by Steven Gould
The cover identity was actually old. Davy and Millie had been “growing” it ever since Cent was born. The family “Ross” annually paid state and federal income tax, social security, and capital gains tax from very healthy investments, filed returns, and purchased items by check and bank card every so often in the city of Cleveland, Ohio.
Millie had wanted the identity and funds for Cent’s college years. Davy wanted it as a form of life insurance, in case anything ever happened to Millie or Davy, so Cent would have something, someplace to go to, someone to be.
But Cleveland was not the place they decided on.
Millie showed him her choice on the map. “I like this town. Only one high school so there won’t be a poor school and a rich school. Generally conservative but that’s offset a bit by good cultural and ethnic diversity. They have a moderate tax base for the school. Some crime, but well below big-city rates and, best of all, the local police aren’t jack-booted thugs—the entire department has only ten deputies.”
Davy asked, “What other law enforcement?”
Millie said, “There’s a highway patrol unit in the county and, of course, on the rez there’s the Navajo Nation Police. Also the Bureau of Indian Affairs Police, federal marshals, and some FBI, but the nearest FBI field office is two hundred miles away, in the state capital.”
“Military?”
“There might be a DIA unit at one of the Air Force bases but that’s halfway across the state.”
“Okay,” said Davy. “I’ll go check it out.”
His nearest jump site was in Albuquerque. He joined a gambling junket heading across to Las Vegas, and left the tour bus on the interstate as it cruised past the exit.
He walked up the state road until he was well past the ramps and held out an arm, three twenties in his hand. He offered the money to the first person who stopped, in exchange for driving him the last thirty miles into town.
The man was going farther than New Prospect, but it was only a matter of an extra ten minutes for him to divert through town instead of sticking to the bypass. He dropped Davy where the road crossed Main near the hospital, thanked him for the “gas money,” and drove on.
Davy bought the local newspaper at an Allsup’s convenience store and jumped back to the Yukon to read it.
The lead story was about a hoped-for improvement in the local economy based on higher natural gas prices and new wells in the area. The high school football team finished six and six for the season. A local man was arrested for termiting homes.
Davy imagined a man introducing pale heaps of multi-legged insects into soft wood floors and walls, but further down the column, the reporter explained that termiting was the process of stealing fixtures, copper tubing, and copper wire from houses sitting empty.
For budget reasons, the town Christmas decorations were going up a week later than usual, and the school district was settling out of court in an ongoing lawsuit involving a false arrest.
Davy turned to the classifieds, which took up most of the rest of the paper. There were a lot of homes for sale, also cars, tractors, mowers, bicycles, kitchen appliances, and services of all kinds. The “Wanted to Buy” section was much smaller.
The real estate agents’ paid ads, with head shots of the agents, ran down the edge of the classifieds. Davy cringed when the first agent, a dark brunette with her hair pulled tightly back in a severe bun, reminded him of Hyacinth Pope, the woman instrumental in imprisoning him on Martha’s Vineyard.
It wasn’t her, of course. This woman’s apparent age was what Hyacinth’s had been sixteen years before, and Hyacinth had spent that period in prison. He was willing to bet that Hyacinth didn’t look the same, now.
Nevertheless he moved his thumb down the page and picked another woman Realtor whose hair was, to put it kindly, as far from dark, tight, and severe as possible.
He jumped to New Prospect’s Main Street and walked east until he came to the Dunbar, an old hotel, newly renovated to a bed and breakfast.
They had a vacancy and he registered using the new ID (David Ross) and called Ms. Meriwether from his room.
“It’s ‘Mrs.’ Martha also works,” she told him on the phone. “Are you trying to sell a house?” She sounded unenthusiastic.
“Buying. We’re relocating here in early January.”
Cent had wanted to start school immediately. Davy had suggested the following school year, in the fall, “moving” in the summer. Cent hadn’t bought it, but Millie talked her into the two-month delay. Davy still felt like he had lost the fight.
Mrs. Meriwether sounded surprised. “Oh! Right.” She paused for a second. Davy could swear she was holding the phone away from her and taking deep breaths. When she spoke again she sounded suspiciously casual.
“What are you looking for?”
“Something close to the high school. Walking distance.”
“Bedrooms?”
“Yes. Uh, bathrooms, too.”
She laughed. “You’re a riot. How many of each?”
He blushed. “At least two of each.” He didn’t really care. He had no intention whatsoever of sleeping in that house. Why, people could probably drive right up to it!
“And if I had something with more rooms? Would you look at that?”
“Certainly.” Davy remembered the guy who’d been arrested for selling off the fixtures in empty homes. “As long as they haven’t been ‘termited.’”
“Of course not, Mr. Ross. I don’t handle those kind of homes. When will you be in town?”
He glanced out the window. The street was darkening. He was one time zone east of the cabin, which put local time just after four in the afternoon. “I’m here now, but I was thinking about tomorrow morning, if that works.”
“Certainly! Where are you staying?”
“The Dunbar Bed and Breakfast.”
“Isn’t that the cutest place! I can pick you up there and show you a few places and start you on the paperwork.”
Paperwork? “What time?”
“Any time after 8:30.”
“That works for me.”
He returned to New Prospect the next morning and met the Realtor in the Dunbar’s breakfast parlor. Her hair was as blonde and bouffant as her picture had advertised, like Dolly Parton in the eighties.
The paperwork turned out to be a credit application. He pushed it back across the table to Mrs. Meriwether without touching pen to it.
“Did you already arrange financing? I’m not one to brag, but I’ve gotten some awfully good deals, requiring very little down payment.”
“We’ll be paying cash,” Davy said.
Mrs. Meriwether tried to say, “Oh,” but her mouth just made the shape, not the sound.
Davy gestured to the waitress, pointing at Mrs. Meriwether’s cup. “More coffee, please?”
By the time the waitress had refilled their cups, Mrs. Meriwether had recovered. “So you must’ve had good equity in your previous home.”
Davy made a neutral, “Um.”
“I’m sure we can find you some excellent candidates! Where will you be working? Do we need to think about that for your location? Not that anything in town is more than fifteen minutes away.”
“Just close to the school. We’re self-employed.”
She raised her eyebrows and he felt compelled to add, “Consultants. We work with NGOs dealing with emergency relief efforts around the world.”
Mrs. Meriwether nodded. “My church does some stuff in Africa.”
“Oh? Where?”
“Africa.”
Davy winced. Second largest continent. Over a billion people. Fifty-six countries. You could overlay all of the U.S., China, India, and Europe on Africa’s landmass.
“Oh—Africa.”
He’d promised Millie he wouldn’t buy the first house he looked at or reject them all as unsuitable because of his “paranoid security concerns,” so he stuck it out through six different showings, then asked to be taken back to the second one they’d seen,
on Thunderbird Road, ten minutes’ walk to the school, either through the woods, or along the road.
He picked that one because of its seclusion, because of its proximity to the high school, and because of his “paranoid security concerns.”
While trees screened the house from the surrounding lots even in the winter, they weren’t so close to the building that they would conceal anybody approaching.
He showed Millie the house in the early light the next morning, then met with the Realtor again.
“This is the most expensive home on my list,” Mrs. Meriwether said. “But they took a job in the Bay Area and now they’re paying two mortgages and have been for over a year and a half. I’m sure we can get them to drop the price by almost a quarter.”
“That’s okay. I’ll pay the asking price.”
“But the asking price was inflated. They expected to be lowballed! They’ve got some equity on their loan. It’s not like they’re upside down!”
Davy had to ask what that meant.
“When someone is upside down, or underwater, they owe more on their loan than the property is worth.”
“Oh.” He added these terms to “termiting.” “So for over a year and a half, they’ve had to pay two mortgage payments?”
Mrs. Meriwether nodded her head. “Right. So they’ll very likely take a substantial reduction in the asking price.”
Desperate and running out of cash? At least they were employed, but that didn’t mean they didn’t need the money. “Are you afraid the deal won’t go through if I offer to pay the asking price?”
“What? No. They’ll probably break their necks getting back to us. But you shouldn’t spend money you don’t have to!”
“Uh, Mrs. Meriwether, don’t you get a bigger commission if I pay the asking price?”
Mrs. Meriwether shut her mouth with a snap. She put her hands primly together and said, “So. Offer the asking price?”
Davy frowned. He didn’t want all of Mrs. Meriwether’s friends discussing the family that paid asking price in a buyer’s market. “Offer them ninety percent.”
They closed two weeks later.
SIX
“Or is it to be a food fight?”
New Prospect is in the American Southwest, about two hours’ drive from Durango. If you do the maps thing you’ll find that this circle could put New Prospect in Arizona, New Mexico, or Utah, as well as Colorado. And the map thing would show that there isn’t a town called New Prospect in any of those states. An internet search shows towns of that name in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, and a place called Nova Prospekt in Eastern Europe near the Black Sea.
That’s because my New Prospect doesn’t exist, not by that name. And if I’m lying about the name, keep in mind that I might be lying about other things, too.
But there is a town, somewhere, that we drove into, about lunchtime, in early January, in a large U-Haul truck, with Mom driving, Dad fidgeting on the passenger side, and me bouncing up and down between them.
The town was situated on an elevated bench, one side backed onto the mountainside, the other sloped down into the arid scrub of the lower foothills. Ten inches of snow had fallen the week before but the roads had been plowed. Though melted snow had refrozen into occasional patches of black ice, the asphalt on State Road 87 was mostly clear and dry.
“That’s the municipal complex,” Dad said, pointing. “Courthouse, city hall, and police. The middle school is over there—see, between those two buildings?”
I knew all this. I’d been studying the town for a month, using online maps and satellite images, blogs, photo galleries, and official and unofficial websites. But Dad was nervous, so I let him rattle on.
“The middle school used to be the high school, but they built a new one when they decided it made more sense to bring kids from this side of the reservation here, rather than bus them forty-five miles to the on-reservation school.”
We went a few more blocks and passed the County Medical Center, a three-story hospital with an attached building for medical professionals, and a helicopter pad near the ER driveway.
Mom turned onto Main Street, an old-fashioned avenue where the new buildings were built to blend with the late nineteenth-century architecture. The streets were concrete but with a surface molded like cobblestones. I’d walked on real cobblestones in Europe and nearly broken my ankle. I wondered what the local emergency room frequency for knee and ankle injuries was. Good thing it was only a few blocks away.
Though it was mostly cloudy, a patch of open sky was letting the sun hit the north side of the street. A bunch of teens were out in the sunshine on the corner outside a coffee shop. I stared at them as we went by.
Dad saw me looking and glanced over at the corner, reading the sign on the coffee shop. “Java, East of Krakatoa. Way, way east. I wonder if any of those kids have seen the movie?”
“What movie?”
“It was called, Krakatoa, East of Java. Krakatau, the volcano, is actually west of Java, but that’s Hollywood for you. At least the store has it right.”
“Indonesia,” I said, half asking.
“Yeah. Biggest volcanic eruption in modern history. An explosion, really. Heard thousands of miles away.”
I was only half listening, more intent on the kids—what they looked like, what they were wearing, but it was hard to tell since they were bundled up for the cold. At least my snowboarding jacket would fit in.
“Did you hear it?” I asked, absently.
Mom laughed and Dad said, “I’m not that old. It was in the 1800s. I wasn’t even born when the movie came out. I caught part of it on afternoon TV when I was a boy.”
We left the downtown area behind and threaded toward the lower edge of town, passing the high school and then a set of four grain silos that reminded me of our trip to Merredin, Western Australia.
The property sloped deeply away from the road. A garage with a short drive was level with the road, but the house itself was down the hill. A gravel driveway ran all the way down to the house, but it was scary steep.
The snow was piled high to the sides and Dad and I got out to direct Mom before she backed down the hill.
“Who plowed the driveways?” I asked.
Dad said, “Mrs. Meriwether, the Realtor, got someone to do it.”
My heart skipped a beat when the truck backed over the edge, the thing was still at an angle to the road and it lurched alarmingly to one side, but then it completed the turn and righted itself while still angled down the steep hill. It did slip backward once, when all four wheels were on the packed snow, but Mom got it down the driveway and stopped beside the house without further scares.
When she’d climbed down from the cab she said, “I’m afraid it won’t make it up the hill with that snow there.”
Dad looked around. The property was wooded, a mixture of cedar, piñon, and a bunch of bare deciduous trees I couldn’t identify without their leaves. Despite the bare limbs, the combination was thick enough to hide the neighboring houses from view. “I’ll take care of the snow before its time to get it back up the hill.”
“Oh, look,” Mom said.
There was a banner across the door saying “Welcome!”
“Mrs. Meriwether?” Mom said.
Dad shrugged. “Probably. Like I said, the local housing market is in the dumps. She was … pleased with the commission.”
The house was built into the hillside, with the top floor exposed all around but the bottom floor exposed only on the downhill side, opening onto a large deck that stuck out over the rapidly steepening hillside. Down below, through the trees, I could see a glint of sunlight on water.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The creek at the rear property line.” Dad thought for a moment. “They told me the name of it, but I don’t remember. Some Indian name. Diné maybe, or Ute. It’s on the plat I got at the closing.”
I carried boxes into the house and we took a couple of disassembled bedsteads and leaned them
against the porch, but Dad and Mom jumped the majority of stuff from inside the truck to inside the house. We could’ve done without the truck entirely but that would’ve looked odd, a house full of furniture and other belongings, showing up as if by magic. We could hear the occasional car going by on the road above, but we’d nearly emptied the truck before one slowed and turned into the upper driveway with a quick double tap of the horn. I looked up and saw a woman climb out of a large SUV.
Mom came to the door. “The Realtor, I’ll bet.”
Mrs. Meriwether was a middle-aged, big-haired blonde wearing a full-length down-filled coat. A boy in a sheepskin jacket walked behind her, dragging his feet. He was carrying a large wicker hamper.
“My goodness, girl, aren’t you cold?” the woman said.
I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt but I’d been in and out of the house. If she wanted cold I could take her to our other place. The temperature in the Yukon had been twenty below zero Fahrenheit that morning. Here, with the sun shining, it was fifty degrees warmer. Which, admittedly, was right at freezing, but it felt like spring to me.
Mom spoke from the porch. “Hello. Mrs. Meriwether, I presume?”
“And you must be Mrs. Ross.”
I tried to keep my face still. That was the name we were using. I even had a nondriving state ID and a Social Security card with that name on it, but I wasn’t used to it. “Call me Millie, please,” said Mom. First names were the same. We’d agreed that it would be too confusing otherwise.
In fact, Dad said, “Introduce yourselves with first names only. Someone asks who you are, again, just the first name. They push for your last name, you’ll have time to remember what it is now.”
He put it like that. Don’t think about who you’re pretending to be. Don’t think of it as a lie. Instead, think of it as who you are now.
“I’m Martha. I’m so glad to meet you. Did you have any trouble with the roads? The snows last week were just awful, but I guess the interstate must’ve been cleared.” Almost as an afterthought she said, “This is Grant, my youngest. He’s a freshman at Beckwourth High School—your new school.” She turned to me. “Aren’t you the spitting image of your mother, uh—”
