Blind Lake

The falling snow gave the town an illusory vagueness, like a tintype photograph or a stage set painted in shades of gray. The windowpane flexed in a gust of wind, lensing the image slightly. Subject stared for an indeterminate period of time at the approaching storm.

When he turned away, the chair’s castor caught on something hidden under the desk. The cleaning staff had gotten sloppy, but that was hardly news. A sheet of paper. Scowling, he bent down to retrieve it.

EX: Bo Xiang, Crossbank National Laboratory TO: Avery Fishbinder, Blind Lake National Laboratory TEXT: In answer to your question, the possibility that the dry-land structures are natural is very slim. Although this kind of symmetry is often enough seen in nature, the size of the structure and the degree of precision are remarkable and suggest engineering rather than evolution. Not that this is a clinching argument, but

Ray stopped reading and placed the paper face-up on his desk.

Slowly, taking his time now, resisting hasty judgment, he keyed open his desk and removed from the bottom drawer the thick sheaf of printouts Shulgin had delivered to him. He leafed through it quickly.

The pages were out of order.

Someone had been in his desk again.

Ray stood up. He saw his reflection in the window, an image pasted on a mural of clouds, a man frozen in a layer of glass.

Twenty-Four

The weather was conspicuously worse by the time Chris, Marguerite, and Tess reached the house. Maybe that was a good thing, Chris thought. It put another barrier between Marguerite and Ray. If Ray came looking for his daughter Tess — or looking for revenge — the snow might at least slow him down.

Tess had cried after the phone call. Now her tears had subsided into a flurry of hiccups, and Marguerite walked her into the house with an arm around her shoulder. Tess shrugged out of her jacket and boots and ran for the living room sofa as if it were a life raft.

Marguerite carded the door. “Better throw the dead bolt too,” Chris said.

“You think that’s necessary?”

“I think it’s wise.”

“Aren’t you being a little paranoid? Ray wouldn’t—”

“We don’t know what Ray might do. We shouldn’t take chances.”

She threw the bolt and joined her daughter on the sofa.

Chris borrowed her office to print the docs Sue had transferred to his server. The office was windowless, but he could hear the wind kicking up outside, prying at the eavestroughs like a man with a blunt knife.

He thought about Ray onstage at the auditorium. Ray’s first order of business had been to deride and humiliate Marguerite, and he had done that fairly cleverly, disguising his anger, controlling it. For a guy like Ray, it was all about control. But the world was full of unmanageable insolence. Expectations were confounded. Wives disobeyed and then abandoned him. His theories were proven false.

His desk was rifled.

The important thing about Ray’s little meltdown, Chris thought, was that it evidenced a deeper unraveling. Guys like Ray were emotionally brittle, which was what made them such effective bullies. They lived just this side of the breaking point. And sometimes passed it.

Pages snapped briskly out of the printer, all of the thirty-odd documents Sue had filched. Ray’s treasure, for what it was worth. Chris sat down and began to read.

Marguerite spent the gray end of the afternoon with her daughter.

Tess had calmed down considerably once she was inside the house. But her distress was still obvious. She had curled up on the sofa with a quilted comforter around her like a prayer shawl and fixed her attention on the video screen. Blind Lake TV was showing old downloads of The Fosters, a children’s show Tess hadn’t watched since she was six. She had turned up the volume to drown out the sound of the wind and the sound of hard snow rattling against the windows.

Marguerite sat with her much of this time. She was curious about the documents Chris was printing and reading; but, perhaps strangely, none of that seemed urgent now. For a few hours the world was suspended between darkness and true night, cosseted in the worsening storm, and all she needed or wanted to do was hunker down with Tess.

She went to the kitchen a little after five to assemble some di

Tess came into the kitchen and pulled up a chair, watching Marguerite chop yellow peppers for the salad.

“Is Chris okay?” Tess asked.

“Sure he is. He’s just upstairs doing some work.” Conferring by phone with Elaine Coster, last time she’d checked.

“But he’s still in the house?”

“Yup, still here.”

“That’s good,” Tess said. She sounded genuinely relieved. “It’s better when he’s here.”

“I think so too.”

“How long will he stay?”

Interesting question. “Well — at least until all this trouble at the Lake is finished. And maybe longer than that.” Maybe. She had not discussed this with Chris. If she asked him about his long-term plans, would that seem needy or presumptuous? Would she like the answer? And under the circumstances, how could anyone have long-term plans?

The relationship felt reasonably solid to Marguerite. Had she fallen in love with Chris Carmody? Yes, she thought so; but she was afraid of the word, afraid of saying it and almost as frightened of hearing it. Love was a natural phenomenon, often false or fleeting. Like a warm spell in October, it could end at any time.

“Tess? Can I ask you something?”

Tess shrugged, rocking gently against the back of the chair.

“Back at the auditorium, you said, ‘You can’t kill her.’ Who were you talking about?”

“You know.”

“You mean Mirror Girl?”

“I guess.”

“I don’t think Dad was talking about Mirror Girl. He was talking about the processors out at the Eye.”

“Same thing,” Tess said, obviously uncomfortable.

“Same thing? What do you mean?”

“I don’t know how to explain it. But that’s where she really lives. It’s all the same thing.”

When Marguerite pressed for details Tess became unresponsive; finally Marguerite let her retreat to the sofa. Still, it was a new twist, this idea that Mirror Girl lived at the Eye. Perhaps meaningful, but Marguerite couldn’t decipher it. Was that why Tess had snuck off to the Alley last week? Tracking Mirror Girl to her lair?

When all this craziness ends, Marguerite promised herself, I’ll take her somewhere away from here. Somewhere different. Somewhere dry and warm. Marguerite had often thought of visiting the desert Southwest — Utah, Arizona, Canyonlands, Four Corners — and Ray had always vetoed the idea. Maybe she would take Tess to the desert for a vacation. Dry country, though perhaps disconcertingly like the Subject’s UMa47/E. Looking for salvation in empty places.

Chris put a call through to Elaine. Marguerite’s office server picked up the audio and relayed it through the transducers in the walls, a co

Elaine bunked in a two-room utility apartment left vacant by a maintenance man who had gone to Fargo for lithotripsy the day before the lockdown. It was a ground-floor unit with a view of the Dumpsters in back of Sawyer’s Steak Seafood. “Not a lot of room to move around in here… is that better?”