Alison didn’t wait for an answer but headed for the den, where the fireplace was. I took Melissa by the hand and brought her to the refrigerator. But I caught her hand when she reached for the handle.
“Remember, honey,” I said. “There’s no power coming to the fridge now. So we’re going to open it only when we really have to, and we’re going to be really fast about getting what we need. If the power stays off for a while, we might have to cook everything in there, but if it comes back on soon, we’ll be keeping everything inside cold. Okay?”
Melissa got a look on her face that made her so closely resemble Alison in the dim light I almost did a double take. “There’s not that much in there to cook, Grandma,” she said. “A couple of eggs, a tube of cinnamon rolls and I think some apples, maybe.” There were also the remnants of the dinner I’d cooked tonight, and some extra supplies I’d brought with me. Melissa didn’t know that yet.
“And some batteries,” I reminded her. “Ready?”
Melissa nodded, so I opened the refrigerator door and pointed the flashlight inside. She stuck her hand in like a dart and came out with a package of C batteries. I closed the door as soon as her hand cleared it. “Good job!” I said.
We had just replaced the batteries in the radio when Alison walked back into the kitchen. “That’s great!” she said when she heard the static. “Can you find the news station?”
It took a little doing, but we tuned in an all-news station from New York. The news was not at all encouraging. “Hurricane Sandy is wreaking havoc all through the area. Power is out for tens of thousands of homes on Long Island, and we’re starting to hear reports of water in lower Manhattan,” the newscaster intoned. New Yorkers. It’s all about them.
“This could be a while,” Alison said, looking at Paul.
“Indeed. I think Maxie and I should alternate keeping a watch on the outside, make sure no serious damage is done to the house if we can.”
Alison grinned what she’d call her dopey grin, her eyes filling just a little. “Thanks to both of you,” she said.
“What do you mean, ‘both of you’?” Maxine asked. “I didn’t agree to that plan.” But she rose through the ceiling to take the first shift on the roof, which is one of her favorite spots anyway.
Alison looked at me. “Check your cell phone,” she said. “It’s weird that I haven’t heard from Jeannie or Tony.” Jeannie and her husband, Tony, were Alison’s closest friends. And she was right; it was unusual for them not to have called to see how she and Melissa were weathering the wind and rain, and to let us know how they and their infant son were handling the storm at their home in Lavallette.
But one look at each of our phones showed that they were both without service. “The tower must be out,” Alison said.
“There isn’t anything we can do right now,” I replied. “Come on, let’s go into the den and enjoy the fire.” We walked into the den, the largest room in the house, with its very tall and lovely wood-burning fireplace. With the windows boarded, it seemed darker than it would have otherwise, even though night had clearly fallen by now. Alison had put just two logs on the fire, though, and I saw that the pile of wood next to it was pretty paltry. She caught me giving the woodpile a doubtful look and said, “I have some more in the shed.”
“But nobody’s going outside tonight,” Melissa reminded her.
Alison hugged her daughter. “That’s right, baby. This should do us, though, and when you go to bed, we’ll take one or two of the guest blankets to keep you extra warm. Even with the ones I gave Mac, there are still plenty for us.”
“Alison,” Paul interrupted, “since we have the time, perhaps we can focus on the search we’ve undertaken on behalf of Robert Elliot.”
Alison closed her eyes for a moment in a gesture of frustration, I think. “We’re in the middle of a hurricane and we can’t really start searching until it’s light in here,” she reminded him. “What is there to talk about?”
But Paul seemed prepared for that question. “The real reason he wants to find that bracelet,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Melissa asked. “Don’t you think he wants it because his name is on it?”
“It’s possible he’s telling the truth,” Paul said, pacing in midair as he did when he was thinking through a problem. “But from what you’ve told me, Loretta, there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of these bracelets distributed. Would he need to collect every single one in order to evolve to the next level?”
Melissa looked into the fire; it was always fascinating to watch the flames, but I think she was considering. “Maybe his . . . What’s the word, when it’s the thing that’s how you look at stuff?”
“Perspective,” Alison offered.
“Yeah, perspective. Maybe his perspective is different after all these years. Maybe it changed when he died. Did yours change, Paul?” Melissa can be very direct. Paul doesn’t like to be reminded that he’s no longer alive, but this time it didn’t seem to bother him because it was in service of his case.
“Yes, in some ways,” he answered, stroking his beard. “There are some things I don’t care very much about anymore, like the clothes I’m wearing or who’s elected to office. I do still keep track of the football scores.” When Paul says “football,” he means “soccer.” He was born in England and grew up in Canada. “But that’s more a way of passing the time now.”
“Did you care less about the people you knew?” Alison asked. I knew that when she first “discovered” Paul and Maxine, she’d asked if there was anyone he wanted her to contact, and Paul had declined. But later, he had asked her to find a woman he’d been especially fond of when he was alive, just to see if she was all right. That ended up being quite a story.
“I don’t think so,” Paul said after a moment. “The ones I cared about were still on my mind, although it’s possible I’ve forgotten some and don’t know it. But Robert Elliot has been a ghost for more than forty years. How is this relevant to his wanting to find the POW bracelet?”
“It raises questions,” Alison asked. “Why did Robert wait all these years to look for this one bracelet? Why is this the one that makes all the difference?”
Paul nodded, digesting the question. As he thought, probably without noticing, he lowered throught the air to floor level. “You’re doing better and better as an investigator, Alison,” he said, as if the rest of us didn’t know that already. “I wouldn’t have thought to ask that.”
“I don’t understand,” Melissa said, getting closer to the fire. “Sergeant Elliot asked us to find the bracelet. Does it matter why he wants it?”
Paul’s eyes, difficult to see in this light, seemed squinted. He paced more quickly, an action made all the more strange by the fact that he was up to his ankles in floor. “Not necessarily,” he said. “But Robert has all the same abilities as Maxie and me. He could have searched this house from top to bottom anytime he wanted to in the past forty years. Why haven’t we seen him before? Why didn’t he find the bracelet himself?”
“What reason would he have to lie to us?” I asked.
“A good question indeed,” Paul said.
We had no time to ponder it because there was a loud crash from somewhere inside the house. Alison leapt up at the first sound. “Was that a window?” she asked, and didn’t wait for an answer. She ran toward the main entrance room, the area where the sound seemed to have come from.
Melissa and I followed immediately, but as it turned out Paul beat us all to the front room. “I think it came from there,” he said, pointing toward the largest guest bedroom Alison has in the house, the one with its own private bath just off the stairwell up to the second floor.