“Excuse me?”
“You’re like your friend, the one that came out here. Sat right there where you’re sitting.”
“As I said, ma’am, I never knew Mr. Zell.”
“Still, you’re like him though.”
There are wind chimes hung right out the back window, behind the kitchen, and I just keep still for as second, listen to their gentle crystal tolling.
“Ma’am? WIll you tell me about the Institute? I would like to know what all that money will go toward.”
“That’s just what your friend wanted to know.”
“Oh.”
“It’s not illegal. We’re a registered nonprofit. 501(c)3, whatever it’s called.”
“I’m sure.”
She doesn’t say anything else. The wind chimes go again, and then a drift of parade music, tubas and trumpets from the gazebo, warming up.
“Mrs. Talley, I can find out in other ways if I must, but it would be easier if you could just tell me.”
She sighs, stands up and shuffles out of the room, and I’m following her, hoping we’re going somewhere so she can show me, because that was pure bluff—I have no real way of finding out anything. Not anymore.
The money, as it turns out, has gone in large part for titanium.
“I’m not the engineer,” says Mrs. Talley. “Bernard was the engineer. He designed the thing. But the contents we chose together, and we solicited the materials together. We started in May, as soon as it became clear that the worst was a real possibility.”
On a worktable in the garage is an unadorned metal sphere, a few feet in diameter. Mrs. Talley tells me the outer layer is titanium, but that is only the outer layer: there are several layers of aluminum, levels of a thermal coating of Mr. Talley’s own design. He had been an aerospace engineer for many years, and he felt certain that the sphere would be resistant to cosmic radiation and to damage from space detritus, and it could survive in orbit around Earth.
“Survive for how long?”
She smiles, the first time she has done so in my presence.
“Until humanity recovers sufficiently to retrieve it.”
Packed carefully inside the sphere are a brick of DVDs, drawings, rolled-up newspapers in glass cases, and samples of various materials. “Salt water, a clump of clay, human blood,” says Mrs. Talley. “He was a smart cookie, my husband. A smart cookie.”
I go through the inventory in the little satellite for a few minutes, turning over the odd assemblage of objects, holding each thing in my hand, nodding appreciatively. The human race, human history, in a nutshell. While putting the collection together, they had contracted with a small private aerospace company to do the launch, scheduled it for June, and then they’d run out of money. That’s what the insurance claim was for; that’s what the suicide was for. Now the launch, says Mrs. Talley, is back on schedule.
“Well?” she says. “What do you want to add to the capsule?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Why do you ask that?”
“That’s what the other man wanted.”
“Mr. Zell? He wanted to put something in here?”
“He did put something in there.” She reaches into the accumulated materials, shifts through and removes an innocuous manila envelope, thin and small and folded over. I hadn’t noticed it before. “I actually think this is why he came up here, to tell you the truth. He pretended that he needed to investigate our claim in person, but I had told him everything, and then he showed up here anyway. Came up here with that little tape, and then he asked, kind of mumbling, if could he put it in here.”
“Do you mind?”
She shrugs. “He was your friend.”
I lift the small envelope and shake out what’s inside: a microcassette tape, the kind that was once used for answering-machine messages, the kind on which senior executives would make their dictations.
“Do you know what’s on it?”
“Nope.”
I stand there looking at the tape. It might take me some effort to find something that could play this tape, is what I’m thinking, but I could definitely make it happen. At the station house, in one of the storerooms, there were a couple of old answering machines. They might still be there, and Officer McConnell could maybe dig one out for me. Or I’m sure I could find a pawn shop, or maybe at one of the big outdoor markets they’re having down in Manchester now, every week, big public-space flea markets—I could find one, play the tape. Be interesting, if nothing else, just to hear his voice—be interesting—
Mrs. Talley is waiting, watching me with her head at an angle, like a bird. The little tape rests in my palm like my hand belongs to a giant.
“Okay, ma’am,” I say, slipping the tape back into the envelope, laying it back in the capsule. “Thanks for your time.”
“Okay.”
She walks me to the door and waves goodbye. “Watch yourself on the steps, there. Your friend slipped on the way out, banged up his face pretty bad.”
I unchain my bike from the green central square of New Castle, now crowded with merrymakers, and start out for home, the joyful clamor of the parade fading behind me until it sounds like a music box, and then is gone.
I ride along the shoulder of highway 90, feeling the breeze in my pant legs and up the sleeves of my coat, wavering in the wake of the occasional delivery truck or state vehicle. They suspended mail delivery last Friday, with a rather elaborate ceremony at the White House, but private companies are still delivering packages, the FedEx drivers with armed heavies riding shotgun. I have accepted an early retirement from the Concord Police Department, with a pension equal to eighty-five percent of my full salary at the time of retirement. In total, I served as a patrol officer for one year, three months, and ten days, and as a detective in the Criminal Investigations Unit for three months and twenty days.
I go ahead and take my bike right down the middle of I-90, ride it right along the double yellow lines.
You can’t think too much about what happens next, you really can’t.
I don’t get home until the middle of the night and there she is waiting for me, sitting on one of the overturned milk crates I keep on the porch for chairs: my baby sister in a long skirt and a light jean jacket, the strong bitter smell of her American Spirits. Houdini is giving her the evil eye from behind the other milk crate, teeth bared, trembling, thinking somehow that he’s invisible.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I say, and I rush up toward her, leaving the bike in the dirt at the bottom of the porch steps, and then we’re hugging, laughing, I’m pressing her head into the bones of my chest.
“You total jerk,” I say, when we pull apart, and she says, “I’m sorry, Hen. I’m really sorry.”
She doesn’t need to say any more, that’s all I need to hear, in terms of a confession. She knew all along what she was doing, when she begged me, in tears, to help spring her husband.
“It’s okay. To be honest, I guess I’m rather impressed, retrospectively, with your cleverness. You played me like a—how did dad used to say it? Like an oboe? Something?”
“I don’t know, Henry.”
“Sure you do. Something about an oboe, with a bonobo, and—”
“I was only six, Henry. I don’t know any of the sayings.”
She flicks the butt of her cigarette off the porch and pulls out another one. Reflexively I scowl at her chain-smoking, and reflexively she rolls her eyes at my paternalism—old habits. Houdini gives a little tentative woof and pokes his snout out from under the milk crate. Officer McConnell has informed me that the dog is a bichon frisé, but I still like to think of him a poodle.
“So all right, but now you need to tell me. What did you need to know? What information did I unwittingly provide for you by worming my way into the New Hampshire National Guard?”