Lyle sidestepped crud until he got to the recycling, trash, and compost bins near the front of the garage where the bugs hovered. They told him these bins hadn’t been attended recently. Then he opened the compost and saw it was more foul than he thought. Inside, a bird, half eaten away by bacteria, maggots, and flies. He withdrew from the bacteria scent and closed the green lid. The trash held similarly little interest, as he poked through what looked like the detritus of a Dustbuster, fluff and dust bunnies. He heave-dragged the blue recycling bin over the piles and stacks until he came back to the stairs and the lightbulb above. Jerry and Eleanor stood there speechlessly watching. He tipped the tall bin and dumped. Half a foot of junk mail and assorted papers slipped out. Lyle picked through it. He paused on a scrap, held it close to his face, put it on the stair for further examination. Leafed some more, tossed most of it aside. Found another small scrap and scrutinized it. Then picked up the first scrap.
He started looking again with greater intensity.
“Lyle,” Eleanor said.
Lyle didn’t answer and she couldn’t be sure he even heard her, so lost was he.
“Hey, so-called doctor, what’s the deal?” Jerry said.
Lyle now looked intently at another sheet of paper culled from the pile. He stood and whisked right between the two flummoxed pilots and up the stairs he went, into the kitchen to the fridge. He pulled off the shopping list held by the pizza magnet—a magnet that matched his own exactly—and opened the sheet of paper, which had been folded in quarters. Inside was a grainy image of a mouse. It looked to have been printed in black and white on a not-very-fancy printer. Beneath the picture, a caption that read: “The deer mouse is three to four inches long with a brown back and a white stomach.”
Lyle closed his eyes and rocked on his feet, thinking. Then, suddenly, he walked purposely toward the door.
“Hey!” Jerry said.
Lyle, lost in thought, kept walking. Eleanor hustled behind him. She took his arm and gently spun him around. “Hello, Earth to Dr. Martin. What’s up?”
He looked up, seeming surprised he had company.
“I know where she is.”
Forty-Three
Lyle kept walking. Eleanor wondered if he was muttering to himself. She resisted the urge to look back at Jerry because she didn’t want to encourage his skepticism. Truly, though, she felt some of it herself. She hustled up behind Lyle and walked next to him, hearing the sound behind her of Jerry shutting the door.
“You ever fly a plane, Dr. Martin?”
“What? Um, no.” He kept toward the car.
“It takes all the concentration in the world. Still, though, you have to pause now and again and communicate to the passengers, y’know, explain to them what’s happening.”
“Uh-huh.” He kept walking.
“Or they’ll storm the flight deck and tear you limb from limb. Unless, of course, you’ve given them Wi-Fi. Then they’ll be so distracted you can fly into the ocean.”
Lyle laughed. “Fair enough.” He opened the door and climbed into the back.
“Somebody tell me what the hell is going on,” Jerry said, standing with arms crossed in irritation. “Or we’re not going anywhere, capiche?”
Eleanor shot him a look.
“Give me a break and quit the lovebird crap,” Jerry said.
She held her arms up, like What the hell, where did that come from?
“Flight plan calls for Nevada,” Lyle said.
Jerry shook his head in disbelief.
“So-so start. This is the part where you need to communicate,” Eleanor said.
She climbed into the passenger seat and Jerry took the wheel. He put up the top of the sports car and Lyle explained what he’d found.
In the recycling bin were several receipts that caught his eye. He fanned four of them in his hand. One was a restaurant, another for an electric-car charging station, and a third for a hotel. The fourth was for a place called “Winter Place,” but left no other evidence what it was. The restaurant and charging station had come from three months earlier, well prior to the Steamboat flight. The Days Inn hotel was from the week before.
All of them had the 702 area code. The hotel had an address in “Hawthorne, Nev.”
“How do you know she’s there now? Why wouldn’t she be at work?”
“Fair question and easy enough to check. We can call Google,” Lyle said. “She won’t be there. She’s here,” he mused, and it sounded very much like he was talking to himself or the receipts. He realized it and looked up. He explained his reasoning. The receipts were from very different time periods. That wasn’t necessarily a big deal—after all, Jackie might have dumped receipts together over time and then cleaned her office and recycled them at one time. But Lyle suspected it was a clue for two reasons. One was that a bird had been left in the compost. This, Lyle thought, had been designed to draw flies and to attract their attention.
“To the compost? Give me a break,” Jerry said.
“I agree it sounds thin,” the pilot said.
“Or just dumb luck,” Lyle said with a shrug.
“Keep going.”
He showed the mouse picture and told them that the deer mouse had become a particularly nagging source of hantavirus.
“It’s a symbol of sorts, something any immunologist would recognize,” Lyle said. “Comes from Nevada. I think she was giving another gentle reminder, and it was held on the refrigerator with the same magnet I’ve got—the one where my own note disappeared.” He’d already told them that story.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Jerry. “And you’re telling me you’ve never met her.”
“So, like, she’s leaving clues?” Eleanor ignored Jerry. “Why in the world would she do that? Why not just leave a note saying where she is?”
Lyle looked blankly at Eleanor. He had no answer for her.
“Fair enough,” Lyle said. His logic did sound thin. “We can call the hotel in Nevada and see if she’s checked in there.”
“Well now, there’s a sane thought,” Jerry muttered. “Except that you’ve made us all turn off our phones.”
With about as much sense of cohesion as the United States Congress, they drove to a nearby café and Eleanor asked a man if she might borrow his phone because she’d lost hers and needed to call a friend. No biggie, the guy said. She looked at the number on the receipt for the Days Inn.
She asked for Jackie Badger’s room.
“Connecting you now to 106,” the woman said.
Eleanor hung up.
Jackie’s phone rang. She looked down and recognized the number.
“Ms. Badger?”
“This is she.”
“Hi, it’s Becky from the Days Inn.”
“Hi, Becky.”
“You asked me to call you if anyone called to ask for you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Someone called just a few minutes ago.”
“Asking for me.”
“Right. I told them what you said to.”
“Becky, well done. Was it a man or a woman?”
“Woman’s voice.”
Jackie winced and her eye twitched. “Thank you, Becky,” she managed.
“You’re welcome. Thank you for the new iPad and a new iPhone. I don’t know what to say. I’ve never gotten anything like this before in my life.”
“My pleasure. I take care of the people who take care of me.”
“Is there anything else you need, Ms. Badger?”
“No, Becky. I’m good. Just keep me posted.”
“Yes, ma’am. And, um, ma’am—”
“Jackie is fine.”
“Yes, Jackie. You want me to do the other thing, too?”
“Yep, just like we talked about. Thank you, Becky.” She hung up. She sighed. It had been a long time without sleep, and hard work. She’d moved her operation downstairs into one of the exam rooms they had used for study subjects. It had entailed moving a computer and two monitors. The gadgets sat on a table, Jackie in the swivel desk chair, and Alex lying on her side, dumb smile on her face. Jackie liked the idea of having her there, a mascot. Down here, at least on the scientists’ side of the room, it was protected from the electromagnetic field. Not so much on the other side, where the study subjects used to sit. An empty chair was there and, as Jackie looked at it, she sure hoped she’d eventually have Lyle on her side and that she wouldn’t have to put him in that chair.