by J. C. Nelson
Salt. A line of salt across my doorway. Was this what Brynner did last night? The man lived on superstitions.
Down at the office, I roused a sleepy teen who looked irritated to be alive. “Where do you serve the continental breakfast?”
“Hold on.” He yawned and opened a miniature fridge, then set out a container of potato salad, a hard-boiled egg, and a carton of milk that sloshed like it had chunks.
I’d rather have feasted on my dirty laundry.
He pointed up the road. “There’s also a diner in town.”
Who knew when Brynner might see fit to rise and shine? I could at least have my glyph tables ready and maybe read a little of Osiris to get back in the groove. By daylight, Bentonville looked even smaller. If you sneezed on one side of the town, you’d get a bless-you from the other side of the tracks.
I pulled into the town square and parked, then walked through the unkempt grass to the diner. When I opened the door, the communal conversation paused as everyone catalogued the newcomer. After a moment, the buzz of a dozen conversations returned.
A Hispanic woman at least twenty years my senior pointed to the bar. “No tables.”
I didn’t need a bar stool for two. “What’s good?”
“Nothing. He cooks everything in bacon, everything in fat.” The waitress, Isabella, according to her tag, pointed with the menu to the fry cook.
“Two eggs. Whites only, not runny, fresh fruit, and coffee.” I handed her the menu.
Her gaze darted to my BSI tag before moving on, then she shouted in Spanish, something that sent the fry cook into a frenzy.
“Morning, ma’am.” From behind me, a black man spoke, his accent placing him from the Deep South. He slid onto the seat beside me. His shaved head gleamed, dark skin complementing the police uniform he wore. “I’m Sheriff Bishop. You must be part of the Carson field team.”
“I am.” The words came easily. Not a lie. I was part of it, if only a temporary part.
“Good to see a real BSI team once in a while. We get reports now and then. ‘Meat-skins took my dog,’ or ‘Meatskins ate the chickens in the coup.’ I check them out, but most of the time it’s just a coyote.” He handed his menu back to the waitress without looking at it. “I’ll take it all.”
My plate came. I’d only ordered two things. I got three. Not one of them resembled my order. The eggs, sunny-side up stared up with blind yellow eyes. A slab of bacon like half a pig sat to the side, with a sea of gravy slathered on top of biscuits. “This isn’t what I ordered.” I flagged down the waitress on her next orbit. “Ma’am? Where’s my fruit?”
Sheriff Bishop laughed, a deep rumble that started in his toes. “You ordered fruit? From here? We don’t do healthy, lowcalorie, or low-cholesterol. Eat hard, work hard, sweat it off in the sun.”
Sheriff Bishop watched me while I reluctantly dug into my meal. “You do me a favor? Like I said, mostly, we get coyotes, not meat-skins. But two nights ago, something tore up one of the Donaldsons’ horses.”
“Was it a wolf?”
He glanced around the restaurant before continuing. “I didn’t say ate. I said tore up. I think it’s all still there, though could be some guts missing. It’d do me a favor if you and Brynner looked. Coyotes I can handle.”
How much I should tell him about our assignment wasn’t a subject Brynner and I had discussed. So I did the safe thing. “I’ll tell him, but it’s his call. Could you tell me which way Brynner’s house is?” I mopped up the last bit of gravy with a biscuit.
Again, he rumbled with laughter, then hit the radio on his shoulder. “James, I need you to see the nice lady here with Brynner out to his house. And take that parking ticket off her windshield, too.” He showed me a smile of white ivory. “It’s good to have Brynner back in town. When he wasn’t tearing up graves or taking the high school girls up to the quarry, he was a good kid.”
“He did that a lot?”
“The graves or the girls? Only dug up a coffin once. Only God knows how many girls he— Hey, there’s James.” At the diner door, a dingy white car with “Deputy” on it pulled up. I paid, left a tip just in case I needed to eat there again, and ran to my rental car.
We drove out beyond the city limits, off onto side roads, until I pulled up at a familiar ranch house. The deputy honked the horn three times, then pulled off, leaving me alone at the edge of the desert.
Bran Homer came flying out the door, watched the sheriff back up the driveway, and waved to me. “Morning. You rise like I do.”
I shook his offered hand. “Not normally, but I need this job. You think today I could get to work?”
He snorted. “My Emmy just wanted to have a nice dinner with our boy before he got to work. She’ll let him into the room today.”
“She still angry with me about the whole religion thing at dinner?” I had my principles, but Aunt Emelia shone with such a warm kindness, the decent thing to do was attempt to get along.
Bran sat down in the swing and brushed the leaves out so I could do the same. “I think the word you want is ‘confused.’ Faith’s such a key weapon against the meat-skins, it’d be like leaving half your bullets at home.”
“I didn’t mean to offend. We work to control the co-orgs every bit as much, we just do it with measurements and analysis. So it works for everyone.” I pulled the laptop from my messenger bag, opened it to the weekly briefings.
Bran nodded. “Don’t you worry. If our faith depended on your belief, it wouldn’t be our faith.”
“Can I ask a question?”
“Shoot, girl. Don’t mean I have to answer.”
“Why do you call Brynner ‘son’?”
He looked to the door first. “My Emmy and I had one beautiful daughter. She died two hours later. After that, Lara’s boy filled the empty spot in our home, what with his daddy being gone on missions and Lara busy in her lab at all hours. When Lara had the accident, he came to live with us.”
“What happened to Lara Carson?” I’d never seen it documented. Even Bran’s word ‘accident’ was more information than the ‘tell-all’ books contained.
Bran rose from the swing and opened the door. “Boy doesn’t like me talking about it. You ask him. Emmy might talk, or she might not, but if Brynner hasn’t told you, it ain’t my business.”
BRYNNER
I slept in for the first time in five and a half years. The clock said 11:30, my brain asked what year. If I had nightmares, I didn’t remember them. I stumbled out to the kitchen, where Aunt Emelia stood, a fry skillet in one hand and a spatula in the other.
The scent of fish fried with coconut oil filled the house. “That smells so good.” I took out a cereal bowl. Aunt Emelia pointed the spatula at me. “Brynner Carson, in this house, you miss breakfast, you eat at lunch. Go shower, young man. You’ll be hungry enough when lunch is ready.”
I was hungry already, but arguing with Emelia Homer was like playing tug-of-war with a monster truck. I’d still be arguing when lunchtime came. So I went to the bathroom, with its rusted sink and a drain that kept two inches of water in the shower at all times.
I dried off and dressed in BSI-issue fatigues. Resistant polymer, smooth so meat-skins had nothing to grapple on, tough enough to prevent road rash, and generally speaking, clothes that wouldn’t get a man laid unless the circus was in town and all the clowns were sick.
When I got back into the kitchen, it hit me who was missing. “I forgot to get Grace from the motel. She’ll be halfway to El Paso if she takes a wrong turn.”
Aunt Emilia let out a harrumph. “Unlike some people, she gets to work on time. She’s been translating since eight. Be a dear and tell her lunch is ready.”
I lumbered down the hall to the memorial room. When I was younger, it still held a crib and changing table. When Dad died, and I wanted everything burned, Aunt Emelia took it all. Refused the BSI’s offer to buy it. Refused my demands to turn it over.
I opened the door, and the smell took me back twelve years in on
e breath. Old leather, fountain pen, and shaving cologne. The scents of Dad. He’d come home with twelve-inch gashes, shave, shower, and then let Mom drive him to Aunt Emelia’s clinic to get sewn up.
And if one minute of his life passed without him making a record of it in one of those books, I didn’t know when it was.
“Morning.” Grace’s voice startled me from my reverie. She sat cross-legged on the floor, wearing an orange “Bentonville” T-shirt and black sweatpants. She didn’t wear a trace of makeup, letting me see every fine detail of her cheeks, which had freckles at the edges. She brushed a hair out of her face, looking at me beneath long lashes. “What?”
I looked away, caught staring. There seemed to be no safe way to appreciate Grace. If I let my eyes rove her body, she’d know me for a creep. If I drank in the details of her face, she shied away. “Lunch. My aunt cooked fish for us.”
Grace rose, leaving a mound of notebooks in her wake.
“Did you already translate all of those?” My Egyptian wasn’t good, but that was incredible.
Her musical laugh made me smile. “Hardly. There’s no organization, so I have no idea which ones came first or last. I want to start with the last ones, if possible. How many of these did he keep?”
“All of them. Dad always had a journal. Drew maps, wrote instructions. If it was in his brain, it’s here.” I looked around at the stacks of boxes. “Somewhere.”
Grace followed me out to the kitchen, taking a place at the end of the table.
Aunt Emelia untied her apron and hung it on the rack, then sat with us. “We’ll go down to the clinic after lunch, Brynner. Get those X-rays done. Catch up on your records.”
I shook my head. “Sorry, can’t leave Grace alone with Dad’s journals. I’ll stay here just in case she needs anything. Plus, if I get any more X-rays, I might start glowing in the dark.”
“I don’t mind going. I could use a break to clear my head.” Grace put down her fork. “If you don’t mind the company.”
“I do.” While spending more time with Grace was my number one priority, I was not taking her with me to my checkup. Embarrassing wouldn’t begin to describe that. Of course, having a checkup from the woman who raised you through puberty didn’t exactly fit on my list of “things I can’t wait to do.”
“Well, if you trust Grace with your father’s journals, I’ll trust her.” My aunt watched me over her bifocals.
Clearly a test, one I’d normally fail. If I said no, Grace wouldn’t speak to me again. If I said yes, it might be a lie. Or even worse, the truth. Because the nagging part of me I usually ignored told me Grace wasn’t here because of me.
I could live with that. “I trust her.”
I must have waited too long to answer. She’d read my face. Knew the conflict inside, or at least suspected it.
Emelia looked away. “Then it’s settled. Grace, you are welcome to spend time on the porch swing if you need to get away. If you leave, just pull the front door closed.”
I’d rather have gone back to bed after lunch. “I’m a grown man. I don’t need you to drag me into the office for a checkup.”
Aunt Emelia held up her palms. “Men are just bigger boys. Take care of yourself like a man, and I’ll treat you like one.”
I glanced over to Grace, who didn’t move fast enough to hide her smile. Not by a long shot. Then she reached over and touched my arm, her fingertips cool and smooth. “The sheriff wanted to know if you would check out a dead horse.”
I didn’t respond, being more focused on the chills where she’d brushed against me. When her words finally sank in, they frustrated me for many reasons, not the least of which was I didn’t want to stop thinking about Grace, and her fingertips, and deep blue eyes.
Which I was staring at again. Must focus. Focus. Not focus on Grace. “Sorry. Let’s say it turned out that it really was a meatskin. I seem to recall direct orders not to expose you to anything dead. I’m not sure you should even be eating that fish.” I forked another bite of my own.
Grace shrugged. “You didn’t have a problem disobeying orders before.”
Nothing was worth risking my operative status, or dragging Grace back into a danger zone before I got to know her very, very well. “That was the old me. I’m turning over a new leaf, at least until you are off my team.”
“Excellent,” said Aunt Emelia. “In that case, you’ll cooperate completely.”
Grace and Emelia exchanged a knowing grin. Conspiring against me together.
So I went to the clinic, rubbing my fingers over the spot on my arm where her skin had met mine.
Ten
GRACE
After Aunt Emelia hauled Brynner away, I went out to the porch to work. I rocked in the swing, savoring a soft breeze. How on earth would I make sense of the jumbled mess in even one of the journals, let alone all of them?
I set my sun tea on the porch rail and surveyed the yard, a mix of crushed lava rock and cactus. Red pumice ran right up to the foundation of the house—except for a gray rock line beside the foundation. A quick trip down the stairs let me look closer. The gray rock had flecks of black. On a hunch, I touched my tongue to a pebble. Salt.
The whole house was surrounded by salt.
I’d seen Brynner’s line of salt outside my door and heard field operatives insist on salting the thresholds of a house before entering, but what sort of man built a house on salt rock?
I retreated to the air-conditioned sanctuary, sat down in the memorial room, and picked up another journal. The symbols, the words individually made sense. The problem was, this was a modern man, writing in a language that hadn’t changed in thousands of years. The challenge lay in understanding the meaning behind the arrangements.
If I could reach into Heinrich Carson’s mind, and understand why he used the symbols he did, I might be able to figure it out. I tossed aside a journal and selected another. Each time I found a starting point, scratching noises under the house distracted me. Like a rat gnawing on wood just below the floorboard. I’d finally found a section of the diaries I understood, detailing a massacre Heinrich interrupted, in which the victims offered themselves willingly. The hours slipped away while I struggled, and the late afternoon cast long shadows. The longer I sat, the less comfortable I felt.
Each creak of the house sent shivers down my spine. My mind began to invent sounds that couldn’t be there. The patter of leather skin on a dry wood. The scratch of sunken fingernails on wallpaper. I reached into my messenger bag and pulled out the Deliverator for comfort.
Just as I fell into a rhythm of translating, another scurry of activity startled me. In frustration, I slammed the Deliverator on the floor. The scratching stopped. Then started again, right where I’d hit the floor. I scratched once, drawing my nails across the floor.
And something answered, a long, nibbling sound. From the floorboards, a smell, like rotten lunch meat, rose. A smell I recognized from the restaurant in Seattle, sickly sweet and disgusting at the same time.
I slammed the Deliverator down again, and this time, scratched with one nail once, twice, and again.
Again something answered. Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
Out in the living room, a thud made me jump. I shivered from a surge of adrenaline as much as the chill air. Half of me wanted to close my eyes. The other was more afraid of not seeing. Was the grave stench in my mind? Or was I alone with a walking corpse?
I couldn’t let fear rule my life. I took the Deliverator and rose to the balls of my feet. A creak from the kitchen floor let me know I wasn’t alone. Sliding the door open, I stepped out into the hall.
Something was in the house.
With me.
The wooden floor creaked as it moved, just around the corner, casting a shadow into the kitchen doorway. I wanted to call out “Who’s there?” But the co-orgs in the restaurant had responded to sound as much as movement. Any noise I made might as well include the words “Here I am! Come get me.”
The more I tried to
force myself to calm down, the more my hands shook. This time there wouldn’t be anyone to save me. The fear threatened to flood me, paralyze me. And I made a decision: I was not going to die in the desert, without seeing my daughter again.
So I acted, stepping out into the kitchen, leveling the Deliverator, squeezing the trigger.
As the gun went off, something grabbed my hand and yanked. I flew forward, crashing into the table.
“Grace!” Brynner shouted, nearly screamed at me. “What are you doing?”
The front door slammed open and Aunt Emelia came running in. “What in hades—”
“I heard something. I thought it was—” I couldn’t continue, my eyes brimming with tears. I’d let my own imagination nearly kill a man. A combination of fear and embarrassment competed to see which would leave me sobbing.
“What is with you trying to shoot me?” Brynner leaned over, looking at the hole in the far wall.
“Oh, sweetie.” Aunt Emelia came over and helped me up, hugging me. “Ignore him. It’s just another bullet hole. Whole house is full of them. I’ll make the boy patch it up later.”
“I’m so sorry. One stupid rat, and I . . .” I stopped, puzzled by the look between the two.
Brynner cocked the Deliverator and held it easily, scanning the shadows. “There are no rats in this house. Scorpions, sure. No rats.”
At the mention of scorpions I panicked, trying to find my messenger bag. Rats I could live with.
He glanced to Aunt Emelia. “When did you last lay the barriers?”
“Spring. Bran and I redid them. Olive oil, amber, salt. Everything.” Aunt Emelia stopped her crushing hug. “Where did you hear the rat?”
“Under the floor while I was translating. Like the sound at my door last night.”
Brynner walked over to face me. “You heard something at the motel and you didn’t call me?”
