Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

  I drove a full mile before putting on my lights and slowing down. Sweat was pouring off me. I felt like a fool. I had not panicked like that in years, not since David had pulled me off a rock face in the Dolomites where I had frozen in absolute terror. That had been over twenty years ago, and then I had at least had real reason for the fear, while tonight the panic had been entirely self-induced. My imagination had worked on my fears, turning von Rellsteb’s sinister face into a devilish threat that had never existed. I was still shaking.

  I slowed down, worried that the truck driver might have alerted the police with his CB radio, but no patrol car waited for me as I drove back to the warren of Key West’s streets, nor as I at last parked in the small driveway of Charles’s guest house. I turned off the engine, then sat in the car for a few seconds, feeling the jackhammer beat of my still frightened heart.

  The revolver had fallen off the seat when I skidded onto the highway. I groped on the floor for the weapon then, wearily, I climbed out of the car. The guest house was dark, though I was sure Charles would be waiting up for me, even if only to reassure himself that I had not damaged his beautiful Austin-Healey. I closed the car door.

  Then, from the deeply shadowed porch behind me, I heard the scrape of a footstep. I turned in a renewed and terrible panic, realizing that of course they would ambush me here, where else? If I died here it would be written off as just another street crime, and so I ripped the gun from its holster, then half fell against the car as I twisted desperately away from the threat of whoever had been waiting for me in the darkness. I used both hands to raise the Ruger and pointed dead center at the shadow, which now moved toward me from the porch.

  “No!” It was a girl, who flinched away from the threat of the gun, and who screamed at me in a panic every bit as frantic as my own. “No! Please! No! No!”

  It was the girl from the conference, the girl in the yellow skirt, the girl who had obscurely made me feel glad to be alive. And I had almost shot her.

  “I hate guns!” The girl was gasping in her panic. “I hate guns!”

  “It’s all right,” I said with an urgency equal to her terror, “it’s OK!”

  “I hate them!” Her fear seemed out of proportion to its cause. She had twisted away so violently from the sight of the gun that she had dropped her huge, sacklike handbag, which had consequently spilled its contents across the path. “Have you put the gun away?” she asked in a stricken voice. She was still shaking like a sail loosed to a gale.

  “It’s gone,” I said.

  She dropped to her knees to retrieve the slew of notebooks, pens, tape cassettes, lipstick, chewing gum, and small change that had cascaded from her enormous bag. “Are you Tim Blackburn?” She turned her anxious face up to me.

  “Yes”—I stooped to help her collect her scattered belongings—”and I’m sorry I frightened you.”

  “You didn’t frighten me, the gun frightened me. I’ve never had a gun pointed at me before. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Why didn’t you ring the doorbell and wait inside?”

  “I telephoned,” she explained as she grabbed coins out of Charles’s flower beds, “and someone said you were out, but would be coming back later, so I came straight round here, but there were no lights on downstairs. I thought everyone must be in bed already and I didn’t want to disturb anyone. So I waited.”

  “A long time?”

  She nodded. “Long enough.”

  “I thought journalists didn’t care about waking people up?”

  She blinked at me in gratifying astonishment. “How did you know I was a journalist?”

  “I noticed you at the conference,” I confessed, “and saw you had a press badge.”

  “Wow!” Her amazement seemed to stem from the fact that anyone might have noticed her. She retrieved a last pencil and straightened up. “My name’s Jackie Potten. Actually my name is Jacqueline-Lee Potten, but I don’t use the Lee because it was my father’s name, and he left my mom when I was kind of little, and Molly Tetterman says she’s sorry she wasn’t at home when you phoned, but she was away in Maine because her son is in college there and she was visiting him all week, and she only got home today, and I phoned her tonight and she told me about your messages on her answering machine, and she asked me to talk to you, which is why I wanted to see you, and I’m sorry it’s so late, but I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  “Whoa!” I held up my hands to check the impetuous flow, found my key, and opened the guest-house door. “Come and have a drink,” I told Jackie. I did not yet know her connection with the Genesis Parents’ Support Group or exactly why she wanted to see me, but there was something in her disorganized volubility that I liked. Her presence was also good for me because her vulnerability forced me to control the panic that raced had my own heart and filled me with an inchoate fright.

  “I don’t drink alcohol or coffee,” Jackie informed me in an anxious voice, as though I might be about to force those poisons down her throat.

  “Come in anyway,” I said.

  “Tim!” Charles, hearing his front door open, shouted from the private parlor upstairs. He was waiting up for me, as I had assumed he would, so I gave him the news he really wanted to hear, which was that his precious Austin-Healey was unscratched.

  “I didn’t expect you back so soon.” Charles, who was splendidly dressed in a Chinese silk bathrobe, appeared at the top of the stairs. “What happened?”

  “He was early,” I said, then placed the gun on the hall table. “I didn’t need it, but thank you anyway.”

  “And who on earth are you?” Charles imperiously demanded of Jackie Potten who, faced with the ethereal creature on the stairway, shrank back into the doorway.

  “My name’s Potten,” she said, “Jackie Potten.”

  “I assume,” Charles said haughtily, “that you are the person who telephoned earlier. You may wait for Mr. Blackburn in the guest parlor, and he will help me make a pot of coffee.” Charles walked slowly downstairs. “Come, Tim.”

  As soon as we were in the kitchen Charles dropped his absurdly pretentious manner. “So what happened? Tell me!”

  “Not a lot. He was early, we spoke, he took the letter, and then vanished. I didn’t learn a thing.”

  “Is that all?” Charles was disappointed.

  “That’s all.” I sat on a stool and shook my head. “I don’t know, Charles. For a time there I actually liked the bastard, then at the end I thought he was laughing at me.” I had also thought that von Rellsteb had wanted me dead, so that Nicole could inherit, but there had been no ambush, so even that theory was wilting.

  “You don’t need coffee”—Charles saw the weariness in my face—”you want something stronger. Your usual Irish?”

  “Please.”

  Charles pulled open a cupboard and sorted through the bottles. “What do you know about that creature?” He waved in the vague direction of the parlor where Jackie Potten waited.

  “She’s a journalist,” I explained, “and I suspect she must be interested in the Genesis community because she said Molly Tetterman told her about me. You don’t mind her being here, do you?”

  He offered me a dramatic shudder. “Of course I mind. She’s such a drab little thing.”

  “Drab?” I sounded offended. “I don’t think she’s drab at all.”

  “You don’t? That hair? And that awful blouse? And the skirt? That skirt wasn’t tailored, Tim, it was a remnant from a chain-saw massacre! Here!” He tossed me a bottle of Jamesons.

  “I think she’s rather appealing,” I said stubbornly.

  Charles raised his eyes to heaven, then poured himself a large vodka. “Would you like to find out what this ravishing creature of your dreams wants to drink?”

  “She told me no coffee or alcohol.”

  “A club soda and ice, then,” Charles decided. “I’m certainly not wasting designer water and a twist on such a creature.”

  I carried the soda water back to the parlor, where Jackie was
staring very solemnly at an alabaster reproduction of Michelangelo’s David. Charles followed me. “So tell us what happened,” he instructed me, as though we had not already spoken in the kitchen.

  I told, leaving out only the details of my panicked flight from Sun Kiss Key, lest Charles should think I had been anything less than careful with his precious car. Not that there was much to tell, for my meeting with von Rellsteb had been remarkably unproductive. “I should have come with you,” Charles said.

  “What good would that have done?” I asked.

  “I would have pointed the gun at him, and then told him he had five seconds to tell me where the Genesis community lived. What is it?” This last, rather brusque, question was addressed to Jackie.

  “The ice cubes.” She gestured at her club soda. “Are they made with tap water?”

  “Of course.”

  She blushed. “Do you mind?” She began fishing out the ice, which she dropped into an ashtray. Charles was amused, but pretended to be exasperated. Jackie Potten, once the offending ice was safely out of her drink, took a tentative sip, then searched through her capacious handbag for a notebook and pencil. “How did von Rellsteb travel tonight?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean by boat? Car?”

  “I don’t know. He sort of appeared, then vanished.”

  “By broomstick,” Charles said happily.

  “Gee.” Jackie frowned at me. “I mean they had a boat the other night, so I guess they must have come to Florida by sea. I hired a motorboat to look for them, and I searched most places from here to Marathon Key, but I didn’t see them.”

  “What were you looking for?” I asked her. “Erebus?

  “Erebus?” She frowned. “Oh, the catamaran! They renamed her Genesis One. They’ve got two other boats we know of, Genesis Two and Genesis Three.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Molly asked the State Department, and they gave us copies of complaints that Japanese fishing boats had made. It was nothing to do with the State Department really, because none of the Genesis boats are American, but the Japanese complained to them anyway. And sent some photographs.”

  “And you looked for one of the boats here?”

  She nodded. “But I didn’t see any of them. I wondered if von Rellsteb and the others flew here. Maybe I should try and find their records in the airline computers?”

  She seemed to be asking my advice, but I knew nothing of such matters and had nothing useful to say, so I merely shrugged. I wished I could have been more helpful because I was finding her oddly attractive. I did not understand why, she was an unremarkable girl, but I was acutely aware of her presence. I decided her eyes were her best feature. They were large and a curious silvery green, though perhaps that was just the reflection of the sea-green lampshades Charles favored in the guest parlor. Otherwise Jackie’s face was very narrow in the chin and broad in the forehead. Her skin was chalky pale and she seemed, under the billowy clothes that had so offended Charles, to be painfully thin. Her fair hair was in disarray despite the pins and clips she had used to tame it. I put her age at mid- to late-twenties, but her innocence made her seem more like a fourteen-year-old waif; the orphan of some heartless storm.

  “Would you mind telling me,” Charles asked in his silkiest voice, “just who you are, Miss Potten?”

  “Oh, gee.” She was instantly flustered. “I’m here for the Genesis Parents’ Support Group.” She paused, as if expecting us to respond, and when neither of us spoke, she added a nervous explanation. “I’m Molly’s investigator,” she added in further reassurance.

  “Investigator?” I sounded incredulous.

  “I investigate Genesis,” Jackie said defensively.

  “So you’re not a real journalist?” Charles made the question sound like a sneer.

  “Oh, yes! I work for a paper in Kalamazoo”—she paused because Charles had sniggered, but then she decided not to make anything of his scorn—”and the editor isn’t really sure that the Genesis community is a proper story for our paper. I mean our only connection with Genesis is through Molly Tetterman, but the editor doesn’t like Molly very much. Not because she isn’t a good person, because she is, but because she can be very insistent, and she keeps on pestering Norman, he’s the editor, about the Genesis Parents’ Support Group.”

  “Jackie,” I interrupted her very politely, but I was becoming aware that this orphan of the storm could talk the back legs off a herd of donkeys unless she was checked. “What were you doing at the conference?”

  “Oh!” She was momentarily confused, as if trying to remember just what conference I was talking about. “I went there because I hoped to get an interview with Caspar von Rellsteb. Which I didn’t, of course.” She looked at me rather pathetically. “It’s been a wasted trip, really.”

  “And mine,” I said as though it might make her feel better.

  “Did you ask von Rellsteb where Genesis lived?” Jackie asked me.

  I nodded. “But he wouldn’t tell me. He just fed me a whole lot of mystical nonsense about how Genesis needed its privacy.”

  “I think it’s Alaska,” Jackie said suddenly.

  “Alaska?” I asked.

  “The Genesis group has always been based in the Pacific,” Jackie explained, “and when they left British Columbia they probably wanted to stay somewhere on that same coast, and von Rellsteb has always been intrigued by Alaska. No one would know if they were there, because parts of that coast are really inaccessible, so they wouldn’t need to bother with green cards or anything like that.”

  “But why Alaska?” I insisted.

  “Because I found the man he shared a prison cell with in Texas, and he said von Rellsteb was always talking about Alaska, and how it was the new frontier and a place where a man could.”

  “Prison!” I interrupted.

  Jackie nodded, but, for once, had nothing more to say.

  “Why was he in prison?” I asked.

  “It was attempted robbery,” Jackie said, “but I only found out about it last month, so I haven’t had time to write it up in Molly’s newsletter. It all happened ten years ago. He served two years of an eight-year sentence, and when he was released they sent him back to Canada because he should never have been living in Texas anyway. He tried to hold up an armored truck. You know, the kind that collects money from stores and banks? But it all went wrong and he didn’t steal a penny in the end. The whole thing was really kind of stupid, except he was carrying a gun, which didn’t help his defense in court. His lawyer tried to claim that von Rellsteb was alienated, and that he was only protesting against society.”

  “Did he fire the gun?” Charles asked.

  Jackie shook her head. “The police say it jammed, but for some reason the technical evidence about the gun was inadmissible.”

  “But if the evidence had been admissible,” I said slowly, “von Rellsteb might have been arraigned on a charge of attempted murder?”

  Jackie nodded slowly, as though she had not thought of that possibility before. “I guess so, yes.”

  “Bloody hell,” I said.

  Charles, plainly bored with the night’s lack of interesting news, yawned, and Jackie hurriedly said she had to be leaving. She was driving back north the next day and we agreed that she would give me a lift as far as Miami Airport. The hundred-and-fifty-mile journey would give us each a chance to pick the other’s brain for more news of Genesis. “Though of what use such a dull creature can possibly be is beyond me,” Charles said grandly after Jackie had left for her motel.

  She returned at ten o’clock the next morning in a tiny imported Japanese car that was spattered with bumper stickers; so many stickers that they had spread off the fender onto the fading paint of the trunk. “Vegetarians Do It on a Bed of Lettuce,” one sticker proclaimed, while another warned “I Brake for the Physically Challenged,” which seemed to imply that the rest of us plowed indiscriminately into wheelchairs with merriment aforethought. “You car?” I as
ked Jackie.

  “Sure. I worked out that it would be cheaper to drive than fly, so long as I stayed in really economical motels.” Jackie explained that her editor in Kalamazoo was not interested in Genesis, so she had attended the conference on her own time and on her own and Molly Tetterman’s money.

  I put my seabag onto the car’s backseat, said farewell to Charles, then climbed into the cramped front passenger seat of Jackie’s car, where one dashboard sticker thanked me for not smoking and another enjoined me to buckle up.

  We took four wrong turns in our mutual attempts to navigate out of town, but eventually Jackie steered the car safely onto the Overseas Highway where she gingerly accelerated to forty-five miles an hour. “Are you really going to drive all the way to Kalamazoo?” I asked in astonishment.

  She evidently thought I was being critical of the car rather than of her nervous driving. “It sort of shakes if you go too fast.” She began to describe various other symptoms of the car and, while she spoke, I surreptitiously examined her and wondered just what it was that attracted me to her. She did not, after all, have the impact of beauty, and I did not know her nearly well enough to determine her character, yet still I felt an odd excitement in her company. It was, I finally decided, her very touching look of earnest innocence which made her seem so very fragile and which made me feel so very fatherly toward her. She was, after all, just about young enough to be my daughter.

  When she had exhausted the problems of car ownership I asked what had first made her interested in Genesis.