Zero Option

17

Mrs. Hadley had proved to be more than a competent cook, and Stafford was comfortably replete as he sat down in one of the rocking chairs out on Owen’s private porch. There was a three-quarter moon rising over Howell Mountain, and he thought he could still see the spring colors in the willows and fields around the house. Gwen brought out a tray of coffee and sat down in the other rocker. She had changed clothes for dinner, wearing now a much more flattering dress. The kids had been fed.early and sent upstairs. She had been more animated during their own quiet dinner in the kitchen, telling him more about Willow Grove, how the state programs for orphaned children worked, and of the constant battle for funding. He told her about his own work with kids in the Boys Club program up in Washington, and how funding had become pretty difficult for that operation, too.

After dinner, she told him about the children and their origins. Crash, a four-year-old fast neutron who never quite seemed to make it arourtd corners and fixed objects without a collision, had been orphaned by a trailer fire. Hollywood was the oldest boy; his nickname arose from his fascination with video movies. His father had killed his mother in a drunken argument, packed his three children into the pickup truck, and then had driven jt into a mountain river at fifty miles an hour.

Hollywood, the only swimmer, got out and made it to the shore, where he was found curled up on a tree stump two days later by a deputy sheriff.

No-No came from less violent circumstances: He had been found hiding in a Dumpster up along the Tennessee border as a two-year-old — parents or relatives entirely unknown. For the first six months at Willow Grove, the only word he spoke was no-no.

Of the little girls, Too had been handed to the Department of Family and Children Services by her mother when her heroin addiction had closed in and she sensed she was dying. The child had been on the brink of death by starvation by the time the state intervened. Her nickname also arose from sorhething she said, which was most often heard at mealtimes, where she would hold out her hand and say, “Too,” meaning, they finally realized, “Me, too,” whenever food was handed out. It had taken her a year to understand that she wasn’t going to be starved anymore. Last, and saddest, was Annie. Annie was a crack baby, a bright, energetic, loud child who could learn anything — for two minutes. Then it was as if she had never even seen the person who had just taught her to tie her shoelaces. Annie was bound for special placement as soon as she was five, or as soon as there was an opening, whichever came first. Courtesy of her mother’s crack habit, Annie would never be able to learn and retain anything, although she would probably live as a ward of the state well into old age.

Stafford had wondered aloud if the children would make it into normal, mainstream life in America. “That’s our job here,” she replied. “I should say, That’s our objective. We have to bring them up from some deep negative number, get past zero, and into a positive mental and physical environment where they finally believe that what happened to them wasn’t their fault. Then we can proceed. Success after that is based — a lot on their native talent.”

“And the care they get here.”

“That, too. But the truth is, if their parents were dullards, and their parents were dullards, genius is not likely to manifest itself. There is no escaping one’s mental heredity.”

“Are they classified as emotionally disturbed?”

“Sometimes. I must confess to applying that label, although at the mildest classification. The per diem for the home is increased if there are emotional disturbances. We barely break even as it is. But we make do, and we do our best.”

“You make it sound so matter-of-fact, so, I don’t know, professional. I don’t think I could handle some of the emotional embers you must touch from time to time.” “Ah, yes, those,” she said, looking away for a moment. “Like when Hollywood goes sleepwalking, calling out for.his mama in a voice very much like Bambi in the Disney movie. Especially when he says, ‘Mama,” followed by ‘Sh h-h-h, Poppa’s comin.’ That’ll do it.” There was a special shine to her eyes when she told him this.

“Yes, I guess that would.” He was about to ask her about Jessamine, but then he decided to keep waiting. He asked Gwen instead about her coming back to Graniteville.

“It’s my home,” she said. “When you’re a southern woman and you’re no longer married, you either go far away or you go home. I was actually born and raised here.” “But you said you were a doctoral candidate at the university? At one time you’ve lived elsewhere.”

She nodded in the shadows. “Yes. Technically, my field of study is child psychology. I’ve discovered that there are different dialects of sign language practiced in the hill country, especially among children from some of the more dysfunctional families. Jessamine is an example. That’s not ASL she’s using; it’s her own.”

“Inbreeding is still a problem up here in the mountains?”

“That’s an indelicate phraseology, but the phone book is pretty revealing,” she said wearily.

“And you were married? To John Lee Warren?” “Yes,” she said softly. “For a while. We had grown up together through high school. He stayed behind here in Graniteville to work for the Sheriff’s Department when I went off to college. We got married when I came back home.”

“Was that always in the cards? That you would come back here?”

“My father insisted that I go away to college, but in my heart, I never left this town. Especially after Mom died while I was in college.

Graniteville isn’t such a special place, but this farm is, and so are these hills, although at I times they seem lonely, too, with all the people gone.”

She had shifted the conversation away from her marriage, so Stafford went with it. “As I said earlier,” he — noted, “I’m not so sure these hills are all that empty. Of people, I mean.”

She looked past him again but did not directly answer his question. She has that mountain secretiveness about her, he thought. He was utterly intrigued by this woman, by her physical grace and intelligence, all cloaked in a dignity that he had not seen in his world of Washington and government. He found himself wishing she were plain and uninteresting, because now it really was time to get back to business.

“So, Gwen,” he said. “The business at the airport. Jes’samine.” “Yes,” she said with a small sigh. “The airport. First, I have to tell you why we were at the airport. We were returning from Charlotte. I’d taken Jess to the Braden Institute there.”

“Which is?”

“A hospital specializing in young adult brain tumors.”

“Oh my.”

“Yes. She went to be tested. The good news is that all the scans were negative.” “That’s wonderful,” he said. “What on earth could be the bad news with a report like that?”

She turned to face him directly. “This is the part I need you to promise to keep to yourself,” she said. “I mean, you can know it, but I need to know that you won’t make it part of your official world.”

“I’m not following, Gwen,” he replied, equivocating a little.

“I know. But will you promise? — It’s for the child’s protection, not mine. I think you’ll understand when I tell you. But I guess what I’m saying is that even though you can know about it, you won’t be able to act on it. I simply can’t permit that.”

“Well,” he said, “I can promise to be discreet. And since you’re her guardian, if you won’t permit her further involvement, that pretty much settles it, doesn’t it?” But even as he said it, he knew that wasn’t true, either.

She thought about his answer for a moment, then nodded her head. “All right. As I said, it’s complicated. Jessamine — Jess — is, we think, a psychic.”

What did this have to do with the price of rice? “Oh” was all he could manage., “Yes, ‘oh.’ Emphasis on the ‘we think,’ of course, because it isn’t all that cut-and-dried. And then there is the problem of her speech, or the lack of it. But I, for one, think it’s true. The question is, To what degree? And what to do about it? She appears to have the ability of presence telepathy.”

“Presence telepathy,” Stafford repeated. He stood up, suddenly needing to stretch his injured arm. All he knew about psychics was that a certain government agency had gotten its bureaucratic mammary glands in the media wringer recently over a program called Stargate. There had been quite a flap, with the press preaching indignantly about millions spent on questionable research, joined eagerly by a horde of self-righteous congresspersons. He remembered all the talk of so-called mind readers communicating with clandestine agents and seeing through walls in far-off places. Right.

“Do you know anything about the subject of psychic research?” she asked.

“No. I was just thinking about Stargate and the fiasco that caused.”

She nodded. “Yes, that was unfortunate, because there’s more to it than palm readers by the roadside. Believe it or not, there is a growing body of professional research literature on the subject, such as the Macklin study done at Princeton.”

Stafford struggled to be polite. “I suppose there is,” he said. “And a lot of charlatans in the field, as well.” “Oh, yes,” she said, sounding a bit defensive. “Except I’ve personally seen manifestations of it in this child.”

Stafford sat back down. “Look, Gwen, I’m basically a cop. I’ve been trained to see the evidence in front of me. I kind of have a problem with the whole concept of psychic powers, or whatever you want to call them. I’m not saying they don’t exist, mind you, just that I’ve never seen anything remotely resembling convincing proof of it.”

“How about those people who help the police? And aren’t most of them women?”

He couldn’t answer that one. He had read about enough of those cases to make him wonder, but he remained skeptical.

“So what can she do?” he asked. “Bend spoons, things like that?”

She froze in the act of lifting her coffee cup. Dammit, he thought, that was a dumb thing to say. “Forget I said that,” he said. “It’s just—”

She put down her coffee cup, her face a pale mask of annoyance, and for a moment he thought the evening was over, but then she surprised him.

“I understand, Mr. Stafford,” she said patiently. “I should have anticipated that. It’s not an … unreasonable reaction to this whole subject.”

So now it was back to Mr. Stafford. He tried again. “Look, Gwen, you asked earlier what I was doing down here in Georgia. Well, officially, I’m pursuing a longstanding fraud investigation that involves the auctioning of surplus government material. Unofficially, I’ve been sent—

or maybe exiled is a better word for it — to Georgia for committing some political indiscretions within my agency. Add to that the fact that my wife left me for another man a year ago, and add to that the loss of my right arm. I’m probably not the most focused government investigator you’ll ever meet. That said, I must tell you that I haven’t exactly uncovered the crime of the century down at the DRMO in Atlanta, either.” “What’s a DRMO?” she asked. He explained the term, concluding with the fact that Carson, the man who’d fainted at the airport, was the manager.

“If there is something going on there, I would have to look hard at the manager, Carson, because it would be tough to run the kind of scam we’re looking for without his knowledge or even participation. But so far, there is no real evidence of that. Right now, the only odd thing about him is what happened at that airport.”

She thought about that for almost a minute. Finally, she spoke.

“You asked what Jessamine ‘does.’ Well, what she does is a form of what most of us would call ‘mental telepathy.’ ”. ‘

“You’re saying she can read minds?”

“Not exactly. I hate that term — read minds — because it provokes an image of science fiction.”

Or science fantasy, he thought.

“But the best way I can describe it is to say that she can apparently form a mental image — a picture, if you will — of what.another person is thinking, provided that person is in an agitated mental state. If they’re very angry, for example, or very afraid.”

That made him stop and think back to the airport. Carson had been staring at the girl when he passed out. Stafford was positive of that.

Had Carson been in an agitated mental state? He hadn’t seemed so, at least not after the incident. And yet, Stafford had-not been there before the man had fainted. Had Carson been scared witless there in the terminal because the DCIS was paying him a no notice visit? And if so, for what reason? Had the girl perhaps detected the reason?

“So you think maybe Jess ‘saw’ something,” life said. “Or received this mental image of some evildoing on Carson’s part just before he fainted?

Why do you think that?”

“Because he fainted,” she said softly. “That’s what happens when she sees something. It’s happened here in the home.

Twice. On the first occasion, one of the other kids, a child who is no longer here, accused her of taking one of his books. He was not very stable, emotionally, and he got really ugly with her, got right in her face with lots of shouting and name-calling, and then suddenly he just fainted. Jess looked around for a moment, then signed to me that the thing he was looking for was not a book, but a magazine, and that it was hidden behind his own bureau. I went and looked, accompanied by Mrs. Benning, by the way, who also saw this. The magazine was right where she said it was, taped to the back of the bureau. It was one of those porn things.”

“She could have already known that it was there,” he pointed out.

“Then why did the boy faint when he got into it with Jess?”

“Hyperventilated, maybe? Got so mad, he held his breath?”

She looked at him patiently.

“Okay, and the second time?”

“The second time involved a teenage boy who worked afternoons for Mr. Jackson in the barn. Jess was down there one day, getting ready to ride, when the boy came into the stall aisle. She looked at him, dropped the reins,” picked up a broom; and went after him. This time, she was the one who was extremely agitated. The kid just backed away, but she kept after him. She can’t speak, remember, so the only way she can express serious anger is by doing something.”

“Like beating him ip with a broom?”

“Yes. Fortunately, Mr. Jackson was there, but as he ran to break it up, the boy suddenly fainted. Mr. Jackson had to restrain her physically from doing some real damage.” — “What had he done?”

She refilled their coffee cups. “This was a little more difficult to get out of her,” she said, “but apparently, when the school bus was late, Jess had been going directly to the barn and changing clothes in one of the stalls. The stall was next to the feed room, and the boy had a peephole and had been spying on her when she got undressed. He was very likely thinking some seriously impure thoughts when this episode erupted. He was fifteen, raging male hormones and all that, and she is, as you’ve seen, developed. We found the peephole, and there was evidence that it had been used frequently.” “Damn,” he said. “And what did the kid do when he woke up?”

“He was disoriented and embarrassed, in about equal proportions.”

Just like Carson, he thought. “Did you have any tests done in Charlotte in this area?”

“Not beyond a brain scan. She’d been complaining of headaches, and I suppose I thought …” She didn’t finish the sentence.

He remembered her comment about good news. “And the bad news was that you were hoping they’d find a physiological explanation for the two incidents you described?”

“Yes. I believe the thing at the airport makes three.”

Stafford finished his coffee. “As I recall the press reports on the Stargate program, they were trying to find people who could establish a telepathic relationship over long distances.”

“Well, you know more about that than I do. But if that was the case, Jess couldn’t have helped them. This phenomenon apparently happens only when she’s right in front of the other person, and that person is mentally agitated.”

“Or she is. Have you talked to her about it? I don’t mean the incidents, but the phenomenon itself?”

“Tried. We have the basic problem of having to use sign language, and my having to explain new terms to her. Plus, she went through a pretty horrific experience as a very young child. Talking about this phenomenon is very tricky, because any teenager, and especially Jess, is hypersensitive to any implication that there’s something different, or wrong, with them. I told you, Dave, this is complicated.”

It certainly is, he thought, although he wanted to know more about why Gwen was being so protective of the girl. On the other hand, that was, after all, her job. But assuming the phenomenon was real, what had the girl seen in Carson’s mind?

“Would you consider letting’me talk to her?” he asked. “With you present, of course; I can’t read sign language, so you’d have to translate. But I guess I need to know what she saw in the airport.”

Gwen had to think about that, and he gave her time. He could not imagine what the hell Carson could have going at the DRMO that might trigger one of the girl’s psychic episodes.

“That depends,” she replied finally. “On what you’re investigating at that place, and what would happen to her if you catch this Carson person because of something Jess saw.” “As I said, at the moment I don’t have any evidence that Carson is doing anything wrong. I don’t much like the guy, nor do his employees, but that’s neither here nor there. But if I had to wrap up and report to my boss right now, I’d say there’s very little going on at that DRMO.”

“Well, what I’m getting at is that I won’t expose Jess to some media circus over a case of stolen airplane parts. Maybe we should just drop this.”

He nodded thoughtfully. For his part, he could just see himself bringing in a report to Ray Sparks based on a fourteen-year-old’s — what, visions?

“I could go along with that, Gwen. Unless she ‘saw’ a murder or something equally serious, that might be the best course of action.”

She looked at him for a moment. “You still don’t believe it, do you?” He sighed. “There are a lot of things in this world I don’t understand.

Understanding is different from believing. But like I said, I’m supposed to see what’s in front of me. I can’t see mental telepathy.”

She nodded. “Neither can I. But let me get something for you.”

She got up and went through a screen door. A light went on in her office and he could hear her looking for something. He got up and stood by the porch railing. Her side of the house faced away from the pond, overlooking the grove of sprawling, moonlit pecan trees. The scent of swelling greenery perfumed the darkness, and he could hear the first peeps of the nocturnal tree frog chorus. Gwen came back out onto the porch and handed him a piece of paper.

“What’s this?” he asked. It appeared to be a crude but detailed pencil drawing of a cylinder. In the background were several dozen small x’s, scattered randomly across the paper. No, not x’s. Crosses.

“I asked her to draw what she had seen when she encountered Mr. Carson in the airport. This is what she produced.”

He studied the drawing. A cylinder. So what? “And these marks? Crosses?” “She told me that the cylinder was filled with dead people. Thousands of them. Millions of them.”

“Terrific. What in the hell does that mean? I wonder.”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. She said the man was bad, but that this thing, whatever it is, was worse. Much worse.”

He studied the drawing again. The cylinder had knurled caps at each end, a detail he had missed the first time. “Can I keep this?” he asked.

“I’ll make you a copy.” He gave it to her and she went back into the office. He picked up the empty coffee cups and followed her.

“I still feel like I should interview Jess,” he said. “Although actually, I don’t know what I would ask.”

She smiled at him over her shoulder, and his breath caught in his throat for a second. “Your first instincts were probably correct. Here’s a copy. Perhaps it will make sense later.”

He took the drawing and folded it into his coa? pocket. He looked at his watch and said he should probably go. He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t think of an excuse to prolong his stay. She smiled again and walked him to the door. He thanked her for dinner and said he would let her know if anything came of the drawing. She took his hand for a moment. Her fingers were warm and soft.

“Mostly, keep it away from us, will you?” she said. “Whatever it is?

This is a pretty fragile group of kids, despite appearances. Your world would not bring us anything good.”

“My world?”

“You’re a federal policeman, Dave. What’s in your world that’s good for kids?”

Absolutely nothing, he thought. He thanked her again, reluctantly letting go of her hand, and walked out to his car.

As he drove out onto the state road, he looked back at the big house framed by all those trees, but all the outside lights were already out.

He went down the hill toward tpwn, driving slowly on the unfamiliar road, thinking about Gwen Warren. There was so much he wanted to know about her. After the wreckage of his own marriage, the upheaval of the whistle-blowing incident, and his arm’s uncertain prognosis, he had pretty much put women out of his mind. Every attractive single or divorced woman he met in the Washington milieu looked or sounded like his ex-wife, so putting them out of his mind had been easier to do than he had expected. But Gwen was not like them at all.

As he drove into the town of Graniteville and turned right up the hill toward the motel, he became aware of headlights behind him. The car followed him, some distance back, almost all the way to the motel, until he turned up the driveway by the Waffle House. As he pulled into the parking lot, he saw the car slow and then turn around. It was a police car. Now that’s interesting, he thought. He wondered if that might be Sheriff John Lee, minding the store.

Carson saw the two county arson investigators out the front door of the admin offices and went back to his own office., The Haller woman had wanted some background on Bud Lambry, what his job had been here at the DRMO, and why he might have quit. Carson was pretty sure he’d deflected any further inquiries.

He’d told them Lambry had just gotten mad and quit. Man even took the derail control console’s keys with him. Damned inconvenient. The personnel records indicated the address in southeast Atlanta, no further family data, no prior criminal convictions or serious disciplinary problems, and certainly no motives for arson. He had asked Haller if it had been arson, but she hadn’t really answered the question, giving him instead some “We’re still investigating” IJS.

Fair enough. He’d seen the television news report. They’d need an aircraft accident investigating team down there to prove anything other than that a propane leak had touched off an explosion. Well, no shit, Sherlock. Hardly a surprise event in those dilapidated old houses down there.

He sat down at his desk and thought about his latest conversation with Tangent, who had been less than thrilled at the news that the Army might know the cylinder was missing. Carson had switched immediately to the offensive: They would come and check the place out; he was sure of it.

Once the Army saw the demil machine, however, they would assume the missing cylinder had been destroyed in its environmental container, and then Tangent would be buying an object that didn’t exist. Tangent hadn’t been so sure the Army would make that assumption, but Carson had pointed out that the Army would also be looking desperately for a reason, any reason at all, to cover up their screw up. He had suggested that they shelve the deal for a few more days. Tangent reluctantly agreed, but he wanted to be informed the instant the Army backed out.

Carson tapped a pencil on his desk. Now he just had to wait. He had not been blowing smoke; he was sure in his bones that the Green Machine would be here, and probably very soon. Maybe even today. He wanted to go get the records of the Tooele shipment, although he dared not. Anything he did now connected with the containers would raise suspicions. The shipment had come in and the containers had become Monster feed. That’s all. And nothing could escape the end processes of the Monster. Not metal cylinders, not toxic substances, not the mortal remains of Bud Lambry. And this had happened some time ago. He listened with some satisfaction to the muted shrieking of rendering metal floating across the tarmac from the demil building.

One million in cash. All he had to do was wait. And keep his cool. The only wild card now was Stafford, but there was no way he could know anything. And the cylinder was hidden well. He could and would worry about it, but his sense of the matter told him his secret was safe.