Willpower

by Anna Durand

Pressing the blinking button, the receptionist said, "You still there, Sally?"

  Grace walked out of the office into the hall. This was just what she needed after the events of the last twenty-four hours. Wasting a good hour and half driving to and from the business district of Lassiter Falls swallowed up time she could've spent on paying projects. Besides, her irritation at Petrovicz's failure to cancel their appointment churned up the acid in her gut. She felt her migraine threatening to resurface too, as pangs erupted behind her eyes.

  All her life she'd believed certain events occurred for a reason. Why she believed this, she couldn't explain. But whenever she tripped over a pothole in her life path, the notion of fate soothed her — mostly. Sometimes, like today, the notion also disturbed her. Why did fate want her to feel sick, delusional, severely aggravated, and utterly alone?

  Lately, she'd realized fate was an illusion. So was control. She no more controlled her life than she controlled the programming on television. Just like networks would air drivel no matter what she wanted, her life would also bump and skip forward without her consent. Chaos governed the universe.

  Still, she occasionally felt destiny's hand nudging her. Maybe she'd watched too many movies.

  The carpet bounced under her feet as she tramped down the staircase. Maybe one look at Grace convinced the receptionist she wasn't their kind of book designer. "Sally" on the phone might've been Ron Petrovicz hiding in his office, awaiting a signal from his receptionist. Thumbs up, come on out. Thumbs down, lock the door. Grace's attire was professional, she thought, but her hair looked like straw laden with grease. She'd been too exhausted, and too harried, to take a shower.

  Groaning, she shook her head at her own pessimism. Her looks, her clothes, none of that condemned her. Ron Petrovicz was at jury duty today. She had no reason to doubt the receptionist's veracity. Yet she did.

  She doubted everyone.

  Paranoia. It was the devil on her shoulder, whispering dark notions in her ear. She needed an angel to kick his ass off her shoulder.

  She had good reason for a modicum of paranoia. Her brain had become a bit Swiss-cheesy in recent months.

  Grace pushed through the doors and into the daylight. Halting on the sidewalk, she half closed her eyes as she let the sun melt the ice encrusting her soul. Birds chirped from the bushes. The heat still slumbered, though its eyes had begun to open, releasing a sticky breeze.

  A man darted out from between parked cars, careening toward her. She jumped sideways. He brushed against her. His hand, warm and rough, clasped hers for an instant before he vanished around the corner of the building.

  Grace felt an object in her hand, smooth with sharp edges. She uncurled her fingers. The man had shoved a piece of paper into her palm, a small sheet ripped off a notepad and folded into a square. The sheet's corners jabbed her skin. She unfolded the paper. Someone had scrawled a message on the sheet.

  "Meet me at Ray's Country Café. Twenty minutes. Urgent. Your grandfather was murdered."

  The brunch crowd haunted booths and tables throughout the old building that housed Ray's Country Café, an establishment that, despite it highfalutin name, was a traditional greasy spoon. The diner hunkered alongside the interstate on the outskirts of town, like any self-respecting greasy spoon would. The crowd hardly qualified as a throng of people, but it was large enough to quell the churning in Grace's gut. If the man who passed her the note attacked her inside this diner, she would scream. Surely, one of these people might rush to her aid.

  Surely.

  Grace chose a booth near the entrance, in the corner, a few feet from the picture window at the front of the diner. Hand-painted lettering on the glass announced today's special — chicken-fried steak with mashed potatoes, country gravy, and black-eyed peas. From the jukebox in the far corner, a country-western singer crooned a love song. Chatter from the back of the diner drifted forward on the breeze from the air-conditioning system. The smell of frying burgers tantalized her senses. She hadn't come to Ray's in years, since before her parents moved to California, yet she could still taste the burgers and curly fries, and the special sauce that made the diner famous locally.

  The door chime jangled. A man stepped over the threshold.

  The man who gave her the note? Maybe. Out on the street, he darted past her so quickly she didn't notice what he looked like, not even the color of his hair or the kind of clothes he wore.

  The man surveyed the diner. When his gaze intersected hers, he hesitated. She returned his stare. He shifted his attention to the window. Apparently satisfied, he ambled toward her.

  She stiffened. The guy might be crazy. He must be crazy. No one murdered her grandfather. Edward McLean died when the jet he'd chartered crashed over the Kansas prairie. Grace read the official reports in the papers, talked to the police, and watched TV news stories that played an amateur video of the crash over and over until the images burned themselves into her mind. A plane crash was an accident, not murder. Even if the pilot was drunk or the charter company got lazy with its maintenance, those actions didn't qualify as murder. Manslaughter, maybe. But not murder.

  For the millionth time in the last two months, she replayed the crash video in her mind. A teenager had been filming his buddies doing donuts on their dirt bikes when the jet screamed into sight over their heads. The plane plummeted from the sky so fast that the video needed to be slowed down in order for the shape of the jet to be discernible, but what came next required no manipulation. Flames exploded. Smoke plumed upward. The horrendous crash of the impact drowned out the terrified voices of the teenagers.

  The fire. The smoke. The anguish.

  Her stomach churned. Her ears rang. She took an uneven breath. The fire and the smoke, she knew of those from the video footage. The anguish she'd imagined, in vivid and horrifying detail, for weeks afterward every time she closed her eyes. Footage of the crash site taken hours after the accident revealed debris scattered over farmland, smoke curling up from the twisted and shattered wreckage. According to the authorities, the plane depressurized for unknown reasons, leaving everyone on board unconscious or dead when the plane ran out of fuel and smashed into the earth. The bodies were burned beyond recognition.

  Grandpa had worked as a neuroscientist, first at a university, and later for a private research foundation based in California. His later work formed part of a secret project, maybe for the government, though he wasn't allowed to tell her anything about it. His area of expertise had centered on consciousness research, the same topic his daughter, Grace's mother, studied as well. Christine Powell followed in her father's footsteps, to the point that she left her own university post to join the same secret project where Edward McLean worked. Grace's father, Mark, had been a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence. He too joined the mysterious project in California.

  Grace knew nothing about the work her grandfather and parents did. She felt relatively secure, however, in her belief that no one murdered any of them. Why should anyone want to kill three scientists who shared a passion for neurology? The man walking toward her must be crazy. Edward McLean was not murdered.

  She suspected the mystery man was nuts from the get-go, but she came to the meeting anyway. Maybe a tiny part of her needed to believe the plane crash and auto accident happened for a reason, more than bad karma or pilot error or a manufacturing defect. She needed a reason, a tangible shred of evidence, a crumb trail to guide her out of the woods and into the open space of clarity.

  The man slid into the bench opposite her. He clasped his hands atop the table.

  He must be nuts. But she wanted to believe his claim.

  The conflict within set her stomach to roiling.

  "I assume," she said, waving his note at him, "you're the one who gave me this. Would you care to explain?"

  "You're Grace Powell?"

  "Naturally. And you are?"

  "Bri
an Kellogg," he said, examining his hands. "I worked with your grandfather."

  "Did you know my parents?"

  "No, they died before I joined the project."

  Grandpa never mentioned a Brian Kellogg to her. He hadn't mentioned any of his colleagues. Whenever she asked him about his work, he snapped at her to mind her own business, or hung up on her after a curt brush-off. His odd behavior started after her parents' deaths seven months ago, so at first she dismissed it as grief related, except it got worse rather than better as the months passed. She struggled to understand the change in him, to no avail. After her parents' deaths, he was the only person she could talk to, which made his withdrawal from her all the more painful. She needed a connection to life, through someone she trusted. Edward McLean had provided that link.

  Until he cut her out of his life.

  A month before his death, he cancelled a trip to visit her. She tried calling him to ask what happened, but got no answer at his home or office. She left messages that he never returned. His sole response came in the form of a terse message on her answering machine, left two days before his death. In the message, he warned her not to call him because he would be unavailable and he had nothing to say anyhow. Besides, he'd said in a rough voice, she needed to learn to get by without his support. At the time, she took the statement as an insult. After his death, however, she wondered if he knew he was about to die.

  She had many questions. Brian Kellogg might hold the answers in his twitchy brain.

  He looked to be in his mid thirties, although his brown hair and tanned skin made him appear younger. He was trim, not skinny. Thick eyebrows sheltered his caramel-colored eyes. He wore a heavy watch, the kind with two time zones and fifteen alarms, and he frequently checked its digital readout. He wore gray slacks and a white shirt with a gray tie loosened to accommodate his unbuttoned collar. Despite his one slip into the casual, his collar was starched to concrete. She looked under the table, pretending to drop her fork. His pants had sharp creases ironed into them and he'd double-tied his shoelaces.

  Grace straightened in her seat. Shadows darkened the skin under Kellogg's eyes. His hair looked odd, as if he'd glued Barbie's fur coat on top of his head. Men. They just had to have something resembling hair on their heads or they'd hide in a closet. She'd allocated all of two minutes to detangling her own locks and pinning them back with a barrette. Looks hardly seemed important when she was losing her mind.

  Possibly losing her mind.

  A crash echoed through the diner.

  Kellogg jumped. As laughter erupted from the back of the diner, a waitress stuttered apologies for dropping a glass. Kellogg exhaled, massaging his hands.

  "Mr. Kellogg," Grace said, "are you all right?"

  "Sorry. I'm tired and … anxious. If they find out I've come here to see you, I'm dead."

  His tone resounded with finality. She couldn't believe anyone would kill over her. She simply wasn't that important.

  "They killed Edward," he said. "Dr. McLean. He was going to expose them."

  "Expose who?"

  "He found out they'd been lying to him. So they had him killed. The crash was a cover."

  "Who, Mr. Kellogg?"

  "Call me Brian."

  She slammed her fist on the table. "Who are 'they'? I'm not psychic and I hate riddles."

  An odd, almost confused look flashed across his face. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something, but when she didn't he cleared his throat and muttered, "This isn't easy for me."

  "Not my problem."

  "I'm sorry, I'm doing it again. Please forgive me."

  She stood halfway.

  He grabbed her wrist.

  She glared at him. His face flushed as he released her arm.

  "I don't know who they are," he said. "Edward never told me and I never asked. All I know is what I found out afterward."

  She plopped onto the bench.

  Afterward. After Grandpa died. She swallowed a glacial lump. She'd had two months to get used to the idea that she wouldn't see her grandfather again. She boxed it all up in the back of her mind, sealed with five layers of duct tape, blanketed in steel, chained to the farthest reaches of her psyche. Now Brian Kellogg tore through her security and ripped the box open. She felt naked.

  "Edward was going to Washington," he said. "To talk to some senator he knew. He had evidence. He was determined to stop the experiments."

  "What experiments?"

  "It's hard to explain."

  She fisted her hands, suppressing the urge to strangle him. He lured her here with a sensational statement that he had yet to explain or prove.

  "Try," she said. "Or I'm walking out that door."

  His gaze flitted across the diner, his head bobbing with a motion similar to a gazelle listening for lions. "Not here. It's too public."

  A waitress, approaching the table, asked if they wanted to order. Kellogg threw a panicked expression at Grace, who batted it back to him with a roll of her eyes. The waitress tapped a pen on her order pad. Kellogg sat robot stiff, lips compressed. If they didn't order something, they might get kicked out of the diner. It wasn't a public meeting hall.

  Grace ordered a chocolate malt and curly fries. The waitress scribbled the order on her pad and trotted away.

  "Why did you want me here?" Grace asked. "If you're not going to tell me anything, I mean."

  Kellogg leaned forward. Sweat rolled over his temples, down his cheeks. "Edward was murdered. I can prove it. I have evidence."

  "Show me."

  "It's at my motel room."

  She blew her breath through her nose, certain that flames erupted from her nostrils.

  He shifted in his seat. "He was dead before the plane hit the ground. Everybody on board was. They were murdered. The crash destroyed the physical evidence. The investigators identified pieces of all the bodies, except Edward's. Wasn't much to identify."

  "Nobody knows if they were dead or unconscious."

  "I know."

  "You claim to have evidence."

  "That's not the main reason I came. I have to warn you."

  "About … "

  "They want you."

  Grace tapped her boot on the floor in a drum-roll cadence. She'd had enough of hearing about the nebulous "them." She should leave now, before Kellogg told her "they" were aliens from the planet Beta Zappa, come to Earth to kidnap humans for use as sex slaves.

  "Nobody," she said, "would waste time coming after me."

  "They think Edward gave you something."

  "Unless you count DNA, he gave me nothing."

  With a sigh, Kellogg launched into a stammering, unspecific monologue about an "item" Grandpa left her — something vital, something worth killing for, something "destined to change humanity forever." Those words, Kellogg claimed, came from Edward McLean himself, uttered when he told Kellogg about the item. Whatever the "item" was. Kellogg offered no answer, of course.

  If she believed him, which she did not, she had to wonder why Grandpa chose her to bear his secret. She didn't deserve the honor of dying to save the world. Or to save a cockroach. According to everyone else on the planet, she was delusional, not heroic.

  This was insane. No one murdered Grandpa.

  She checked her watch. She'd wasted fifteen minutes listening to this garbage.

  The scarecrow man.

  No, that incident had no connection to Kellogg. One nut accosting her did not signify a conspiracy. Besides, Kellogg's assertion of murder was too much. If she accepted it, her notions about life and justice and security would vanish like shooting stars.

  "Sorry," she said. "I don't buy any of this."

  Kellogg reached into his pocket.

  She tensed. An image of him withdrawing a gun and firing a round into her head flashed in her mind.

  He pulle
d out a pen. She almost laughed.

  Grabbing a napkin, he scribbled on it. Then he said, "This is where I'm staying. If you decide to believe, come by. I'll be waiting."

  Kellogg handed her the napkin.

  And then he got up and hurried out of the diner.

  Chapter Seven

  After leaving the diner, Grace headed for the Oak Hills Mall, the one concession Lassiter Falls had made to consumerism. Five years old, the mall housed the usual novelty shops, department stores, and jewelers.

  She needed time to think. The encounter with Kellogg renewed her sense that her life operated by someone else's design — whether that someone was a human being or the force of fate — and infused her with a new sensation of foreboding. She needed people around her, without the obligation of talking to anyone or pretending to care about their problems while they yammered at her as if she were a therapist at a free clinic. She needed anonymity in a crowd.

  College kids milled in the corridors, chatting loudly, listening to music through headphones. Older people speed-walked amid the throngs.

  As Grace meandered past the novelty stores and jewelry chains, she remained aware of the noise around her even while tuning it out. The cacophony calmed her. It blocked her thoughts and drowned out the anxiety. No worries about her loss of sanity. Just a background of laughter, talking, and the ka-chunk of vending machines dispensing their wares.

  She almost felt alive.

  A pack of kids slammed into her. Nodding in response to their apologies, she veered toward the escalators. Part of her envied those kids. They had vitality, innocence, possibilities. She was no more than seven years their senior, yet she felt much older. Ancient. Half buried. Suffocating.

  As she stepped onto the down escalator, out the corner of her eye she noticed a man stepping onto the track behind her. He moved onto the step directly above her. Great, a tailgater. She hopped down two steps to get a little distance from the creep.

  He moved down two steps.

  She hopped four steps, taking them two at a time.

  He hesitated, then closed the gap and stopped one step behind her.