Mom had left plastic flowers on Ben's grave, and a wooden hummingbird whose wings windmilled frantically in the wind. I straightened the flowers, wiped the grass clippings from the headstone, and wished that Ben could tell me what to do now. I remembered his saying that I really only lived in the perceptions of others, and suddenly it seemed painfully true. I couldn't think of a time when I'd acted on my own, when I wasn't driven by my grief for Ben or my love for Dana or my desire to show up Michael Langford – or, for that matter, the tyranny of Pete Decker or the suggestive looks of girls in high school. I wondered if I even had a self.
"I miss you," I said aloud. Surprised at myself, I looked around to see if anyone had heard, but no one was near.
I left the cemetery and drove into Spokane, to the northeast end of downtown, to a brick storefront that had been an antique and junk shop until six months ago, when it became the offices of Empire Interactive.
This was at the beginning of Eli's compulsion about security, and he'd recently installed an elaborate key card system on the door. In addition, the windows were tinted so no one could see in. I pounded on a window, unsure if anyone inside could see me.
Finally the door opened and out came Louis Carver, beaming. "Clark! What are you doing here?"
"I came to check on my investment."
Louis patted me on the small of my back. "Come in."
I followed him through the door into a narrow anteroom, where a security camera monitored our progress, then through another key-carded door into what looked like a cafeteria: tile floor, long tables where a half-dozen people sat working intently on computer terminals. At the far end of this room were three small offices, one for Bryan the tech guy, one for Louis, and one for Eli.
He came out of his office wearing wrinkled slacks and a striped shirt with a salsa stain near the collar, his glasses slightly askew. "Clark!" he said, and then his piggy little eyes shifted around the room, as if embarrassed by the excitement in his voice.
"Hey, Eli." I reached out and he took my hand reluctantly, gave it a soft, fleshy shake, and then turned back toward his office.
Louis gave me a lingering stare and then went back to work.
I followed Eli into his office, a simple, white-walled room, with a long computer table and the old Empire binders stacked on bookshelves along the walls. He looked out the window at the people in the office. "I don't trust them," he said. "I don't like the way they look at me. They're ingratiating. They smell money. They pretend to hang on every word I say. They pretend to like me."
"Maybe they do like you," I said.
He turned to me, one eyebrow raised, as if I'd just suggested that he become a male model or an exotic dancer. Then he turned back to stare into what they called the Game Room. "I just don't know why we had to hire so many," he said.
"We've got to get this thing off the ground, Eli," I said. "If we don't start earning money pretty soon, the investors are going to get antsy."
"I don't care," Eli said. "I'll pay them out of my own pocket."
I had to beg him to show me what they were working on, including an e-mail component that would allow characters (Eli still wouldn't call them players) to contact each other away from the instant messaging of the game – to allow more backstabbing and double-dealing. "That's the key," Eli said: "treachery." I hadn't been by the office in more than three months, so he showed me the newest graphics, which were – as our team of young testers assured him – "killer." He was especially excited about a prison for miscreant and broken characters – a rocky island covered with catacombs, tunnels, and torture chambers, straight out of The Count of Monte Cristo.
But he was leery of showing me much else, including the game engine that he and Bryan were constantly tinkering with, the "brains," the basic system that ran the shadow world, took the information and the actions of the characters and translated them into the movements of people on the computer screen.
"It's not that I don't trust you, Clark," he said, "but you come in contact with a lot of other companies. I'd hate for something to end up in the wrong hands."
It was late in the afternoon. Eli had recently moved into the house on Cliff Drive (that place of horrors, now) and he invited me over. I said we could take my rental car – I knew Eli hated to drive – but he smiled wryly and pulled a single, plastic-coated, black key from his pocket. I followed him out back, and there it was: a new, dark gray Mercedes-Benz convertible, and the only extravagant thing I ever knew Eli to buy.
I followed him up the South Hill to his house, but after we parked he led me away from the main house to the small carriage house in back, where he was living. There was very little furniture in the carriage house, and his clothes were still in his suitcase. Apparently he only ate pizza; the boxes were stacked against one wall. "You want a beer?" he asked.
I explained that I'd been drinking too much lately, and that I'd recently had a kind of pre-midlife crisis. Yet after what had happened at the prom, I didn't figure he'd sympathize with my attempts to steal Dana from another guy, so I spoke generally about my desire to find some part of myself that I'd forgotten. "I just can't help feeling," I said, thinking of Dana, "that there are things from my past I need to confront."
Eli stared at me for a long moment. "Come here," he said finally. "I want to show you something." I followed him into the kitchen. He opened a drawer. Inside was a bulging folder with the word DONTES written across the top. Eli reached in the Dontes folder and pulled out a thin file, then slid it across the counter to me.
A name was typed on the file: Pete Decker.
"Open it," Eli said.
There were three black-and-white glossy surveillance photos, taken through a car window, each showing a thin and tired-looking Pete Decker coming out of a downtown apartment building in jeans and a T-shirt and a dishwasher's apron. The last picture showed him climbing in a beat-up Chevy Nova. He'd aged considerably, and not very gracefully, in the twenty years since I'd seen him.
Eli stood over my shoulder as I looked at the picture. "I hired an investigator to find him. He's been in and out of jail." Eli grinned. "He just got busted again a few days ago for cocaine. Isn't that great?"
"You hired an investigator to find Pete Decker?" I asked.
He must've registered the discomfort in my voice because he took a step back. "Yeah, like we were talking about. Unfinished business. I mean, you of all people must've wondered what happened to Pete Decker."
I was curious, but honestly I felt nothing as I looked at the pictures of this skinny, smoked-out guy, hands in his jeans pockets, a cigarette butt dangling from his mouth.
"Yeah," I said. "I don't mean there are scores to settle. It's more about myself, like I got sidetracked, like I've forgotten who I was supposed to be." Again, I thought of Dana. And Ben. "Like I've let people down."
Eli smiled and took the pictures back. When he put them in the drawer I saw something black and metallic and it was only later that I realized that it was a handgun. And if I make this discovery sound casual on my part, a fleeting image, know that later, when hatred and revenge filled my chest, I had no trouble remembering exactly where that gun was located.
"Come on," Eli said. "I want to show you one more thing."
I followed him out the door and down the stairs. We crossed the dry lawn to the main house, dark and empty. He juggled some keys until he found the right one. He turned on a light and half the bulbs lit up in a huge chandelier in the foyer. I followed him into the big open living room, pillars on either side of the door and a curved staircase climbing to the second floor. The windows were topped with stained glass and the wood floors were polished and immaculate.