Confirmation

by Barna William Donovan

  When Eunice fixed the cop with an indignant, withering stare, Ballantine nearly laughed. This was a smart woman, well aware of the sort of skeptical traps Carpenter was trying to guide her into.

  “Furthermore,” Eunice said, “when I saw the first lights outside, I put the TV on mute. I want to know exactly what this is all about. I tried to listen to anything out there. Other than the lights, I could see nothing else and hear nothing else.”

  “All right, I understand,” Carpenter said, definitely placating her now. “But let me ask you another question. You said that you wanted to talk to Mr. Ballantine and his group because what you saw was unusual even by the standards of…well, all the other strange things people have claimed to have seen in the area. How do you mean?”

  “Chief,” Eunice said with a deliberate emphasis in her voice; more than a bit condescending, in fact, Rick thought. “I saw bright, blue-white rays of light coming through the trees. They looked like spotlights shining out of the sky. I’ve never heard of anything else like that around here. These weren’t lights that blinked mysteriously in the distance or flickered over the horizon or zigged this way when they should have zagged that way.” She paused now, looking around the room, as if trying to make eye contact with everyone. “When was the last time anyone ever said anything like that around here?”

  That, actually, was a very good question, Rick thought. He and the group would need to look for others who might have seen anything like the intense aerial beams Eunice was describing.

  “What can do that?” she asked. “What kinds of aircraft fly in the sky and shine such powerful lights and make no noise? And come out of nowhere and disappear in seconds?”

  “And now you think this has a connection to the stone globe?” Cornelia asked.

  Eunice arched a pencil-thin eyebrow as she looked at her. “It does seem like there are two unexplained mysteries here now. I am wondering about a connection.”

  “Well,” Chief Carpenter said, “it does seem like it. Although let me just ask you something about this stone business.”

  “Yes?”

  “You said there were no sounds coming from the air, from the lights. And you heard nothing from the road? From the ground? Anything that might have sounded like trucks or heavy machinery?”

  Eunice shook her head emphatically. “No, I did not.”

  She was right, Rick thought. As far as her claim about two mysteries was concerned at least. There was no easy way of explaining either the lights or the stone. If they took her words about the lights at their face value, if she indeed saw what she said she saw, it was difficult, if not impossible, to account for how multiple beams of brilliant light just suddenly appeared in the middle of the night. But the globe was even more difficult to wrap one’s mind around. It was an enigma that wasn’t about to let one take the easy way out. There was no way of writing a fifteen-ton monolith off as a hallucination, as misidentification, or the trick of some freakish atmospheric condition.

  “Mrs. Stephens,” Carpenter said at length. “I’m curious as to why you did not want to be identified by Mr. Ballantine’s program.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, you do have quite an astounding story to tell.”

  “Astounding,” Eunice slowly, as if feeling the weight of the word. “I’ve told an astounding story publicly before,” she added, then paused.

  The silence hung in the air.

  Rick wished that at least one of their cameras could be rolling right now.

  “It’s the reason,” Eunice went on after drawing out a long, dramatic beat, “I moved up here after Stanley’s—my husbands’—death. As I said, I was a doctor before retiring. I, however, had the misfortune at one point of seeing an unidentified flying object hover over, then quietly drift away from, Leadbetter Beach. That’s by Santa Barbara.” She paused, then allowed herself a tight, rueful little smile. “Then after I agreed to be interviewed about it by a local TV station, the harassment started. It was a group called the Rational Investigations of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. They wrote article after article on their blog about how a doctor could give credence to talk of green men and alien invaders. They said I was mentally unstable and shouldn’t be allowed to practice medicine. Probably no abortion doctor had ever been harassed and threatened by any group of evangelical nuts as viciously as I was.”

  As Eunice spoke, Rick noticed a strange light in Knight’s eyes. Several times he nodded—at first ever so slightly, then more and more vigorously—as the woman’s story unfolded. “Unbelievable,” he said emphatically.

  “Oh, believe it, Dr. Knight,” Eunice replied. “Then they sent their letters and emails to my patients, telling them that their lives were in danger every time they walked into my office. They hounded me out of my practice. I had enough money at that point so I could afford to close my office and retire. I would have liked to have been able to work a few more years…but it just wasn’t worth putting up with this anymore.”

  “Trust me,” Knight spoke again, “I’ve been an associate professor for over twenty years, Eunice. I tried for a promotion to full professor time and time again. No luck. All because I once wrote that phenomena may exist that we simply do not have a measurement device for, the technology to quantify. And mind you, once I even published a paper on the mythology of the Loch Ness monster, where I very clearly wrote that there is not one iota of evidence to suggest—by any stretch of the imagination—that the monster exists or ever existed.”

  Eunice chuckled bitterly. “Doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, you do have everything I can tell you about the lights I saw. You know, I didn’t move up here, by the way, because of all the new agers and paranormal buffs. Stanley and I had bought this house three years before his death. But, nevertheless, please understand that I really don’t want any more public attention when it comes to unexplained mysteries.”

  “Sure,” Knight told her, that odd, elated look of joy at having found a kindred spirit, Rick thought, beaming off his face.

  5.

  “I think Jerry will forgive you for wrecking the SUV if we just stay on this story,” Knight said and pocketed his cell phone, all the while slapping Rick on the back. “Another round for me and my friends here,” he then told the bartender with a grin.

  “No problem, Doc,” the girl behind the bar confirmed.

  Rick was surprised by how quickly the particulars of their group had gotten around the Mountaintop Vista Hotel. He was also amused by the way the spirits of the two people the most ambivalent about their roles on Confirmation had risen throughout the day. Perhaps Cornelia was starting to sense the emergence of a real news story around this globe, he guessed. And Knight might have seen the possibility of getting more money out of Jerry. Until now, Rick was certain he was the most appreciative of the show among the three senior members of the cast. He, unlike Knight, had no best-selling books to his name, so he considered his payday adequate. Moreover, Bigfoot sightings, UFO reports, and mystery globes beat having to deal with the L.A.P.D.’s Internal Affairs division as he had done in his previous life.

  “Whoa!” he said. “It’s been a long day for a third round of whiskeys….”

  “Come on!” Knight said with that giddy tone that had been getting more and more ebullient throughout the day. “Don’t embarrass yourself by letting the old man drink you under the table.”

  The pretty brunette bartender, a local college coed, Rick would have guessed, slid the shot of JB in front of him and winked.

  “If you put it that way,” Rick said with a mock sour expression as Knight was handed his own drink.

  “We might as well get smashed and have a good time,” Cornelia said, and turned off her iPad. As she sat next to Rick at the Happy Hour Tavern’s bar, she had snuck a glance at the latest updates on the San Diego terrorist situation. Since she said nothing about
the story, Rick assumed there were no new developments. “We’re not getting arrested, and this stone globe thing just might make Confirmation a hit.”

  As Cornelia glanced at Rick and smiled, holding eye-contact for a drawn-out beat, Rick suddenly realized that there was no amount of alcohol he could drink that would make him feel as warm as that look in her eye.

  “That,” Knight said, and raised his shot of whiskey to Rick and Cornelia, “is exactly what Jerry said. So pick up your drinks, kids, and let’s start acting like grownups. You can sip if you want, but a toast is in order.” He then proceeded to drain the shot glass in one swift swig.

  Cornelia winced.

  “To Jerry, I suppose,” Rick said, and tipped his glass toward Cornelia and Dan.

  “He can be a pain in the ass, but he is perceptive little prick,” said Knight.

  Despite whatever anyone might ever say about Jerry Peretti, he was, Rick had been told, an unusually decisive producer—by Hollywood standards, at least, where years usually passed between a project’s conceptualization and its actual filming—but he was also notoriously tight-fisted. Jerry had produced three ultra-low-budget films about, respectively, giant time-traveling spiders, a beautiful female FBI agent partnered with a T-rex dinosaur to solve a string of serial killings, and a vampire who gets elected president of the United States, for the SyFy network. When paranormal-investigation reality shows hit the ratings stratosphere, however, Jerry was, as usual, fast to jump on the bandwagon. Rick was lucky, he supposed, that his agent, Wilt Kamen, played poker with Jerry every Tuesday night at the producer’s house in Malibu. It had been over three years since Rick saved Wilt’s life from the crossfire during a bank robbery in Sherman Oaks. It had also been over a year since the CBS network canceled Rick’s first reality series, Hollywood Justice, after ten episodes. Wilt Kamen, still grateful for Rick’s act of off-duty heroism, set on repaying the favor by establishing him as a “real life action hero,” had recommended Rick for the Confirmation team when Jerry Peretti’s paranormal brainchild was conceived during a five-hour poker-and beer-bender.

  “Of course,” Knight said as he winked at the bartender and cast a glance at his shot glass, “as we all know, Jerry, he’s a cheap little bastard, too. But, since he says—and I quote—’I’m sensing a thirteen-episode commitment from one of the cable networks, so I won’t deduct the price of the totaled SUV from Rick’s salary’—we stay right here and see where this whole stone ball situation is going to go.”

  “To Jerry’s benevolence. My salary’s very important to my ex-wife and her lawyer,” Rick said, and drained his whiskey while Knight was getting a refill.

  Cornelia merely toyed with the shot glass in front of her. “But what if it goes nowhere?”

  “Good point,” Rick replied. “But think about this: where do you think our original investigation of the mysterious portal to otherworldly dimensions under Mount Shasta was bound to go?”

  There was a sly, cynical hint of a smile somewhere in the right corner of Cornelia’s mouth now.

  “We would’ve talked to locals,” Rick continued. “Gotten some interviews with wide-eyed, serious-looking people talking in a serious-sounding whisper. We get the night vision gear and wander around the woods at night….” He paused and looked at Knight. “We have a CGI budget for this thing, right?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “OK,” said Rick as Cornelia licked the whiskey in her glass. “So our special-effects wiz-kid, Ian, and some college tech-geek Jerry’s going to screw out of a payday will go and make up some special-effects footage of what the mysterious subterranean dimension’s supposed to look like, based on all the reliable and unimpeachable eyewitness testimony.”

  “You know, you do need to keep a degree of an open mind when you investigate the unexplained,” said Knight, with a tone that was both somewhat serious and ironically self-mocking as his glass was refilled

  “I stand corrected,” said Rick. “But it doesn’t much matter what we find or don’t find over the next few days here. We just keep shooting footage, talk to people, and then Ian will turn it into a coherent narrative.”

  “I just wish someone else would have seen something,” Cornelia said at length after sipping some more whiskey. “Some of those lights Eunice Stevens talked about.”

  After the Stevens interview, Tony, Matt, Lacy, and Melinda had accompanied a pair of squad cars to check the cameras at three local toll booths. The digital recordings, the Confirmation team had been told, would be sent to police headquarters. They wanted to see if the police chief’s hoax theory had any credibility. Was there any evidence at all suggesting that some mysterious party of hoaxers had transported that globe through the area and up to Scenic Lane? But just as Rick suspected, there was no sign of any vehicles sneaking a gargantuan globe into Mount Shasta City.

  Rather than tagging along with the police for the rest of the day, Rick, Knight, Cornelia, and Ian chose to do some of their own canvasing of locations that a truck of any sort carrying an enormous stone globe might have passed by. They had found no one claiming to have seen anything out of the ordinary.

  “Goddamn, this stuff tastes like shit,” Cornelia exclaimed after downing her last swallow of whiskey, just as Rick noticed the incoming text message alarm of his phone blang to life.

  “Come on!” he said, fishing his phone out of his jeans’ pocket. “You gotta act your part. Doesn’t your press release say you’re the tough, kickass action girl of the show? You’re supposed to be able to drink any man under the table.”

  “Are you trying to intoxicate me so you can take liberties, Mr. Ballantine?” Cornelia asked, and even surprised Rick with a little wink.

  The heat spreading through the middle of his body reminded Rick of something he hadn’t felt since before he got married.

  “The men wearing the uniform of the Los Angeles Police Department have unimpeachable integrity, ma’am,” Rick said, and winked back.

  “Yeah, and do you see any uniforms?” Knight quickly exclaimed with a leering chuckle.

  Glancing at his phone’s display, Rick saw that the text was from Lacy Anderson.

  “Well, on the show they can have me drinking iced tea, and we’ll pretend it’s whiskey or bourbon or something,” Cornelia said. “Who is that?”

  “Lacy. She says we should meet the rest of the team at the Indie Voices bookstore. Right now. It’s very important, she says.”

  “I think that’s two blocks from here,” Knight said. “What’s going on?”

  6.

  “A chance for us to get our names in the paper. How’s that for raising our profile?”

  Knight chuckled. “Nice going. Very nice. What’s happening?”

  Lacy kept glancing over her shoulder as they walked toward the inner recesses of the large and very tightly shelved bookstore. “Remember that crowd of people from the globe this morning? It looks like they got word to the local newspaper. A reporter’s nosing around.”

  “Jerry will love this,” Cornelia said. “Let’s get us written up in the local paper. Start spreading the word about Confirmation.”

  “So what’s the reporter doing here?” Rick asked. He was trying his best to get a sense for what the store specialized in. Aside from the general genre fiction and nonfiction sections, Indie Voices, not surprisingly for Mount Shasta City, was well-packed with occult, paranormal, and new age literature.

  “Checking out a discussion group,” said Lacy. “Some locals usually hold a book club meeting in here. Mainly talking to Mount Shasta authors. Except for tonight. Tonight’s all about the globe.”

  “And what do you think those locals’ll have to say about us?” Knight asked. “Any of ‘em think we set this whole thing up?”

  Lacy gave him a pointed look over her shoulder, then a sly grin. “Are you kidding? They think we’re rock stars.”

  The group found
Matt, Tony, Melinda, and Ian in a sort of meeting space in the back of the store. The space, Rick thought, looked somewhat like a college dormitory lounge from the seventies. Situated in front of a fireplace, the clearing amidst the bookshelves had a thick blue-green shag carpet on the floor, and most of its occupants sat on a mismatched collection of chairs, a futon, three beanbag chairs, a ratty recliner, some uncomfortable-looking ottomans, and a wooden bench. Five people sat on the floor.

  When Rick and the team joined the gathering, they were glad to see that Matt, Tony, and Melinda were recording a vigorous exchange among the locals.

  “…We can’t fall into the same old trap!” Rick noticed a woman taking her turn in the discussion when he and his partners situated themselves on the periphery of the meeting. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” she said. About fifty-years-old, the woman was wearing an ankle-length, hippieish linen skirt and a sweater with very bright—mainly orange, red, and green-based—Native American designs. She made him think of a junior-high-school art teacher. “We can’t react to this phenomenon with fear. I see all the long faces here, all the worry…you know, all the stress already, and I’m like, ‘what are we automatically afraid of?’ Why are we even having a discussion of whether or not this object’s something we have to worry about?”

  “Because,” a man called out from the bench, “none of us’ve ever seen anything like that thing.” He paused as abruptly as he’d first spoken, his eyes sweeping the crowd.

  Rick wondered whether the man was gauging the crowd to see how many potential allies sat nearby. There appeared to be a very strong, fundamental difference of opinions about to surface between this man and the woman with the bright sweater. The man appeared to be somewhere in his late fifties, with a headful of perfectly white hair. With his sturdy-looking face and clear, resolute intonations, he resembled either a retired businessman, Rick pondered, or a career politician on vacation. Although dressed casually in khakis and a bright purple denim shirt, Rick thought the man’s outfit looked high-quality, expensive. He appeared to be a man of means bedecked in top-shelf designer wear well-cut to look rustic and casual.