It reminded Cade of artifacts he’d found in the mining town. Lanterns softly orange with age, their glass long smashed and oil drained away. Picks and tweezers . . . once, he’d found an iron stem sticking out of the ground.
When he dug it out, he discovered it belonged to a frying pan. It felt almost soft with rust, like it might disappear entirely if he was too rough with it. But after a brisk rubdown with sand and walnut shells, it was solid underneath. Blackened all over. Weighty and good.
However long it had sat abandoned, it was brand-new to Cade. Better than his parents’ griddle for a lot of things, it became one of his treasures. Even now, it hung in his cave. Probably needing a new scrub, Cade realized. Which in turn, made him realize he didn’t know how long he’d been away.
That pang hooked in his chest again, and he jerked himself out of the thoughts before they consumed him.
“Hey there, sailor,” Dara said. Her smile was curious now, softer. It gentled her gaze. “What are you thinking about?”
Cade watched her full lips form the sounds, then turned his attention to the trees in the distance. The deceptive trees, not very deep, very full of trash. Plastic bags and shattered glass; what a terrible place. Dragging his heels in the dirt, he slowed to a stop. “I know everything about my home. I’m the only one. Everyone else is gone.”
Slowing herself, Dara twisted the chains. Still in motion, her swing gyrated toward his. Her knees bumped his. Their ankles tangled. She had this talent for making him look. It was like she wanted him to fall into her eyes.
“Tell me something.” She grabbed his swing, anchoring them together. “Then you won’t be alone.”
Alone.
She didn’t realize how big that was. How true. And rather than climb back into the closet with a potted plant, Cade shoved those feelings aside. Today was a good day. Bacon for breakfast again and no tests. The prettiest girl at his back door with cookies. In his bathroom, wearing steam and touching his face . . . good day. It was a good day.
Seizing on his best, favorite thing, he said, “Honey doesn’t come in plastic bears. It comes from beehives. Honeycomb.”
“Pretty sure everybody knows that,” Dara said, not unkindly.
“But you don’t know how to find a hive in the wild, do you?”
“I don’t. Fair enough. Proceed.”
Cade drew a meandering path in the air. It was supposed to be a bee, which he explained as he locked their ankles together. “Worker bee, starving. Flying everywhere to find nectar and pollen.”
“Is he busy?” Dara asked with a crooked smile.
“Very,” Cade replied, ignoring her joke. “Now, they don’t fly in straight lines. If you followed him all day, you might end up miles from home and starving. So you only follow him for a while. Then you . . .”
He clapped his hands together. Completely unexpected and wonderful, her squeak delighted him.
“Messing with me, nice.” Dara wrinkled her nose in disdain. “Very funny.”
“Not funny, not done. Listen. You follow him, then you catch him. Gently, you’ll ruin him if he stings you. Now, if he was flying east, you walk west. Vice versa. North, south. Anyway, walk at least a hundred steps, two hundred is better, in the opposite direction. Then let him go and follow.”
“I’m not falling for that again.”
Cade leaned toward her, hooking his knee behind hers, catching the chain of her swing in one hand. Pulling her closer, his brow brushed hers. Their noses nearly touched. “You’ve never heard of triangulation? I guess I really am alone.”
Caught on a hitched breath, Dara didn’t move away. Instead, she knit her brows and glanced down. Like there was very important information printed on the knees of her jeans. But really, she was thinking about what he’d said, making it make sense. After a second, she raised her head. Now her mouth rounded, her eyes, too. There was a new light on her, and she laughed—surprised, not amused.
“That’s really how you find a beehive?”
Cade raised his finger again. This time, he trailed it through the air in a gentle spiral, and touched it to her hand. As if the bee had landed there, cradled between them. It was their bee. Their secret. She smelled like sugar and the wind and shaving cream.
Voice suddenly warm as his blood, Cade raised his head and said, “It really is.”
And with that, he let his imaginary bee fly home.
The second time Dr. O’Toole called the police department, he was incredibly apologetic.
“I know you must be getting a lot of calls about this case,” he said. “And it’s entirely possible you’ve already investigated this lead and discarded it. I didn’t expect anyone to call me back . . .”
Reaching for a pencil, Deputy Krause asked, “What was your name again?”
“Dr. Jupiter O’Toole, PhD, not MD.”
What kind of name was that? The deputy scribbled it down, then leaned back in her chair. She trained her gaze on the front windows. Any minute, she expected Deputy Bates to come back in with a cardboard box full of Chinese takeout. The taste of chicken fried rice taunted her—so close, but still an eternity to wait.
Distracted by the potential of lunch, Deputy Krause said, “PhD not MD, all right. Did you have a tip you wanted to report, sir?”
Dr. O’Toole’s voice was soft, dusty like powder. It soothed, belying his distress. “Yes. I called previously, because I’m an epidemiologist at Case Western Reserve. Eighteen years ago, I was working with Dr. Liza Walsh on the World’s Plagues project.”
“Mm hmm.”
“We were mapping every outbreak from 1600 to the present day. With that data, we planned to build a model that would predict the next outbreak before it happened. I specialize in etiology, she specialized in exposure assessment, you see, and . . .”
Chicken fried rice, so far away, the deputy thought. Out loud, mildly, she said, “This is what you told us when you called before?”
“Yes.” There was a pause. Papers shuffled. Then Dr. O’Toole said, “But since I called, I have new information. I checked my records. Dr. Walsh and her husband had Jonathan in the summer of 1997. They disappeared, spring of ’99.”
“Is there a missing persons report?”
“Well, no,” Dr. O’Toole said. “I mean, yes, the university reported her missing. But when the police went to their house, it was empty. Nothing left behind. There was no family that I’m aware of, and the police said people were entitled to move without leaving a forwarding address if they wanted to. So nothing came of it.”
Light flooded the office, a reflection of a car passing by. The deputy sat up a little straighter. But the door didn’t open. Silently, she cursed Bates and asked the doctor, “And what makes you think this is related to our Doe, sir? The names aren’t the same.”
“Well, I heard on the news that the first question he asked when he was evacuated from the forest was ‘how many people are left?’ Which piqued my curiosity. And the drawing looked a bit like Dr. Walsh. Since I called last, I double-checked my records, and the dates line up. But mostly . . .”
The deputy waited for him to fill in his own silence. She gave up on watching for lunch, and hunched over her notepad. Scribbling in quick details about the call, she hummed. To remind him that she was listening. To get him to quit taking up her time.
Finally, Dr. O’Toole said, “Found it. I’ve been watching the news coverage, and I was certain when I saw the picture of the boy. I’ve got pictures from his first birthday party. If you compare them, you see the resemblance.
“That’s why I called back, I had more to offer than I did before. I do truly believe Jonathan Walsh and John Doe are the same person. Could I . . . would it be possible for me to send the photos to you? I had my wife scan them.”
“Sure,” Deputy Krause said. “Let me give you the email address.”
Then she proceeded to give him Deputy Johnson’s address, because he was lead on the case, second to the sheriff. He could go through it when his shift sta
rted at eleven.
Thanking Dr. O’Toole, Deputy Krause rolled her chair back and hung up the phone. Dropping the message on the department assistant’s desk, she headed outside. It wouldn’t make the food get there any faster, but she went to stretch on the front walk just in case.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
THIRTY-TWO
The kitchen smelled like pizza when Dara let herself in.
Oil stained the corner of a delivery box, proof that it was the best kind of all: greasy and halfway to cold. Locking up, Dara pushed her hood down and helped herself to the last two slices of pepperoni.
Groaning in pleasure, she slumped against the fridge. With another bite, she slid down and savored it. She had no idea how hungry she was until the first taste of mozzarella and sauce. The perfection of grease and sweet filled her mouth and she sighed again.
“Glad that’s you I heard,” Sheriff Porter said. He brushed her away from the fridge. Pulling open the stainless steel door, he searched the drawers inside systematically. “I have handcuffs and I’m not afraid to use them.”
“Ha,” Dara said.
Bottles rattled, and Sheriff Porter finally emerged with a beer. Closing the fridge door, he offered the bottle to his daughter. She lit up, and he smiled. Watching her do the counter trick pretty much always made his day.
She rested the fluted edge of the cap against the edge of the counter. Then she gave the cap a thump. It flipped into the air as the bottle wheezed a steamy breath.
“Don’t forget to tip your bartender,” she said, smiling like a loon.
It was a dumb, simple thing. Something he’d taught her when she was barely old enough to see the top of the counter. When she was little, it used to earn her quarters from her friends’ parents during summer barbecues. Now it was just a leftover, something they alone shared.
Reclaiming his bottle, Sheriff Porter took a thoughtful sip as Dara picked up her pizza again. “So how’s Sofia?”
Dara made a face like she might hedge. But she told the truth anyway, no point in lying about it. “I went and saw Cade, actually.”
“Huh.”
“Daddy,” she said, resigned to her exasperation now.
The sheriff shared that exasperation, and whinged back at her. “Daraaaa.”
That teased another smile from her. Polishing off her appetizer, Dara took her turn and brushed her father away from the fridge. This time, she rummaged. Leftover chicken, lunchmeat . . . in her heart, she knew she was looking for more pizza. Or, irrationally, something hot and delicious that she wouldn’t have to make herself.
“He’s doing better,” she said. “And you’ll like this, he shaved.”
Sheriff Porter nodded. “I do like that.”
“He didn’t cut his hair.”
“I like that less,” Sheriff Porter said, amused. “So you were at Kelly’s all afternoon with him?”
Another hedge. Then Dara emerged with a carton of eggs and a bottle of hot sauce. “We snuck down to Clayton Park.”
Though he wasn’t wearing his uniform, the work version of Dara’s dad suddenly appeared. It showed in the angle of his gaze. That, and a particular tightness swept over him. It was a shield, the one he put on before the badge. The attitude that kept most people from giving him a hard time. “Why’d you have to sneak? Were there reporters out there?”
“A couple out front,” Dara admitted. “But Mr. Anderson had a hoodie that fit Cade, and we just went out the back. Nobody saw us.”
“Good. I wish somebody’d drive a truck up on their front lawn a couple nights in a row.”
Dara snorted. “Recursive story is recursive.”
When Sheriff Porter looked over, his baffled expression was almost comical. Dara laughed under her breath and greased her pan. There was no point in explaining memes to her dad. By the time he caught on to the intricacies, they were long over.
Soon, the satisfying crack and sizzle of eggs filled the kitchen. The pizza scent faded, replaced by breakfast at night. One of the best scents in the world, Dara thought.
Then she wondered if Cade had ever tried it. If he could even conceive of it. Pretty sure he didn’t have a toaster in the middle of nowhere. Or bacon, or OJ—citrus definitely didn’t grow in the wilds of Kentucky.
“What would it be like if you’d never had orange juice?” Dara mused aloud.
“Less heartburn,” Sheriff Porter quipped. Considering the question, he added, “I don’t know. That’s like asking, what if you never had food from Ethiopia? I never have, but I expect I don’t know what I’m missing.”
Scraping her pan, Dara said, “I couldn’t do it. Live in the forest. Even if I could give up my phone, and the internet, I mean . . . how do you even survive? I’d die without AC in the summer.”
Sheriff Porter laughed. Loudly, and long. “No you wouldn’t. I didn’t have it growing up. My mother still had an outhouse until she was ten or eleven.”
“Are you serious?”
“You have no idea.” Sheriff Porter finished his beer and tossed the bottle in the recycling. “Now, sugar, let me ask you something. And I don’t want you to get bristly on me. It’s just a question.”
Being warned not to bristle put Dara on instant alert. She kept her attention on the pan, but shrugged. The gesture told him to go ahead, ask away—but it didn’t make promises. She’d bristle if she wanted to.
“Has he said anything to you? Anything that could help me help him?”
Dara sighed. Taking her pan from the fire, she turned to him. “You know what? I honestly don’t know that he needs help. He’s healing. He’s smart. Why can’t he just go home?”
“I’d take him myself if I knew where that was.”
“Um, and you know. He told you where he lived.” She shrugged. “I’ll work on visualizing no AC. Why don’t you try imagining a world outside your categories and boxes?”
“And there’s not a single thing come out of that boy’s mouth to make you doubt?”
Dara hesitated. She carefully and precisely maneuvered her food from the pan to her plate with the spatula. It was something to concentrate on until she could sort out her thoughts. Or her feelings.
Finally, she dumped the pan in the sink and turned to lean against the counter. “I don’t doubt him, no. There’s a lot I don’t know, but that doesn’t mean the rest isn’t true.”
“Give me something. Anything. Help me believe him.”
Cradling her plate, she picked at the eggs. It’s not that she knew so much. It’s that she didn’t necessarily trust her father with the things she knew. And that, more than anything, felt like crap. He was her father. This was her family. Ignoring the strange, liquid beating of her heart, she hung on a moment of silence.
Then, she said, “He knows a lot about colds. Not in a home remedy way. He sounds like a doctor or something. A scientist, when he talks about them. Calls it rhinovirus. Did you know people only get them from other people?”
Drawling slowly, Sheriff Porter said, “As a matter of fact, I did not.”
“You can’t get it from a cat or a dog . . .” Dara trailed off. What if she’d said too much? She felt both better and worse for telling Sheriff Porter that little bit. And yet, it was like she couldn’t stop herself. Starting for the hallway, she turned back and added, “But maybe if you shared a spoon with a rabbit. Possibly.”
Sheriff Porter watched his daughter dart from sight. He didn’t know what to do with this little dab of information, but it felt important. He filed it mentally, something to think about in the shower and on the drive to work. Anywhere, everywhere, until inspiration hit him. Until it suddenly made sense.
That’s how crimes got solved; that’s how he would figure out who this Primitive Boy really was.
The next day, Cade couldn’t stop looking at the pencil-sketched innards of a human chest.
Trailing a
finger along the pericardium, Cade rested his brow against the poster. He’d never seen these labels before, but they were familiar. Written in the kind of Latin his mother spoke, her secret language. No matter how often he grasped at a memory of her face, it was her voice that surfaced.
She wouldn’t want him to be here. Or maybe she would have. Far away from the place where she raised him, he saw her inconsistencies more clearly. Vaccines that were both necessary and useless. Antibiotics—dangerous and essential. Even people, the whole world: dead and not dead. Beautiful and terrifying.
It used to make sense to Cade. Mom said it, it was true.
Roasting hot, Cade returned to the paper-covered table. The big, tinted windows let in too much light, not soothing at all. And they blasted the shadows away. Everything was antiseptic white and smelled like chemicals. Mom’s paradoxes aside, Cade was pretty sure he hated hospitals and clinics all on his own.
Thankfully, someone knocked on the door. Dr. Rice came in a moment later, looking nothing like the doctors in the hospital. No white lab coat. No metal dangling from his neck. He wore a T-shirt that said Ask Me About My Zombie T-Shirt, though it was mostly hidden under a plaid button-down.
“Hey there, Cade, just finished looking at your labs from the hospital,” Dr. Rice said. He flicked through a folder, then set it aside. “Everything’s looking good, how are you feeling?”
Cade shrugged. “Fine.”
“Can I take a look at your chest and your foot?”
Another shrug. Cade watched him pump an astringent gel into his palm, then scrub it over his hands. The smell burned off quickly, but it stung Cade’s eyes until it did. Powder dusted in the air with a new pair of gloves. So many layers and layers, Cade thought. Holding himself very still, he let the doctor peel off the bandage on his chest.
Humming, Dr. Rice touched the edges of the wound gently. “I hear you won this fight.”
“I think it was a tie,” Cade said.
Warmth filled Dr. Rice’s laugh as he moved on to the bandage on Cade’s foot. Even through the gloves, his touch was warm. “No signs of infection, healing up nicely. We’re going to want to get you some physical therapy for that shoulder but I think you’ll live.”
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