by AJ Scudiere
Reenie looked across him, completely missing him as a person, as she too turned her attention to Ivy.
“It looked like they dragged several people away, alive or not. . . .” She shrugged.
This time Reenie’s eyes flicked to him. “Once again, we have to get our stories straight.” She picked up the phone and Evan could see the name “Reginald Standish” across the screen.
Her voice was tight. “Reggie.”
The older man had waited behind at the house. Thus he’d probably already been interviewed by the sheriff’s deputies. They would have had to respond to an emergency call that was clearly the result of a gunshot. Reenie nodded while she listened, her tension loosening visibly as she spoke. Eventually, when she tucked the phone back into her purse, she looked as though her shoulders carried less of a load. For that, Evan was grateful.
“He cleared out the cinderblocks and the straps before the deputies came.”
Evan breathed his own sigh of relief. He hadn’t even considered the mess left behind. Had anyone official stumbled into that room, it would have been clear that it was designed for holding a prisoner. In short order, they would find enough evidence to see that, in fact, someone had been held there recently. And that could have opened a can of worms that could have led someone to check the floorboards of the slave cabins. But without the appearance of the cinderblocks and straps, there would be no reason to suspect anything.
Even in his relief, Evan felt sick to his stomach.
He’d helped hold a prisoner. Though the reasoning had been sound—and he’d do it again in the same circumstances—he couldn’t help noting that he’d held a man against his will. He shot at humans and was pretty sure he’d hit two. He would likely never know if he’d killed them. He preferred not knowing.
“Reggie told them everything starting with the dogs barking and gunshots flying. And except for what Kayla said.”
Evan nodded. That was an easy enough lead to follow. They had agreed before, that if anyone asked why they were all holding, it was because of the robbery, then the fire. The deputies had already been out once. No one should be surprised or suspicious that they were all sleeping with their guns. The assault had been forewarned.
But Evan didn’t know if they would survive the next one. What lie could they possibly tell the deputies next time?
There wasn’t time to think about it.
A doctor was coming out of the double doors at the end of the hallway and Evan was on his feet before he understood what he was doing.
The doctor’s face was a plane of acceptance and exhaustion. Evan braced for the worst.
Kayla played with the bed covers.
“You told them I yelled?” She looked at her brother.
She hated this. She’d been moved from the ICU finally. She was in a normal hospital gurney now, with fewer things tying her to the bed, but she was captive nonetheless. An IV ran into her arm, a slim tube with prongs blew air up her nose as though her lungs didn’t work. Her ears had begun to ache from having that slight but constant pressure from the nasal tube. Her right hand was tied to a board, and several bags hung from the tall metal pig tail at the head of her bed. Her finger wore a white laundry clip with a red light that monitored her oxygen levels. Her chest was covered in foam stickers with metal snaps that led to even more wires, this time running to the left side of the bed, and making an incessant beeping each time her heart beat. Thank God her heart had a good sense of rhythm.
They told her that now that she was out of the ICU she’d be able to get up and around a little bit. That was clearly a joke they all thought was hysterical. She couldn’t even just go to the bathroom, because budging even one wire would set off alarms and people would rush into the room to save her from getting out of bed.
She knew; she’d tried it once. And nearly had a heart attack as she was swarmed.
Twenty minutes later, she’d been wired neatly back into the bed and still had to pee.
Now Evan sat at her side, providing further unnecessary policing, and all she really wanted was to go home. She could watch her own machine better than anyone here.
“I told them I couldn’t hear what you yelled.”
She nodded. “I told them word for word what I yelled.”
Lowering his voice and leaning in, Evan stared at her. “Shit, Kayla. You told them that? Why?”
“Because they can look into it. Once the trail leads far enough—and we already know that it does—they’ll turn the investigation over to the FBI.” She made a series of perfect pleats in the sheet, the argument with her brother the best relief she’d had all day. She’d been bored out of her skull since she woke up.
“That’s going to bring a load of publicity down on this.”
“Which is exactly what we need. Publicity is going to get people interested in the Whitney Device and get more working machines out there.” She looked away. “I was content to go plugging along with my websites and just working around getting sabotaged at every turn, but they brought this to our doorstep with deadly force. I’m done pussyfooting around.”
“Pussyfooting? Is that your word of choice?” He smiled at her.
She grinned right back. “Yes, yes it is. We have been pussyfooting.”
His expression turned somber once more, the startling transformation revealing that a serious thought had just passed through his head and wiped out everything in its path. “How did you tell them that you came by this info?”
“I told them that a cop came to the house—”
“Jesus, Kayla!”
“Wanna let me finish?” She sighed and tried to adjust her pillow. She couldn’t reach since her hands were bound by wires and tubes. She had a fleeting moment of sympathy for her one-time prisoner. “I told them a cop came to the house, and I answered the door. I recognized that he was fake—I told them he wasn’t a very good fake cop.” Which was only untrue because he was grossly out of district. “And that I unexpectedly drew his gun on him. And I made him tell me why he was there and why we had been arsoned the week before. I made no mention of any of the rest of you in that.”
Evan’s phone rang. Without moving away, he answered it, then began to look alarmed. But the volume was up, probably because his hearing was shot from all the loud power tools he worked with and Kayla heard everything. So she interrupted. “I told them where to find the gun. It will have my prints and the fake cop’s prints on it, unless you guys touched it?”
There was a distant rumble of Reenie’s voice relaying that question, followed by a faint chorus of ‘no’s.
Kayla smiled. “It turns out, this is all about the machine. Who knew?”
39
Hazelton House, Opening Day
It seemed as many people came to see the machine as came to see the plantation itself. Kayla stood to the side and watched the public come to visit. She wore jeans and a T-shirt, but she was the only one.
Reenie was dressed as the mistress of the plantation. Had they opened on their original planned date, she would have sweated her way through the layers of crinolines and fine fabric that bounced in simple harmonic motion as she walked. Well, she sashayed or whatever. It’s apparently what you did when you put on one of those dresses. It was inevitable, Ivy said, and that was just part of the reason Kayla refused.
Also, she couldn’t put on a corset as per doctor’s orders. Thank you, God.
A bullet through your left lung nicking the heart muscle was a good reason not to bind your ribs and reduce your lung capacity. Pain was another good reason, though Kayla was relatively sure she’d feel it from a corset regardless of the bullet hole.
Ivy came by, in house-servant gear—a beautiful but simple gray dress topped by what resembled a fluffy white shower cap. They told her the name of it, but Kayla had forgotten. She didn’t have a head for those kinds of things.
There had been a media onslaught after the shooting. Evan, Ivy, and Reenie had refused all interviews,
leaving that to Kayla and Reggie. Once Kayla was home, Reggie put his people to work lining up TV time slots and interviews. She’d now been quoted in most major news outlets and had been seen on two of the big morning shows. They all came here and sat down for an interview in a room Reenie and Ivy had refurbished plantation-style. They said it lent charm. Kayla said it lent a place for two people to talk in front of a camera setup.
There were some requests for the talk-show circuit, but Reggie handled that. He was in Chicago right now, sleeping off what he referred to as a three show bender. Kayla had watched several of the interviews and he seemed good at it. She didn’t understand half the questions the couch jockeys asked. These people wanted to know about Reggie’s personal life, about his late wife, about Edwin, and how Reggie felt. She preferred the news outlets, where she stated facts and talked about the Whitney Device and how it had been found—none of this ‘What’s your favorite color and will you be manufacturing Whitney Devices in that shade of green?’ Kayla shook her head because it hurt just thinking about it.
“So, can you sell me one of these?”
Though it had been preceded by heavy footsteps, the voice seemingly came out of nowhere and Kayla jumped, feeling the pull deep inside her chest. She looked up to find a beefy man in jeans and an untucked button-down shirt.
“Sorry.” He shoved his hands down into his pockets. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“That’s okay.” Kayla felt each sound form in her mouth; the feeling of talking to strangers had always been a little unnatural to her. But she knew everyone started out as a stranger, and she pushed her way through. “We do have a website. You can order one there.”
Thinking that would be the end of the conversation, she started to turn away, but was startled by more words.
“I just thought it would be nice to own one built by the inventor.” He looked at her more closely. “That’s you, right?”
She nodded, only to recant a moment later. “Well, I just tweaked Eli Whitney’s original design. But since you can’t get Whitney to build you one . . .”
Reggie was already manufacturing them. He’d seen the opportunity when the media blitz hit. They still gave away the schematics for free. They sold build-it-yourself kits, too. But there was a market for plug-in versions and Reggie had invested heavily to get that up and running.
There had been no profit from any of it yet. But, as of 9 a.m. today, they had income from Hazelton House.
The parking lot was full and they had stuffed each of the three first tours to capacity—Ivy, Reenie and Evan each heading in a different direction and rotating through the different buildings. Even Evan was in plantation gear, suspenders and old-timey shoes included.
The man spoke again. “I know your time is valuable, but if you’d be willing to build me one, I’d be honored. And I’d pay whatever you’re asking for the work.” He offered up a shy smile. “I think these things are going to change the game and I get to tell everyone I met the inventor.”
Kayla was taken aback. Suddenly it hit her that she’d become a minor celebrity. What a mess. But since there was nothing she could do about it. She nodded and offered to look into it. Then she added, “Are you waiting on a tour?”
“My wife and kids came for the tour. They want to see about soaps and buggies and that kind of thing. Sheila’s real excited about getting a mint julep at the end.”
Reenie’s idea, Kayla remembered.
“But me, I came for the Whitney Device. They say you found the plans in the hearth? How does that work?”
She wound up showing him the stone. It was carefully set at an angle, revealing the pocket underneath. A reprint of the original Whitney schematic hung on the wall along with Reggie’s slightly altered version that led to Kayla’s breakthrough. In halting sentences, she told the man about the steps they’d taken. “Do you want to see the original Whitney Machine? It’s in the Carriage House.”
It, too, was part of the tour. A nearly complete—nonfunctioning—device, made from the parts and gears she had found in this very spot.
The man asked intelligent questions, obviously a bit of an engineer himself. Kayla happily answered him, the words no longer forming like bricks in her mouth, but tripping happily out without worries about counting sentences.
They talked about the machine and she told him about her struggles with the shadow constant. About cannibalizing the old tractor in the barn to link the device to the generator so that she could actually run things.
When the tour finished up, the man pulled his wife and three kids out of the way and introduced them to Kayla. Though the middle child, a boy, responded politely, he didn’t shake her hand or meet her eyes. And she recognized it.
She didn’t ask the parents. Kayla knew better than that. She’d been talked around most of her life. “Do you have Aspergers?”
“Highly functional autism with asocial disorder.” He didn’t say yes or no. Of course not.
She didn’t hold out her hand for a handshake. “My name’s Kayla. I have Aspergers.”
He nodded, though he still didn’t look at her face, he moved his gaze to her feet and then her knees, his eyes darting all around. He moved even as he stood still, almost undulating in the breeze. “We’ve been watching you on TV. You built the machine.”
“Yes, I did. Do you build machines?” It would get him started, she knew. Though it was a yes/no question, it wouldn’t be answered as such.
“I draw. I paint. Sometimes on the walls. Mom has to tell me which walls I can paint on. She marks them for me with a pencil. She used to mark them with a Sharpie but I can’t erase it for pencils or watercolors, and it bleeds through both acrylic and oil paints.” He kept talking, pausing only when his big sister commented on how talented he was and when his parents asked if she would like to join them for drinks.
So she sat at the table with them, inside the boundaries of the old forcing house, where Reenie and Ivy had set up a café with two mobile carts to serve drinks and cookies.
She listened and she watched as the two kids running the small food service delivered soft drinks and mint juleps. While she sat there, the first tour ended, and the people waiting near the front entrance and on the front lawn were herded in and divided up for the second tour. Ivy smiled and waved as she walked by, clearly busy with the inundation of guests. She didn’t seem to resent Kayla for sitting and chatting while she worked her butt off.
Kayla left a while later with the man’s card in her pocket so she could get back to him about building him a Whitney Device with her own hands.
She had her own work to do.
One month later
Kayla sat at her computer, the desk along the wall sitting just out of the spill of light from the large windows looking out over the front of the plantation.
“It’s Monday. Time to stop working.” Ivy’s voice came from behind her.
Four full weeks of tours and they were finally finding their groove.
She and Ivy had moved to the third floor, their previous digs proving problematic. It seemed impossible to keep people out of their side of the floor when other rooms there were open. They now had a suite of rooms here, and as Ivy liked to point out, great legs from going up and down the stairs all the time. Kayla still preferred the servants’ staircase that led directly to the kitchen.
They’d all learned quickly to rope things off. Lock doors. And even gate the driveway. They took Mondays and Tuesdays off, but spent their first break turning away visitors who drove all the way to the front and even knocked on the closed door, not paying attention to the online info about days and hours.
“You’ve been in bed all morning. What do you care if I work?” Kayla was making updates to the websites. She was crafting a letter to her mailing list.
“Whatcha got there?” Ivy came into view at Kayla’s side, her arms crossed under her breasts, her legs bare in the pajamas of boxers and T-shirt that she always wore.
Kayla smiled up at her. “We just crossed 700,000.”
“Wow.”
They both knew that was just the email list. There had been a burst of interest from all the TV activity and newspaper articles. Though that initial acceleration had tapered off, more kept coming.
When she first came home from the hospital, Kayla searched the plantation and pulled four listening devices in addition to the two Evan had already ripped out. Ivy went with her and spoke into each device just before Kayla yanked it, telling the listeners in no uncertain terms exactly where they could stick it.
There was still a possibility that there were more devices. But the sweep they’d done had been thorough, and certainly nothing remained in the areas where they lived and worked. Kayla still checked for new ones each week, just to be sure that nothing new popped up.
There was one set of footprints out by the slave cabins, and Robert Bell’s body had disappeared. But nothing since then. Kayla was pretty certain efforts had been directed elsewhere.
The internet at the plantation tended to crash for no reason, and Kayla wound up hacking her way around it. When she was on television for an interview, there would be an unusually high number of glitches with the broadcast functions for that station. But the signal always got through somehow.
Ivy broke through her thoughts. “We have to try on dresses today.”
Kayla groaned. The last thing she wanted was to attend a dress fitting.
“We promised.” Ivy reminded her gently.
She knew.
As Reenie’s bridesmaids, they were obligated. Since Kayla couldn’t care less about the dress, Reenie had picked them out herself with help from two sorority sisters, but Kayla and Ivy had to get tailored; there was no way around that.
Ivy changed the topic to a better one. “Are you sending out adjustments again?”
Kayla nodded. She had a plan and was already on recalibration number two. Out of seven.
