The Lightning Stones

5

It was eight thirty in the morning when Mercer rolled up to Abe Jacobs’s little faux-Tudor house just outside a side gate of the college where he’d last taught and had chosen to retire. Apart from the surrounding stone wall, the school was indistinguishable from the charming town of Killenburg, Ohio. Located on the banks of a feeder stream to Raccoon Creek, which eventually drained into the Ohio River, Hardt College had just celebrated its one hundred twentieth year. Its founder, Konrad Hardt, was a German émigré who had never spent a moment past his tenth birthday in a classroom, but had been a genius of mechanical design. His inventions streamlined industrial manufacturing in such diverse businesses as cigar rolling, railway lanterns, and thread bobbins.

Hardt had recognized the importance of education, and upon his death bequeathed a grant large enough to buy virtually the entire town of Killenburg and create what he thought a liberal arts college should be. He modeled it somewhat on the nation’s first coeducational college across the state in Oberlin, Ohio. Hardt College had been coed since its founding — its namesake had seven daughters and no sons and was rumored not to have had a choice in the matter. The school had grown over the years and now had a total of two thousand students, as opposed to its first graduating class of just thirteen.

The town was as much a part of the school as the school was of the town. In fact Killenburg would have long since become a ghost town when an upstream hydro project siphoned off half its stream — and thus the motive power for the two mills that had once employed its citizens. The presence of the school was what kept the town alive, and it remained a quaint enclave. If not for the changes in clothing styles and the makes of cars, Mercer could imagine Killenburg looking much like it had fifty, even a hundred years ago.

As with the rest of the town, the street in front of Abe Jacobs’s house was lined with stately oaks that would provide ample shade in the summer and coat the ground in a Technicolor carpet come autumn. Spring was still far enough off that the trees were just skeletal silhouettes against a cloudy sky. The steep-roofed Tudor was of tan stucco with real wood-beam accents and late-Gothic-style mullioned windows.

His old mentor had chosen Hardt because several friends from his days at Carnegie Mellon had settled here. For its size, the private college had a strong science program, thanks to an endowment that had allowed it to construct a dedicated building four years earlier with state-of-the-art labs and enough high-tech toys to keep even Abe and his coterie of aging geeks enthralled.

Mercer imagined that Abe’s final years had been happy ones. Some men retire to golf courses or fishing holes; Abe Jacobs would have retired to an experimental laboratory. That’s the kind of man he was.

Mercer killed the engine and forced his hands to relax on the wheel of his rental. He stepped from the SUV. The air was oddly colder here than in Minnesota, and still carried the hoary blade of winter. Thick snow covered much of the lawn and any other spots that hadn’t been hit by plow or shovel. Though Mercer hadn’t visited Abe since he had come to Hardt, there were certain things he knew would remain consistent, and one was the moldy cement frog crouched next to the front door. Beneath it, as he knew after doing this countless times at Penn State, was a spare front door key. In some categories, Abe was lacking in originality — security and decorating among them.

The house smelled of pipe tobacco and was outfitted in a style likely called midcentury bachelor. The heat had been absentmindedly left on, so it was at least seventy-five. The furniture was all too big for the spaces and had been shoved against walls, so little paths ran from room to room. The prints and paintings on the walls were all garage-sale rejects that Abe had owned forever. His favorite, an aerial shot of Jerusalem, hung over a brick fireplace with a blackened mantel. Off the living room was a kitchen done up in harvest-gold-colored appliances and a dappled linoleum floor that looked like the mummified hide of a long-dead giraffe. A Formica table and 1960s vintage chairs designed to impart some futuristic vision of mankind’s seating needs took up much of the floor. The table was spread with old newspapers, trade magazines, and loose envelopes.

Most of the drapes were at least partially closed, so the house remained dim even as the sun struggled to burn through the morning clouds. There were two other rooms on the downstairs floor — a formal dining room that hadn’t seen a meal served since McDonald’s recorded their billionth, and Abe’s study, which Mercer decided to search last. He climbed the narrow stairs, sending a cadence of creaks through the home. Off the tiny landing at the top of the steps was a bathroom so dated the toilet tank was affixed to the wall a good four feet above the bowl, and the mirror over the pedestal sink was losing its silver backing, so that Mercer’s reflection appeared in sepia tones. Somehow the old looking glass made him smile. Abe would have looked better with a few of his wrinkles blurred by the mirror.

The master bedroom was dominated by an antique four-poster that Mercer didn’t recognize and assumed had come with the house. A matching chest of drawers was tucked under the window, and atop it in cut-glass bowls was Abe’s collection of cuff links, one of his many idiosyncrasies. The bed was neatly made and the room didn’t smell musty, which made Mercer think the old man had had a housekeeper.

It was the guest bedroom that revealed the house’s greatest surprise. The bed not only was unmade, it was occupied. A woman lay in it. She had shucked off most of the bedcovers, and her white T-shirt had ridden high enough on her thighs that had he chosen, Mercer could have deprived her of her last shot at modesty. She lay facedown, and her dark hair spread across the pillows in a wild mane that brushed far past her shoulders. By her slim form and the tautness of her skin he knew she was young.

A red leather jacket was tossed over a nearby upholstered chair, while the girl’s jeans lay on the floor to the side of the bed. Mercer quietly retreated from the room. He partially closed the door and, from the hall, loudly cleared his throat to rouse her.

She startled awake with a sharp intake of air.

“Hello,” Mercer called out softly. “I’m a friend of Abe Jacobs.”

“What? Who’s out there?” she snapped in fear-tinged aggression. He could hear her shift on the bed, doubtlessly covering herself with blankets.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” Mercer went on. “I am a friend of Abe’s.”

“How did you get in here?” she demanded.

“Abe always leaves a key under the decorative frog next to the front door. I let myself in. My name is Mercer. Professor Jacobs was my adviser when he taught at Penn State.”

Her next demand was, “What are you doing here? Professor Jacobs is out of town.”

“I know,” he replied patiently. “Could you please come downstairs so we can talk without having to shout through a door? I’ll see if I can make us some coffee.” Mercer turned away without giving the girl a chance to ask further questions.

As he got an old kettle of water onto the hideous yellow stove, he heard the toilet flush upstairs and another rush of water from the bathroom sink that made the thin walls sound like they were holding back a biblical deluge. A few minutes later came the creak of feet padding down the stairs, and then she turned into the kitchen.

Mercer guessed she was in her mid-twenties, a grad student most likely, and saw that she was very pretty with nearly black hair and the dark sloe eyes to match. She hadn’t had time to put on makeup, but she didn’t need any. Her skin glowed with youth while her mouth was bright-lipped and generous. She’d tamed her mane of hair into a thick ponytail that fell in a rope down her back, but loose tendrils still danced around her face and forced her to either paw at them or blow at them with charming bother.

She sported a red leather jacket over a V-neck sweater and jeans. A small black knapsack he hadn’t noticed in the bedroom was slung over her shoulder. She didn’t step into the kitchen but positioned herself against the wall dividing it from the living room so that she was much closer to the front door than to Mercer. She was cautious but not overly alarmed.

“Who are you again?” she asked. Her voice had a rasp like she was a lifelong smoker, but she hadn’t smelled of cigarettes and she made no effort to light one.

Mercer found milk in the fridge, noted the date was still a day away, and pulled a jar of instant coffee, another of Abe Jacobs’s hallmarks, from a cabinet as well as two mismatched mugs. Spoons he found in a drawer. He set everything on the table. “My name is Philip, but people mostly call me Mercer. Abe was my academic adviser when I was at Penn State. We’ve been friends ever since. Who are you?”

“I’m his niece, Jordan Weismann.”

Mercer was stirring granulated coffee into a cup and looked up at her, his expression more severe than the neutral one he had wished to present. Given the circumstances he couldn’t be blamed, though. He said, “Abe doesn’t have any nieces, and if your next answer is another lie I’m calling the police.”

Her expression changed only slightly. It was a look of contrite embarrassment, not deception. “Look, I grew up calling him Uncle Abe — well, at least when he and my dad both taught at Carnegie. They were in the metallurgy department. I said that niece thing because I wanted you to know I belong here.”

“And why are you here?” Mercer asked.

“He’s letting me watch his place while he’s off on some experiment. I forget where. I’m…Hey, can I get in on that coffee?” Mercer nodded and handed over the mug he’d prepared for her. She added enough milk to cloud the brew before stepping back again. “I’m kinda between jobs right now and, well, between homes too. Uncle Abe’s doing me a huge favor.”

Mercer got a mental flash of the gunmen fast approaching. He had no real evidence that they were coming here after murdering Abe and the others, but it was something he couldn’t discount out of hand. He’d kept his SUV moving well above ninety for most of the drive from Minnesota, and had only caught a couple hours of rest. The shooters wouldn’t need to stop for sleep if they shared driving duties, but they would not speed so as not to draw attention to themselves. Mercer estimated he had a thirty-minute cushion, and decided he shouldn’t waste it chatting with one of Abe’s old family friends.

“Jordan,” Mercer began, “I don’t know how to say this, so I am just going to come out with it.” He was a stranger to her, and yet societal evolution had imparted an innate understanding of the tone he used. She blanched.

A hand went to her chest in a universal gesture of self-protection. “What happened to him?”

“He was killed,” Mercer said as kindly as those words could ever be uttered, then added, “Shot dead by men who might be coming here.”

It was like a rug had been pulled from beneath her feet. She slid down the wall, landing with a thump on her backside, her instant café au lait falling from her fingers and splashing across the hardwood floor. She tried to keep her eyes on Mercer, but her head fell to her chest. For a moment he thought she had fainted, but then her face rose once again and her eyes brimmed with tears.

“Why would you say something like that?” Gone was the mature huskiness in her voice, replaced by a lost little girl’s plaintive cry.

“I am sorry. But it’s true. I chased the men who killed him, but they got away. Like I said, it’s possible they are on their way here. You need to leave. Right now.”

“But I just talked to him the day before yester—”

Mercer recognized that she was about to spiral into denial, followed by every other stage of grief, and he didn’t have time to usher her through her sorrow. “Jordan, please. Pull yourself together. Do you have a car?”

She had managed to sniffle back tears, and focused all of her attention on him. He was now her anchor, and her eyes stayed with his as he crossed the room and offered her a hand back to her feet.

“Car?” he prompted again.

“Yes. Um, no. I mean I have a car, but it died when I got into town. It’s at a garage out by the interstate.”

“I have an SUV outside. Get whatever stuff you have here and hop in. I’ll be there in a minute.”

She didn’t move. “My bag is in the trunk of my car. I forgot it yesterday and then Abe left and I was planning on walking out there today to get it. But now…” Her voice trailed off.

She was handling the news worse than he had expected, but then again he had no idea how close she and Abe had been. That he hadn’t heard of her didn’t mean the two hadn’t been as tight as real family.

He made a quick decision. “Okay. Just follow me. This won’t take a second.”

“What are you going to do? If the men who killed Abe—” This time she choked off her own words because saying Abe had been killed was the first step in accepting he was gone.

“Don’t worry,” Mercer said with a smile and gripped her upper arm. She was so thin his fingers almost met despite the leather coat. “Like leaving a key under the frog, Abe was a creature of habit.”

He found what he was looking for in the tiny closet off the room Abe Jacobs had used as an office/den. Mercer well remembered the old desk and swivel chair that squeaked only seconds after being oiled, and the club chairs that sat in front of the desk, chairs Mercer had lolled in through many, many evenings while deep in discussion back in Happy Valley. This room was a little smaller than that at Penn State, the view out the window a little more bucolic, but this was exactly like the den Mercer remembered from all those years ago, and he felt certain that Abe had replicated it wherever his career had taken him. In the bottom of the closet was a scuffed Samsonite suitcase made of a hideous blue indestructible plastic. Mercer pulled it free from under a mound of other detritus and set it on the desk. He pressed open the locks and levered up the lid.

Inside were all sorts of old papers, some stuffed in binders, others loose or in yellowed envelopes. There were some black-and-white photographs of people who were long dead and whom Abe had never discussed. There were a couple of books, including a Hebrew copy of the Talmud and a partial field guide for the maintenance of a Sherman tank’s L/40 75mm M-3 cannon. At the bottom of the suitcase was a dirty rag rolled around a flat object about the size of a hardcover book.

Mercer unrolled the rag, and into his hand flopped a brown leather holster for a German P-38 pistol, made not by the fabled Walther Company but under license by Spreewerke and marked by the letters CYQ. Abe’s father had landed in Normandy as a tank’s driver, and by the time he had battled through the Ardennes he was its commander. He had taken the pistol off a dead German officer following the Nazis’ last major pushback against the Allied forces. Below the pistol was a small strongbox. Mercer knew that inside it were Mort Jacobs’s medals, insignia, and military discharge papers. An entire gruesome chapter of both a man’s youth and a continent’s agony neatly tucked away.

“Is that a gun?” Jordan Weismann asked with a mix of revulsion and fascination.

Abe had first shown him the weapon when Mercer was an undergrad, and it had been Mercer himself who convinced Jacobs to allow him to clean the then rust-bound automatic. Abe would never be convinced to actually fire the pistol — he was a New York — born intellectual first and foremost — but out of respect to his late father he let his young protégé restore the P-38 to its original condition. What he didn’t know was that the spare magazine tucked into a slot under the holster’s flap had been loaded all those years before with eight rounds of Federal Premium 124 grain 9mil.

She watched with glassy eyes as Mercer pulled both the pistol and the spare magazine from the holster and allowed the tough old leather to drop back into the Samsonite. He thumbed the release to eject the empty magazine from the pistol’s butt and rammed home the loaded one with a precise slap. He flicked the safety off, jacked the slide to chamber a round, thumbed the hammer back down, and reengaged the safety once again. The gun vanished behind his back and under his bomber jacket.

The cool ease with which he handled the deadly looking black gun brought a flush of unexpected arousal to Jordan’s cheeks. She looked at him in hopes he hadn’t noticed. He had, but his expression didn’t change, for which she was grateful.

“This was Abe’s father’s,” Mercer said. “He brought it back from World War Two. Abe hated the thing. He hated all violence, but he also couldn’t part with it, so he’s been lugging it around from one campus to the next just like that stupid cement frog and the picture of Jerusalem over the mantel.”

Mercer took another look around the study. If there were any clues as to what Abe Jacobs had been doing in the mine to get him killed, they likely weren’t here. Abe kept all his important research material and files in a campus office near his lab. At least he always had. The look on Jordan Weismann’s face was one of doubt and uncertainty. She had to be wondering how a former student of stolid old Abe Jacobs could be so comfortable around a handgun. He wished he had time to explain, but the mental clock in one corner of his mind continued to wind down. The gunmen couldn’t be that far away.

“I need to check out Abe’s office on campus. Do you know where it is?” He took Jordan’s hand, and they started out of the house.

She shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. I just got here yesterday. Uncle Abe was in a hurry to leave, so I didn’t get a tour of the school or anything.”

“Okay. I’m going to stash you someplace, and then afterward you are getting out of town. Where are your parents? Still in Pittsburgh?”

“No,” she said with a defiant edge to her voice. “My mom died three years ago from cancer, and my dad and I aren’t exactly close.”

Mercer paused just shy of the open front door and swung Jordan around so that he was looking her in the eye. “I don’t know you from Adam, but you were a friend of my friend and that’s good enough for me. Take some free advice and do yourself a favor. Unless your father is some sort of monster, there will come a time in your life where you are going to regret not having him around. I lost both my parents when I was twelve, and not a day goes by that I don’t think about the relationship we were supposed to have. Reconcile with your father.”

Her eyes tightened, and a crease formed between her well-maintained brows. “My life is none of your business.”

Undeterred, Mercer said, “I’m sure Abe gave you this same advice on more than one occasion. He had no family, so I know he took on students as surrogates. I was one and so were you. He was a father figure and now he’s gone, Jordan, and your real father is the only one you have left.”

He was about to go on, but movement over her shoulder drew his attention. Jordan was tall enough for him to need to push her out of the way a little to clearly see the tree-lined street. A compact car — a Honda Fit — was driving by much too slowly for the time of day. Mercer had never seen the driver and the man had never seen him, but they both recognized each other as being someone out of place.

The driver was in his late twenties, blond and fit looking. His eyes widened at seeing a couple stepping from the house. Mercer tried to hide his surprise at seeing Abe’s house being cased by an ex — Special Forces type. The driver turned his attention back to the road and buried his foot in the floorboards. The little car didn’t have much in the power department, but it was nearly lost from view by the time Mercer launched himself at his SUV.

He had noticed the car had an Indiana license plate. It had doubtless been stolen by the gunman as he made his way south from the Minnesota mine. The man’s apparent youth also suggested he wasn’t a seasoned professional and was therefore not likely to be alone here in Killenburg. The lead man, the man Mercer had vowed to kill, was here too. Most likely at Abe’s office while he sent his subaltern to search the less conspicuous house.

Mercer felt the SUV’s passenger door slam as he jammed the key into the ignition. Jordan Weismann whipped an arm across her shoulder to buckle her seat belt. She didn’t look over at Mercer, but he could see a tightening of her jaw and the ferocity at one corner of her eye. He knew women enough to know that asking her to get out would be a complete waste of time. Intellectually she knew the risks. He assumed she had never faced a barrage from an automatic weapon, so in a practical sense she had no idea what she was doing, but she had made a choice, and Mercer wasn’t going to talk her out of it.

The big V8 roared to life, and arcing jets of slushy snow blasted from beneath all four wheels. Mercer balanced the heavy pistol into his partially unzipped bomber jacket.

“Do you have a plan?” Jordan asked, finally turning to look at him as the Yukon plowed through part of a snowbank in pursuit of the little Honda.

“Run this guy down and find out why he killed Abe and the others,” Mercer said.

“Are you sure he’s one of them?”

“I never got a good look at them all, but the way he just reacted tells me everything I need to know. He’s one of the shooters.”

The SUV had an automatic transmission, but Mercer worked the column shifter like a NASCAR driver, eking out the engine’s maximum torque and using the motor to assist the brakes through the neighborhood’s tight turns.

The light green Honda juked around a sharp corner a second after Mercer spotted the nimble little four-door. He cursed. It was like chasing a jackrabbit. The Honda Fit was more agile, had better acceleration, and the driver had the advantage of knowing where he was going. Mercer felt like he was guiding a hippopotamus, the Yukon lumbered so. It rolled into the corners like a sailing ship heeling in a gale wind.

The fleeing Honda took yet another sharp right turn, and Mercer suddenly understood what the gunman was after. He had flushed the SUV away from the target house, and now he was doubling back.

Mercer cranked the Yukon’s wheel hard over and slotted the big SUV between a couple of pine trees and the corner of a mid-block house. The Yukon turned the front fence into so much wooden kindling as it blew through. They had no problem with the snow, bulling over drifts like a tank. They passed the house, and a nice glassed-in back atrium where the startled owner had been enjoying the morning paper and a coffee before an SUV barreled through his backyard. The truck tore apart a more substantial back fence and sped across some other poor suburbanite’s lawn. This one abutted a raised ranch with a back deck draped in snow like white bunting. Mercer guided the truck through a high-speed slalom, avoiding copses of trees and an aboveground swimming pool. He didn’t see a large plastic sandbox buried in the snow and tore across it in an unexpected explosion of sand particles as fine as diamond chips.

They careened past the ranch house and raced across the owner’s front lawn. There were no more fences to crash through, but Mercer managed to accidentally clip the trailer hitch of a boat sitting in the driveway. In their wake the trailer’s front jack collapsed, and a nice eighteen-foot bass boat tumbled to the frozen ground and capsized.

In a four-wheel drift that taxed the Yukon’s suspension, Mercer threw the truck back onto Abe Jacobs’s street. He’d managed to cut deeply into the Honda’s lead but not nearly enough. The car was stopped in front of the Tudor house, driver door open, and the man was running from the house back toward the car. He saw the Yukon’s sudden appearance, only a half dozen houses away, and dove back into the idling car.

The driver didn’t wait to see his handiwork. The street was too wet with snow melted by the municipal salt trucks to peel out the tires, but he managed to get the car twitchy as he rocketed up through the gears.

For a breathless second, Mercer glanced at the house, and noticed the front window was broken. Then came a shattering explosion that blew the remains of the living room window across the lawn like a cannon blast from a ship of the line discharging grapeshot. The front door resisted the overpressure for only seconds before it, too, blew off its hinges and flew like a playing card into the street. Mercer stopped the SUV. Flames quickly engulfed the front of the house, licking at the stucco and igniting the decorative oak beams.

The explosive device the Honda driver had thrown through the window must have contained an accelerant. Gasoline would be easy enough, thought Mercer. Abe Jacobs’s quaint Tudor home was about to become a charred pile of cinders and ash. The conflagration grew before their eyes. Smoke and then flame started pouring from the upstairs window above the front room. The house, and whatever clues Abe might have left behind, were moments away from being a total loss.