Burning Paradise

Leo gave Beth the key to the Park Service man’s pickup and told her to start it up and to follow the car. There was a road through the forest that would take them to a co

Cassie forced herself not to look back.

A couple of miles down the road Leo stopped the car. Beth came over from the pickup and slid into the front passenger seat while Leo put the Park Service vehicle into neutral and pushed it over an embankment into a bushy declivity where some nameless creek ran brown and fast. The pickup wouldn’t be especially well-hidden—even a cursory search would turn it up—but it would be out of sight at least until someone came looking for it. Or so Leo said.

Cassie thought about the Park Service man back at the cabin.

Sooner or later he would wiggle out of his restraints. Without his truck he would have to walk to the public road, flag down a passing car, get a ride to the hospital or the nearest police station. All of that would buy them a little time. (Or, Cassie thought, the man might be too weak to set himself free; he might die of exposure on the filthy cabin floor, and they would be guilty of another murder… that was possible, too.)

Leo climbed back behind the wheel of the car, smelling of mud and pine needles, and drove wordlessly through the forest. The rain was a relentless obscuring wash against the windshield. Thomas, no longer sniffling, seemed comforted by the rhythmic noise of the windshield wipers. Cassie understood that. Since the death of her parents she had learned to value all the wordless consolations of the world—wind and rain, sunlight and moonlight, noonday shadows and darkened rooms—everything reliably felt and not treacherously unpredictable.

They reached the turnpike, and a mile outside the town of East Cut Leo parked the car behind the ruin of a failed and abandoned gas station. The rain had stopped, and they were able to hike through a gathering ground fog to the East Cut bus depot. A largely empty afternoon bus carried them to Kewanee, where they caught an express to Galesburg and from Galesburg a late-evening local that stopped in a town called Jordan Landing. On the outskirts of Jordan Landing was the house where Leo’s father lived.

Leo didn’t want to risk another payment on the credit card he had been using, so Cassie paid for the motel room where they spent the night. Come morning they set out on foot to find the address Leo had memorized.

The town of Jordan Landing had grown up around a Mississippi River wharf, a John Deere branch plant, and a brickworks. They stopped for breakfast at a Main Street diner with calendars from local businesses tacked to the wall behind the counter. Leo picked a booth by the restaurant’s big window, where they could see a shopkeep er rolling out his awning and a grocer stacking boxes of lettuce on the mica-flecked sidewalk. Today, Cassie realized belatedly, was Armistice Day. Ba

The waitress who brought their breakfasts ruffled Thomas’s hair and asked whether they were visiting or just passing through.

“Passing through,” Leo said.

“Too bad. We’re having a nice show in the park to night. Fireworks and all. Though I expect you’ve seen better—you look like city people to me, am I right?”

“Detroit,” Leo lied.

I could live here, Cassie thought. It would be easy to fall in love with this su

They paid the waitress for their eggs and bacon and whole-wheat toast dabbed with butter, for their coffee and cream and for Thomas’s mug of hot chocolate. The restaurant had begun to fill up with locals, and Leo was looking fretful and impatient. Time to get on with business. They all knew there was a real possibility that Leo’s father had been targeted in the latest round of attacks. Werner Beck was famously wealthy and well-defended, but even Werner Beck was mortal.

The house where Leo’s father lived was located farther from the center of town than it had seemed on the map, and as they walked Cassie could see the tension rising in Leo’s body, the way he hitched his shoulders and glanced compulsively behind him. Twice she asked him to slow down so Thomas could keep up. The air was cool but the sunlight and the brisk pace raised a sweat on her face. Jordan Landing was a hilly town, and the Mississippi was occasionally visible to the west, brown and busy with shipping.

She was surprised, though she shouldn’t have been, when they finally came within sight of the house: it was modest and unremarkable, which was probably why Werner Beck had chosen it. Beck could have afforded a Manhattan pent house had he wanted one, but prudence had led him to choose this perfectly ordinary house in this perfectly ordinary town. It was the last home on a street that curved gently eastward from the Mississippi embankment. Cassie guessed most of these small houses belonged to workers at the brickworks or the John Deere plant. The houses backed on unimproved lots, each divided from its neighbor by a hedgerow or a picket fence. Some of the houses had elaborate gardens, now bedded in for winter; in one of these gardens an elderly woman looked up from her work—laying canvas sheets over rosebushes—and waved tentatively. Cassie waved back as if she belonged here. It was better not to look furtive.

Leo followed the patio-block pathway to his father’s door. Cassie saw with dismay that a few days’ worth of newspapers had been delivered to the porch but never picked up. Leo had brought his pistol, tucked into his waistband under his shirt and jacket, and he took it out now, keeping it concealed in front of him. He knocked at the door, waited, rang the bell, rang it again. There was no answer. And when he turned the knob the door swung open, unlocked.

“Stay here,” he said tersely.

Cassie felt Thomas grab her hand. Maybe it was reckless to have brought Thomas along, but leaving him at the motel had seemed equally risky. And she had not imagined that the sims, even if they had come to Werner Beck’s house, would still be here—why would they? But she backed a few paces away just in case, and she leaned and whispered to Thomas, “If you have to run, run. Don’t worry about me.” Which frightened him, but it couldn’t be helped.

Leo disappeared into the shadow of the house while Beth sulked on the porch. Minutes passed. Cassie heard the distant tolling of a church bell, muted by the morning air. It was if the day had been encased in cool blue glass.

Then Leo reappeared in the doorway, looking stricken, and waved them all inside.

There was no evidence that Leo’s father had been killed. No blood, no upturned furniture or broken glass, no bullet holes in the walls. But Werner Beck was gone, had apparently been gone for some days, and seemed to have left in haste. An uneaten meal sat on the kitchen table: roast beef congealed in its own gravy and a slice of buttered bread from which a few threads of mold had sprouted. A copy of the Jordan Landing Advertiser lay unfolded beside the plate.

Cassie followed Leo upstairs, to a room that must have been Beck’s study. An oaken desk shared the space with bookcases and filing cabinets. The filing cabinets had been rifled; the drawers were open, some pulled from their cabinets and dumped on the floor. “What happened here?” Beth asked.