Читать книгу Alice Isn’t Dead - Joseph Fink, Joseph Fink - Страница 18

Fourteen months ago. Keisha’s friends, and yes, she had once had friends, even though that idea seemed as distant from her current life as every other part of her past, were worried about her sudden obsession, and especially her plan to become a truck driver.

“Do you know how hard those things must be to drive?” said Margaret, the last friend she hadn’t fully pushed away with the utter focus on finding a wife they all believed was dead. They were in a kitchen that had once been Keisha and Alice’s kitchen, and soon would be no one’s kitchen, a kitchen in a house that would stand empty month after month.

“I’ll learn,” Keisha said. She didn’t want to talk to Margaret. She didn’t want to talk to anyone.

“You’ll learn.” Margaret sat at the counter. “Keisha, how long has it been since you were in therapy?”

“Too busy.”

“I know.” Margaret tried to make a compassionate expression, which really pissed Keisha off. “Finding Alice.”

“Yes, finding Alice. Yes, that’s what I’m doing. Because my wife isn’t dead. And as long as she isn’t dead, I will use every moment of my life finding her. And I don’t need therapy for that. I need support. And if you can’t give me support, you can give me my fucking quiet morning back.”

And that was the last time she had spoken to Margaret. Margaret did return, five days later, to try to make amends, to try to find some better way into the maze that Keisha was running inside her head, but by then no one was home. Margaret would check the house once or twice a month, to see if Keisha had come home, had decided to get better, but eventually Margaret realized she hadn’t checked the house in a couple months and then she never did again.

Keisha and Sylvia stopped in a parking lot off 95 and went through what they had taken.

A lot, and mostly crap. Reports. Department memos. Printed-out emails. Because it became apparent that Ben was the type of person who printed out his emails to read them. Which would have been amazing luck if his emails had been anything but the dull minutiae of his job. Ticket quotas. Reminders of policies. Automatic emails to let him know that someone had responded to his comment on Huffington Post. Even the emails that might hold interest didn’t have enough information to lead to further investigation. Emails to a library near Tulsa with questions about a flooding incident they experienced as a result of burst pipes over the winter, and questions about papers there belonging to someone named Cynthia. Repeated delivery failures from Ben’s attempts to email a variety of addresses all with the domain of praxis.edu. Keisha paused at those, but his sent emails contained nothing but short greetings, and none of them had gotten anything but an automatic error reply.

“Do any of these places seem important to you?” said Sylvia, after nearly an hour of tedious reading in which they had both learned a lot about Ben’s opinions on Star Trek canon.

It was a list of cities, handwritten on the back of one of the printed-out emails.

VECTOR H

Everett

Kingston

Waco

Victorville

Paw Paw

Burnt Prairie

Vector H. Keisha felt the swoon of grief. One of the phrases from Alice’s secret papers.

“Yeah,” she managed. “This is definitely something.” She considered the crossed-out names and the one that had been underlined. “Of course it had to be the one on the complete other side of the country.”

She had been getting frantic calls from Bay and Creek, about the missing travel-sized deodorant shipment, about the missing truck, about the missing her. She had ignored them. So she probably didn’t have a job now. That was fine. After everything she had lost, what was a job?

“This is going to be a long drive,” Sylvia said. “Do you have an iPhone hookup in here or something?”

Keisha considered this teenager whom she had only known a few days. The girl was so young. And so fucking brave. She was so much braver than Keisha. Smarter too. Faster. Stronger. By almost any measure, a better person. And, knowing this, Keisha knew what she had to do.

Sylvia didn’t take it well. Immediately reverted into arms crossed, slumping back, an angry kid with a bargaining mother.

“Well, you can kick me out if you want,” she said. “Be a dick move after everything, but I’ll find another way to get there.”

And Keisha believed that she would. Sylvia had gotten a long way on her own, and she could get a whole lot further. It wasn’t a question of could, though, but should.

“It’s silly, what we’re doing, Sylvia,” she said. “Maybe even it’s wrong. But you and I, we can’t not do it. Right?”

Jaw set, a slight nod.

“Right,” Keisha said. “We’d be out here no matter what, even though whatever is waiting in that town, it’s not good. Maybe it’s the kind of thing a person doesn’t come back from. And, Sylvia, I am a foolish, foolish person. Because I’m going to go. No matter what, I’m going to that place.”

“And I am too,” Sylvia said, in a voice soft as stone, gentle as a knife.

“But you’re not a fool,” Keisha said. “The Thistle Man, the Hungry Man, whoever else is doing all this, they should be terrified of you. Because I think you’re going to be the one who stops it. No, I mean it. I think you haven’t even grown into the force for good you could become. But you won’t stop anything if you get killed poking around some town that may or may not have any answers. That doesn’t have to happen. Because, no matter what, I’m going to go there. Whether you go or stay, it’s too late for me. I need you to be smarter than me. I need you to lie low, and keep trying to hear what you can hear, and I need you to grow and get even smarter and more powerful than you are now. Let me be the fool. You be the one who lives.”

It was only when the drops reached her mouth that she noticed she was crying.

“Whatever needs to be done in that place,” she finished, “I will fucking do it. I really will. And if I fail, then you will be right here, alive and ready.”

Keisha didn’t say please. Didn’t try to touch Sylvia or make any gesture. She sat and she waited. Either Sylvia would agree with her or she wouldn’t. The girl was old enough to know which. Sylvia’s glare faltered at the edge of her eyes. Her arms loosened. And then she pulled Keisha into a fierce hug. She shook through the hug, and so by transposition Keisha shook too. Sylvia’s tears soaked into the shoulder of Keisha’s T-shirt.

“Ok,” Sylvia said. “Ok. Ok. Ok.”