Janis relaxed her grip on the branch. “But how did you know I’d be here?”
“I didn’t.”
But even as Janis had asked the question, she knew he hadn’t found her, but that she had found him. The experience with Scott the month before had drawn her here, to the site of their old fort.
“What is here, anyway?” Janis asked. “Underground?”
“An emergency bunker. We held drills here a few times before your family’s arrival. Motion sensors line the levees, but I had ample time in the last year to practice slipping past my own system. Back inside Fort Oakwood, I was in the last place they’d think to look. And closer to you.”
The growing dusk had reduced Mr. Leonard’s head to a pale sphere. The depressions of his eyes and hollows beneath his pronounced cheekbones had become large and shadow filled, like on a plastic Halloween skull. Janis stood in a tandem stance, her weight shifting from her front toes to her rear heel. She struggled between wanting to see Mr. Leonard more clearly and wanting to draw farther away from him. Similarly, her mouth grappled with the question that had been on her mind ever since he’d stabbed her.
She took a small step nearer. “Who’s Them?”
Mr. Leonard’s head crouched low and angled toward a distant snap followed by the crunching of leaves. Footfalls. The pale sphere turned back toward her. “Someone’s coming.”
But Janis remained rooted, the sound of leaves being crushed underfoot still distant. “I need to know.”
“Next time.” Fear spiked his voice.
“I’ll come tomorrow then,” she said.
“No, not tomorrow,” he whispered. “No patterns. Saturday.”
“What time?”
“Whenever it seems most natural that you might come into the woods. Don’t look over your shoulder. Don’t act as if you’re being watched. And don’t come straight here. Move in a large, meandering circle, like you’re just out on a walk.” The whites of his eyes shone with insistence. “When you do get here, tap a stick against the cement. Like you did earlier.”
Janis nodded, not knowing whether he could see her.
He stood and began creeping away from her. And as he did, something seemed to trail after him, more felt than seen. An energy, gray and ponderous, like heartache. Like loss.
“Your partner,” she said.
He paused and twisted his torso.
“Is… is she all right?” Janis pictured his wife-who-wasn’t-his-wife as she had last seen her, slumped over and bleeding, a bone jutting against the inside of her gown.
You did that, a voice reminded her.
Mr. Leonard didn’t answer right away. “I don’t know,” he admitted at last. “I don’t even know where she is. After I help you and your sister, I intend to find out. That’s the plan.”
“I-I’m sorry,” Janis said.
“Nothing that happened that morning is your fault.”
“Why are you trying to help us?”
His gaze never left hers. “Because you’re innocent.”
Janis felt the threads she experienced in her out-of-body state reaching toward him like fingers. The woods around her became overrun by images: Mr. Leonard infused in the orange glow of a cigarette, watching her house; Mr. Leonard at the kitchen table, head in his hands, Colleen holding her to him; Mr. Leonard staring at his bedroom ceiling. Now the faces of neighbors appeared, and Janis understood them to be members of the surveillance team, members Mr. and Mrs. Leonard had had to lie to. And she felt his fear for Colleen now, a brand on his heart… Janis understood because it was the same fear she’d come to feel for Scott.
“Be careful,” she whispered.
He hesitated in what seemed surprise. “You too,” he whispered back.
As Mr. Leonard threaded his way through the trees and retreating images, Janis crouched and listened. The sounds that had driven him back into hiding were fading. Janis couldn’t see anyone through the dark and trees. She waited several more minutes, then began picking her way home, surprised to discover that she was no longer holding her branch.
19
Scott lifted Janis’s bag by the canvas strap. Pine needles fell away while books and some bulkier items shifted inside. He peeked around, then held the strap to his nose. The clean smell of her hair still lingered, summoning a flood of longing that frothed around his heart.
What in the hell are you doing? he thought. Not only is Mr. Leonard alive, but at least one of the voices on the tape believes he’s still lurking around. She needs to be told, not drooled on, dummy.
Scott set the bag back down, duly self-admonished, and peered into the dim woods. The woods seemed to steal an hour of daylight — more if you ventured into the thickest parts — like something out of a Dungeons & Dragons module. In any case, no sign of Janis. He half considered cupping his hands to the sides of his mouth and shouting her name, as he would have done when they were kids. But finding her out here had to look like an accident.
If I’d come here to think, where would I go?
He headed in the direction of the fallen tree, the remnants of the winter’s blowdown crunching beneath his shoes. But, arriving at the tree, Scott found it empty. He climbed onto the tree anyway. At the trunk’s midpoint, he heard the creek ahead of him, tinkling over sand and stones. He pushed up his glasses and squinted at the cement levee rising beyond the creek’s far bank.
“Who built you?” he muttered.
As he regarded the levee, he experienced a piercing notion that the pale reflectors along the top of the cement wall were regarding him right back, like eyes. Scott continued across the log until the branches diverged and thinned and he had to hold his arms out to the sides like a tightrope walker. Scott shuffled down a dipping branch and jumped the last two feet to the ground. Five years earlier, that would have landed him in two feet of boggy water — and maybe a nest of water moccasins — but now tufted seeds gusted up around him.
Up close, the levee appeared solid and imposing, like a fortress wall. Scott closed his eyes… and felt something.
Damned if there isn’t a current.
He seized the sides of his head as his consciousness twined more and more tightly. He sagged to his knees. A gasp spewed from his lips as he burst inside what felt like a power line.
Inside the levee? Why would a levee need power?
Scott concentrated and pushed against the direct current. He was inside a cable running along the base of the cement wall. Vertical shoots terminated at what felt like small circuit boards. He arrived at a board, but before he could inspect it, he was being shot out in all directions — a sickly, weightless sensation.
Then he was staring at a fallen branch in front of himself, the cool ground against his cheek. Scott pushed himself up until he was kneeling again. He brushed his face and straightened his glasses. Blinking, he ran his gaze along the line of reflectors. The levee hadn’t been watching him, after all, but monitoring him, sensing his body heat. What had been made to look like reflectors were infrared motion sensors. Cold stole inside Scott’s sweat-damp shirt.
Like the camera in his streetlight, the sensors were radiant, their signals being gathered at some unknown point and monitored by God only knew who.
At this very second, someone knows I’m here.
By the time Scott returned to the entrance of the woods, Janis’s bag was gone. Lights glowed from the Graystones’ windows out into their lawn. He imagined the Graystones inside, sitting down to dinner. The knowledge that Janis was safe calmed him — for the moment. He needed to find a way to reach her, one that wouldn’t alert anyone watching that he and Janis were colluding. Her insistence on discretion had been right as rain. More than she probably realized.
* * *
“Blue Sky Realty?” Scott’s mother squinted at him over a forkful of rice and lemon chicken. The frozen entrees were the latest in her long chain of diet plans; Jenny something or other. “Never heard of them. Why?”
Scott was prepared. “Someone at school ment
ioned his mother used to work for them.”
“Selling houses?”
“I guess so.”
“Not in Gainesville, she didn’t.”
“Maybe this Blue Sky went under,” Scott’s father offered. He had finished his first entrée and was starting on his second.
But Scott’s mother was already shaking her head emphatically, eyes closed. “Realtors rarely go under, Stanley. They get bought up, brought into a larger fold. And if this one had been bought, I would know. I’m a member of the regional association of realtors, for Pete’s sake. No one’s ever mentioned a Blue Sky.” She looked back at Scott and spoke with finality. “Your friend’s mother was not working in the local market. Either that or your friend’s a fibber.”
“Probably a different market, then,” Scott said, becoming defensive over his imagined friend (who looked like the Karate Kid for some reason). But there had been a Blue Sky Realty. It was there in the county record data.
His mother pushed the forkful of Jenny something into her mouth.
Not only that, Blue Sky had sold his parents their house. Scott had checked.
“Hey, um.” His vision swam at what he was about to ask. “Who did we buy our house from?”
His mother stopped chewing and spoke into the side of her fist. “Hell’s bells, Scott, what is it with you and your questions suddenly?”
He turned to his father, who seemed to be frowning over the speed with which his second entrée was vanishing. “Dad?”
“What’s up, Scotty?”
“Who sold us our house?”
“We were in Michigan at the time,” his mother said, then took a quick gulp of water. Scott had figured that putting a question to his father on which his mother was, by all rights, the authority would get her talking. Indeed, she would shudder to know how much she had in common with Wayne. “The whole thing was done through a third party, a housing attorney. Someone the V.A. had recommended. Why on earth do you want to know?”
Scott watched his mother’s black eyes. When they didn’t flinch or waver, Scott decided she hadn’t heard of Blue Sky Realty. He released his breath. She was telling the truth.
She raised her stenciled eyebrows in question.
“Oh, that guy at school said his mom had sold some of the houses in Oakwood — when she was working for another realtor. I thought our house might have been one of them.”
“And your friend’s mother’s name is…?”
“Um, Macchio. Mrs. Macchio.”
“Macchio?” Scott’s mother frowned over her next forkful of lemon chicken and rice. “Never heard of her.”
* * *
Scott paced the length of his bedroom until he lost count of the about-faces — in the hundreds, probably. He removed his glasses and scrubbed his face with his hand. It had been a mind-blowing day. But everything fit somehow. If only he could find the nerve center. An operation over Oakwood had to have a nerve center, some sort of command and control — maybe even based inside the neighborhood itself.
“Here’s what we know,” Scott whispered, snapping on the radio. “Phones are monitored. The levees on both sides of the neighborhood are rigged with motion sensors. Janis’s house is being watched. Mine too. Not only that, but Janis and her sister are routinely followed. Yours truly as well. Maybe.” Scott had been vigilant for the past few weeks but hadn’t noticed anyone tailing him. Of course, he hadn’t gone anywhere besides school. “Jesse and those guys were definitely being followed before their accident. The computer data bears that out.”
About the accident, Scott knew little. The details were only beginning to gel around a consistent narrative at school, if you used “consistent” in the loosest sense of the term. Jesse, Creed, and Tyler had spent time in the hospital and were recovering at home. Nothing too, too serious — bumps and bruises, a couple of minor breaks, a concussion, maybe. The story of who had suffered what kept changing, though, depending on who you talked to; in some of the early versions, one or all of them had gone into comas. Scott cared little for Jesse, of course, and even less for Creed, but he kept picturing Tyler as he had last seen him New Year’s Eve — a lonesome silhouette against the moonlit trees.
Scott resumed pacing. “So someone uses Blue Sky Realty as a cover to buy up the houses in Oakwood. They close the neighborhood, turn it into something out of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, populate it with watchers.” Scott thought about the military network extending from the Leonards’ house, the basement rooms with the bunk racks, the voices on the tape. “Watchers working in groups of anywhere from five to ten, probably. Only, one of the watchers freaks out and makes an attempt on Janis’s life. The police supposedly find him. He’s supposedly dead. But now someone’s talking like the man’s capable of taking a midnight stroll around his old homestead, like it’s no biggie.”
The clipped voice had used the term AWOL, absent without leave. If Mr. Leonard had come back, his target was Janis. Of this, Scott had little doubt. But whether his motive was to warn her — as he’d claimed to be doing before he stabbed her — or to finish the job, he couldn’t be certain. Which meant Scott had to assume the second.
“Got to communicate with her.”
The only problem was the information wouldn’t fit on a note or within a passing whisper. No, he needed time with her, uninterrupted time to explain everything that had happened since they’d last talked…
Scott’s feet stuttered to a stop as he squinted at the school calendar tacked beside his desk. That’s it! He double checked the date and picked up the cordless phone. Though he hadn’t dialed her home in more than three years, the sequence of numbers came in a rush as his fingers punched the keypad. Following a delay that remained milliseconds too long, the line rang.
Attaboy! the Bud voice called from the dresser.
Scott waved for silence.
“Hello?” a man’s voice answered.
“Is, ah, is Janis there?”
“May I ask who’s calling?”
Scott almost mashed the OFF button when a memory came to him. It was from when he was a kid, nine or ten years old. He’d gone down to play with Janis and found her and her father throwing a football in the backyard. Janis explained her father was having her run routes.
“Wanna try?” she asked.
Scott shrugged, not knowing what a route was. The first route was a “post.” Scott was supposed to run ten yards, then angle toward the line of bushes that bordered the yard. He did as Janis’s father said. When he turned, the football was already in flight. Scott threw his arms out, getting his elbows twisted somehow, and the ball bounced off his forehead. He fell into the bushes. The rest of the routes went similarly.
“Football’s not for everyone,” her father had said at last, tucking the ball under his arm. “I’m a little worried you’re going to break your glasses.” He had turned to Janis, who had snagged everything he’d thrown at her, naturally, and whispered, “We’ll do it another time.”
With the phone to his ear, Scott felt like that suffering boy again, as if his transformation over the past six months had never happened.
“It’s Scott.” He cleared his throat. “Scott Spruel.”
“It’s a little late to be calling, Scott. Is this something that can wait until tomorrow?”
“I’m really sorry, sir.” Scott never called anyone sir, but the tone of her father’s voice, authoritative, almost stern, seemed to demand it. “It’s just, we’re in the same English class, and I forgot to write down the assignment for tomorrow. I hate to call, but I really need it.”
A pause. “Let me see if she’s still up.” He heard the receiver being set down.
His heart hammering away, Scott closed his eyes and concentrated on what he was going to say.
20
Graystone household
Three hours earlier
“Have you been crying?” Janis’s mother asked.
“What? No.” Janis said. Margaret’s and her father’s faces turned toward her. She lowe
red her gaze and pressed her fork into the square of corn soufflé on her plate.
“Your eyes look a little puffy.” Her mother gestured to her own face.
Janis shrugged, not surprised. During her shower, everything Mr. Leonard had said had risen around her, mingling with plumes of steam. Alive. Observing her and Margaret for seven years. Seven years! Developing a kind of affection for them, even — yes, Janis had felt that — a tenderness stemming from the absence of children in his own life, maybe. His and Colleen’s. And then an upswell of sorrow had seized Janis, squeezing her throat until her tears ran with the water. It had come from the part of her that had reached for Mr. Leonard, that had felt the depth of his pain. He had loved Colleen — a love bound, in part, by their shared concern for Janis and her sister. But Janis might as well have smashed their love to pieces that morning, just as she had smashed Colleen into the hallway wall of their house.
Her father muted the television. “I understand you went to softball practice today.”
“You did?” Margaret said — an accusation.
Janis shook her head in irritation. “Just to watch.”
Margaret glared at her.
“After I stopped in at the library,” she added, remembering she’d told Margaret she was going there to study.
“How did you get home?” her father asked.
“I walked.”
He frowned with his entire face. “Call us next time. One of us will come get you.”
“We don’t want you walking alone,” her mother added. “We’ve told you that.”
“It’s only a couple miles.”
Her father studied her a moment as though deciding whether or not to raise his voice. “Just listen to us, Janis. Call next time.”
Janis forked a broccoli crown and glowered at her father in her thoughts. Yeah, just listen to you: Mr. Invisible and a mother who sneaks out to meet strange men in parks. Fine examples.
XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation Page 46
