She would get him a good lawyer. Even if it bankrupted the foundation, she would get him off from whatever charges were filed. He’d fired in self-defense, and in defense of her and Sissy.
Oh, God… Sissy. To never see her dance around the office in her outrageous sweaters, never hear her scold Marianne about her clothes or diet, never again see the softness in her eyes when she looked at Tim…
A cop came into the room. Middle-aged, he looked weary, hard-eyed, competent. Tim did not so much as glance up. Marianne blinked back her tears and made herself stand. What she said now could be critical to Tim’s future. The interrogation was beginning.
“Hello,” she said steadily. “I’m Dr. Marianne Jenner, and this is my bodyguard, Tim Saunders, who was defending me from attack. Who are you?”
Two days spent in the police station and in court. Tim was arraigned and held until Marianne could arrange bail. Two suspects and six “persons of interest” were picked up by the police. At nine in the morning on the third day, Marianne sat in her hotel room—not the hotel downtown but a cheap one near the airport—and waited for ten o’clock, when the shuttle would take her to the damaged airport for the only flight she could find back to New York. The hour ahead felt like the arid years to come.
She had lost everything.
Sissy, the daughter of her heart.
Noah, gone to the stars.
Ryan, shut up in his grief over Connie and his implacable hatred of the Denebs.
Harrison, who’d thrown her out of his life.
The Star Brother Foundation, because she didn’t see how she could go on with it. If she paid Tim’s bail and a really good lawyer, she was out of funding. Out of courage, maybe even out of belief that the spaceship to World could ever be built. She could feel the dream leaving her, the last smoke from a spent fire.
Marianne sat on the bed, head bowed, unmoving, until her spine ached. It seemed to her that she might never move again. She had known pain before as an active thing, piercing and lancing her; this frozen pain was something new, and infinitely worse. Even breathing hurt.
A knock on the door. She couldn’t move to open it. Another knock, louder. Then the murmur of voices. The shuttle? She couldn’t break free of the icy shards of pain.
The door opened. A bellhop stuck his head in. “Dr. Jenner? This man—” He was pushed aside and Jonah Stubbins entered.
His eyes, small in the broad face atop the huge body, swept around the room. “Well, now, little lady—” He stopped, paused, and then, “Marianne, I know what happened. I need to talk to you. I have something to offer you that will, I think, matter to you.
“May I sit down?”
PART THREE
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
CHAPTER 16
S plus 6 years
“There is mouses down there!” Colin Jenner said.
“No,” his father said in that slow, frowny way that Colin hated. Jason hated it, too. “Not here.”
“Yes.” Colin pointed at the ground. “Little baby mouses!”
His father tugged at both boys’ hands so hard that even Jason was almost lifted off his feet.
Daddy hadn’t wanted to bring them on this walk. He never wanted to bring them anyplace. He sat in the living room and stared at the television or sometimes just at the wall, which was dusty and had a big spiderweb up in the corner by the ceiling. Colin didn’t think there was a spider in it, but he wasn’t sure. He hoped there was. Spiders were interesting. Sometimes Daddy would get up and cook or wash their clothes, and sometimes Jason would do it. Jason was way over six and went to real school, not just preschool, and so he could do things like that.
But today Jason had begged and pleaded, and Daddy and Jason and Colin got in the car and drove to Daddy’s swamp, which would have been exciting except for Daddy, who looked unhappy to be there. More unhappy.
The swamp was squishy underfoot and Colin’s boots made a nice splurgly sound each time he pulled a foot out of mud. There was so much to hear! To look at, too—frogs and bugs and the purple flowers Daddy hated and Colin sort of liked. But looking wasn’t as exciting as hearing. It never was.
But after just a little time Daddy said he was tired. They left the swamp and walked the trail to the parking lot, with its broken-off sign that nobody ever fixed: REARDON WETLANDS PRESER. Colin pulled away from his father’s hand, planted his muddy boots, and pointed again. “Baby mouses are down there!”
“I told you, Colin, there are no mice here. Not anymore, thanks to your grandmother’s alien ‘friends.’”
“I hear them! Baby mouses!”
His father grimaced, knelt, and put his hands on Colin’s shoulders. “Say ‘mice.’ One mouse, two mice. Look, I explained all this to you, remember? You’re old enough to begin to understand.”
“I’m five now,” Colin said, in case Daddy forgot. He seemed to forget Colin and Jason a lot.
“Yes, five. A big boy. So you can remember that all the house mice and field mice, all the ones like those in your picture book, are gone. They all got sick and died. A different kind of mouse, the deer mouse, might come and live here, but they haven’t spread this far yet. And even when they do, you couldn’t hear the babies way underground.”
It was the most words Daddy had spoken in a long time, but they weren’t true words. Colin stamped his foot. “There is mices down there.”
Ryan Jenner stood, took both sons’ hands and started toward the car. Behind them, a deer mouse sped from the cover of brush and disappeared into a tiny hole in the ground.
Daddy was wrong. Colin did understand about the mice. Grandma had explained it all on Skype. That was a while ago and Colin didn’t remember all of it, but Jason did and he explained it, everything that had happened when Colin wasn’t even born yet. Aliens had come from out of the stars, and Grandma and all the other scientists had helped them to not get sick. Only, after the aliens went away, a lot of mice died, like Jason’s hamster last Christmas, which was really scary because Pockets had been all stiff and cold. Grandma promised that she, Colin, Jason, and Daddy wouldn’t die for a long time. Mommy was already dead but that didn’t count because Colin couldn’t remember her and Jason could only remember a little. She’d died of cancer, which was different than what had killed mice. That was sad. Then birds and owls and even wolves died because there weren’t enough mice to eat. Then there were too many bugs because there weren’t enough birds to eat them.
Somehow the whole thing ended up hurting farmers and bread and fruit and money, although Colin didn’t really understand that part and neither did Jason. But it was the reason people got poor and Daddy lost his job and the car was so old and the porch steps were broken and Colin was never, ever to tell anybody that they had food in the cellar and guns in the house. Not ever.
The really confusing part, though, was the aliens from the star. Grandma said they were good and hadn’t meant to hurt any people or mice. They left directions for building a spaceship, a real one not like Colin’s toys, which sounded really exciting except that the important people who were in charge of the world didn’t have enough money to build it. And a big storm wrecked part of the spaceship, so they stopped. Grandma’s job was to tell people that the spaceship should get built again and that the aliens were good.
But Daddy said the aliens were bad. Really, really bad. They killed people and mice and wrecked something called “the economy,” which Colin didn’t understand, and “the ecology,” which he did because Daddy used to talk about it all the time, before he started staring at the wall or the TV. Ecology was how everything needed to eat everything else. Daddy said the aliens were even worse than the purple flowers.