Pallor’s next phone call was to the young football player’s coach. When he finally got through, he introduced himself and said that he had been asked to write a series of feature articles for one of the local papers. “Right now, I’m working on an in-depth feature on college football. I’ve been reading about your quarterback, the one who was injured, and I’d like to interview him and get his perspective on the sport. Do you know when he’s meeting with his doctors to get their final evaluation?”
The coach hesitated. Pallor waited a few moments and then added, “I want to wait until he knows one way or the other.”
“Next Tuesday morning,” the coach finally said. “But don’t crowd him if it’s bad news. Give him a chance to … I don’t know … come to terms with it, I guess.”
“You’re expecting bad news then?” Pallor asked. Then he added, “Off the record.”
“I’ve seen a lot of knee injuries. I knew it was bad when he got hit.”
“Have you told him what you think?”
“I’ve tried to prepare him, but he’s not hearing me, or at least that’s the way he’s acting.” The coach was quiet for a moment. Pallor felt like he had more to say, so he just waited. Finally the coach sighed and said, “He’s a smart kid. I’d be willing to bet he’s figured it out for himself, but he’s not going to acknowledge the possibility that it’s over until the doctors say so. After all, until they say no, there’s always hope.”
“Yeah,” Pallor said softly.
“Just give him a little breathing room. He’s a good kid. He didn’t deserve this,” the coach said. Then he disconnected.
Pallor left his house and went to a few of the restaurants on his list, looking for likely candidates, but the only thing he got was indigestion. When he got back home, he called his contacts back to see if any of them had come up with anyone.
He struck out on his first two calls. The newspaper hadn’t had any requests for new subscriptions within the last few days and no one had applied for a new library card either. But when he called the real estate company, his contact there told him that they’d had four rentals move in over the past weekend, but all four of those were married couples, two with children. The only one that sounded the least bit promising was Chris McAllister, a twenty-six-year-old marketing director scheduled to arrive on Friday. According to the information on his rental application, he was single and had lived in New York City all of his life. He had stated that the reason for the move was that he had been offered a new job in Omaha.
Pallor almost didn’t bother with him. Anyone who had spent his whole life in New York City would find Terah even more alien than Kevin would. But he made notes of all the specifics and got directions to the apartment complex all the same. It wasn’t like he had an over abundance of prospects.
Pallor didn’t have any luck at all on Thursday, but Friday morning he stopped at a small diner just inside the city limits. One of the waitresses caught his eye. Her accent didn’t sound native to the area and from the bits of conversation he overheard, she had to have lived some place rural. She even looked the part with sandy hair, blue eyes and a down-to-earth way of carrying herself. She came across as being perfectly comfortable with who she was.
He had taken a seat at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee when he walked in, but once he had his coffee, he picked up the newspaper he was carrying as a prop, and moved to one of the empty booths in her area. When she stopped by to refill his cup, he noticed her nametag: Joan. It fit. A no-nonsense name for a sensible lady.
“You aren’t from around here, are you?” Pallor asked.
She grinned, shook her head, and said, “My husband and I had a farm in Missouri until last fall. After the drought last summer, we decided to call it quits.”
“Do you like living in the city?” he asked.
“Truthfully, I think we both miss the open spaces and peace of the country, but we’ll adjust,” she said with a smile. “Now, what would you like to go with that coffee?”
Pallor ordered a small pastry and settled in to observe her while he pretended to read the paper. She was friendly and attentive without being intrusive. He hadn’t really considered using a married couple, but he could see some advantages to it, and there was a definite advantage to sending someone with an agrarian background. The more he thought about them as prospective companions for Kevin, the more he liked the idea.
While she was writing up his check, he asked, “Do you have any children? There are a couple of pretty good museums uptown that cater to children.”
She shook her head and said, “No, it’s just me and Karl,” as she handed him his bill. “Thank you, and come again.”
“I certainly will,” Pallor said, and added to himself, every morning.
After Pallor left the diner, he drove out to the apartment complex to wait for Chris. He had the make, model, and tag number of the car that Chris would be driving. He cruised through the lot to see if Chris had already arrived, but the car wasn’t there, so he parked his car at the end of the lot and settled in to wait.
A couple of hours later, a large truck pulled up in front of the apartment building and two burly men climbed out. They opened the back of the truck and started unloading a bed. Pallor got out of his car and walked over towards them.
“Is that for Chris McAllister by any chance?” he asked the larger of the two men.
“Yeah. Are you McAllister?” the man answered.
“No, but I’m a friend of his. He isn’t here right now,” Pallor said.
The man grunted, looked at his paperwork, and said, “Load it back up, Mac. He’s not here. We’ll have to come back this afternoon.” Then he turned to Pallor and asked, “Do you happen to know which floor his apartment’s on?”
“Third.”
“And I’ll bet there’s no freight elevator,” the big man grumbled as he climbed back up in the cab of the truck and drove off.
Pallor headed back over to his car to wait. About the middle of the afternoon he saw a car pull into the parking lot that matched the description he’d been given, right down to the New York license tag. The car backed into an empty space near the entrance to the apartment building and the driver climbed out. From a distance, all that Pallor could tell was that he had a fairly good physique and dark blond hair.
While the driver was stretching and looking around, Pallor got out of his car and walked over. When he reached the driver he held out his hand and asked, “Chris McAllister by any chance?”
“Guilty as charged,” the driver said with a lopsided smile. “Are you the manager?”
“No, I was out here waiting for my girlfriend when a couple of guys in a big truck came by looking for you. I think they had a delivery to make,” Pallor said. “My name’s Paul Stewart.”
“My bed! Do you have any idea what they did with it?”
“They said that they’d come back later.” Pallor motioned towards Chris’s car. “Are you moving in today?”
“Yeah, I just arrived from New York,” Chris said as he unlocked the trunk of his car. The car and trunk were both jam-packed.
“New York? As in the City?”
Chris nodded.
“That’s a long drive,” Pallor said. Then he pointed towards the car. “My girlfriend is running late. Do you need some help?”
“I’d love it, but you might want to reconsider your offer,” Chris said and tipped his head towards the building. “I have a third floor apartment, and I don’t remember seeing anything about an elevator in any of the material the agency sent me.”
Pallor shrugged. “Hand me a load and point me in the right direction. I may not be able to help you get it all upstairs, but I can take a couple of loads.”
While they unloaded Chris’s car, Pallor found out that not only was Chris single, he wasn’t even seeing anyone. All the girls he’d dated in New York had been more interested in building their careers than in working on a long-term relationship, which had suited him just fine. He was from a l
arge family, and although he got along okay with his parents, brothers, and sisters, he wasn’t particularly close to any of them. Each of them had moved out of the house when they’d gone to college, and after college, they’d pretty much gone their own way.
When Pallor asked Chris about his job, Chris said, “I’ve been working for the same firm ever since I graduated from college. I was getting bored with my job, and a couple of weeks ago I realized that I was as high in that company as I was going to go. It was family owned, and only family members could be project manager, which was the next rung on the ladder, so I started looking for something else.”
“Any particular reason you chose Omaha?” Pallor asked.
Chris shook his head. “I had already decided that it was time to get out of New York. I know it’s supposed to be the most exciting place to live in the country, and there is a lot to do there, but to be honest, it can be depressing at times. I wanted some place new, some place different. And then I saw an ad in the newspaper for a marketing director out here. I sent my résumé to a post office box, and the next week I got a phone call. It was a conference call and I’m not sure how many people were on the line, but I was interviewed right there and then. I got another phone call the next day, offering me the job, so I took it.”
“Just like that? You didn’t want to come out here and check things out first?”
“No, not really. They told me that I would be heading up a marketing campaign for a new line, which was what I wanted to do, and they offered me more money than I was making in New York, so I figured it was worth a shot. If I don’t like it, I’ll start looking again.”
The more Pallor heard, the better he felt about Chris as candidate for Terah. After a couple more trips, they were pretty much done. When they went back downstairs, Pallor made a few admiring remarks about Chris’s car.
Chris smiled. “I don’t know anything about cars. Fortunately one of my brothers does. He found this one for me last week. The price was right and he said that it would get me out here, so I bought it.”
“You didn’t have a car in New York?”
“No. I’ve never owned a car before. It costs too much to park it in the city, and since I almost never left the city, I couldn’t see any reason to bother with one. I’d driven before, I even got a license when I turned eighteen, but I never bothered to renew it. I had to go get another one last week so that I could drive out here.”
Pallor laughed and said, “You’re going to need a mechanic then. Mine’s good and his rates are pretty reasonable. I’ll get you one of his cards next time I see him.”
“Thanks,” Chris said. “And thanks for helping me unload.”
“I enjoyed it.” Pallor took out his wallet and fished around in the back for a moment. He kept a well-stocked pack of business cards, listing a wide variety of occupations. He pulled one out that identified him as the proprietor of a modeling agency. “Here’s my card. If you need anything, give me a call. I know how it is to move to a strange city and not know where anything is.”
Chris smiled and put the card in his pocket. “Thanks. I may take you up on that.”
~ ~ ~ ~
Over the weekend, Pallor searched through the newspaper to see if he could spot anything that might give him a lead on someone else, but he couldn’t find a thing. He felt good about Joan, her husband, and Chris. Darrell Simmons, the football player, was another possibility, depending on what the doctors had to say on Tuesday. But that was only four. He’d like to have six or seven companions to send with Kevin and time was running out.
Monday morning, he ate breakfast at the little diner, but he got there during what must have been the diner’s busiest time, so he didn’t get to say much more than hello to Joan. He thought about hanging around until most of the customers were gone, but he was afraid he’d make her suspicious, so he left with the crowd.
After he scanned the morning paper, he started going around to the small restaurants on his list. About 1:00, while he was on his fifth light lunch, he spotted a man sitting off by himself near the back of the restaurant. Most of the waitresses stopped by his table to speak to him and a couple even sat down with him for a few minutes while he was lingering over his coffee.
Pallor guessed that he was probably in his fifties. His brown hair was speckled with gray and longer than most men his age wore their hair, almost as if he had forgotten to get it cut. Pallor watched as the man stood up and made his way to the front of the restaurant. He was not quite six feet tall and a little stocky, but overall he appeared to be in relatively good shape.
A couple of minutes later, while Pallor’s waitress was making out his ticket, he asked, “Do you know that man’s name? The one who was sitting near the back? I feel like I know him, but I can’t quite place him.”
“That’s Steve Patterson,” she said.
Pallor shook his head as if he was trying to remember, but just couldn’t quite get hold of it. “I can’t place the name, but I’m sure I know him from somewhere. Do you know where he works?”
“He’s a retired teacher. He taught at the high school around the corner for thirty years. Maybe you know him from there. Almost everyone in this section of town was either in his class or had kids in his class,” the waitress said. Then, after a moment, she added, “It’s really sad about his wife, Cathy. Did you know her? She was so sweet. They used to come in here for dinner every Friday. She held his retirement party here.” The waitress shook her head and gathered up his dishes.
“What happened?” Pallor prompted.
“What? Oh, you mean to Cathy? Well, about six months after he retired, she died. Poor thing had cancer. They found out about the cancer right before he left teaching. Such a shame. They had such wonderful plans for his retirement,” she shook her head again and wiped off the table. “Now he just sort of drifts. He comes in here everyday for lunch. You never see him with anyone, always by himself. Really sad.”
“How long has it been?” Pallor asked.
“Let’s see. He’s been retired for about three years now, so I guess she’s been gone for a little over two years.”
“Maybe he just needs a new interest, a distraction of some kind,” Pallor said, thinking that he might be a good candidate for Terah.
The waitress giggled and said, “We think so too, and every one of us has tried to be that distraction, but mister, I just don’t think he’s interested in being distracted right now.”
Pallor laughed and handed her a nice tip.
After Pallor left the restaurant, he walked uptown to the library to see if he could find a newspaper article about the retirement or about the wife’s death. It took a couple of hours, but he discovered that Steve Patterson had taught history and political science to high school juniors and seniors, and that he was well-thought-of in his field. He had won several teaching awards and his students had won quite a few local competitions. As far as he could tell from the newspaper articles, Steve had never had any children. In fact, he didn’t seem to have any family left at all.
The more Pallor thought about it, the more he liked the idea of Steve as an advisor, especially if Badec didn’t recover and Kevin had to take on the role of Master Sorcerer. Now all he had to do was figure out some way to get to Steve.
~ ~ ~ ~
Tuesday morning, Pallor got up before daybreak and drove over to Chris’s apartment complex. He had decided that it would be easier to explain their “deaths” if he could get Kevin and all of his companions in one placed and have them all “killed” by the same event. He hadn’t worked out any of the details yet, but if he was going to maneuver Chris into position, he figured it was probably going to involve disabling Chris’s car and then offering him a ride. And in order to do that, he needed to know what time Chris left for work, so he parked in a dark and crowded corner of the parking lot and kept an eye on Chris’s car.
Finally, at 7:30, Chris emerged from the building with a steaming cup in his hand, got in his car, and left. Pallor nodded to him
self. That was about the time he had figured Chris would leave. Chris would want to give himself plenty of time to get downtown, find a parking space, and get to his office. Just to be on the safe side though, Pallor planned to be in the parking lot by 7:00 every morning for the rest of the week, just in case Chris’s schedule changed once he settled into his new job.
When Pallor left Chris’s, he killed a little time riding around so that he wouldn’t hit rush hour at the diner again. It worked. The diner was nearly empty by the time he walked in.
While he was eating, he asked Joan where her husband worked.
“Karl works at Home Depot, in the gardening section,” she answered.
“That should be right up his alley.”
Joan nodded. “It is, but sometimes I think it depresses him. He would much rather be the one buying seed than the one selling it.”
“He’d rather be farming?”
“We both would. We hated to give it up, but it was one of those rock and a hard place choices. We finally came to the conclusion that we just couldn’t afford it anymore, so here we are.”
“Well, at least in a city the size of Omaha, if he doesn’t like his job, it should be easy enough to find another one.”
“That’s sort of what we were thinking when we moved here. Lots of options.” She topped off his coffee and then asked, “Now, do you need anything else?”
“No, that’ll do it for today,” Pallor said.
~ ~ ~ ~
When Pallor left the diner, he headed out to the hospital to see if he could find out what the verdict was for the young football player. While he was driving, he thought back over his conversations with Joan. The more he learned about Joan and Karl, the more certain he became that they would be a good fit. But once he arrived at the hospital, he put all thoughts of everyone else out of his mind and concentrated on Darrell.
It took him a while to find the orthopedic surgeon’s office and he was half afraid he might have missed Darrell, but shortly after he got there, the office door opened and the doctor escorted a young man out of the office.
The picture in the newspaper must have been taken when Darrell was quite a bit younger, before his muscles had fully developed, because the young man in front of Pallor had a lot more definition. The accompanying article had described Darrell as African-American, but this young man’s skin looked more golden than brown and his features looked Mediterranean. Even so, there was no doubt in Pallor’s mind that he was looking at Darrell.
The Master's Chair (The Chronicles of Terah) Page 9
