But the twins had been feeling nauseated ever since eating the potato salad at lunch, and were queasy even at the smell of the Coppertone lotion, and they had decided to stay out of the surf and just lie on the towels, on the solid bumpy mattress of the sand.
Kootie had been listening as Sullivan had been describing his proposed device, and he now interrupted: “You don't want a magnet in the receiver. This is such a sensitive thing you’re talking about that an actual magnet in the same room would draw the voices of all the ghosts in Los Angeles. We’ll have enough trouble with fields caused by the changing electrical charges. Use chalk, I had the ladies buy some.” He paused, and then said, “We still have some of the Miraculous Insecticide Chalk, Mr Edison. That won’t do, Kootie, this has to be round, like a cylinder. Good thought, though.”
“Chalk?” asked Sullivan, trying to concentrate.
Their father had shrugged, and his remark about Speedy Alka-Seltzer had hung in the air as he turned away from them, toward the foam-streaked waves, and young Pete had been able to see the frail white hair on the backs of his father’s shoulders fluffing in the ocean breeze.
“The friction of a piece of wet chalk varies with changes in its electric charge,” Kootie said. “Without a charge it’s toothy and has lots of friction, but it’s instantly slick when there’s a current….”
The three cans of Hires Root Beer were laid out like artillery shells, awaiting their father’s return from his swim. There was one for him, and one each for Pete and Elizabeth. Their stepmom had explained that she didn’t drink soda pop, so there were only three cans.
“…A spring connected to the center of the diaphragm,” Kootie was saying, drawing with his hands in the stale dim air, “with the other end pressed against the side of the rotating chalk cylinder. The fluctuations in the current from your Ford coil will change the mechanical resistance of the chalk, so the needle will wiggle, you see, as the chalk rapidly changes from slick to scratchy, and the wiggle will be conveyed to the diaphragm.”
“It sounds goofy,” quavered Sullivan, forcing himself to pay attention to what Kootie was saying, and not to the intrusive, unstoppable, intolerably resurrected memory.
“It works,” said Kootie flatly. “A young man named George Bernard Shaw happened to be working for me in London in ‘79, and maybe you’ve read his description of my electromotograph receiver in his book The Irrational Knot.”
Sullivan shivered, for he was suddenly sure that the ghost this boy carried was, in fact, Thomas Edison. Sullivan’s voice was humble as he said, “I’ll take your word for it.”
But he didn’t add, “sir.” Aside from police officers, there was only one man he had ever called “sir.”
Their stepmother didn’t even bother to act very surprised when Pete and Elizabeth screamed at her that their father was in trouble out in the water. The old man had swum out through the waves in his usual briskly athletic Australian crawl, but he was floundering and waving now, way out beyond the surf line, and their stepmother had only got to her feet and shaded her eyes to watch.
“…and the carborundum bulb should be sensitive enough to pick the ghost up, and reflect his presence in the brush discharge. He should easily be able to vary it, so it’s a signal that’s going through the lens into the Langmuir viscosity gauge…” Sullivan blinked stinging sweat out of his eyes.
Their stepmother hadn’t eaten any of the potato salad, and she seemed to be fine; but she wouldn’t even take one step across the dry sand toward the water, and so the twins had gone running down to the surf all by themselves, even though cramps were wringing their stomachs. …
Kootie had asked Sullivan a question, and he struggled to remember what it had been. “Oh,” he said finally, “right. We’ll have primed the quartz filament with a ground vibration, set it ringing by waving a magnet past the little swiveling iron armature in the gauge, and then I guess we get rid of the magnet, outside the building. The quartz starts from a peak tone, and then the vibration will damp down as the quartz loses its initial’its initial ping. We’ll gradually lose volume, but even with the damping radiometer effects of the signal it’s getting from the focused light, and from friction with the trace of mercury gas in the gauge, the sustaining vibration should last a good while.”
Both of the twins had paused when they were chest deep and wobbling on tiptoe in the cold, surging water. But Elizabeth let the buoyancy take her, and began dog-paddling out toward their distant suffering father; while Pete, frightened of the deep water that was frightening their father, and of the clenching pain in his abdomen, had turned and floundered back toward shore.
“You’re the antenna,” said Kootie, who was now looking down at him curiously from his perch on the couch back, “but you’ll need a homing beacon too, a lure.”
And after a while Elizabeth had dragged herself back, exhausted and sick and alone.
“I’m that as well,” said Sullivan bleakly. “I’m still his son.”
They had not of course opened the three Hires cans, though the twins were destined to glimpse the cans again twenty-seven years later…again in Venice.
And Sullivan’s face went cold—the memory of Kelley Keith’s face blandly observing the drowning of her husband had overlaid memories of deLarava’s face, and at long, long last he realized that they were the same woman.
“Nicky!” he said, so unsteadily that Elizalde shot him a look of spontaneous concern. “Loretta deLarava is Kelley Keith!”
“Shoot,” said Bradshaw. “I’ve known that since 1962.”
“When we were ten? You could have told us!”
“You’d have wanted to go back to her?”
Sullivan remembered the pretty young face looking speculatively out at the old man drowning beyond the waves. “Jesus, no.”
“She killed your father,” said Bradshaw. “Just like she killed me. And now she wants to erase both guilts. Both reproaches, both awarenesses. If we’re gone, see, it can be not true. For her.”
“She; no, he drowned, she didn’t kill him—”
“She fed you and your sister and your father. Poisoned potato salad. All in the golden afternoon.”
Kootie bounced impatiently down off the couch, and as he began pacing the floor he picked up Sullivan’s pack of Marlboros. Now he shook one out and, with it hanging on his lower lip, slapped his pants pockets. “Somebody got a match?”
“It’s the kid’s lungs!” protested Elizalde.
“One cigarette?” said Kootie’s voice. “I hardly think—It’s all right, Mrs. Elizalde, I’ve smoked Marlboros before. Really? Well, she’s right, you shouldn’t. Don’t let me catch you with one of these in your hand again!” He took the cigarette out of his mouth and put it back in the pack. “You started it, you were working my hands. Don’t argue with your elders, the lady was right. I was out of line… dammit.” He turned a squinting gaze on Sullivan. “I think your plan will work. It’s better than mine was, in some ways. I like the carborundum bulb to focus just the one signal—it just might eliminate the party-line crowd. Let’s get busy.”
Bradshaw volunteered to clear off the top of his desk, and soon Kootie and Sullivan were laying out globes and boxes and wires across the scarred mahogany surface. Bradshaw even dragged a couple of old rotary-dial telephones out of a cupboard for them to cannibalize. Twice Sullivan went out to the van, once for tools and once to disconnect and tote back the battery so as to have some solid 12-volt direct current and at one point, while he was doing some fast, penciled calculations on the desktop, Elizalde stepped up behind him and briefly squeezed his shoulder. She’d been intermittently busy with something in the little added-on kitchen, and the stale cinnamon air in the office was getting sharp with the steamy fumes of mint and hot tequila.