Following Christopher Creed (34 page)

Step one: Admit you are powerless over your addicted relatives
...I admitted it, silently, to the lightning. And I breathed easier, felt my head loosen a little.

I started to walk with Lanz toward the trail and decided I'd keep myself busy.

I called my lawyer. I punched in his cell number, as my case was considered huge.

"Tom, I want you to call Randolph in the morning. Tell them I'll take the settlement."

This meant a hundred thousand for him instead of six hundred thousand. "Michael. What the hell happened? Don't be impetuous, okay? That is a
lot
of cash, and I really think—"

"How many times have we talked about this? I know exactly what I'm doing." He called me Michael always. He'd known my real name was Christopher Michael since the second or third time we met. But he was afraid he'd forget that part and call me Chris in the courtroom, and my "family history" was not part of this case, he'd assured me from the start.

"Did you run into your mother or something?" He meant it as a joke. "Are you getting ready to run again?"

That wasn't really what this was about.

"We all like ... money in the bank," he stammered. "God,
don't do this—
"

"Listen! There are some things more important than money," I said, and he sighed. We'd weighed out my options a bunch of times. "For me to take that six million dollars, it's like making a statement that I don't believe I can earn it for myself. It's a declaration of distrust in my ability to support myself."

"Can't you ... hold out for the big bucks and still earn your own fortune?" he asked.

It just felt all wrong. "I don't know what I would be telling myself about myself ... if I felt I'd let all that money be handed to me. It could be crippling. And I'm not crippled."

Not yet. I kept my eyes wide to make sure I wasn't losing vision from all this stress. Everything looked the same.

"I know, I know, I know." His singsong was not happy.

"When do you think I can get the money?"

"If you deliver Randolph that great a news report, I would imagine they would write you a check in a few days, just to make sure you didn't change your mind. Where will you be?"

"Just make that call and I'll let you know."

I called Claudia. She made it tougher by throwing me a surprise curve ball.

She saw my number in caller ID and got on the phone with "You owe me fourteen hundred bucks if you're not coming back here."

I stopped dead in the trail, stunned. "What did you do? Open a budget to hire a psychic?"

"I had a long conversation with your little friend RayAnn. She submitted your story and called me because she wanted to submit one of her own about Steepleton. It doesn't read as well as yours. Well, that's why they have me. It's pretty good, though. I'm running a side-by-side. Anyway. She told me she doesn't think you're coming back."

RayAnn and her research abilities. Had she searched for a woman investigator who'd pulled bodies out of the Oklahoma bombing site and discovered that no women investigators had children our age? It turned out to be something much easier. "She was being a little cryptic, but I take good notes. Wait a minute..."

Claudia shuffled papers. Finally she said, "RayAnn wondered how you knew what Bo Richardson looked like when he pulled up to Torey Adams's house. She said there's no picture of him on Adams's website. And then she wanted to know how you knew that water moccasins were poisonous snakes indigenous to New Jersey. You're not exactly a walking encyclopedia of knowledge like she is, and that one struck her as odd."

When you become somebody else, it takes work, but after a while,
you actually become somebody else.
When people talk about the person you were, you have a system in place to keep being the new you. That's not to say you wouldn't have momentary lapses, but they're few and far between.

"RayAnn also says she wants me to call the Mother Creed."

"What the hell for?" I asked. "Don't you give me up!"

"I wouldn't dream of it. Ethics, darling, though I might punch a hole in the wall before I'm done with you. Anyway. It's a series of interview questions she thinks is over her head." I listened to her printer go off. I took it they were doing some figuring in my absence. She rattled a piece of paper. "Ready?" she finally said.

"Shoot."

"Mrs. Creed. Had you eavesdropped on your son Justin—intercepting his e-mails and listening to his end of cell phone calls—the night of Darla Richardson's suicide? Did you follow him, see the corpse, and think your son would be implicated? Did you have Justin locked up in jail overnight so that your cousins, the McIntyre brothers, would have time to clean up the scene and bury the girl so that your only remaining child would not be implicated in a murder?" Claudia panted dramatically, as if she'd just sprinted a mile.

A blast of thunder struck and Lanz moved me on a little faster, though I was busy smiling and trying not to trip at the same time. RayAnn was not exactly in front of me in what she could figure out, I told myself. She'd just been sitting and punching out words all afternoon while I was slaying one dragon after another.

"She'll deny the whole thing," I said.

"Whatever. A lie is still a quote."

"She'll threaten to sue you."

"Bring it on." When I laughed, she wasn't amused by it. "And you still owe me fourteen hundred bucks."

"I'll pay you back next week."

"So you're coming back, then."

I sighed. "It's more than a story, Claudia. Maybe it's a book or a website or—"

"You're not answering me, Mike. You're the best writer I've got. Don't mess up your education."

I laughed again. "Claudia, you're a first-year grad student. But trust me. I learned more from you than I ever learned in a classroom."

"Don't patronize me, even if it's true. Where the hell are you going?"

Dang. She was sincerely pissed. I tried not to think of it as I hung up.

I dialed Torey Adams.

"What's up?" he answered.

"Got another job for you after you drop those kids off, if you're up for it."

"The last one is just getting out of the car. What do you need, man?"

"How'd you like to drive my brother back up to rehab tonight?"

It wasn't a slip, calling Justin my brother. Torey suspected what was up the minute he did that double take at Brownie's last night. He was good enough not to bust me to Ali and Bo, guessing it's something you'd rather do yourself, and only if you're up for it. But he'd come around today, asking to play humble servant—that was rich. He and my mom, the only ones who'd gotten it right away, would always have had their antennae up.

I knew for sure he'd guessed the truth when his answer contained no surprise. Only: "Well. I got this full tank of gas."

We chuckled. My headache was gone. "It's about a two-hour drive, Torey. But he's seen a dead body. I thought you might be ... a perfect person to drive him."

He asked, "Where?"

"I'm not sure. But he's on his bike, and he's going to pass by your house in about five minutes. He'll get you to the place if you cut him off."

"I'll find him."

"Do it fast, because he could fly over the handlebars or drive into the meadows. He's not sober, but if you offer to drive him, I think he'll go back. Just take him and take off. Don't worry about me."

I could see the end of the trail coming up. Lanz was steadily moving us forward in spite of more thunder.

"Wait, Chris," Torey said. "Where are you going?"

"Hold on a sec."

A huge explosion had suddenly gone off behind us. I turned to see an orange puff of mushroom smoke rising above the Lightning Field. If my instincts were right, it came from the place where RayAnn had seen the lights. If Justin's friends had seen this, the stories would have gone on for centuries. With my overly keen ears, I made out the sound of an engine, a hose squirting water, and I half imagined a fire truck and some Stockton geologists detonating a natural lightning reservoir before it hurt anyone. If they were stupid and forgot to call the media about this, the stories of people having seen lights out here would go on for centuries.

I turned. Torey was panicking slightly, going, "Chris?
Chris?
"

"Don't worry about me," I said.

"But ... will you be here when I get back tonight?" I could hear his voice rise, a panic in it that went through me like a hatchet.

I ought to stick around for Justin, a part of me said, and I might have actually had the courage to do that if my mom was together. But with the two of them so problematic, I could only think of what I felt the Twelve Steps would say to me:
Let them pull themselves out of their messes. You can't do it for them. If you stay now, you'll return to your lamb-led-to-slaughter routine. You can return later as a reward instead of now as a supplement. You still need more healing to your vision. Preserve yourself first.

Adams would have to straighten Justin out about who I was, but my gut feeling was that the truth would dawn on Justin somewhere between home and rehab if Adams just stayed quiet. I imagined it like that. Like everything else, Justin would understand what I'm doing in time. And whatever he had to say about where science meets magic, that would be fine with me, too.

"Torey, thanks, man. For everything." It certainly didn't do justice to the guy who gave me a fresh set of eyes in which to view my life, a set of eyes that helped me flip from first person to third person about who I was. Adams had probably kept me from winding up dead—yeah, under some overpass out west of Nowhere. For now, I let the click say it all.

We reached the end of the trail, and it had taken long enough that a Yellow Cab was there. I tossed my cell phone down, right at the center of the trail where anyone could find it. It was the first thing I'd intentionally done since leaving here to keep the talk growing. Some temptations are irresistible.

Lanz and I jumped into the back seat of the cab. With the slamming of the door, the rain started coming down in buckets. It was like magic. Two nights ago the cops worked all night on that corpse while it rained April showers like this. And as soon as they were done, the rain stopped. I had some thought of bad frequency in reverse.

"Where to?" the driver asked.

I pulled out my key ring and held on to the laminated goals on the plastic strip. I think you're allowed to change your goals, so long as it's for the right reasons. My reasoning lately had always centered on following that next great story, and what was I going to do with all this info? Where could I write this thing where nothing—not even something good—could interrupt me? Hawaii? Lake Superior? Maine? Key West? Paris?
Polynesia?

"Just take me to the bus station," I said.