intentions, but you were wrong to exclude her. She’s Allen’s mother, for Heaven’s sake. Trust her. She’s worthy of it.”

  Ryan thought about it for a moment. “Should I confront her?”

  “Soon, but not yet. There’s more going on than you know. I’ll tell you about it later. Let her have her secret for now. It’ll be all right, trust me.”

  Ryan sighed. There was nothing left to do now but to play it out. He walked out the door to the table, as...

  Annie looked at the family Bible and read a few passages from it. Her hands must be weak, she thought. It was so hard to turn the pages. She focused her strength and forced herself to do it anyway. Reading the same page was tiresome and, for some reason, it caused an amusing stir when others saw the page turn. “Stupid strangers.”

  It was time to inspect the home. “A good wife keeps everything just so.” The glass figurines from Paris had been dusted; the grandmother clock was wound proper (a gift from her father - couldn’t get things like that for love or money after the blockade). Shoes in the closets were lined up the way she liked, though this was one area she really didn’t like the strangers looking into. The lights still confused her though. Seemed to light themselves and the wicks never got trimmed. She recalled that Marigold used to do such a good job with that.

  Rachel had switched the two jacks (still C&W, with one of her old favorites playing), then got up from the chair and stretched. Marianne was waiting for her at the door. The two conspirators went lockstep to the cleared desk where the snacks were. Allen was already there, but he was picking at the goodies with little enthusiasm. There was just too much on his mind. Ryan buttonholed Gustav and pulled him into the main office.

  “She knows. Rachel has been listening in.”

  “WHAT!? That’s not, I mean, how do you know? Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure. ‘You know who’ told me. Said it would be all right, just go with it. Do you know what happened?”

  Gustav thought for a few moments. “Had to be Marianne. But why?” Another few moments. “It’s about Mike. That has to be it. She’s getting revenge.”

  “I don’t think revenge is the whole picture, but it probably plays a role. You know how she feels about being kept in the dark about someone she cares about.”

  “Ouch,” thought Gustav. “You agreed on that one. So did Mike. The intentions were good, doesn’t that count for anything?”

  “They do, old friend, but what’s paved with good intentions?” Those were difficult memories for Ryan, but there was the small compensation to have caught a lawyer speechless.

  “A silent lawyer! Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

  Gustav saw the look on Ryan’s face. “What did she say, Ryan?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “No, let’s eat someth
ing and get on with it.” They went over to the table first, then to Allen, who was now looking around in the viewing room his mother had just left.

  Voices low, Rachel and Marianne were at the ‘desk/table’, each with a small plate of a variety of snacks and a drink. “Can it be true, is he really that old?” She looked over through the open door of the viewing room.

  “Rachel, you are looking at the only man who can troll a nursing home and be found guilty of robbing the cradle.” A whoop of laughter turned three male heads to the ladies.

  “Uh oh,” said Ryan.

  “He’s really a wonderful man,” Marianne said. “Rich enough, fun to be with when he isn’t preoccupied, which isn’t often. Ryan respects people worth respecting and has no time for those who aren’t.”

  “Quite a guy, but, oh! He’d outlive anyone who hooked him. They’d get old, and he wouldn’t.” Rachel stopped when the implications of that set in. Long life, like anything else in excess, could be a curse.

  “It’s worse than that. Can you imagine it if the public got wind of it? Ryan’s life wouldn’t be his own. Everyone afraid of dying would be hounding him for his ‘secret’. Feds would have him tested and examined, almost literally forever. Not that they would find anything. We’ve done a lot of our own research already. This is a one-time deal. A lot of the animal studies that were done later in the same field only cut short the lives of a lot of Fluffies and Spots.”

  “Well, I guess it’s true what they say about single men.” Marianne looked at Rachel, not knowing what that meant but catching the edge of humor in it.

  “I’ll bite.”

  “They’re all like parking spots at the mall. The best ones are taken and the rest are handicapped.” It was an old joke, but even an old joke was funny to someone who hadn’t heard it before. It was Marianne’s turn to throw her head back and whoop.

  Gustav moaned; “We’re sunk, they’re bonding.”

  Allen added, “If Marianne is anything like Mom, you are in deep doo-doo.”

  The three men looked at each other. Ryan chuckled, Allen began to snicker and finally Gustav let fly with a good German howl. The two women looked at the three cackling men, still snickering themselves.

  “No matter what their age, they’re just kids,” said Marianne, “...and we stay mothers all our lives.” A FedEx deliveryman came through the door just then and wondered what sort of madhouse he had walked into.

  Once the delivery man left, “So what happened next? Did the Navy figure out how that exposure to magnetism changed you?” Allen wasn’t able to wait till the next session to ask more questions.

  Gustav took that one. “Ryan wisely decided not to say anything. Can you imagine what would have happened to him if he continued to insist on seeing ghost doctors? The one admission could be overlooked as a bad dream, or some mental after affect of the magnetic or element exposure. Besides, as far as he knew it was a dream. Why push it?

  “He was bumped up his two grades, as promised, and settled in for post-action physical examinations. Tests turned up normal, perfect in fact. The Navy was looking for something wrong and, thankfully, they didn’t clue in to the fact that everything was too right. Two days of exposure to the elements without water or food and no ill effects? Physical exercise tests showed him to have suffered no loss of stamina. In fact, there was a mild gain. Vision was 20/20 on both sides where it used to be 20/40 on the left. So, he was soon discharged from the hospital and continued working with the Navy R and D. A week after his hospital discharge, things began to happen again. Your ball, Ryan.”

  “I was finishing up some work at the lab on missile guidance packages when I saw someone out of the corner of my eye. It was after hours and there were only a few of us in the building. Nobody else was in my section, as far as I knew. This was a secured area, so you got into the institutional paranoia mindset. This was wartime and the brass kept you paranoid of Axis boogiemen. The person I saw was not in uniform. That she was a woman registered next, followed immediately by a damned good-looking woman at that. Hey, sailors have traditions. She had light brown hair, hazel eyes, about four inches shy of my height. She just stood there in a blue dress, looking at me like she was as surprised as I was. She asked if I could hear her.

  “What kind of question was that,” I thought?

  “Ma’am, I can hear you just fine, now, who are you and what are you doing here?” was my reply. She flashed the biggest smile, ignored my question and went on with her own agenda. She asked my name, still smiling, which I told her. I asked for hers and she said ‘Vanessa’ and then her smile faded. Fair’s fair. I gave her my whole moniker, so I asked her for her last name. She got this worried look on her face and said she didn’t know it, or where she came from and she just kept getting more and more upset. Guess she reached her boiling point because she turned and ran. Training kicked in and I gave chase, then stopped and stood there with my mouth hanging open. She ran right through the door.”

  Allen asked, “What’s so surprising about the fact that she would head for the door?”

  “The door was closed. She went through the door like it wasn’t there. I’ve no idea how long I stood there until one of the guards came up from behind me. I must have jumped halfway to the roof when he touched my shoulder. What was I supposed to tell him? “Follow that ghost who might be a foreign spy?” I told him that I’d had it for the night and had better close up shop, then locked up my paperwork in my desk, which wasn’t easy given how my hand was shaking. Had to stop off at the head and relieve myself, because it wouldn’t have taken much for me to open the floodgates at that point. I got to the jeep, started it up and thank God I hadn’t put it in gear because there she was, sitting in the passenger seat. She said she was sorry she ran away, and could we start over again?”

  Gustav’s eyes had malicious merriment in them and he was having trouble keeping control, a lot of trouble. It was getting worse as the tale went on. “OK, Chuckles, you like it so much, you take it.”

  “Big macho sailor man (snort), give heap big scream like teenage girl whose brother sell her diary and, run out of car.” Gustav crossed his arms tighter, looked at the monitor screen, trying not to make eye contact, then squinted his eyes shut. “Run far and fast, like deer (snicker), not look where going, run right into flagpole (bigger snort), knock self out cold, heap big goose egg on forehead!” He lost ground on self-control, having to lean on the monitor desk with one hand and hold his ribs with the other. Ryan turned around to say something to Allen, only to find him leaning against the wall with both hands busy holding his own ribs in.

  Both women looked at the men. Marianne whispered, “I think I know which story that was. Remind me to tell you later.”

  Rachel said, “What ever it is, Ryan doesn’t think it all that funny.” She saw the merriment dancing in Marianne’s eyes. “This one I have got to hear.”

  Gustav had been holding his voice down, but it was an effort. “And then, and then, when they found him and he woke up, they asked, asked him what he was running from.”

  Ryan looked at the doorway, at what only he could see, and raised one eyebrow.

  “Just let him continue. It's doing his tired heart good.” The women began edging closer. Allen, still leaning against the wall, began slowly sliding down to the floor.

  No longer able to manage volume control, Gustav barked, “A BAT! He said it was a bat, BIG bat! Hiding in his car or something. Tried to bite him, he said. HUGE, with BIG TEETH!” After that, Gustav’s main concern was trying to sit down and get air to breathe. Allen’s back pockets met the floor.

  Rachel said, “A bat?”

  “I was right. It was when he first met Vanessa.”

  Ryan took in the panorama, shrugged his shoulders and said, “What the hell. OK, folks, everyone grab a chair and let’s gather at the snack table. You too, Rachel, since you’ve been listening in on everything in the office, anywa
y.” That stopped both women in their tracks. They looked at each other, then back at Ryan.

  Allen stopped laughing. “Geez, Mom. What are you, some kind of super-spy?”

  Rachel flushed, “How did, I mean, well, it wasn’t her fault. I found the other sound jack and plugged it in myself. How did you find out?”

  Rachel’s new best friend crossed her arms and sulked. “She ratted on us, didn’t she? Vanessa? Women are supposed to stick together!”

  “Only if they don’t shower often enough.”

  It was Ryan’s turn to crack up. Gustav, having just regained a modicum of decorum, fell back to the chair to resume his efforts to breathe normally. He had heard the standard retort to that one, before.

  Marianne sighed, “Boss, first of all it’s not polite to hear things no one else can hear. Second, I don’t want to hear what she just said because I know what she just said.” She had heard it before, too.

  Allen now had gone from tears of laughter to incredulity at his mother’s subterfuge. Now there was wonderment. “You mean that lady, the one you saw in the car I mean, she’s...here? This is getting serious weird, people.”