War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel (35 page)

“No one else was using it,” she said.

“Even if you don’t go home, your father might ask you to leave this building.”

“Fine,” she snapped again.
“It’s probably time for us to move on anyway.”

I studied her.
She seemed very young.
But I had learned in Chicago that youth wasn’t any guarantee of innocence.
I wondered if I should ask her about the explosives I found in the Barn or if I should wait until I saw Daniel.
I didn’t want to scare the group away from here too quickly, but I also didn’t want them to do anything stupid.
First, I needed to figure out how to stop them.

“When’s Daniel due back?” I asked.

“What’s it to you?”

“I want to talk to him,” I said.

“I’ll tell him you were here.” Rhondelle crossed her arms.

“I need to talk to him, for his mother’s sake.
Even if he chooses not to go home, I need to tell her I saw him.”

Something passed across Rhondelle’s face, something sad and lonely and filled with regret.
Then she blinked up at me, the expression gone.

“Let me take you home,” I said so softly that for a moment, I wondered if she heard me.

“Why?” she asked, and this time, she didn’t laugh at me.

“Because,” I said, “you don’t deserve to be treated like this.”

She shook her head slightly, her eyes downcast.
Then that half smile returned to her face.

“You think you know everything don’t you?” she said, and walked out of the room.

THIRTY-FOUR

My phone call to Whickam was short.

“I found her,” I said, using the phone across the street from my apartment. “She’s in your parents’ place.”

“Oh, thank God,” Whickam said. “I will be down there as fast as I can.”

“You might want to reconsider that.” The phone, which had been sitting in the sun, was hot against my hand.
People milled around me, going about their business.
The day had grown unbearably muggy.

“She is my daughter,” he said.
“I need to bring her home, for my wife’s sake.
For my sake.”

“That may be so,” I said, “but right now, she needs a little time, and what I’m afraid of is that she’ll move out and we’ll have to start the search all over again.”

Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted Whickam to walk into that mess.
Not the messy row house; the possible bombs, the rhetoric, the strange uneasiness I’d felt ever since I stepped through that beautiful mahogany door.

“What about Daniel?” he asked.

“I’m going back later today.
I hope to talk to Daniel then.”
And I hoped he would give me something.
Some clue to what he was planning.
Some idea of how dangerous he truly was.

“I worry about her, all alone there,” Whickam said.

“She’s not alone.”
I wiped the sweat off my forehead.
I didn’t like standing in the sun.
“She’s with a number of other people. I’m not sure how many.”

“They are all in the house?” Whickam asked.

“I’m afraid so,” I said.

“I could arrest them for trespassing.”

“I’m sure you could try,” I said. “But I don’t know if you’ve noticed how run-down the neighborhood is getting. Even if you call the police, I doubt they’ll come, and if they do, I doubt they’ll arrest anyone.”

At least not for that.
The police might not go in for other reasons.
If they suspected the group of militant activity, they might be spying on the row house, and they wouldn’t go in if it compromised their investigation.

A trickle of sweat ran down my back.
I hoped the house wasn’t under surveillance.
The last thing I needed was to be back in some police file.

Whickam sighed heavily. “Can you assure me that’s she’s in no danger?”

“Just give me a day,” I said. “That’s all I ask.
Then you can come down here if you want.”

“What if they leave? What if they decide it’s not safe there and run, now that you have found them?”

“That’s the risk we take,” I said.
“If you don’t show up immediately, they might think everything’s all right.”

“I want my daughter back,” Whickam said.

“I think you’re going to have to realize that your daughter is an adult who makes her own choices.
Whether you agree with them or not.”

There was not much more to say after that.
I promised to call him if anything else changed.
Otherwise, I would get back in touch with him late the next day.

I let myself out of the booth, crossed the street, and headed into my new apartment.
Jimmy and Malcolm were gone. They had planned to go to Central Park, and if they didn’t enjoy themselves there, they would go to Morningside Park. They planned to end their day in the library, in air-conditioned comfort.

Air-conditioning sounded good to me
,
too.

There wasn’t much I could do until later.
I went into the back bedroom, clicked the air conditioner on high, and fell asleep.

* * *

I woke to the sound of thunder.
The room was dark, even though the cheap alarm clock beside the bed told me it was late afternoon.
The stress of the last few days had gotten to me
,
and so had the lack of sleep.
I had slept for more than four hours, and my growling stomach told me that I needed something to eat.

I showered, got myself dinner, and headed back to the Whickam apartment.
The sky had turned black, and a vicious wind made its way through the canyons between the buildings.
I hoped that Malcolm and Jimmy had gone to the library already — I didn’t want them caught in this.

The moment I had that thought, the heavens opened up, and water poured out of them.
I climbed into a doorway,
waiting
for the rain to pass by.

After fifteen minutes, it became clear that the rain wasn’t going to let up.
I ran the last two blocks to the row houses.
By the time I climbed the steps to the Whickam house, I was so wet that my shoes sloshed.

I pounded on the knocker.
This time, the door swung back, and Daniel Kirkland faced me.
He was taller than I remembered, and thinner.
His
A
fro doubled the size of his head, making his face seem very tiny.

“I thought maybe it was you,” he said without inviting me in.
“Tell my mom I’m fine.”

There wasn’t a single breath of emotion in his words.
He didn’t care about Grace.
I wondered if he cared about anyone.

“You tell her,” I said. “She thought something horrible happened to you. She doesn’t hear from you, then she finds out you dropped out of school and you’re going to lose your scholarship.”

He shrugged. “It’s my life.”

“She’s the one who worked hard so that you would get that scholarship. She’s the one who sacrificed nearly twenty years of her life for you, and you’re just walking away as if it doesn’t matter.”

His eyes were flat.
“There’s more important things than my mother right now.”

“Like what?”

“This country,” he said. “It’s killing us.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.
I had promised myself I would listen to him.
I had hoped that he might let something slip.

“It’s sending us to war,” he was saying.
“It’s stifling us, it’s destroying good people.
You know that, man.
You know how these things work.
It’s time to stop it.”

He was giving me clues.
I just had to get through the rhetoric. “How are you going to stop an entire nation?”

“Not just me,” he said, not giving me the answer I had hoped for.
“Lots of us feel this way.
It’s not enough to stop the war anymore.
We got to stop the people who think that war is their right. This is a revolution.
And in a revolution, everything changes.”

Thunder boomed above me, and then the rain started to hurt.
It made tapping noises as it hit the ground.

Hail, barely bigger than the raindrops themselves, but it stung.

I pushed the door open as wide as it went, and stepped inside, dripping on that fine wood floor.

“I didn’t ask you in,” Daniel said.

“It’s a revolution,” I said. “People do what they want.”

He glared at me.
I didn’t care.
We didn’t like each other, which was fine.
I didn’t have to like him.
I just had to find out what he was up to and stop it.

I walked past him toward the kitchen where I had last seen Rhondelle.
A woman stood inside, heating refried beans on the hot plate.
The smell was foul.
Two young men sat at the table, eating a tabouli salad made with too much vinegar.

All three people in the kitchen were white. All three of them had long blondish brown hair, wore jeans and short tops, and had bare feet.

“Is this the man harassing you?” one of the young men asked Daniel, who had come in behind me.

I dripped on the tile floor. Without asking, I grabbed a towel and wiped off my face. “How many of you live here?”

“Who wants to know?” the girl asked, taking the pan of beans off the hot
plate.
She was classically beautiful, her features small and well
drawn.

The power flickered. The lights dimmed for a moment, then came back up.

“He’s a detective,” Daniel said. “My mom hired him.”

“Your mom?” the other young man asked.
“I thought she didn’t care about anything.”

What a strange description of Grace.
If anything
,
she cared too much.

“I see you’ve been lying to them,” I said.

Daniel’s right hand clenched into a fist, and then he forced himself to relax it.
“You don’t have any rights here. You barged into our place—”

“Actually, this place belongs to Professor Whickam’s parents, not any of you.
You’re trespassing.
I just might tell the police.
If they come in here to evict you, what else will they find? Components for a Molotov
c
ocktail, like I found in the Barn?
More dynamite? Some blasting caps?”

The girl spun, looking at the boys as if they were at fault.
They stared at me.

No one spoke for the longest time.
I wasn’t going to get them to admit anything, not without some work.

I balled the towel in my fist.
“What did you plan to do with all that stuff at the Barn?
Show the
A
dministration how stupid it is by bombing New Haven?”

“It wasn’t ours,” Daniel said from behind me.

I turned.
His face was impassive.
If the stuff wasn’t his, he should have been shocked by my accusations.
He wasn’t.

“We weren’t the only ones who used that place,” one of the boys said.

I didn’t turn toward him.
I could tell by the tremble in his voice that he was lying.

This was between me and Daniel.

Daniel tilted his head ever so slightly.
He looked almost bemused.
“That’s right.
We’ve been in the city since May. Someone else could’ve stayed in the Barn since we left New Haven.”

“So if I search this place,” I said, “I won’t find any bomb-making materials?”

“Of course not,” Daniel said, this time remembering to sound shocked.

“What about guns?” I asked.
“Will I find any of those?”

“Didn’t say that,” Daniel said.
“A man’s got to protect himself.”

“Especially from people just barging into his home.” The other boy stood. He was about half my size, but he knew how to hold himself so that he looked menacing.

I gave him a contemptuous look. “What are you going to do? Kick me so hard I have to go to the hospital?”

The boy flushed and glanced at Daniel.
Daniel made a slight sound, almost like a growl, and I knew it wasn’t aimed at me.
He was angry at his friend for failing to lie well.

“He didn’t kick anyone,” Daniel said.

“Oh, that’s right,” I said, turning toward him.
“You did.
Unprovoked.”