The Chronoliths

“Cheever,” Ashlee said, “can you tell me if he’s still in town?”

“I can’t tell you a firm yes or no, but I doubt it. If he is, I haven’t seen him. I talk to people, you know, I follow the links, I keep my ear to ground. There are always rumors. You remember Kirkwell?”

Last summer, a clinically paranoid retired butcher in Kirkwell, New Mexico, had a

“These rumors come and go,” Cox said, “but the big one right now is Mexico. Ciudad Portillo. Adam was in this room three weeks ago and he was talking about it then — not that anybody paid much attention to him. That’s why he hooked up with the suburban Copperheads, I think, because he wanted to go to Mexico and he thought that crowd could supply at least a little money, some transportation.”

Ashlee said, “He went to Mexico?”

Cox held up his hands. “I can’t tell you that for sure. But if I had to bet I’d say he was on the road and bound for the border, if he hasn’t already crossed it.”

Ashlee said nothing. She looked pensive and pale, almost beaten. Cox made a sympathetic sound. “That’s the trouble,” he said. “Stupid people do stupid things, but Adam is smart enough to do something really stupid.”

We talked it around a little more, but Cox had said all he had to say. Finally Ashlee stood up and stepped toward the door.

Cox hugged her again.

“Come see me when your script runs out,” he said.

I asked her on the drive back how she had known Adam was missing.

She said, “What do you mean?”

“It sounds like Adam was co

We pulled up at the curb. Ashlee said, “I’ll show you.”

She unlocked the street door and walked me up a narrow flight of stairs to her apartment. The apartment was laid out like any other railway flat: a big front room facing the street, two tiny bedrooms off a corridor, a square kitchen with a window over the rear alley. The apartment was stuffy; Ashlee said she preferred to keep the windows shut during the garbage strike. But it was neatly and sensibly furnished. It was the home of someone possessing taste and common sense, if not much capital.

“This door,” Ashlee told me, “is Adam’s room. He doesn’t like people going in there, but he’s not around to object.”

In a sense, my first real contact with Adam was this glimpse of his room. I suppose I expected the worst: pornography, graffiti, maybe a shotgun buried in the laundry hamper.

But Adam’s room was nothing like that. It was more than orderly, it was icily neat. The bed was made. The closet door was open and the number of bare hangers suggested that Adam had packed for a long trip, but what remained of his wardrobe was neatly arrayed. The bookshelves were makeshift brick-and-board arrangements but the books were upright and in alphabetical order, not by author but by title.

Books tell you a lot about the people who choose and read them. Adam clearly leaned toward the more technical sort of nonfiction — electronics manuals, textbooks (including organic chemistry and American history), Fundamentals of Computation, plus random biographies (Picasso, Lincoln, Mao Zedong), Famous Trials of the Twentieth Century, How to Repair Almost Anything, Ten Steps to a More Efficient Fuel Cell. A child’s astronomy book and a spotter’s guide to ma

There were no photographs of living human beings visible, but the walls were papered with magazine shots of various Chronoliths. (Briefly, and uncomfortably, I was reminded of Sue Chopra’s office in Baltimore.)

Ashlee said, “Does it look like he never comes home? This is Adam’s ground zero. Maybe he didn’t sleep here every night, but he was here for a good eight or ten hours out of every twenty-four. Always.”

She closed the door.

“Fu

She fixed coffee and we talked a while longer, sitting on Ashlee’s long sofa with the sound of street traffic coming through the closed but single-glazed windows. There was something deeply comforting about the moment — Ashlee moving in the kitchen, absentmindedly smoothing her bristly hair with her hand — something almost viscerally comforting, a shadow of the kind of domesticity I had misplaced more than a decade ago. I was grateful to her for that.

But the moment couldn’t last. She asked me about Kaitlin and I told her something (not everything) about Chumphon and the way I had spent the last ten years. She was impressed that I had seen the Jerusalem arrival, not because she felt any reverence for Kuin but because it meant I had moved, if only peripherally, among the kind of people she imagined were relatively rich and vaguely famous. “At least you were doing something,” she said, “not just spi

I told her she had obviously done more than spin her wheels: It couldn’t have been easy for a single woman to raise a child during the economic crisis.

“They call it spi

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have to talk to some people.”

“Would you follow Kaitlin all the way to Portillo?”

“If I thought I could help her. If I thought it would do any good.”

“But you’re not sure.”

“No. I’m not sure.”

My pocket phone rang. It was set to take messages, but I checked the display to see who was calling. It might have been Janice saying Kait had come home, that the whole thing was a stupid misunderstanding. Or it might have been Ramone Dudley calling to tell me the police had found Kait’s body.

It was neither. According to the text display, the call was from Sue Chopra. She had tracked down my private terminal address (despite the fact that I had changed it when I left Baltimore), and she wanted me to reply as soon as possible.

“I should take this in private,” I told Ashlee.

She walked me down the stairs and out to the car I took her hand. It was late, and the street was empty. The streetlights were the old-fashioned mercury vapor kind, and they put amber highlights in Ashlee’s short blond hair. Her hand was warm.

“If you find out something,” she said, “you have to tell me. Promise me that.”

I promised.

“Call me, Scott.”

I believe she genuinely wanted me to call her. I believe she doubted that I would.

“First of all,” Sue said, leaning into the lens so that her face filled the motel terminal’s phone window like a myopic brown moon, “I want you to know I’m not pissed about the way you left town. I understand what that was all about, and if you chose not to confide in me, I guess I have myself to blame. Although — I don’t know why it is, Scotty, you always expect the worst of people. Did it even occur to you we might want to help?”