by AJ Scudiere
“The search for Collins began when his wife called the Georgia Power switchboard to see if he was working late when he didn’t show up for dinner . . .”
Evan didn’t hear any more of the broadcast and he only partly felt the smooth surface of the wallet slip through his fingers.
19
Back Porch, Hazelton House
Evan was out the door of the Overseer’s and into the night illuminated by the pale glow of a soft yellow lamp someone had attached to the top corner of the kitchen building long ago. He was across the small space before he knew he had decided to check on his sister. The hard pack of earth beneath his bare feet was still heated from the long days. Small pebbles bit into his feet, trying to steal his attention. Where they failed, the sharp sensation of falling succeeded.
The board on the back steps gave way, sending his arms flailing and his mind careening in another direction. Luckily, at the last moment it held, springing beneath his left foot more like elastic than wood and he knew it was probably the last time anyone would successfully step on it and not go through.
But the interruption halted all his forward momentum and he sat down hard on the back porch realizing as his head hit his waiting palm that he hadn’t thought this out.
Tom Collins had been beaten, shot, and dumped in a ditch after leaving the plantation. A brief and sad chuckle nearly escaped Evan at the thought that had really been his name. It seemed like such a ploy at the time—and a good one, too. If Evan wanted to get into someone’s house, he would have dressed as a utility employee and claimed there was something wrong with their system. But, as Kayla had expertly pointed out, there really was something wrong, at least from the power company’s point of view. A plantation of the size they were running should draw massive amounts of current all the time, so Georgia Power had actually been lax in waiting as long as they had to send someone out. Still, the man was now dead. And Evan desperately wanted to check on Kayla.
But there were a handful of major problems with his plan. One was that she was likely to meet him at the door—with a gun trained on his chest. Option two violated the premise that you didn’t wake an Aspy from a deep sleep and you sure didn’t fuck with their schedule. He would be doing both. And the combination of the bad wakeup and the gun was likely to wind up with him getting shot.
Besides, there was nothing to indicate that Kayla was in any danger. Except for the fact that everything was falling down all around them. Collins was dead. Georgia Power knew something was up, as would anyone who could hack utility records—something all four of them had failed to anticipate. The machine in the barn had been checked out, and they didn’t know what had been done. And Ivy was missing—really missing.
After finding Ivy’s wallet, he had no doubt that the woman was truly missing. And it had taken them all day to even figure out they should be looking for her. For a heartbeat, he wondered if she was even still alive.
He had no evidence that they would keep her that way, whoever had her. They had killed Tom Collins, after all. But Evan could only believe that Ivy was more valuable than a Georgia Power employee and he hoped to God that she was singing like a canary and keeping herself as safe as possible. There was nothing on this plantation that was worth any of their lives.
Sitting there, Evan let the wild winds of the late summer night whip by. They came around the corners of the buildings, snuck past barriers, and ruffled the tops of the trees and even the few blades of grass that were hearty enough to grow back here. He could only hope the whistling of the wind irritated the ears of whoever was listening on the other end of that stupid bug.
He could see it from where he sat, a small bump on the otherwise perfectly imperfect lines of the wood siding. No wonder Kayla had found it. Though it was mostly out of sight, she was a master at finding patterns. Sometimes he wondered if that was the only way that she could deal with the world around her.
One of the prevailing theories on autism spectrum disorders—of which Aspergers was right up there—was the lack of mental filters that neurotypicals had. Everything came through, everything that normal people were able to ignore. The feel of the elastic in your underwear. The pinging noise in the distance. The fact that the twenty-third fencepost from the west end of the property had been knocked over even though the barbed wire stayed intact. Kayla saw all of it, counted all of it. So she would have noticed the bug disrupting the sharp-in-and-sloped-out pattern of the siding against the backdrop of the sky. And she would have seen the footprints in the barn had they been there before she arrived. Others might miss that. Others might be focused on the machine and miss the subtle changes in the hard dirt floor. He’d only seen them because something had niggled at the back of his brain and he’d scanned the place. If he hadn’t done that, he’d never have noticed.
But because of Kayla, he knew—knew—the short window of time in which someone had come in. Because of her, he had faith that the house itself had not been bugged. And because of her, he had some bizarre machine that generated power with no electric or fuel input. He also had a missing employee and a dead man that he was convinced were related to that machine somehow.
Knowing he wouldn’t get any sleep and unable to leave the area unattended, Evan traipsed back over to the Overseer’s and went in through the kitchen door.
“Evan?” Reenie’s voice greeted him, low and harsh.
“Yes, just me.” He was unsurprised to hear the click and slide of her gun and the shuffles as she put it away before coming into the kitchen to hug him.
Good girl.
“Did she say anything?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t wake her. It just didn’t seem right. I didn’t make it past the back porch.”
Her frown sunk into him a little deeper than maybe it should have. “Have you been wandering around this whole time?”
“No.” It rode a sigh as weary and confused as he was. “I just sat there, trying to figure things out.”
“And?” She wore a soft smile, as though she had already forgiven him for not figuring any of it out.
“Nothing. You?”
Her head moved slowly back and forth, followed by a bone-tired shrug. Guilt ate at her pretty features, and he reached a hand out to brush away a tear that had escaped her lashes and was making a dash down her cheek. “You didn’t know.”
“Kayla did.” Another layer of guilt settled like a heavy drape around her. “You told me, but I hadn’t ever lived with someone like her. I didn’t believe anyone could memorize like that.”
He almost laughed. “You’ve been on the Internet! You’ve seen that pencil drawing of New York by the autistic kid who flew over it once. Yes, they can do those things.”
“No.” Her head shook slowly back and forth as if her thoughts might lose their harsh grip on her. “He was unusual. A rare case, Rainman. Kayla is just Kayla. She doesn’t say the right things in company and she leaves the room when I have friends over. She doesn’t shut up at dinner sometimes while she starves because she won’t eat things cooked in batter.” Reenie brushed at her own tears this time. “But she’s really brilliant. I guess that’s why she always had a good job. And while she’s eating the same peanut butter and jelly every day, she sees things the rest of us just miss. Sometimes I think if I asked her, she could tell me how many blades of grass are on this plantation.”
Taking her into his arms, Evan hugged her. “She’d never give you an exact number. She’d have to take into account loss and new growth.”
She smacked at his shoulder even as she finally smiled.
“I love you, Reenie, and you see things she doesn’t.” Then his mood turned somber again. “I want you to go back to bed and get some sleep. I can’t. I’m going to sit watch tonight.” He saw her protest before she said it and headed her off before she could start. “You know how I am when I’ve had too little sleep. We need one of us to be clear-headed tomorrow. We have to tell Kayla what we found and she’s going to be up early.”
Reenie
nodded. “Take a gun.”
Kayla came awake at her usual early hour, but even as she rose she knew in her gut something was wrong. Though the room held the summer warmth, the other side of the bed felt cool to the touch. Ivy had not occupied it last night. With a sharp breath, Kayla came fully alert to reality.
For just a few moments, Kayla had forgotten her friend was missing. Forgotten that Evan and Reenie were only just starting to worry about her. Forgotten that the nosy Georgia Power had accused them of bypassing the meter. She wanted to smile at that, but she couldn’t, because Ivy was gone.
She sprang from the bed, getting dressed faster than usual, her uniform of jeans and a T-shirt more than adequate for the day. She brushed her teeth, her will to go and wake up Reenie and Evan and start the search warring with her need for routine and the full two minutes she usually brushed for. She fought the hairbrush as well, her hair up into a ponytail without the usual fifty strokes, and then she was jumping down the servants’ staircase, her favorite place in the house. It was closed off with doors at either end and followed the curve of other rooms. Barely wide enough for a tray, the staircase hugged her on both sides, the weak overhead lights filtering around the corners as she ran her hands down both walls at the same time. Kayla popped out the back door and leapt down the porch stairs before she realized she’d jumped right over a dozing Evan.
He lifted his head and blinked at her. Almost gummy in his just waking speech he said, “Ivy’s gone.”
“I know.” She sat down beside him upset that she was being proven right—she didn’t want to be—and glad that at least now they would start really looking. Then Evan said something that surprised her.
“Reenie’s in the kitchen making us breakfast.”
“Why is she up so early?” Usually, Kayla had this small amount of time to herself.
“Because she knew you would be up, and because we need to start looking for Ivy.”
Stunned, she sat back on her hands for a moment. Beside them, behind the blue tarp, the generator chugged and under that the soft whir of her Whitney Machine made a backbeat to their problems. She leaned a little and bumped Evan’s shoulder with hers.
He sighed and grinned at the same time. Then he explained about the wallet as he walked her over to the Overseer’s back porch, her steps spry and nearly bouncing with anticipation, his soft and blurry like his thoughts seemed to be. That was okay. She was on.
Kayla was talking at fifty miles per hour as she came into the kitchen to find toast and eggs scrambled hard with cheddar cheese mixed in. So she stopped to say, “Thank you, Reenie.”
Though she didn’t say it, the thanks was for everything. For finally believing. For believing enough in the first place to look and find the wallet. For the eggs that were just as she liked them, which meant they could go directly into her mouth without thought of picking out stray pieces of tomato or chives or any of the extra things that ruined food.
But the stream of thought that held those ideas in no way interrupted the one coming out of her mouth. “The wallet means Ivy was forced to leave. It means she was taken from here, probably from this room. They may have told her to take her purse. Chances are, she was sitting and having her breakfast when they came in. They came in too fast for her to get her gun. But made her clean up.” Kayla was eating eggs even as she talked. “Maybe it was someone she knew, or recognized?”
She paused for a microsecond, then kept going. “It may have been someone coming in with a gun on her. She wouldn’t have fought. But she left the wallet.” She looked around. “There’s no evidence of a fight. Nothing is broken or missing.”
Reenie stopped her with a held-up hand. “I checked while the eggs were cooking. I even counted all the plates and silverware. I accounted for the rest, but I could only find seven of the forks.”
Perking at the news, Kayla jumped on it. “We had all eight of those. Is it around here?” Immediately she started looking across the floor, even got onto her hands and knees and checked under the edge of the cabinets and tried to peer around the old refrigerator. Nothing. She stood up, dusted off her hands and sat back down to her breakfast.
Evan, who had been silent, asked, “Well?” just as he polished off the last of his eggs and toast.
Kayla shrugged. “It looks like she may have pocketed a cheap fork. So she’s out there with her purse, no wallet, and a fork. And . . . . her gun!”
Jumping up again, she ran back to the big house. Maybe it was still in the bedside drawer, but if Ivy had come to the Overseer’s in the morning with her purse, she should have had her gun in it or on her. They had all been carrying them everywhere. Or at least they were supposed to.
Breathing heavily from the quick run, she scrambled through the bedside drawers as she heard Evan’s feet pounding gracelessly up the stairs. She reached under the edge of the mattress and even flopped down on Ivy’s side of the bed, swinging her hands around for any place a gun could be in easy reach.
She popped up again as her brother came to stop in the doorway, one hand braced on a bent leg and the other gripping the frame to keep himself upright. She blurted out one word, “Nothing!”
His lungs soughing, Evan ground out, “You’re about to have something when I puke all over this floor.”
“Ew!”
Finally prying himself upright, he gave her a stern look. “Don’t go anywhere alone. We—”
“There’s three of us. That’s not divisible by two, someone has to go somewhere alone.”
His sigh was deep and self-pitying, but he’d told her to do something that was mathematically impossible. “Kayla, don’t make me go chasing after you in the middle of a meal. Or I will yak on your floor.”
She ignored that threat; she’d never seen Evan heave up anything in his life. “So we all go together?”
“Yes.”
“Then where’s Reenie?”
“At the table.” His “don’t speak” hand shot up, palm out, his breathing still interfering with his words a little. “From now on we all try to stay together. Which means no one hops up and runs off, and preferably no running is done in the middle of meals.”
He couldn’t swim after eating either. Kayla stared at him. Waiting.
“I’m done.” And his breathing was about back to normal. “That’s good that you didn’t find her gun. It means she has it.”
Kayla started back to the Overseer’s House. “It means she had it. Which is better than nothing. Probably they searched her and took it. Anyone with half a brain would.”
“Aren’t you a fucking ray of sunshine?”
“I’m just saying.”
They were in the middle of the space between the buildings when Reenie came out to meet them. Tears were streaming down her face. Even an Aspy could figure that one out and Kayla blurted. “Ivy may have her gun, so what’s wrong?”
“It’s my grandfather.”
“What?” Evan had brusquely pushed his way around Kayla in less than a heartbeat, bumping her in his haste. But seeing the way he pulled Reenie into his arms, she didn’t think anything of it.
His words were a soft murmur, “Honey, your grandfather’s been gone for years. You said he died when you were a kid.”
“Yes!” She was sniffling, hard. “Remember I said he was kinda crazy? He gambled on all kinds of things.”
Kayla was nodding. “He’s the one who ran the family fortune into the ground?”
“Well,” Reenie heaved a wet sigh, “They all did. I’m coming to grips with the fact that all the Hazeltons and Carrolls were bad with money.”
Evan shot Kayla a ‘don’t you dare’ look, as though he knew she was going to make a statement about Reenie’s poor money habits. Sure, she’d thought it, but at nearly thirty years old she’d learned to keep her mouth shut. Sometimes. She frowned at them. “Reenie, why is this bothering you now?”
“Because I was looking through Ivy’s phone again when you ran off. Thinking I’d be hel
pful with the search, maybe find some clue, and I saw her texts about the sugar chest.” She gulped and almost became incomprehensible. But Kayla managed to piece it together.
“My grandfather was always doing crazy things, ignoring my grandmother, spending money they didn’t have, but he was good to me. Built me doll houses and a tree house. He fixed up the attic in the big house so I could play there. And I used that stupid sugar chest as a clothes hamper! It’s worth tens of thousands of dollars. And he changed it. He built me a trap bottom in the drawer.”
She hiccupped. Then sniffed.
Evan still looked confused. Kayla waited.
“He told me he had something that was going to change the world. Even at eight, I didn’t believe him. Then he died. Anyway, I remembered and just went upstairs to check the false bottom, and everything’s been tossed around in the Overseer’s attic! Someone’s been up there.”
“What!?” Evan immediately pushed past her to head into the house. “Is he still there?”
Kayla leapt between them, but Evan was having none of it. Even her verbal break in, a loud “Ev!” didn’t stop the conversation.
“No, it must have been yesterday. I haven’t been up since a few days ago.” Reenie was shaking her head and sniffling, but managed to pull a letter out of her pocket. “He wrote this to me. Thought I’d find it long before now. It says he broke the machine and hid the instructions and that he was packing, but if I found this, I’d know he was safe. He intended to disappear, but he died!”
“What?” Evan stared at her.
Kayla tried again, “Evan! Reenie!” she kept her voice at a reasonable level but tried to make it as sharp as she could.
Evan held up his “don’t talk” hand. She ignored it.
But he ignored her better. “You think your grandfather built a Whitney Machine? And was killed for it?”
“His death was very suspicious, but my grandmother was fed up with him and she didn’t demand an autopsy.” Finally getting Kayla’s attention, Reenie spoke directly to her. “You know those gears you found, I think they were my grandfather’s. They weren’t old enough to be Whitney’s, were they?”
