Here was another interesting fact about Elizabeth, her ability to lie without blushing. “I don’t know. I suppose it can.”
“It almost seems alive. Is it alive? I mean to say, will it work this way forever? Or does it need some kind of fuel?”
“That’s a fine question, Mrs.—”
“Cullum,” Elizabeth said promptly.
“A fine question, Mrs. Cullum. On its own, no, it would not work indefinitely. But its functions can be restored with this.” He took another device from a different drawer, a glassy wafer with a wire dangling from it. “You attach the wire like so, and put this under sunlight for an hour or two.”
“Sunlight?”
“Nothing more, nothing less.”
“It fuels itself with sunlight? How is that possible?”
“I don’t pretend to understand it, Mrs. Cullum. I can tell you what it does, and I can tell you how to make it do what it does, but I’m as ignorant as an infant regarding its works.”
“Have you sold many of these?”
“Just a few. They’re scarce, as you can imagine.”
Jesse said, “It’s a costly item.”
“I’m sure it must be! Has Mr. Onslow mentioned a price?”
“Yes, but—”
“In that case, Mr. Onslow, would you excuse us while I talk this over with my husband?”
“Of course.”
Out of earshot, Elizabeth said, “This pretty much nails him.”
“Does it? How so? The device is something a tourist might have lost, isn’t it? There’s nothing to say he got it directly from the City.”
“The device, sure, but not the charger. The City makes sure its guests have access to electrical power everywhere they go. The City hotels in New York and San Francisco run generators around the clock—even the City’s Pullman cars are electrified. Nobody needs to bring a solar charger through the Mirror, and nobody does.”
“So we shouldn’t buy it?”
“Waste of money.”
“We ought to buy something,” Jesse said, “if only to keep up the charade.”
He went back to the counter and looked wistfully at the phone. Onslow said, “Have you come to a decision?”
“Is the price negotiable?”
“I’m sorry, no.”
“In that case, can we see something a little less costly?”
Onslow was visibly disappointed. “There’s an assortment of simple goods in the drawers at the side. All individually priced. You’re welcome to look.”
It was a chilly invitation, but Jesse dutifully open one of the drawers Onslow had pointed out.
His eyes widened.
The drawer was full of Oakley sunglasses in plastic wrappers.
“I’ll take one of these,” he said.
* * *
They went back to the dining room of the Excelsior for their evening meal. The room was crowded tonight. A dozen or more press men, in town for Grant’s visit, filled the air with cigar smoke and forced levity, but Jesse managed to secure a reasonably private table in a darkened corner. He ordered mutton stew with a side of boiled onions; Elizabeth ordered roast beef. A waiter drew the curtains and lit lamps as sunset colored the sky.
“We don’t know for sure if it was Onslow who supplied the pistol,” Elizabeth said, “but we can be fairly sure he has connections inside the City. So we need to look at the supply side, any City employees Onslow might have had contact with. I’ll call Barton tonight and let him know what we found out.”
“It’s a different town after dark,” Jesse said, “when the shops close and the saloons open up. It would be easy enough to follow Onslow, see who crosses his path.”
“I guess we could do that.”
“Not we,” Jesse corrected her. “A respectable woman would be out of place in the kind of establishment Onslow is likely to frequent.”
“I’m respectable now?”
He smiled and said, “In a dim light you’d pass.”
“So what are you suggesting?”
“I can scout the south end of town while you talk to the City.”
“Uh-huh. Or you could just go out and get drunk.”
“I could get drunk and hire a loose woman and come back with my pants on sideways, but is that really what you imagine I mean to do?”
She laughed. “I guess not.”
At least she gives me the benefit of the doubt, Jesse thought. “I’m sorry I raised the subject of your husband, back at the helicopter show. It’s none of my business and I shouldn’t have presumed.”
“Are you curious about my husband?”
He didn’t know how to answer that.
She said, “His name’s Javiar. I met him in high school. He dreamed about doing something big, like becoming a doctor, but he was a west Charlotte kid with all the baggage. We enlisted about the same time. Nineteen years old, both of us, we got married at city hall and signed up a month later, how crazy is that? I ended up in signals intelligence, but Javiar was infantry. Multiple tours. After we mustered out it seemed like we had a chance. I got a job with Riptide, that’s a security company that hires a lot of vets. Javiar hired on, too, and that was okay for a while, but he didn’t last. They eventually fired him for not showing up, or for showing up drunk, some combination of the two. So I was the breadwinner, and we had Gabby by then.”
“Gabby?”
“Our daughter. Gabriella. When Javiar got bored with looking for work he took up with some of his old friends. Who were mostly petty criminals. Breaking and entering, low-end drug dealing. He was happy to spend my paychecks but he resented having to ask me for them. He got angry. Often. He finally saw somebody at the VA hospital, got diagnosed with PTSD. Okay, you don’t know what that means—it’s something that happens to people who’ve had some kind of shocking or terrifying experience. Humiliating for these guys who come back from the front and suddenly they can’t sleep through the night, can’t think straight, get in fights, drink, do drugs, maybe end up on the street or in jail. So I tried to nurse Javiar through it. Talk him down when he woke up screaming. Tolerate his fits of anger. I drove him to the hospital and I made sure he kept his appointments. All that. But.”
Jesse waited as she took a sip of water.
“But he was out of control. It wasn’t just the PTSD. I think PTSD just opened the door to something that was inside him long before he enlisted. It got to where he was obviously dangerous, not just to me but to Gabby. He fired a gun in the house.”
“Is that why he went to prison?”
“They took him on multiple charges, including a botched drug deal where he pushed a guy into a wall and broke his hip. But I testified against him in court. Because by then it was clear to me that Javiar wanted to hurt us, and that he would hurt us, or try to, sooner or later. I wanted him behind bars long enough to get Gabby and me to a safe place. Which is why I’m at the City, actually. The City’s security service offered me a pretty generous contract. It means I’m away from Gabby for months at a time, which is bad, and it means my mother is caring for Gabby while I’m in 1876, which I’m not real happy about. But at the end of my tour I get a paycheck big enough to take us out of North Carolina altogether. Divorce, name change, new job. That’s my plan.”
Jesse was too startled to say more than, “I see.”
“The moral of the story is, I’m not shocked by the fact that you wake up in a cold sweat in the small hours of the morning. I don’t think it’s some kind of weakness you have.”
“Do you think I’m dangerous? Like Javiar?”
“I don’t know you well enough to say. But on slim evidence, no, I don’t think you’re dangerous.” She added, “In that way.”
Clearly, she knew she was treading on troubled ground. But Jesse guessed she wanted to clear the air. She valued honesty. After a moment’s thought he said, “You twenty-first-century women remind me of whores.”
Elizabeth stiffened in her chair. Her eyes went narrow and hard.
He said, “That’s not an insult. I don’t mean you have loose morals or that you’re venal or contemptible. I was raised around whores, and for the most part they treated me well. What I mean is, whores tend to speak frankly. They see much, and they take a cynical view of things. Listening to their talk spared me a host of polite delusions. It made me harder to fool, and it forced me to think honestly about myself. Do you understand?”