Blind Lake (22 page)

“The pilot I pulled out of the wreck is stabilized over at the clinic. I thought I’d pay him a visit.”

“Is he awake?” Marguerite had heard the man was in a coma.

“Not yet.”

“So what’s the point of visiting?”

“Sometimes you just want to touch base.”

Back in the car, then, back on the road with Chris at the wheel, back through the bright, cold February afternoon and the tumbling windblown trash. “How could you possibly owe him anything? You saved his life.”

“For better or worse.”

“How could it be worse?”

“He’s severely burned. When he wakes up he’s going to be in a world of pain. Not only that—I’m sure Ray and his buddies would love to interrogate him.”

That was true. Nobody knew why the small plane had been flying over Blind Lake or what the pilot had hoped to accomplish by violating an enforced no-fly zone. But the incident had turned up the anxiety level in town more than a notch. In the past couple of weeks there had been three more attempts to breach the perimeter fence from inside, all by individuals: a day worker, a student, and a junior analyst. All three had been killed by pocket drones, though the analyst had made it a good fifty or sixty yards wearing a rigged thermal jacket to disguise his infrared signature.

None of the bodies had been recovered. They would still be there, Marguerite thought, when the snow melted in the spring. Like something left over from a war, burned, frozen, and thawed: biological residue. Vulture bait. Were there vultures in Minnesota?

Everyone was frightened and everyone was desperate to know why the Lake had been quarantined and when the quarantine would end (or, unspeakable thought,
whether
it would end). So, yes, the pilot would be interrogated, perhaps vigorously, and yes, he would certainly be in pain, despite the clinic’s reserve of neural analgesics. But that didn’t invalidate the act of courage Chris had performed. She felt this in him more than once, his doubts about the consequences of a good act. Maybe his book about Galliano had been a good act, at least from his point of view. A wrong righted. And he had been punished for it. Once burned, twice shy. But it seemed to go deeper than that.

Marguerite didn’t understand how a man as apparently decent as Chris Carmody could be so unsure of himself, when certified bastards like Ray walked around in the glow of their own grim righteousness. A line from a poem she had studied in high school came back to her:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity…

Chris parked in the nearly vacant clinic parking lot. The solstice was past and the days were getting longer again, but it was still only February and already the watery sun was close to the horizon. He took her hand as they walked to the clinic door.

There was no one at reception, but Chris rang the finger bell and a nurse appeared a moment later.
I know this woman
, Marguerite thought. This bustling, chubby woman in nursing whites was Amanda Bleiler’s mother, a familiar face from the weekday-morning grade-school drop-off. Someone she knew well enough to wave at. What was her first name? Roberta? Rosetta?

“Marguerite,” the woman said, recognizing her. “And you must be Chris Carmody.” Chris had phoned ahead.

“Rosalie,” she said, the name popping into her head a moment before she pronounced it. “How’s Amanda doing?”

“Well enough, considering.” Considering the lockdown, she meant. Considering that there were dead bodies buried under the snow outside the perimeter fence. Rosalie turned to Chris. “If you want to look in on Mr. Sandoval, that’s okay, I cleared it with Dr. Goldhar, but don’t expect much, okay? And it’ll have to be a quick visit. Couple of minutes tops, all right?”

Rosalie led them up a flight of stairs to the clinic’s second floor, where three small rooms equipped with rudimentary life-support gear punctuated a row of offices and boardrooms.

Not very many years ago, the pilot wouldn’t have survived his injuries. Rosalie explained that he had suffered third-degree burns over a large part of his body and that he had inhaled enough smoke and hot air to seriously damage his lungs. The clinic had fitted him with an alveolar bypass and packed his pulmonary sacs with gel to hasten the healing. As for his skin—

Well, Marguerite thought, he looked ghastly, lying in a white bed in a white room with ebony-white artificial skin stretched over his face like so much damp Kleenex. But this was very nearly state-of-the-art treatment. In less than a month, Rosalie said, he would look almost normal. Almost the way he had looked before the crash.

The most serious injury had been a blow to the head that had not quite cracked his skull but had caused intracranial bleeding that was hard to treat or correct. “We did everything we could,” Rosalie said. “Dr. Goldhar is a really exceptional doctor, considering we don’t have a fully equipped hospital to work with. But the prognosis is iffy. Mr. Sandoval may wake up, he may not.”

Mr. Sandoval
, Marguerite thought, trying to take the measure of the man under all this medical apparatus. Probably not a young man. Big paunch pushing up under the blankets. Salt-and-pepper hair where it hadn’t been charred from his skull.

“You called him Mr. Sandoval,” Chris said.

“That’s his name. Adam Sandoval.”

“He’s been unconscious since he got here. How do you know his name?”

“Well…” She looked distressed. “Dr. Goldhar said not to be too free with this information, but you saved his life, right? That was really brave.”

The story had been broadcast on Blind Lake TV, much to Chris’s horror. He had declined an interview, but his reputation had been massively enhanced—not a bad thing, surely, Marguerite would have thought. But maybe Chris, a journalist, felt uncomfortable at the center of a media event, however small-scale.

“What information?” Chris asked.

“He had a wallet and part of a backpack on him. Mostly burned, but we saved enough to read his I.D.”

Chris said—and Marguerite thought she heard a concealed edge in his voice—“Would it be possible to look at his things?”

“Well, I don’t think so… I mean, I should probably talk to Dr. Goldhar first. Won’t this all eventually be police evidence or something?”

“I won’t disturb anything. Just a glance.”

“I’ll vouch for Chris,” Marguerite added. “He’s a good guy.”

“Well—just a peek, maybe. I mean, it’s not like you’re terrorists or anything.” She gave Chris a somber look. “Don’t get me in trouble, that’s all I ask.”

Chris sat with the pilot a while longer. He whispered something Marguerite couldn’t hear. A question, an apology, a prayer.

Then they left Adam Sandoval, whose chest rose and fell with the exhalations of his breathing apparatus in a queerly peaceful rhythm, and Rosalie took them to a small room at the end of the corridor. She unlocked the door with a key attached to a ring on her belt. Stored inside were medical sundries—boxes of suture thread in various gauges, saline bags, bandages and gauze, antiseptics in brown bottles—and, on a foldout desktop, a plastic bag containing Sandoval’s effects. Rosalie opened the bag cautiously and made Chris put on a pair of throwaway surgical gloves before he touched the contents. “In case of fingerprints or I don’t know what.” She seemed to be having second thoughts.

Chris pulled out Sandoval’s wallet, charred, and the items that had been salvaged from it: his cash card, melted beyond utility; an I.D. disc with his digital bona fides, also charred, but bearing the legible name ADAM W. SANDOVAL; his pilot’s license; a photograph of a middle-aged woman with a wide, pleasant smile, the photo three-quarters intact; a receipt from a Pottery Barn in Flint Creek, Colorado; and coupon for a ten-dollar discount at Home and Garden, six months past its expiration date. If Mr. Sandoval was a terrorist, Marguerite thought, he was definitely the domestic variety.

“Please be careful,” Rosalie said, her cheeks flushed.

The items gleaned from his burned backpack were even more sparse. Chris handled them quickly: a fragment of a smartbook, a blackened plastic pen, and a handful of loose, partial pages from a print magazine.

Chris said, “Has anyone else seen this material?”

“Only Dr. Goldhar. I thought maybe we should call Ray Scutter or someone in Administration and tell them about it. Dr. Goldhar said not to. He said it wasn’t worth worrying Ray about all this.”

“Dr. Goldhar is a wise man,” Chris said.

Rosalie checked the corridor again, looking guiltier by the minute. Chris kept his back to her. She didn’t see—but Marguerite did—when Chris picked up one of the magazine pages and slipped it under his jacket.

She wasn’t sure Chris knew she had seen him take the page and she didn’t mention it during the drive back. What he had done was probably some sort of crime. Did that make her an accomplice?

He didn’t say much in the car. But she was sure his intent had been journalistic, not criminal. All he had taken, after all, was a scrap of singed paper.

Several times she got up enough nerve to ask him about it, several times she refrained. The sun had set and it was almost dinnertime when they reached the house. Chris had promised to cook tonight. He was an enthusiastic if not especially talented cook. His stir-fries were a mixed blessing, and he complained that the siege rations didn’t include lemongrass or coriander, but—

“There’s a car in the driveway,” Chris said.

She recognized it instantly. The car was obscure in the wintery dusk, black against the asphalt and the shadow of the willow, but she knew at once it was Ray’s.

“Stay in the car,” she told Chris. “Let me talk him out.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“I lived with him for five years. I know the drill.”

“Marguerite, he crossed a line. He came to your house. Unless you gave him a key, he broke in.”

“He must have used Tessa’s key. Maybe she’s with him.”

“The point is, when people go this far beyond the boundaries it starts to get serious. You could get hurt.”

“You don’t know him. Just give me a few minutes, all right? If I need you, I’ll scream.”

Not funny
, she told herself. Chris obviously didn’t find it funny, either. She put her hand on his knee. “Five minutes, okay?”

“You’re telling me to sit in the car?”

“Sit in the car, walk around the block, anything you want, but it’ll be easier to get rid of him if you’re not there putting his back up.”

She didn’t wait for him to answer. She climbed out of the car and walked resolutely to the front door of her home, more angry than frightened. Fucking Ray. Chris didn’t understand how Ray operated. Ray wasn’t there to beat her up. Ray had always aimed at humiliation by other means.

Inside—the living room lights were blazing—she called out Tessa’s name. If Ray had brought Tess there might be some excuse for this.

But Tess didn’t answer. Neither did Ray. Fuming, she checked the kitchen, the dining room. Empty. He must be upstairs, then. Lights were burning in every room in the house.

She found him in her office in the spare bedroom. Ray sat in her swivel chair, shoes on her desk, watching the Subject cross a waterless graben under a noonday sun. He looked up casually when she cleared her throat. “Ah,” he said. “Here you are.”

In the diffuse light of the wall screen Ray looked like a chinless Napoleon, ridiculously imperial. “Ray,” she said levelly, “is Tess in the house?”

“Certainly not. That’s what we need to talk about. Tessa’s been telling me about some of the things that go on here.”

“Don’t start. I really, really don’t want to hear it. Just leave, Ray. This isn’t your house and you have no right to be here.”

“Before we start talking about rights, are you aware that your daughter was left in the snow for almost an hour while your boyfriend played hero last week? She’s lucky she doesn’t have frostbite.”

“We can talk about this some other time. Go, Raymond.”

“Come on, Marguerite. Just drop the bullshit about ‘my house, my rights.’ We both know you’ve been systematically ignoring Tess. We both know she’s having serious psychological problems as a result of that.”

“I won’t discuss this.”

“I’m not here to fucking
discuss
it. I’m here to tell you how it’s going to be. I can’t in good conscience continue to allow my daughter to visit with you if you’re not willing to provide her with appropriate care.”

“Ray, we have an agreement—”

“We have a tentative agreement written under radically different circumstances. If I could take it to court, believe me, I would. That’s not possible because of the lockdown. So I have to do what I think is right.”

“You can’t just
keep
her,” Marguerite said. But what if he tried? What if he refused to let Tess come home? There was no family court in Blind Lake, no real police she could call on for help.

“Don’t dictate to me. Tess is in my care and I have to make the decisions I think are best for her.”

It was his smug, oily certainty that infuriated her. Ray had mastered the art of speaking as if he were the only adult on the planet and everyone else was weak, stupid, or insolent. Under that brittle exterior, of course, was the narcissistic infant determined to have his own way. Neither aspect of his personality was particularly appealing.

“Look,” she said, “this is ridiculous. Whatever’s wrong with Tess, you can’t make it better by coming here and insulting me.”

“I have no interest in your opinion on the subject.”

Without thinking, Marguerite took two steps forward and slapped him. She had never done that before. Her open palm hurt immediately, and even this brief physical contact (the coarseness of a day’s growth of beard, his flabby jowls) made her want to wash her aching hand. Bad move, she thought, very bad move. But she couldn’t help taking a certain pride in Ray’s astonishment.

When she was little Marguerite used to hang out with a neighborhood boy whose family owned a gentle and long-suffering springer spaniel. The boy (his name had also been Raymond, coincidentally) had once spent an hour trying to ride that dog like a horse, laughing at the poor animal’s yelps, until the dog had finally turned on him and taken a bite out of his right-hand thumb. The boy had looked the way Ray did now, astonished and tearful. For a second she wondered whether Ray would start to cry.