The Archimedes Effect

9

Washington, D.C.

Lewis was on her way home, driving the politically correct Japanese hybrid car she’d picked up second-hand a year past. At this stage of the game, she didn’t want to do anything that might call attention to her, and the little automobile, which she privately thought of as a “Priapus,” was as innocuous as they came. Even so, it still used a certain amount of gasoline to augment the electric motors, and the tank was nearly empty. She pulled over to a self-serve station a couple miles away from her house, got out, pushed her credit card into the reader, and started to pump fuel into the little car. A year or two from now, she’d be able to send her butler to buy her gas, if she felt like it. . . .

An ambulance pulled into the lot and parked next to the mini-market. The EMT riding shotgun alighted and went inside.

Of a moment, Lewis found herself riding a quick surge of memory. Like the best VR, it was almost reality—sights, smells, the feel of the air. . . .

The night her father died, Lewis had been in the hospital with her father’s mother. Granny had, after Grampa passed away, slipped slowly and quietly into senility. One day, she seemed fine; the next, she was talking about men coming out of the walls of her house to chase her around the bedroom. It was sad—Granny had been a strong, smart woman who had raised two sons and a daughter, while working as an accountant, and run her household like a drill sergeant, which Grampa had been, but had given up when he’d retired.

Her doctor wanted to do tests to confirm what everybody already knew, that she had Alzheimer’s and she had been successfully hiding it from her family. Nobody was happy about it.

The room had been unbearably hot. It had been August, in Richmond, the summer days almost tropical and the nights cloyingly warm and muggy, but even so, Granny had been cold, and they had cranked the heat up so that it was eighty-five degrees in the private room. The family had been taking turns going to sit with her—her mother, Rachel, two of her cousins—and on that night, it had been Rachel’s turn.

The room was hot. Granny was in and out of reality. One moment, able to talk about what she’d read in the newspaper and comment on it intelligently, the next moment, wondering how a cat had gotten into the room and onto her bed.

Lewis, just turned eighteen, was herself something of a wreck. Her father’s court-martial had gone as expected—he was guilty, never any question of whether he had taken his side arm and shot Private Benjamin Thomas Little in the head with it, killing him instantly. Her father was waiting for his sentence, and everybody knew it was going to be life or something just short of it, depending on how much the judges sympathized with Sergeant Lewis because two of them also had daughters.

Benny, the bastard. He had been her boyfriend, from the base, doing his first tour, a private. Tall, handsome, funny, and she had thought she loved him. Two, three more dates, she would have given him what he wanted.

But he couldn’t wait. He had refused to take no for an answer when they’d been kissing in the backseat of his car, and had held her down and forced himself into her.

When she’d gotten home, her shirt torn and her face streaked with tears, her father had taken one look, grabbed his gun, driven to the barracks, and shot Benny dead.

So there she was, cooking in a hospital room with the heat turned up in the middle of a hot August night, listening to her poor old grandmother ramble on about a cat that wasn’t there, and feeling like shit because it was her fault that her father was going to spend the rest of his life in a federal prison. Things didn’t seem as if they could get any worse.

Until her mother showed up at Granny’s room with the news.

Rachel’s father had just killed himself. A different pistol, but the same results as Benny . . .

The hurried slamming of the ambulance door brought Lewis back to the present. The driver lit the lights and the vehicle squealed out of the mini-mart’s parking lot, the siren kicking in as it reached the street.

Lewis topped off the tank of her car, feeling disconnected from the act. She had blamed herself for her father’s death for a long time, but as the years went by, she had shifted much of that blame to the Army. Benny had been a soldier—why hadn’t he been taught that forcing himself on a woman was wrong? Why hadn’t the Army looked at what her father had done as something any father would have done? Made allowances for a man who was only dealing justice to a criminal? Had she gone to the MPs, they would have thrown Benny into the stockade, and in a just world, it would have been Benny who went to prison young and came out an old man.

Yes, she had gone into the Army—her father’s suicide note had specified that she still should, as they had always planned—but eventually, she had realized that the Army needed to pay for what had happened to her father. And since they weren’t going to do that voluntarily, she would make them pay.

She climbed into her car, dropped the gas receipt on the seat, and started the machine’s anemic little engine. It had taken years to get into a position where she had enough power to hit the Army hard enough to cause it pain. It would never be as bad as what she had felt, the Army was too big to deal that kind of blow, but it would sting. It would be embarrassing, it would cost them in time and effort and money, and they would never know who had done it, or why. Maybe she would leave a time capsule somewhere, to be opened after she died, explaining it all. Or maybe she wouldn’t.

She pulled out onto the street. It had taken a long time to set it up, but it was coming to pass, just as she had planned. If vengeance was a dish best served cold, then hers was certainly that. But she expected that it would taste perfect when it was done.

The Fretboard

Washington, D.C.

Jennifer Hart said, “How are your fingertips?”

It was nearly nine P.M. Given his job, it was hard for Kent to take off in the middle of the day for guitar lessons, but Jen was willing to meet him here at eight. The shop was closed, but she had a key, and they didn’t seem to mind her teaching whenever she wanted.

The first time he’d showed up, he’d apologized for cutting into her evenings.

She’d laughed. Most evenings, her social life consisted of sitting in an overstuffed chair trying to read a book with her cat curled in her lap, she’d said.

Kent said, “Fine.” In truth, the fingers on his left hand were all sore—the ends felt blistered, and his thumb ached from pressing too hard into the back of the guitar’s neck. He figured it would pass as he developed calluses and more specific strength in the hand. No point in making a big deal out of it.

She grinned at him, and he enjoyed watching the smile lines form around her eyes and mouth. “Uh huh. Going to be stoic, huh?”

He smiled in return. “Too late to change now,” he said.

She took a black silk cloth and began to wipe the fretboard and body of her guitar. He had a similar scrap of cloth in his case, and he did the same for his instrument. Even with clean hands, there was a certain amount of natural oil and grit that worked their way into the strings, causing, she had said, corrosion. A quick wipe with a cloth after playing helped slow that down.

Kent had learned about strings, tuners, humidifiers, all manner of esoterica connected to maintaining a classical guitar in some semblance of form, and he had no problem doing what was necessary. His grandfather had taught him how to sharpen a knife and keep it oiled when he’d been a boy; the old man had never had any patience for a man who didn’t take care of his tools.

“You’re coming along pretty well,” Jen said.

“It’s a lot harder than you make it look,” he said.

She finished wiping her instrument, and tucked it into the case, then latched it shut. “Of course. Anybody with a little skill in anything makes it look easier to somebody just trying to learn.”

“So, am I ever going to learn enough to justify owning this beast?” He held the guitar up in one hand, then lowered it into his case.

“Truth? You probably aren’t ever going to sit on a concert stage and make people want to go home and toss out their Segovia recordings. But if you practice and keep learning, three or four years from now you’ll be able to play some very nice things that people will enjoy hearing—and you won’t have to worry that your instrument is holding you back.”

He nodded. “Good enough. Though that’s hard to see after a fumbling rendition of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,’ or ‘Scales on an E-string.’ ”

She laughed. “Everybody’s got to start somewhere. A few lessons ago, you didn’t know the names of the strings. Now, you can tune the guitar, and pick out simple melodies, plus you know a few basic chords. Most of what people play on acoustic rhythm guitar these days can be done with what they call ‘cowboy chords,’ maybe ten or fifteen or so.”

“Odd name,” he said.

“Think of those old cowboy movies you probably watched as a kid on late-night TV—Gene or Roy or whoever and his buddies sitting around the campfire, somebody with a guitar, somebody with a harmonica—I think that’s where the name came from.”

Kent nodded. He could see it.

“For a lot of blues,” she went on, “you can get by with three or four, and for most rock and roll you only really need half a dozen. You don’t have to be a world-class player to enjoy making music.”

She stood. “Same time, Tuesday?”

“Works for me. Walk you to your car?”

“Think I can’t make it there on my own?”

“I’m parked close to you,” he said. “In case I fall down, you can help me up.”

She laughed again. He liked making her do that.

“You used to be married, didn’t you?”

He nodded. “Yes, ma’am. She passed away a while ago.”

“I was married once myself. But my husband was more interested in work than me. Twenty years ago, he took off and went out to conquer the music world.”

“Did he? Conquer the music world, I mean?”

“He did, actually. His instrument is the cello. He can sit on the same stage and keep up with Yo-Yo Ma. Played first cello with a couple of major European orchestras, formed his own chamber group that puts out a recording now and then, usually goes pretty high up on the classical charts. Married three more times since we split. I believe his current wife is a twenty-six-year-old daughter of some German baron. Beautiful woman, and if I had to guess, probably can’t keep time in a waterproof basket—Armand prefers to be the only musician in a marriage.”

Kent heard just a trace of bitterness, and a hint of ugly history, but then she laughed again, and that seemed real enough. “Lotta water under that bridge,” she said. She turned and headed for the shop’s exit. “No reason to go back there and fall in.”

He didn’t speak to that, only followed her to the door. Maybe he would check on-line and see what he could find about this “Armand” character. Might be interesting to know what kind of man would leave a woman like Jennifer Hart. The more he was around her, the more relaxed he felt. That was interesting, too. . . .