“Well, hang in,” Shannon said. “This isn’t a big town. Unless he’s already gone, we’ll find him.”
We pulled up at her house. She offered to cook me dinner; I told her I needed to get back to Rebecca and Jenny and Mama Laura. She wanted to talk to Trev, who could describe the Het vehicles and maybe some faces. “He can contact me by radio,” she said. “And in the meantime—”
She didn’t finish the sentence. She was interrupted by a trilling that emanated from the left hip pocket of her faded jeans. Wide-eyed, she pulled out her phone. But the ringtone stopped before she could answer it. “False alarm,” she said. “Huh.”
But it was more than a false alarm. It was a promise and a warning. The engineers and IT geeks of the world were working the problem. Communications would be restored soon, maybe any minute now. For better or for worse.
* * *
It was dusk by the time I got back to my father’s house. Trevor came down the front porch as I parked and met me when I stepped out of the car. I told him where I’d been and what I’d learned, and he nodded approvingly when I showed him the two-way radios.
“Gives us a fighting chance, anyway. I’ll talk to this woman—Shannon?”
“Shannon Handy.”
“Living up to her name, seems like. You go on inside.”
“I need to explain all this to Mama Laura.”
“Jenny already had a talk with her. About Aaron. And the video.”
“I should have been here.”
“They don’t know about the Het troops, but they both figure Geddy’s been kidnapped for the purpose of keeping the video quiet. This is hard on both of them, especially Mama Laura. We need to be solving the problem, not explaining it.”
“I still need to talk to her,” I said.
* * *
But Mama Laura was in no mood to talk.
I found her sitting on the bed in Geddy’s old room, her hands folded in her lap, surrounded by the relics of Geddy’s early life: his old desk, his record collection, the faint rectangles on the wall where his posters had once sheltered the paint from sunlight. She seemed to be studying these things, as if she wanted to commit them to memory. She barely glanced at me as I came through the door, and the glance was contemptuous.
“You came here under false pretenses,” she said.
“Mama Laura, I’m sorry. What happened is—”
“Stop! Just stop.” She clenched and unclenched her small hands. “Jenny told me everything I need to know. All about Aaron. And what he did to her. And what your interest in the matter is.”
“We should have told you sooner.”
“Perhaps you should. Or perhaps I should have guessed. You know, when I married your father, I was a single woman with a young child and poor prospects. Joining this family—I can’t quite say we were welcomed into it—it seemed like Geddy and I had been delivered from a world of trouble. But that was wrong, wasn’t it? On the contrary. We were delivered into a den of vipers.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, uselessly.
“You were smart to leave this town. I wish you had stayed away. Because, I don’t know who or what you are when you’re with your friends, but here? You’re just another Fisk, no better than your brother or your father. Maybe you pretended to be nice to my boy, but—”
“I never pretended.”
She shook her head. “Don’t try to excuse yourself. There is only one thing I need to hear from you right now. Do you know what that one thing is?”
“We’ll bring him home, Mama Laura.”
“See that you do,” she said.
* * *
“The trouble with these walkie-talkies,” Trevor said, “is that anybody who cares to can listen in on them. Anybody with a scanner or a similar unit, anyway. And we have to assume anybody who owns one of these things maybe took it out of the closet during the blackout. So I don’t want us discussing anything critical over the air. I had a little chat with Shannon, and she says we can use her house as a base. Get the local Taus together and make plans where we won’t be overheard. Are you cool with that?”
“If we’re at Shannon’s house, who stands guard back here?”
“Jenny and Rebecca want to come with us—they pretty much insisted on it—and I don’t think Het is much interested in your father or Mama Laura. Also … Shannon couldn’t say much over the air, but it sounds like she might already have an idea about what happened to Geddy.”
So we ended up taking two cars. Rebecca drove with Trevor, and I went with Jenny. Jenny sat in the backseat, mostly silent, staring out the window as the headlights swept the darkened streets of suburban Schuyler. Twice she checked her phone, but there was no signal.
As we turned a corner onto Shannon’s street she said, “They took Geddy because of me, right?”
“If Het took Geddy, it was for the purpose of protecting Aaron.”
“To keep me from talking about him.”
“Almost certainly. But there hasn’t been any actual threat.”
“Because of the blackout.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, if they mean it as a threat, it’s working. I’m not saying anything about Aaron until Geddy’s safe. And even then … this is like an object lesson, that I’m vulnerable. That I’ll always be vulnerable. I can go to Canada, I can go into hiding, but they can always get to Geddy or my mother, say, or Mama Laura—somebody who matters to me. They can hurt me no matter where I am, and they will.”
“Once Aaron’s exposed, they have nothing to gain by threatening you.”
“Unless they want to punish me for crossing them. Can you tell me they wouldn’t do a thing like that?”
“It’s not likely.”
“But it’s possible.”
I had no answer for that.
“Look,” she said, “I don’t want Aaron to get away with what he did to me and what he’s doing to other women. But not at the price of someone’s life.”
“No one’s been killed.”
“But Geddy’s already been kidnapped. And it’s Geddy—it’s Geddy, Adam! Geddy wilts if someone looks hard at him. Being taken captive? Physically coerced, maybe beat up, kicked around?”
“We don’t know that anything like that has happened.”
“But it might have.”
I didn’t say anything. Because she was right, of course. It might have.
* * *
Trevor made some kind of instant emotional connection with Shannon Handy. It was a Tau thing, but more: Trev had dedicated himself to protecting Taus, and Shannon had honed her own protective instincts (and other skills) during a tour of duty in Afghanistan many years ago. They looked like the ultimate mismatch—a middle-aged white woman who owned a consumer-electronics franchise next to a dark-skinned guy with Maori-style facial tattoos and the body of a bar bouncer—but they fell into earnest, focused conversation as soon as they were introduced.
They turned Shannon’s kitchen into a command-and-control center. I waited in the living room with Rebecca and Jenny and a couple of local Taus who had already been briefed on the situation: a young IT guy named Clarence, who nodded a cautious hello, and a forklift driver, Jolinda Smith, who lived outside of town and who had brought with her some crucial information.
“Soon as Shannon came to my door and asked me whether I’d seen anything unusual,” Jolinda said, “I knew what she was talking about.” Jolinda was a big woman, muscular, and she leaned forward in her chair, eyes intent. “Because not much traffic comes out my way. I live on Spindevil Road, up past the gravel pit, you know that area? Nothing much past my house but some old hobby farms, most of ’em run down or abandoned. I was on my porch this morning, smoking a little kush and waiting for the power to come back on—not that it did. So I was surprised to see a, like, convoy coming up Spindevil away from the highway. Because that’s not something you ordinarily see up there. Four black SUVs and a late-model sedan of some kind, all together, all moving at a serious clip.”