Burning Paradise

“Yeah,” Ethan said, “that sounds about right.”

13

CASSIE WASN’T SURPRISED BY HOW easily Leo managed to steal a car. Boosting cars was a skill he had learned from his friends back in Buffalo—not his Society friends but the east side musicians and petty criminals he hung out with on weekends. The company he kept was one of the reasons Cassie had never taken him seriously, and why Beth’s fascination with him had seemed so shallow. But now that Cassie was a criminal herself, she appreciated the skills Leo had learned.

Armistice Day had brought a lot of cars into Jordan Landing from neighboring farms and rural routes, which presented a wealth of opportunities. Leo waited until after midnight, then selected a late-model white Ford Equipoise, an economy vehicle common in these parts, parked in the lot of a motel a half mile north on the main strip. The owner of the car was probably asleep and likely wouldn’t report the theft until morning, which would give them a decent head start. He broke off the car’s radio ante

By dawn they were a couple of hundred miles west and within an hour’s drive of their destination. They were headed for an auto-repair shop called Dowd’s, on a flat strip of Kansas highway between Salina and Great Bend.

DOWD’S AUTOMOBILE SERVICE AND PARTS, the sign said.

It wasn’t much of a sign: a slab of whitewashed plywood on which the letters had been stenciled with orange paint. It had been tacked to what looked like a converted barn, the only visible structure from horizon to horizon where Federal Turnpike 156 crossed the exit for a town called Galatea. The unpaved yard where they parked was littered with rusted engine parts and the shell of what Leo said was a 1972 Packard, and the only thing moving was a set of cut-tin wind chimes hanging from a bracket screwed to the building’s aluminum siding.

At the sound of Leo’s horn a man emerged from the darkness behind the corrugated-steel door of the garage, wiping his hands on a blackened rag and blinking at the morning sun. The man was tall, ski

Cassie climbed out of the car, Thomas beside her. She desperately needed to pee, though she dreaded to imagine what might pass for a restroom in this establishment.

The man came to a stop a few cautious feet from the car. “What can I do for you folks?”

Leo said, “Are you Eugene Dowd?”

The man stopped wiping his hands and tucked the rag into the hip pocket of his coveralls. “I guess I am. Who might you be?”

“My name’s Leo Beck. I think you know my father.”

Dowd remained expressionless. The wind gusted, and Cassie heard the clatter of the wind chimes—like music that forgot how to be music—and the creaking of the Packard’s loose hood. Finally Dowd said, “Is this your car?”

“Not exactly.”

“Uh-huh. I was afraid of that. I dislike having a stolen vehicle on my property. Bring it inside where it won’t be so damn obvious. Can you prove you’re who you say you are?”

“I think so.”

“Well, we’ll talk about that. All you lot get inside too.”

“Is there a bathroom?” Cassie felt compelled to ask.

Eugene Dowd gazed at her. “Toilet around the back. It’s nothing fancy.”

No doubt, Cassie thought.

Leo had first mentioned Eugene Dowd during the night’s drive. Cassie had asked whether he had learned the name from the papers stashed under the floor of his father’s house.

Leo had nodded. “The name, not much else. His instructions were to take the key to Eugene Dowd, at a certain location in Kansas.”

Typical Correspondence Society subterfuge. Aunt Ris had once described this kind of reasoning as “paranoia—necessary paranoia, maybe, but still, a kind of mental illness.” And Leo’s father, Werner Beck, was even more systematically paranoid than most Society members.

“So what else is in those papers?”

“A lot of it is statistics he compiled, plus photocopies of newspaper and journal articles…”

“Like what?”

“All kinds of things. Statistics on mining in China, shipping in the Pacific. Imports and exports of minerals and rare earths. Newspaper clippings from the last twenty years, some of them about un explained deaths. Technical articles. Notes from his studies of simulacrum biology. Maps.”

“Maps of what?”

“Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru.”

“Why, what’s there?”

Leo shrugged. “I think it’s in case something happened to him, maybe somebody else in the Society could make sense of it.”

Beth had somehow found the courage or the insensitivity to ask, “Do you think your father’s dead?”

Leo kept his eyes on the road. Night on the turnpike, empty prairie, nothing to see but the periodic glare of passing headlights. “There’s obviously some reason he left the house in a hurry. As for whether he’s still alive, I don’t know. There’s no way to know.”

“So maybe Eugene Dowd can tell us,” Beth said.

“The first thing I got to do,” Dowd said to Leo, “is make sure you’re the real deal. I will admit, you kind of resemble your old man. But that’s not proof one way or another. You might not even be a human being.”

The interior of the garage consisted of a complexly stained concrete floor under a cavernous arched roof. A sort of second-story balcony ru

She sat next to Leo on a torn leather sofa apparently rescued from a trash yard. Beth and Thomas squeezed in beside them. Eugene Dowd pulled up a wooden chair and straddled it.

Dowd was no Society member, Cassie thought, or at least he was unlike any Society member she had ever met. Obviously, he obviously wasn’t a scholar or a scientist. He sounded exactly like what he appeared to be: a rural-route auto mechanic with a chip on his shoulder, unimpressed by the four city-bred young people who had arrived uninvited on his doorstep.

“How am I supposed to prove I’m human?”

“Well, we could stick a knife in you and see what color it comes out. That generally works.”

“Very fu

“Or you could show me a certain key.”

Leo stood up, fumbled in his pocket—What if he lost it? Cassie wondered for one terrifying moment—then produced the key from his father’s safe.

“Okay, let me see,” Dowd said.

With obvious reluctance Leo put the key in Dowd’s open hand. The lines in Dowd’s palm were etched with motor oil. His thumb was calloused, his nails cut clinically short.

“Good enough?” Leo asked.

“Not yet it isn’t. We’ll see if it opens what it’s supposed to open. Come on.”