Meg knew that only time could knit him completely.
Snow began to fall faster and dusk surrendered to night, reducing visibility, so she slowed the jeep wagon. Hunching over the wheel, she could see ahead only twenty yards.
"Getting bad," Tommy said tensely from the rear seat.
"Seen worse."
"Where? The Yukon?"
"Yep. Exactly right. Middle of the Gold Rush, winter of 1849. You forgetting how old I am? I was mushing Yukon dog sleds before they'd invented dogs."
Tommy laughed but only dutifully.
Meg could not see the broad meadows on either side, or the frozen silver ribbon of Seeger's Creek off to the right, although she could make out the gnarled trunks and jagged, winter-stripped limbs of the looming oaks that flanked that portion of the county road. The trees were a landmark by which she judged that she was a quarter mile from the blind curve where Jim had died.
Tommy settled into silence.
Then, when they were seconds from the curve, he said, "I don't really miss sledding and skating so much. It's just… I feel so helpless in this cast, so… so trapped."
His use of the word "trapped" wrenched Meg because it meant that his uneasiness about being immobilized was closely linked to memories of his dad's death. Jim's Chevy had been so mangled by the impact that the police and coroner's men had required more than three hours to extract his corpse from the overturned car; ensnared by tangled metal, his body had to be cut loose with acetylene torches. At the time, she had tried to protect Tommy from the worst details of the accident, but when eventually he returned to his third-grade class, his schoolmates shared the grisly facts with him, motivated by a morbid curiosity about death and by an innocent cruelty peculiar to some children.
"You're not trapped in the cast," Meg said, as she piloted the jeep into the long, snow-swept curve. "Hampered, yeah, but not trapped. I'm here to help."
Tommy had come home early from his first day of school after the funeral, bawling: "Daddy was trapped in the car, couldn't move, all tangled up in the twisted metal, they had to cut him loose, he was trapped." Meg soothed him and explained that Jim had been killed on impact, in an instant, and had not suffered: "Honey, it was only his body, his poor empty shell, that was trapped. His mind and soul, your real daddy, had already gone up to Heaven."
Now Meg braked as she approached the midpoint of the curve, that curve, which would always be a frightening place no matter how often they navigated it.
Tommy had come to accept Meg's assurances that his father had not suffered. Nevertheless, he was still haunted by the image of his dad's body in the clutch of mangled metal.
Suddenly, oncoming headlights seared Meg's eyes. A car rushed at them, moving too fast for road conditions, not out of control but not stable either. It started to fishtail, straddling the double line down the center of the road. Meg pulled the steering wheel to the right, swinging onto the hard shoulder, pumping the brakes, afraid of putting two wheels in a ditch and rolling the station wagon. She held it all the way around the curve, however, with the tires churning up gravel that rattled against the undercarriage. The oncoming car skinned past with no more than an inch to spare, vanishing in the night and snow.
"Idiot," she said angrily.
When she had driven around the bend into a straightaway, she pulled to the side of the road and stopped.
"You okay?" she asked.
Tommy was huddled in one corner of the backseat, with his head pulled turtlelike into the collar of his heavy winter coat. Pale and trembling, he nodded. "Y-yeah. Okay."
The night seemed strangely still in spite of the softly idling jeep, the thump of windshield wipers, and the wind.
"I'd like to get my hands on that irresponsible jerk." She struck the dashboard with the flat side of her fist.
"It was a Biolomech car," Tommy said, referring to the large research firm located on a hundred acres half a mile south of their farm. "I saw the name on the side. `Biolomech.' "
She took several deep breaths. "You okay?"
"Yeah. I'm all right. I just… want to get home."
The storm intensified. They were beneath the snowy equivalent of a waterfall, flakes pouring over them in churning currents.
Back on Black Oak Road, they crawled along at twenty-five miles an hour. Weather conditions wouldn't permit greater speed.
Two miles farther, at Biolomech Labs, the night was shot full of light. Beyond the nine-foot-high, chain-link fence that ringed the place, sodium-vapor security lamps glowed eerily atop twenty-foot poles, the light diffused by thickly falling snow.
Although the lamps were set at hundred-foot intervals across the expansive grounds that surrounded the single-story offices and research laboratories, they were rarely switched on. Meg had seen them burning on only one other night in the past four years.
The buildings were set back from the road, beyond a screen of trees. Even in good weather and daylight, they were difficult to see, cloistered and mysterious. Currently they were invisible in spite of the hundred or more pools of yellow light that surrounded them.
Pairs of men in heavy coats moved along the perimeter of the property, sweeping flashlights over the fence as if expecting to find a breach, focusing especially on the snow-mantled ground along the chain-link.
"Somebody must've tried to break in," Tommy said.
Biolomech cars and vans were clustered around the main gate. Sputtering red emergency flares flickered and smoked along both shoulders of Black Oak Road, leading to a roadblock at which three men held powerful flashlights. Three other men were armed with shotguns.
"Wow!" Tommy said. "Door-buster riot guns! Something really big must've happened."
Meg braked, stopped, and rolled down her window. Cold wind knifed into the car.
She expected one of the men to approach her. Instead, a guard in boots, gray uniform pants, and a black coat with the Biolomech logo moved toward the jeep from the other side, carrying a long pole at the base of which were attached a pair of angled mirrors and a light. He was accompanied by a much taller man, similarly dressed, who had a shotgun. The shorter guard thrust the lighted mirrors beneath the jeep and squinted at the reflection of the undercarriage that the first mirror threw onto the second.
"They're looking for bombs!" Tommy said from the rear seat.
"Bombs?" Meg said disbelievingly. "Hardly."
The man with the mirror moved slowly around the jeep wagon, and his armed companion stayed close at his side. Even in the obscuring snow, Meg could see that their faces were lined with anxiety.
When the pair had circled the jeep, the armed guard waved an all-clear to the other four at the roadblock, and at last one man approached the driver's window. He wore jeans and a bulky, brown leather flight jacket with sheepskin lining, without a Biolomech patch. A dark blue toboggan cap caked with snow was pulled half over his ears.
He leaned down to the open window. "I'm real sorry for the inconvenience, ma'am."
He was handsome, with an appealing — but false — smile. His gray-green eyes were disturbingly direct.
"What's going on?" she asked.
"Just a security alert," he said, the words steaming from him in the icy air. "Could I see your driver's license, please?"
He was evidently a Biolomech employee, not a police officer, but Meg saw no reason to decline to cooperate.
As the man was holding her wallet, studying the license, Tommy said, "Spies try to sneak in there tonight?"
That same insincere smile accompanied the man's response: "Most likely just a short circuit in the alarm system, son. Nothing here that spies would be interested in."
Biolomech was involved in recombinant-DNA research and the application of their discoveries to commercial enterprises. Meg knew that in recent years genetic engineering had produced a man-made virus that threw off pure insulin as a waste product, a multitude of wonder drugs, and other blessings. She also knew that the same science could engender biological weapons — new diseases as deadly as nuclear bombs — but she always avoided pondering the frightening possibility that Biolomech, half a mile overland from their house, might be engaged in such dangerous work. In fact, a few years ago rumors had surfaced that Biolomech had landed a major defense contract, but the company had assured the county that it would never perform research related to bacteriological warfare. Yet their fence and security system seemed more formidable than necessary for a commercial facility limited to benign projects.