The Fearsome Particles Part 21

Jeremy, his head dominated by a thatch of his mother's dark hair, was still in the process of putting his toy back where it belonged, the delay caused by the fact that he'd chosen to return the car by kicking it half-heartedly across the floor.

h.e.l.la turned to see what Vicki was watching. "Jeremy!" She ran back and hauled him away from the car by his elbow.

Vicki stepped forward and picked up the slender blue Guntherman car. Then she crouched down with it in front of Jeremy.

"Jeremy, you're such a little monster sometimes," said h.e.l.la. "Say you're sorry to Mrs. Woodlore."

Vicki looked up. "It's all right, h.e.l.la. I don't want an apology." She lowered her gaze back to the boy. "This is an interesting car, don't you think, Jeremy? So long and thin."

His angry eyes wouldn't connect with hers. He shrugged.

"You don't have to like it," Vicki a.s.sured him. "Tell me what you really think. Is it sort of old and dumb?"

Jeremy flicked a glance at Vicki. "It's stupid," he sneered. "It doesn't work right. The wheels don't turn properly."

"Jeremy!" huffed h.e.l.la. "He doesn't mean it, really."

Vicki waved her off. She focused on Jeremy, on his down-turned eyes and curled-up mouth. "What do you really want to do with this car?" She waited. "Do you like to smash things?"

Jeremy's face popped up. "Yeah," he said, tentatively.

Vicki grinned at him. "Well, if your mother will let go of you, it would be okay with me if you gave this car a good smashing."

He brightened as if he couldn't believe his luck. "Really?"

h.e.l.la was shaking her head. "You don't have to do that, Vicki Victoria. Mrs. Woodlore. Really, I don't think"

She stopped when Vicki glared up at her. Then Vicki set the car against Jeremy's stomach, and held it there until he cradled it in his hands. "All right now," she said. "I'm going to give you one minute to play with that car the way you really want to."

He stared at her with a dark gleam. "One minute? Are you going to time me?"

Vicki tapped her watch. "I'm going to time you. But the rule is you can't touch anything with the car, except the floor and the walls. Otherwise the fun's over. Okay?"

"O-kay!" He raced off with the car toward the north wall and rammed it straight in. He dive-bombed invisible enemies by flinging the car repeatedly into the floorboards, the sounds of his explosions dissipating into the aching hollows of the warehouse. He mashed the tin tires with his heels as Vicki watched, and kicked the Guntherman like a football halfway to the murky rafters.

"Time!" she yelled.

Jeremy stopped his a.s.sault, and returned to Vicki with the battered sc.r.a.p of tin borne proudly in his hands. She thanked him, took the car and placed it in her voluminous fabric bag.

"Wow," said h.e.l.la, seemingly in shock. "That was..." She gathered Jeremy in. "I don't know what to say."

Vicki smiled slightly. She held out her hand. "Could I have the keys now, h.e.l.la?"

"Oh, the car keys, right!" h.e.l.la ran back to get her purse, and returned rifling through it. She pulled out the car keys and handed them to Vicki. "Do you think we could-"

"Also the new keys for Lightenham Avenue," said Vicki.

"Okay, I have them here." h.e.l.la searched and handed them over. "We could go over now, if you wanted."

Vicki held out her hand once more. "And the warehouse keys," she said.

h.e.l.la blinked. "The warehouse keys?"

"The ones you use to get in here."

"Oh." Somewhat less energetically, h.e.l.la hunted through her purse until she came up with the warehouse keys. "How am I going to-"

"You're not," said Vicki, taking them. "I've come to the conclusion, h.e.l.la, sadly, that this sort of work is not really suited to you. It may seem silly, but someone doing what we do really must have an appreciation of things. Must want to take care of them. Must want to understand what they represent."

"But...I do."

Vicki shook her head with genuine sympathy. "No."

h.e.l.la's face took on a hardness. "What about severance pay?"

"You were a casual employee working by the hour. You were paying no taxes. I don't really think severance is required. But I will give you the equivalent of twenty hours."

"I think it should be at least forty."

"I could give you forty," said Vicki. "But then I would be inclined to bill you for the destruction of the papier mache fruit, which will cost about three hundred dollars to replace, and the four-thousand-dollar Chinese folding chair that you allowed your children to ruin." She cast her gaze around the warehouse. "And I suppose I should do an inventory soon to see what else is damaged or missing."

h.e.l.la narrowed her eyes at Vicki. "You know, they're just kids. You can't blame kids for what happens."

Vicki felt her store of patience coming to its end. She breathed out slowly into the cool warehouse air and gave h.e.l.la one last smile.

"I don't," she said.

On her way to the Lightenham Avenue house, Vicki made two calls. The first was to Edward Caughley; she knew he was about to close shop for the day and wondered whether it was possible to have an item delivered. He said he would bring it personally.

The second call went to Avis Nye. For several minutes, Vicki apologized to the agent for having been out of touch for the previous two days, a.s.sured her all was well, and consoled her over the trouble with the locks. It was, indeed, a mystery. Then she shared with Avis the brighter news that the Lightenham house would be finished within the hour, and invited her to come by for a look.

She drove through the curtains of evening being spread across the city, past stores in which she had never shopped, and neighbourhoods whose homes she was never likely to enter, and she wondered whether the path of Kyle's life from this point on would take him into homes like these, beyond her reach, where no one knew the comfort of surroundings designed to keep incivility at bay, and where the happiness she had always a.s.sumed was appreciated, instead, as luxury.

When she arrived at the door of the Lightenham house, she thrust a new key into a different lock, and walked into a home she barely recognized. It contained all the same things set precisely the same way, under ceilings too high to touch as before. But she saw them now as the belongings of a family she had to admit she hardly knew. Margeaux and Robert Lightenham were not the people they had appeared, in her imagination, to be. The responsibility for this, Vicki accepted as her own; certain aspects of their lives she had simply been unwilling to see.

She waited for Edward with her fabric bag on a cream upholstered Regency settee, in the transition area between foyer and hall, and met him at the door when she heard him pull in.

"You're a dear to come, Edward," she said as he arrived on the front steps bearing a thin mahogany box. "I'm lucky you close at six on Mondays."

He looked up at her gravely and blushed, from under wisps of hair. "I would have closed if it were the middle of the day."

She held the box as he removed his shoes, then took her bag and led him upstairs. "I'd only ever seen pictures before, of what you do," he said, admiring it all. "I'm agog."

Together they walked down the hall of the second floor, past the open den that featured the Georges Jacob chairs in crosshatch blue, into the boy's room that, until now, had given her such trouble.

"Oh, I love those," said Edward, pointing to the oeil-deboeuf oeil-deboeuf, glowing tangerine from the sunset beyond. "When I was eight we lived in a house that had one."

"What did you imagine it was?"

Edward thought for a moment, and brought a hand to his cheek. "I wasn't very popular at school," he said. "It was my looking gla.s.s onto all my tormentors, something like the witch's in The Wizard of Oz." The Wizard of Oz."

"Well then," she said quietly, "you were lucky to have it." And she watched Edward raise his eyebrows and nod against his hand, and his memories.

Then she took the thin wooden box to the revolving bookcase. On the broad, low top of the bookcase she laid a square of blue silk, and across the far third of this square she set the box. Then she opened it, and lifted out the silver-mounted violin bow with its severed hair, which Edward had long been so reluctant to sell. This she laid in front of the box, on the middle of the silk, where an anguished prodigy might have placed it before closing his instrument forever in its case.

"There," she said, with approval. Then she went to her bag and retrieved the battered Guntherman landspeed car, and took it to the bookcase, showing it to Edward as she went. "You may not recognize this, but you sold it to me years ago."

"I do, vaguely," said Edward. "What happened happened to it?" to it?"

Vicki crouched in front of the bookcase. "It sacrificed itself for a worthy cause." She turned the revolving compartments of the bookcase until the one left empty of books was revealed, and placed the car there.

Then she took her bag to the bonheur du jour bonheur du jour, where an angry young boy might have sat for hours after school, struggling with his homework. She pulled out Kyle's wounded transparent man, and placed it in the corner of the padded writing surface.

Finally, she went to the mahogany dressing table and laid across its top a simple panel of sand-coloured felt. At either end of this, she set the pieces of her broken Meissen candlesticks.

"Oh," exclaimed Edward, a hand across his mouth. "You loved those."

Vicki touched the face of each innocent putto putto. "I still do."

Avis arrived twenty minutes later, and Vicki called out for her to come up. She entered the room and surveyed Vicki's work with fading excitement until her face settled into a frown.

"I don't understand, Victoria," she said. "I thought you were done."

"I am."

"But what are all these broken things?"

Vicki picked up her bag. "This is Kyle's room," she said, and turned for the door. "You can let the Webbs see it now."

6.

It was as though the city was keeping his son from him, hiding him away under the flare of its long coat. Gerald did his best not to imagine that it const.i.tuted a personal indictment, a clear impeachment of his abilities and conduct as a father, but every phone call he made that yielded no information or leads on Kyle's whereabouts confirmed his suspicion that "Kyle Woodlore: better off on the streets" was the pervasively held view.

He was into his third day of making calls when Bishop's wifely secretary, Sylvia, arrived at his open door. She leaned across the threshold and knocked.

"Are you in?" Sylvia asked, as if it were entirely optional. He doused the list of regional hospitals showing on his computer screen with a mouse click. "Yes."

"I would have buzzed you," said Sylvia, approaching his desk, "but your line has been skipping straight to voice mail for the longest time."

"I'm sorry."

"This is why you need an a.s.sistant, Gerald." She picked up the gla.s.ses that were hanging by a chain around her neck. "Someone to manage incoming needs. Voice mail is only useful to a point."

"I'm sort of what can I do for you, Syl?"

"I have a message here from Gwyn Doremond." She studied a small piece of paper in her hand. "You've met Gwyn, have you?" she said, speaking to the paper.

"A few times, yes." Gerald's eyes moved back to the computer screen.

"Very competent, very direct," she a.s.serted.

Gerald's hand inched toward the mouse.

"Now it says here that Gwyn is coming in at three to meet with you. And he wants a full rundown on your plans regarding the drop in market share."

Gerald pressed a thumb into his temple. "Are you sure that's right, Syl? Bishop said he was going to set up a meeting with Gwyn for when he came back."

Sylvia regarded Gerald from on high. "This is the message I took from Deirdre, who is Gwyn's a.s.sistant." She removed her gla.s.ses and let them, once again, dangle. "If this is, indeed, a surprise visit, it's perfectly in keeping with Gwyn Doremond's modus operandi, which is to throw challenges out to people to see how they respond. I should think he wants to see how you react to a sudden change in plans."

He sighed and checked his watch. It was one o'clock. "Well, fine, we'll see what we can do." He watched Sylvia begin to leave. "Syl, could you do me a favour"

She turned like a ship in the harbour.

"Could you let Sandy Beale and, uh, Trick Runiman, know that I'll need to see them in a few minutes? Please?"

Sylvia smiled as if deciphering a complex puzzle of words. Finally she said, "Of course."

As she left, he restored the list of hospitals with one hand and picked up his phone with the other.

He was done with the hospitals and midway through his rounds of the hotels when Sandy and Trick arrived at his door. Sandy entered first, with Trick tailing in behind her with a clipboard and a pen and the face of a dog who had lost track of the slipper he liked to chew.

Gerald held his hand over the phone as the day-shift man at the Moonlight Inn in Wexford grumbled into his ear. "You keep calling, mister, and I keep telling you. n.o.body named Kyle Woodlore here."

"I'm in the middle of something," he said to Sandy.

"You said you wanted to see us."

He had called the first-cla.s.s hotels first, because talking to efficient, well-spoken desk clerks made the outlook seem less bleak than it would have had he begun with the flophouses. But getting to the fifty-dollar-a-night hotels was a disheartening stage, and it took all his effort to fling handfuls of air at the door until Sandy's eyes lit up and she laid a hand on Trick's wrist and began to back them both out through the doorway, holding a shush finger over her pursed lips.

"I don't know what you expect me to do," the man was saying.

"I don't want you to do anything," stressed Gerald, "except call me if you see a twenty-year-old boy with light brown collar-length hair and a broken hand." broken hand."

"Wha'd he do, get in a fight?"

"I don't know, it's not important. I just need to find him."

"What's a broken hand look like anyway? What if he sticks it in his pocket?"

"It won't fit in his pocket," said Gerald, hardly able to spit out the words. "It's too swollen."

The man made a noise like a tire leaking air. "Sounds more than broken to me. Sounds infected."