The Forbidden Door Page 14

  “Nobody’s real,” Gottfrey says. “It’s all like one big video game, virtual reality. You just never know.”

  46

  WHAT A NICE DAY IT had been.

  Maybe it shouldn’t have been such a nice day with Gavin and Jessica probably dead and with so much trouble about the boy.

  But good and bad came at you with no rhyme or reason. One moment it was raining money; the next moment it was a shitstorm.

  Cornell needed to take things as they came, not get too happy or too upset. If he got too happy or too upset, he felt oppressed, as though his feelings had weight and were crushing him, and his skin grew so tight it seemed like it might split, and his nerves crackled, and a buzzing rose in his bones, as if tiny bees had built a hive in his skeleton. Then he had to lie down in the dark and the quiet, and he had to think of a pool of water in some deep cavern, a stillness of water with no shapes of light quivering on it, nothing swimming in it; he had to let the black water soothe his tight skin, let the silent water quiet his nerves, let the cool water drown the bees in his bones, let the water buoy him, so that the weight of big emotions was lifted from him.

  Anyway, after their lunch, Cornell had thought the boy would watch TV. He believed that ordinary children mostly watched TV and played video games and tormented one another relentlessly; that is, “ordinary” as compared to the abnormal child that Cornell had been.

  A little satellite dish hidden on the roof of the barn fed the TV in Cornell’s library. He never watched any programs or the news, which was all depressing or lies. He turned the TV on only for a minute every day to check that the regular shows were still being aired, because that meant the end of civilization hadn’t yet begun.

  This boy didn’t care about TV, either. He just wanted to see his mother, and he mostly sat on the carpet, cuddling with the dogs.

  The boy would have to wait for his mother to get there, and getting there wouldn’t be easy considering that, according to Gavin, every law-enforcement agency was looking for her. She would not arrive sooner than tomorrow, maybe even later than that.

  Suddenly it had occurred to Cornell that Travis’s mother might not get to them at all. She might die. Mothers died. His own mother had died of a drug overdose.

  If the boy’s mother died…where would the boy go? His father had died months earlier. If Gavin and Jessica were dead and if the mother died, would the boy have anywhere to go?

  The mother must not die. She must not die. She must not die.

  A terrible sadness had come over Cornell as he watched his three visitors and thought how the boy might have nowhere to go.

  Although Cornell was good at math and coding and designing popular apps, he wasn’t good with big emotions. Big emotions made him grow heavy and tighten up and crackle and buzz.

  He had to put this terrible sadness away before it grew so heavy it weighed him down, before it forced him to leave the boy alone and go to the bunker and lie in the quiet darkness for hours.

  He pictured the sadness as a gray brick of lead weighing on his heart. He pictured putting it into a FedEx box and addressing it to someone who really needed to be weighed down by sadness, like some terrorist bomber who killed people. He pictured the FedEx truck driving away, dwindling into the distance…gone from sight.

  Although this made Cornell feel better, if he just sat there watching the boy cuddling with the dogs and waiting for his mother, he would get sad again. So he would have to do what he had always done to keep himself balanced and steady. He said, “I have to read.”

  The boy looked up from the dogs. “What are you going to read?”

  “Not Ralph Waldo Emerson. No, no, no. Not ever again. And not Sigmund Freud. He was crazier than any of his patients. I like to read novels, short stories. Fiction makes me feel better.”

  “I can read a little,” the boy said.

  “That’s very good. Being able to read a little at your age, that is very good,” Cornell said as he got up from his armchair.

  “Would you read to me, Mr. Jasperson?”

  Halfway out of the chair, Cornell froze. He was in an awkward posture, one hand on a chair arm, still pushing himself up, one foot on the floor, one leg in the air to swing it over the footstool, but nevertheless he locked in that configuration, as if his joints had fused. He blinked at the boy and opened his mouth to speak, but he had been struck speechless.

  Reading was a personal matter to Cornell, more personal than anything else. When drawn into a story, he was free. He could become the central character—male or female, child or adult—and live a different life from his own, no longer abnormal in either appearance or behavior. No one ever read aloud to him; he was an autodidact. He had never conceived of the possibility of reading aloud to another person. It seemed to be a dangerous sharing of himself—and a rude intrusion into the interior life of the listener.

  “My mother sometimes reads to me,” the boy said.

  Supported by one hand and one leg, still with one leg in the air, Cornell said, “Really?”

  “My dad used to read to me, too. And Uncle Gavin.”

  “How very strange,” Cornell said.

  The boy frowned. “It’s not strange at all.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No. It’s nice. Parents read to kids all the time.”

  “Not my parents.”

  “I’d read to you if I could read better.”

  Cornell’s raised leg came down to the floor, and whatever the cause of his paralysis, it passed. He stood thinking for a while and then said, “We wouldn’t be on a sofa? We’d be in separate chairs? At a distance?”

  “Sure. Whatever. Can I sit in the La-Z-Boy and can the dogs get in the chair with me when they want?”

  “They have not attacked me,” Cornell said. “They have not attacked me. They have not attacked. They’re good dogs. They can have their own chair or share yours.”

  “Great! So what are you going to read?”

  “Give me a moment to decide, please and thank you.”

  Intrigued by the novelty of reading aloud, Cornell went off to prowl the shelves.

  The boy was smart, though maybe not yet ready for Dostoyevsky. Cornell hadn’t been ready for Dostoyevsky until he was thirteen. Dickens? Maybe. He moved along the shelves, reading titles, and finally selected one.

  He settled his considerable frame into his armchair and said, “I’ve read this one four times. You’ll like this one.” He opened the book and began to read: “ ‘First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren’t rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say.’ ”

  “What book is it?” the boy asked.

  Cornell held up the novel so that the boy could see the jacket and the author’s name. “Something Wicked This Way Comes by Mr. Ray Bradbury. It sounds very scary, but it’s not really. It’s magic.”

  “Scary is okay,” the boy said. “Scary is just the way things are sometimes.”

  And in this manner they had passed the long afternoon: Cornell reading and the boy listening and the dogs—sometimes one, sometimes both—sharing the La-Z-Boy with their young master. At first reading aloud to someone was the strangest thing, though after a while it wasn’t strange at all.

  What a nice day it had been.

  Now night fell on Borrego Valley.

  47

  AFTER STRIPPING OUT OF HER clothes and removing the wig, she took her pistol into the bathroom and put it on the vanity. Although the shower was gloriously hot, she didn’t linger in the spray.

  She dressed in fresh clothes. The pixie-cut wig smelled less of smoke than did the garments she’d shed. New contact lenses made her blue eyes brown. She put on stage-prop glasses with dark frames.

  After washing her underwear and T-shirt in the bathroom sink, she hung them to dry on the shower-curtain rod.


  She paged through an issue of Palm Springs Life magazine and found an ad for a dry cleaner. She drove there and paid an express charge to be able to pick up her sport coat and jeans the next morning.

  She thought it darkly amusing: the most-wanted fugitive in America tending to such mundane tasks. In the movies, a protagonist on the run never took a break from the chase to buy toothpaste.

  In a restaurant, she ordered a twelve-ounce filet mignon. Hold the baked potato. Double vegetables. A glass of Caymus cabernet.

  After ordering dinner, she took a pill from a bottle of acid reducer and chased it with water. From a pocket, she retrieved the cameo that Travis had given her. Waiting for the wine, she worked the soapstone carving between thumb and forefinger, as a penitent might caress the beads of a rosary while petitioning for mercy.

  48

  THE TRAILWAYS BUS STATION IN Killeen, Texas, is so thinly sketched that only a fool would believe it’s real. A single-story white metal building with a minimum-pitch roof. Not even a pretense of style. There is no landscaping whatsoever, unless you are of the opinion that half an acre of medium-gray asphalt paving mottled with darker oil stains is the equivalent of greenery, predicated on the fact that blacktop and plants are both carbon-based.

  Garage bays—where buses are parked, cleaned, serviced, and repaired—occupy most of the structure, and the public area is cramped and drab, but tidy.

  Although the space is clean, the twentysomething woman at the ticket counter is immaculate and more detailed than her environment. Pleasant to look at, she wears her lustrous blond hair in a ponytail tied with white ribbon. No makeup, no eye shadow, no lipstick. Her well-scrubbed skin is smooth, with a slight pink flush. When she smiles, her teeth look as if they have never made contact with food or drink to sully them, and the whites of her eyes are as clear as purified milk. She wears a spotless white dress with a Peter Pan collar, and as Egon Gottfrey approaches the counter, the woman’s hands glisten with sanitizing gel as she works them together.

  He flashes his FBI photo ID. “I need to talk to whoever worked this counter this morning.”

  She is Sue Ann McMaster, who never before met an FBI person, who can’t imagine what she could tell him about anything that would be worth his time, who is near the end of her second shift today because Lureen Klaven took a bad fall this morning and couldn’t work the afternoon. She says she loves the smell of Purell hands, and as the last of the gel evaporates, she asks what he needs to know.

  When she sees the photo of Ancel and Clare, she smiles broadly. “Oh, yes, they were lovely people, going to Houston for the birth of their first grandchild. Just bubbling with excitement about it.”

  “What time did their bus leave?”

  “It was supposed to depart at ten twenty-five, and maybe it was five minutes late. We have three buses a day going to Houston, and our on-time departure performance is over ninety percent.”

  “What time do they arrive in Houston?”

  “Oh, hours ago. Three o’clock is the ETA.” She checks her computer. “Pretty close perfect. They docked in Houston at nine minutes past three.”

  “Can you give me the address of the terminal in Houston?”

  * * *

  When Gottfrey comes out of the bus station, Rupert and Vince are leaning against their Jeep Wrangler, staring at the sky. The darkness and the wealth of stars should create a perception of the immensity of the universe and the emptiness between its infinite suns, but it feels no less heavy than before and still seems to be coming down on him—in spite of the fact that it’s only an illusion.

  He is beginning to think that this perception of a looming, crushing weight arises from an intuitive sense that somehow he is screwing up, that Ancel and Clare are slipping away in spite of all the resources at his disposal, that he no longer understands the script and is in the process of displeasing the Unknown Playwright.

  The Killeen Police Department is within a block of the bus station. The watch commander is pleased to provide three FBI agents with a private office and computer.

  Houston is one of the increasing number of cities from which the NSA now receives real-time input of video from airports, train stations, and bus depots.

  While Rupert Baldwin back-doors the NSA Data Center in Utah and swims through the immense ocean of digital data, seeking archived video from the Houston terminal to which the passengers from Killeen were delivered hours earlier, Gottfrey bounces some questions off Vince Penn. He expects no useful answers, but this helps him frame his own theory of what Ancel and Clare’s intentions might be.

  “At the hour they left the Longrin ranch, say two-thirty in the morning, with hardly any traffic on the roads, they should have been here in Killeen by four-thirty, if not sooner. According to Jim Lee Cassidy they had just parked their Mercury Mountaineer outside his real-estate office at a few minutes after ten o’clock. That leaves five and a half missing hours. Where were they all that time?”

  “Maybe a motel. Getting some shut-eye,” Vince suggests.

  “After that TV show, they figure they’re targeted, they’ll be injected, so they go on the run—only to stop for some shut-eye?”

  “Everybody’s got to sleep. Even Dracula sleeps, and he’s the living dead.”

  “When you go on the run, don’t you take essentials, a few changes of clothes, toiletries? Cash?”

  “I never been on the run.”

  “Jim Lee Cassidy didn’t say anything about them having luggage. If they’d had bags of any kind, when he saw them go two blocks and turn right at the corner, he would have known they were going to the bus depot. He wouldn’t have had to guess.”

  “Well, he’s a Realtor,” says Vince.

  Gottfrey knows he shouldn’t ask. “What does that mean?”

  “They’re like surgeons. They work with real things, so if they can’t be certain, they won’t say they are. They’ll only guess.”

  “Surgeons and Realtors, huh?”

  “And astronauts,” Vince adds.

  “Here we go,” Rupert Baldwin says. “Their bus, pulling into the terminal in Houston earlier today.”

  The three of them huddle before the computer, watching as one by one the travelers disembark. The camera provides a clearer image than is sometimes the case. Ancel and Clare are not on the bus.

  49

  THE NIGHT FEATHERED BY PALMS and ferns, perfumed by jasmine, now by burgers on a barbecue…the blood-red blooms of a trumpet vine in a lighted arbor…young women’s laughter so innocent that it seems to come from another world in which no degradation of any kind exists…and one block later Glenn Miller’s softly swinging “String of Pearls” issuing from the open window of a house…

  After dinner, Jane walked residential streets. In the velvet shadows and subdued lighting, she gazed at a diamonded sky as mysterious as always it would be.

  Every ordinary thing was in this moment extraordinary and precious beyond valuation, rich with meaning, but the meaning ineffable, all of it endangered in these darkening times.

  Eventually, in a pocket park, she stood watching the motel across the street, where she’d taken a room. A few people came and went, but none concerned her. She focused on the window of her room, where she’d left the lights on, waiting to see the drapery panels part slightly or tremble as someone moved against them. Nothing.

  She crossed the street and let herself into the room. She was alone. Wherever death might come for her, it wasn’t here or now.

  50

  THE WATCH COMMANDER AT THE Killeen Police Department happens to know the manager of the bus station, Dennis van Horn. He calls him at home and introduces Egon Gottfrey, who then takes the phone.

  According to van Horn, the bus driver from Killeen, Lonnie John Bricker, has finished his day by driving another coach that departed Houston at 4:00 P.M., scheduled to arrive in San Antonio at 7:10.
Now at 7:26, it is likely that Bricker is still at the terminal in San Antonio, filling out his trip report.

  At 7:39, again in the office provided by the watch commander, Gottfrey sits at the computer—Vince standing to his left, Rupert to his right—and conducts a Skype interview with Lonnie John Bricker.

  The bus driver is a burly, balding man of about fifty. His round and rubbery face has a perpetual look of sweet bewilderment that underlies his every other expression. It is a face that makes him likable on sight and no doubt is comically expressive when he tells jokes to his buddies at the local bar.

  Bricker frowns and leans warily toward the screen out there in San Antonio, as though Gottfrey might be a tiny man hiding inside that distant computer. “Well, no offense intended, but I still can’t know for sure you’re in Killeen. And when you held your badge thing to the camera, I couldn’t see it clear enough to know was it real FBI or from some Junior G-Man play set.”

  In instances like this, Skype is a time-saving convenience; however, it’s harder to intimidate the hell out of the subject of an interview when you are not in the same city with him. You can’t loom over the guy or accidentally knock a mug of hot coffee into his lap.

  Gottfrey says, “The head of security at the terminal there, Mr. Titus, has confirmed my identity to you.”

  “No offense intended to him, either, but he’s near as much a stranger to me as you are. Don’t I need myself a lawyer here?”

  “You’re not a suspect, Mr. Bricker. You’re a witness who might have seen something in regards to a case of national importance.”

  “What I’ve been doin’ all day is hump one bus to Houston and hump another bus to San Antone, so all I’ve seen is highway and some asshole drivers. The true FBI isn’t after speeders and tailgaters.”