Marsh leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes for a moment as he tried to decide what to say to his son. At last, though, he made his decision. Alex might as well know the truth. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “In fact, I got curious about the same things, and today I tried to pull your records out of our computer. They aren’t there anymore. Dr. Torres has all the information pertaining to what happened to you in his own files, and for some reason he doesn’t want me or anyone else to see it.”
Now it was Alex who fell silent as he turned his father’s words over in his mind. When he finally spoke, his eyes met his father’s squarely. “It means something’s wrong, doesn’t it?”
Marsh kept his voice deliberately neutral. “Your mother doesn’t think so. She thinks everything is fine, and Torres is simply protecting the privacy of his records.”
Alex shook his head. “If that’s what she thinks, then she’s wrong.”
“Or maybe we’re wrong,” Marsh suggested. He kept his eyes on Alex, searching for any sort of emotional reaction from the boy. So far, there was none. Alex was only shaking his head.
“No, we’re not wrong. If I’m alive, then what’s happening to me shouldn’t be happening. And I am alive. So something’s wrong, and I have to find out what.”
“We have to find out,” Marsh said softly. He rose to his feet and went to put his hand on Alex’s shoulder. “Alex?” he said quietly. The boy looked up at him. “Alex, are you scared?”
Alex was silent for a moment, then shook his head. “No. I’m not scared. I’m just curious.”
“Well, I’m scared,” Marsh admitted.
“Then you’re lucky,” Alex said quietly. “I keep wishing I was scared, not just curious … I wish I was terrified.”
Alex sat alone in his first class the next morning. He had known something was wrong from the moment he had stopped by the Cochrans’ to walk to school with Lisa, and discovered that she had already left. It was Kim who had told him.
“She thinks you’re crazy,” the little girl had said, gazing up at Alex with her large and trusting blue eyes. “She says she doesn’t want to go out with you anymore. But she’s dumb.” And then Carol Cochran had appeared, and sent Kim back into the house.
“I’m sorry, Alex,” she told him. “She’ll get over it. It’s just that you scared her yesterday when you told her you thought whoever killed Marty Lewis was still loose.”
“I didn’t mean to scare her,” Alex said. “All she did was ask me if I thought Mr. Lewis did it, and I said I didn’t.”
“I know what you said,” Carol sighed. “And I’m sure Lisa will get over it. But this morning she just wanted to go to school by herself. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Alex had replied. He’d said good-bye to Lisa’s mother, then continued on his way to school. But he wasn’t surprised when no one spoke to him, and he wasn’t surprised when the classroom fell silent when he came in.
Nor was he surprised to see that there was no empty seat next to Lisa.
He wasn’t surprised, but neither was he hurt.
He simply made up his mind that in the future he would be more careful what he said to people, so they wouldn’t think he was crazy.
He listened to the first few words of the teacher’s history lecture, but then tuned him out, as he had tuned his parents out the night before. All the material the teacher was talking about was in the textbook, and Alex had read it three days earlier.
The entire contents of the history text were now imprinted on his memory. If he’d been asked to, he could have written the book down word for word.
Besides, what concerned Alex that morning was not the history text, but the book about the brain that he had borrowed from the library. In his mind he began going over the problem he had discussed with his father the night before, looking for the answer. Somewhere, he was certain, he had made a mistake. Either he had misread the book, or the book was wrong.
Or there was a third possibility, and it was that third possibility that he spent the rest of the day considering.
The idea came to him late in the afternoon.
His last class had been a study hall, and he’d decided not to bother with it. Instead, he’d wandered around the campus, trying once more to find something that jogged one of his dormant memories to life. But it was useless. Nothing jarred his memory, and more and more, everything he saw was now familiar. Each day, there was less and less in La Paloma that he had not refamiliarized himself with.
He was wandering through the science wing when someone called his name. He stopped and glanced through the open door of one of the labs. At the desk, he recognized Paul Landry.
“Hello, Mr. Landry.”
“Come on in, Alex.”
Alex stepped into the lab and glanced around.
“Recognize any of it?” Landry asked. Alex hesitated, then shook his head. “Not even that?”
Landry was pointing toward a wooden box with a glass top covering a table near the blackboard. “What is it?” Alex asked.
“Take a look. You don’t remember it at all?”
Alex gazed at the crude construction. “Should I?”
“You built it,” Landry said. “Last year. It was your project, and you finished it just before the accident.”
Alex walked over to examine the plywood construction. It was a simple maze, but apparently he’d made each piece separately, so that the maze could be easily and quickly changed into a myriad of different patterns. “What was I doing?”
“Figure it out,” Landry challenged. “From what Eisenberg tells me, it shouldn’t take you more than a minute.”
Alex glanced at his watch, then went back to the box. At one end was a runway leading to a cage containing three rats, and at the other was a food dispenser. Built into the front of the box was a timer. Forty-five seconds later, Alex nodded. “It must have been a retraining project. I must have wanted to be able to time the rate at which the rats learned each new configuration of the maze. But it looks pretty simpleminded.”
“That’s not what you thought last year. You thought it was pretty sophisticated.”
Alex shrugged disinterestedly, then lifted the gate that allowed the rats to run into the maze. One by one, with no mistakes, they made their way directly to the food and began eating. “How come it’s still here?”
Landry shrugged. “I guess I just thought you might want it. And since I was teaching summer school this year, it wasn’t any trouble to keep it.”
It was then, as he watched the rats, that the idea suddenly came into Alex’s mind. “What about the rats?” he asked. “Are they mine too?”
When Landry nodded, Alex removed the glass and picked up one of the large white rats. It wriggled for a moment, then relaxed when Alex put it back in its cage. A minute later, the other two had joined the first. “Can I take them home?” Alex asked.
“Just the rats? What about the box?”
“I don’t need it,” Alex replied. “It doesn’t look like it’s worth anything. But I’ll take the rats home.”
Landry hesitated. “Mind telling me why?”
“I have an idea,” Alex said. “I want to try an experiment with them, that’s all.”
There was something in Alex’s tone that struck Landry as strange, and then he realized what it was. There was nothing about Alex of his former openness and eagerness to please. Now he was cold, and, though he hated to use the word, arrogant.
“It’s fine with me,” he finally said. “Like I said, they’re your rats. But if you don’t want the box, leave it there. You may think it’s pretty simpleminded — which, incidentally, it is — but it still demonstrates a few things. I’ve been using it for my class.” He grinned. “And I’ve also been telling my kids that this project would have earned the brilliant Alex Lonsdale a genuine C-minus. Even last year, you could have done better work than that, Alex.”