Centralia (15 page)

Lawrence Habit was a patient man, but he hadn’t started out that way. As a young man, he was as impulsive and stupid as a monkey in a mall. He functioned primarily on instinct and reactions. He did what he wanted, when he wanted, where he wanted and simply walked over anyone who opposed him or got in his way. But the military had drilled that out of him. He’d learned discipline, honor, the importance of planning, and respect. And his time with Patrick had taught him patience.

Now that patience would be tested. He’d arrived at his destination an hour ago, concealed his vehicle under a blanket of heavy brush, and settled in for a long wait. From where he sat in the driver’s seat, he could see the incoming road and any traffic on it.

It would be a sleepless night. He was fairly certain Patrick wouldn’t arrive until daybreak, but he didn’t want to take any chance of missing
an early arrival. He knew the agency had dispatched another team to take care of Patrick. It was simply their way of dealing with problems. But he also knew that team had failed as well.

Because he knew Patrick.

He admired Patrick, respected him. The world needed more men like him. The deal to bring him in had been business and nothing more. But now that the deal was off and Lawrence had become a target himself
 
—a target for
discontinuation
 
—the two shared a bond. Lawrence could use that bond to his advantage.

The agency would be coming for Lawrence, so he needed to get to them first and destroy them. But he couldn’t do it without Patrick. The man possessed skills that Lawrence had never seen before. His ability to stay calm under the most stressful situations was remarkable. And his aim was dead-on. The man simply didn’t miss. He was, in every aspect of the term, the perfect soldier. Tough, resilient, flexible, loyal, intelligent, he was the complete package. Even outside the war zone, outside that valley of death, he’d proven to be all those things. The memory hit Lawrence again, the one he’d kept buried for too long. Not because he didn’t want to remember it, but because he thought it no longer held any relevance; he’d thought he’d never see Patrick again.

Patrick had talked him down off that ledge, convinced him to pull the handgun away from his head and lay it on the bed. The apartment was quiet, empty; the only thing to fill it was Patrick’s voice over the phone. It was the voice of reason, of truth, of hope. He’d proven that day that he wasn’t only a loyal soldier; he was just as much a loyal friend.

Lawrence had thought Patrick was dead, that he’d been discontinued.

Sipping a cold coffee, watching the empty road, Lawrence smiled. It’d be just like old times.

He was in the house again. The same one as always. He never got a look at the exterior but could tell from the layout and architectural details that it was an old home. The decorative molding around the windows and doors, the hardwood flooring, the large double-hung windows, the archways between rooms, the ornate brass chandelier in the foyer area.

There wasn’t much on the first floor. The rooms were mostly empty with only a few stray items of furniture: an oak straight-back chair with a caned seat in the dining room, a cherry pedestal table in the living room, an old toaster on the granite counter in the kitchen. But each room had a feeling about it that it was waiting for something, waiting to be filled with objects, with furniture, with memories. He’d been through the first floor multiple times,
searched each room as if it were a rare archaeological find and he a treasure hunter. And every time he’d found nothing but dust and splinters and a couple loose nails. And that persistent feeling of expectancy, of waiting, of longing.

The real intrigue, though, for Peter, was always the second floor.

Up the staircase he plodded, the aged wood of the steps creaking under his weight, a curious excitement building in his chest. The closer to the top he drew, the harder and more rapid his heartbeat.

Just like always.

And as always, he expected to find something up there, something of value or a piece of important evidence, anything that would trigger more memories, clear the fog, and clue him in to what was going on.

The sensation he experienced in this house was like none he’d ever had before. He was dreaming and yet he knew he was dreaming and was in a kind of semiconscious state. Yet he was fully asleep. It was a dream like any other dream he’d had at any other time in his life, but he could think, he could reason, he was aware of where he was and what he was doing. He was in control and not at the whim of the irrational side of his subconsciousness.

Once he reached the top of the steps, he rested his hand on the banister and surveyed the hallway. Four rooms lined one side, three with their doors open as if inviting him in. But that last door, the fourth one, remained closed, warning him away.

He needed to do a more thorough search of each of the open rooms. He hoped that in them he’d find clues, signs to point him to even more clues, and puzzle pieces. This was where he needed to focus his efforts, not on discovering the source of the longing on the first floor, not on finding the key to the locked door and
exposing the source of the shadow. These rooms, the ones open to him, begging him to explore, to find, to remember, were where he’d find his answers.

The first room consisted of a dresser, a bookshelf, a desk, and a floor lamp. No bed. No closet. No mirrors. And there were boxes of all sizes. Shoe boxes, gift boxes, trunks, lockboxes . . . all stacked and arranged in a haphazard manner. On and around the boxes were objects from Peter’s past
 
—mementos, photos of times he didn’t remember, toys he had no recollection of ever playing with yet knew were his. There was his baseball glove, worn and flimsy though he couldn’t remember using it, not even once. He picked it up and slipped his hand into it. The glove was too small now, but still it felt right, like he’d worn it for hundreds of hours and caught thousands of balls with it. Why couldn’t he remember ever playing baseball?

Peter walked to the dresser and pulled open the top drawer. It was stuffed with underwear and socks, nothing out of the ordinary. In the second drawer he found shirts, ties, sweaters. The third drawer held pants, mostly khakis. No jeans or shorts. In the bottom drawer were four lab coats, white, mid-thigh length. Over the left breast of each was stitched
Peter Ryan, Biology.

Peter pulled out one of the coats, unfolded it, and tried it on. He wore one just like it when he worked in the lab. He slipped out of the coat and let it fall back into the drawer without bothering to refold it.

The bookshelf reached from floor to ceiling and consisted of seven shelves, all stuffed full of books, mostly biology texts and reference books. One shelf was reserved for journals and another for a variety of other books, ranging from classics
 
—Jack London, Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, Austen, and Henry James
 
—to biographies. On
the end, separated from the other books as if it were something too precious to be in the presence of other texts, was a book that caught his eye: a Bible.

Sliding the Bible off the shelf, he cracked open its faded leather cover. On the first page was the handwritten inscription:
May these words always be a lamp to your feet and a light to your path. Love, Mom and Dad.

Mom and Dad. He thought it odd that he had no memory of his parents. No real memory, anyway. Nothing specific, nothing that made them any different from every other mom and dad out there. It was as though he’d been raised in some television life, where everything was scripted and stereotyped and nauseatingly typical but nothing was real.

Peter flipped through the thin, crisp pages and landed in the book of John. He scanned the page and finally came to rest on some familiar words, comforting words. Words he’d read before. Words that at one time had meaning to him. His eyes lingered on those words, drew them in as a mother welcomes her newborn, the child she feels she’s known all her life but has only just met. He lifted a hand and ran his fingers over each word. The feeling he had when reading them was incredible. Such peace. Such hope.

And then it vanished as quickly as a mist is dispelled by the wind.

He returned the Bible and moved to the desk on the other side of the room. It was a wide, thick partners desk made of oak. The top surface was as wide and deep as a dining room table and littered with papers and photos and forms and receipts. It was an exact replica of his desk at home in his study.

On the left side of the desk was a notepad, one of those small steno pads detectives and reporters used to jot down phone
numbers and important information. Peter reached for it and opened it. A phone number was on the first page, written by Peter’s hand. He didn’t recognize the number, but the name under it
 
—
Nichols
 
—was oddly familiar. He knew it from somewhere but couldn’t place where; he’d said that name before, used it in conversation, used it to address a man of some stature. But no specific memories were attached to it, only a distant familiarity. Peter closed the pad and placed it back on the desk. He needed to remember that name when he woke up.

On the right corner of the desktop, a brochure attracted his attention. A photo of a school and a smiling boy standing with his parents adorned the cover. Across the top in a scrolling font, it read
The Andrews Academy
.

Peter opened the brochure, but the interior panels were all blank, just white space. On the back was the name of the school again and a motto:
The place for gifted students to develop to their fullest potential.

That memory returned to him then, floating out of the ether. It was the same memory he’d had before, when he’d been awake and searching for the meaning of Centralia.

He and Karen and Lilly sit around a table, and a man in a suit sits across from them. His face is chiseled, his brow heavy, his hair perfectly groomed, combed to the side and carefully sprayed in place. His eyes are a piercing green. He sits erect, chin up. Statuesque.

“It’s a remarkable school, I assure you,” he says. There’s an air of confidence about him that is reassuring. This is a man who knows what he’s talking about.

He smiles and dips his chin. “Children like Lilly
 
—gifted children
 
—need someplace special to hone their skills. She deserves that, don’t you think?”

An address was printed on the bottom of the page. The school was located in a town called Buck’s Valley in Indiana. But below the address in small, italicized print were the words
A Centralia School
.

Centralia.

At once, Peter felt a great urging tugging at his mind, his heart, his soul. He had to act now, had to move. There was someplace he needed to be, someplace that
needed
him to be there, and there was no time to waste. He glanced at his watch, but there were no hands on it. Only numbers
 
—solitary, lonely numbers that told him nothing he didn’t already know: that there were a mere twenty-four hours in a day and time stood still for no one. And his time was up.

And then he was standing in front of the closed door. The fourth door. Behind it lay the answers to his questions, he was certain. He reached for the knob and tried to turn it, but it wouldn’t budge. He rattled it, pulled on it, but got nowhere. It was stuck as fast as rebar in concrete.

Below the door, in the space between the bottom edge and the wood flooring, the shadow moved, back and forth, pacing, always pacing.

“Who are you?” Peter hollered. He put both hands on the door and pressed his ear to it, hoping to hear some breath or whisper or anything. But there was only silence, not even the sound of footsteps.

He had an idea. Peter reached over his head and ran his fingers along the ledge of the molding above the doorway. Maybe the key was there, out of sight, hidden from anyone who was not supposed to enter the room. But no key was there. He ran his eyes along the floor, searching every angle, every corner, but still no key was to be found.

Again he tried the knob, but the outcome was no different from before. The door was locked fast.

Peter did not awake from his dream casually as he had done countless times before when dreams had entertained his sleeping hours. This time the transition out of the dreamworld house full of strange rooms and misplaced memories was harsh and jarring. Peter awoke suddenly and with a frantic feeling in his chest. His hands were sweaty and the muscles in his forearms ached. His hair was wet, but he couldn’t tell at first whether it was because of sweat or not.

Then he realized he was outside, lying in the grass, damp from the dew that had settled overnight.

A Ford Fiesta was there, the latest in his string of grand thefts auto, its driver’s side door open, the soft electronic bell still chiming, letting him know the keys were in the ignition.

He was in a clearing in the woods. Trees like sentinels rose around him, spreading their leafy arms across the light-gray sky. A gentle breeze blew and surrounded him with the earthy odor of grass and fallen leaves. If he were a child of the forest, raised by rabbits or squirrels or coyotes, he would have thought it a beautiful morning and would have stretched contentedly after a comfortable night’s sleep. But the wood was foreign to him, and awaking there was as unnatural as discovering he had somehow sunk to the bottom of the ocean and could miraculously breathe water.

Peter sat up and rubbed his eyes, ran a hand through his hair. He tried to remember how he’d gotten there, how he’d come to spend the night with nature, but couldn’t. He recalled the events
of the previous evening. The Oceanview, the gunmen, three Tahoes, twelve men. All dead. And they’d killed Amy. It was his fault. Sorrow threatened to overwhelm and shove him into a very dark and uninhabitable place, but he pushed it aside. Remarkably, he didn’t find it all that difficult. His mind was a weapon he had at one time mastered and tamed and trained, but now he couldn’t remember when or how.

Amy’s final words, that last conversation they’d had right before a single bullet pierced her skull and snuffed out her life, surfaced and pricked at his mind.

“Peter, I’m so sorry. . . . I had no idea they’d go this far.”

What did she mean? Who were
they
? And how did she know anything about them?

“Things aren’t what they seem. They’re not what you think. . . .

“This. You. Me. Everything. We need to find Abernathy. It’s
 
—”

Questions stabbed at his mind. So cryptic, so mysterious. And no answers. It was nearly too much for Peter. He wanted to claw at his own flesh. What had he gotten involved in? And had Amy somehow been a part of it, even before he’d dragged her into the danger?