Blind Lake

Chris knew about the Saturday debate. Marguerite was supposed to be one of the speakers. She’d written something for it, though she’d been extremely reluctant to appear on stage with Ray. Ari Weingart had convinced her it would be a good idea, increase her visibility and maybe shore up her support with the other departments.

“How do we come into this?” Chris asked.

“You don’t, really. I just want you guys in the auditorium keeping an eye on the stage. That way, if Ray takes off in a hurry you can give me a call.”

Sebastian shook his head. “This is still far too dangerous. You could get in trouble.”

She smiled indulgently. “I appreciate you saying that. But I think I’m already in trouble. I think we all are. Don’t you?”

Nobody bothered to argue.

Elaine stayed on a few minutes after Sue and Sebastian left.

Business at Sawyer’s picked up a little around lunchtime. But only a little. The afternoon sky outside the window was blue, the air still and cold.

“So,” Elaine said, “are you up for this, Chris?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“We’re in deeper shit than anyone wants to admit. Getting out of this alive might be the hardest thing any of us has ever done. Are you up to it?”

He shrugged.

“You’re thinking of your girlfriend. And her daughter.”

“We don’t need to make it personal, Elaine.”

“Come on, Chris. I have eyes. You’re not as deep and inscrutable as you like to think. When you wrote that Galliano book, you put on your white hat and set out to right some wrongs. And you got burned for it. You found out that the good guy isn’t universally loved even when he’s right. Quite the opposite. Very disappointing for a nice suburban boy. So you wallowed in some justifiable self-pity, and you’re entitled, why not. But here comes all this lockdown bullshit, plus whatever happened at Crossbank, not to mention Marguerite and that little girl of hers. I think you feel the urge to put that white hat back on your head. What I’m saying is: good. Now’s the time. Don’t resist it.”

Chris folded his napkin and stood up. “You don’t know the first fucking thing about me,” he said.

Twenty-One

After Chris had left the house, and before the call came from Charlie Grogan asking her to pick up her daughter, Marguerite had spent the morning with the Subject.

Despite the implied danger to Blind Lake and Ray’s explicit threats, there was nothing useful she could do, at least not right now. Much would be asked of her, Marguerite suspected, and probably very soon. But not yet. Now she was stuck in a limbo of dread and ignorance. No real work to do and no way to calm the churn of her emotions. She hadn’t slept, but sleep was out of the question.

So she made herself a pot of tea and watched the Subject, scribbling notes for queries she would probably never submit. The entire enterprise was doomed, Marguerite thought, and so probably was the Subject himself. He appeared visibly weaker as the sun rose into a pale sky flecked with high clouds. He had been hiking for weeks, far from any traveled road, with scant supplies of food and water. His morning cloacal evacuations were thin and faintly green. When he walked, his body periodically contorted in angles that suggested pain.

But this morning he found both food and water. He had entered the foothills of a tall range of mountains, and though the land was still terribly dry he discovered an oasis where a stream of glacial water cascaded down a terrace of rocks. The water pooled in a cup of granite, deep and transparent as glass. Fan-leafed succulents splayed their foliage around it.

Subject bathed before he ate. He advanced gingerly into the pool, then stood under the falling stream. He had accumulated a coat of dust during his journey and it discolored the water around him. When he emerged from the pool his dermal integument was gleaming, changed from near-white to a somber burnt-umber. He swiveled his head as if sca

Then he sat patiently digesting his meal, and Marguerite called up the file she had been writing for Tess: her children’s-book story of the Subject’s odyssey.

The act of writing soothed her, although the narrative was far from up-to-date. She had just finished a description of the sandstorm crisis and Subject’s awakening in the ruined city of the desert.

She wrote:

All around him in the still and windless morning were the pillars and mounds of buildings long abandoned and eroded by the seasons. These structures were not like the tall conical buildings of his home city. Whoever had made these buildings — perhaps his own ancestors — had made them differently. They had erected pillars, like the Greeks, and the pillars might once have supported much greater houses, or temples, or places of business. The pillars were hewn from black stone. The gritty desert wind had polished them to a fine smoothness. Some stood tall, but most had been worn to fractions of their original size, and where they had not fallen the wind had left them listing toward the east. There were the remains of other kinds of buildings too, some square foundations and even a few low pyramids, all of them as rounded as the rocks you find at the bottom of a stream. The storm had scoured the desert floor to a level surface, and now the sun cast stark shadows among the ruins. Subject stood in contemplation. The sundial shadows grew shorter as the morning wore on. Then — perhaps thinking of his destination — Subject began to walk westward once again. By noon he had left the ruined city entirely, and it vanished below the horizon as if utterly lost, and nothing remained ahead of him but glittering sand and the ghostly blue silhouettes of distant mountains.

She had just keyed the period when she took Charlie Grogan’s call.

Tess was quiet in the car as they left the Alley.

Marguerite drove slowly, struggling to assemble her thoughts. She had an important choice to make.

But first she wanted to know what had happened. Tess had left school and wandered over to the Eye to bother Charlie, that much was obvious, but why?

“I’m sorry,” Tess said, shooting apprehensive glances at her from the passenger seat. Am I, Marguerite wondered, as frightening as that? Judge and jury? Is that how she sees me?

“You don’t have to apologize,” Marguerite said. “Tell you what. I’ll call Mr. Fleischer and tell him you had an appointment but you forgot to give him the note. How’s that sound?”

“Okay,” Tess said cautiously, waiting for the hook.

“But I’m sure he’s worried about you. So am I. How come you didn’t go back for class this afternoon?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to go to the Eye.”

“How come? I thought you didn’t like it there. You hated the tour, back at Crossbank.”

“Just felt like it.”

“Badly enough to skip school?”

“I guess.”

“How’d you get inside? Mr. Grogan seemed a little upset over that.”

“I walked in. Nobody was looking.”

That, at least, was probably true. Tess was too guileless to have bluffed her way in or found a hidden entrance. In all likelihood she had just walked up to the front door and opened it: Charlie’s investigation would discover a sleepy security guard or some employee who’d wandered out to smoke a joint. “Did you find what you were looking for?”