Читать книгу Space - Roger Reid - Страница 13

The trip back up to our cabins was quiet. I imagined they all wanted to talk about the night’s events; they just didn’t want to talk in front of me. Once in the cabin, things didn’t get any more talkative between Dad and me. We minimized our verbal contact as we got ready for bed and sleep that would never come. I could hear my dad tossing and turning on the bed. I knew he could hear my tossing and turning on the sofa when in the single-digit hours of the night he said, “Stephen’s father was killed in a car wreck.”

“I know,” I replied.

“It was a one-car accident, and there were only two people in the car,” Dad continued, “Raymond Warrensburg and Stephen Warrensburg.”

“I know,” I repeated.

“Yes, but what you don’t know is that the wreck happened on this mountain,” said Dad.

I didn’t know that.

“It was January a year and a half ago. Late night or early morning depending on how you look at it. Maybe two or three AM. Ray and Stephen had been up here at the observatory. They were on their way back home. Back down the mountain. Back down that winding narrow road we took to get up here.”

I didn’t know that either, and it made me wonder about the selection of Huntsville for this year’s Space Cadet get-together. “Did that have anything to do with Dr. Warrensburg choosing this mountain for your meeting?” I asked.

“Actually,” said my dad, “Angie wanted to go to Chicago. She has a colleague at the University of Chicago she wanted us to meet. And frankly, the rest of us were looking forward to Chicago, too.”

So why are you here? I started to ask. I didn’t ask. I knew the answer.

“I guess,” Dad said, “now we know why Stephen begged her to bring the Space Cadets to Huntsville.”

The moon had been full two or three nights before. It still had enough strength to find its way through the humid Alabama night and sneak into the cabin through a breach in the curtains. I watched its subtle light fill a crack in the wood floor.

“Dad,” I asked, “why did you and the others agree to come here?”

“Obviously,” he replied, “we didn’t know we were going to be murder suspects.”

Then he laughed.

And so did I.

The laugh felt good. It took the tension out of the room, out of the night.

“Murder suspects.” When he said it out loud it sounded like the joke that it was.

“I don’t know,” I said, “Huntsville might not be so bad. The barbeque was good, and I’d love to see the Saturn V and the Ares rockets.”

“I think you’ll get a kick out of the observatory, too. Last time I was here it was kind of cold. There was even a little snow on the ground up here on the mountain.”

Last time?

“You’ve been here before?”

“Sure,” said my dad, “several times. We all have.”

I didn’t know that.