Track 53

“The View From the Woods”

Present Day

“I’ll be back a week from today,” Dad reminds me on Sunday morning. He inhales coffee and leaves the empty World’s Best Dad mug on the counter.

“Yes, I remember. It’s in my calendar.” Plus, he’s already told me twice this morning.

“Aunt Carole’s going to check in with you every day. The Robinsons next door will, too. And the Wangs across the road. And I’ll call you as often as I can, okay?” he says. I track him through the house, carrying his wool overcoat on my arm. “And don’t open the door to strangers. I mean it.”

I swallow thickly. “I won’t, Dad.”

He has no clue the strangest of strangers have no problem getting me in and out of the house without him, the Robinsons, or the Wangs noticing.

But we’re going to put a stop to that. As soon as we figure out how…

“No wild parties, either. I really mean that, too,” Dad says.

“How about a wild study party? I have a lot of research to do.” And thanks to Lisa’s magical vitamins, I’ve been feeling a lot more alert lately. Alert enough to stay up past midnight working on my project.

Standing on the porch, he smirks. “You can have the study party minus the wild part. Don’t forget, everybody’s watching you.”

He’s joking, but I squirm. So close to the truth. He kisses me on the forehead.

“Break a leg, Dad. Love you.”

“I love you, too. Be good. Now go inside and lock the door.” He grins and heads for his Tesla.

I smile and wave, then do as he says. I lean my back flat against the door. No lock or alarm system is going to stop the aliens. One slash of a proton beam and they’ll storm through and snatch me.

Sighing, I look around. It’s silent and still and lonely already. I have the whole three-thousand-square-foot house to myself, and yet there’s somewhere else I’d rather be.

I grab Mom’s resurrected MacBook and head out to her tiny house in the back garden. I described it as an upscale IKEA dollhouse at the time it was built. All clean lines, light-colored wood. Clever storage. No amount of hidden drawers and cupboards would have been enough to contain Mom’s vast wardrobe and shoe collection, though. The bulk of her clothes and shoes are in the main house’s spare room.

The work desk is a tiny-space marvel. When not in use, it folds down into a shallow niche in the wall. I release a latch, and the cantilevered timber desktop pops up. Dragging a chair over, I sit before the laptop, contemplating possible passwords. I found a bunch of tutorials on how to recover a forgotten password, but none of it seemed simple.

Mom hasn’t answered any of my calls for help or my texts. By now, that shouldn’t surprise me. Intellectually, I accept she’s in treatment. She’s doing what she needs to do. Still feels like a stab in the guts when she doesn’t reply.

I drum my fingers on the desk and stare out the window at the overcast sky. When she wasn’t on the road, Mom would have spent countless hours looking at the same mountain view. A row of six towering pine trees acts as a kind of border between the yard and a ravine. Dad built even tinier houses in each tree for the squirrels.

As I watch two feisty squirrels fight among pine needles on the ground, an idea crystallizes. On paper, I scratch out a list of various combinations of six, pines, and squirrels. The combo that finally does the trick? 666Squirrels.

For a few seconds, as I watch the status bar, guilt jabs sharply at me. This is Mom’s personal laptop. What if there’s something on it that she didn’t want me to see? What if there’s something I don’t want to see, like rejected selfies or her journal?

Then I think of her locked away in Eden Estate, a place that sounds idyllic but in reality wouldn’t even rate a star on Expedia. I purse my lips and remind myself why I’m breaking into her files. Ultimately, it’s going to save her.

Yep, just keep telling yourself that, Cassidy.

Her computer desktop is a cluttered mess of folders with cryptic filenames. Some contain documents with titles and headers but no contents. Either they’d been wiped or she hadn’t done any work on them at all.

“Mom, what the hell were you doing all that time?” I murmur. This is not like her at all. What I’m looking at is the digital equivalent of a thousand filing cabinet drawers that had been emptied onto the floor, papers scattered to the moon and back.

It occurs to me that the state of her computer mirrors her state of mind. Or at least, how frenzied she became the longer her investigation went.

I click on the Notes app, hoping to find a roadmap of sorts to her filing system at the very least. My hopes are dashed, but there are dozens of unfinished sentences that start with “What if…” One of the most recent ones had “Daisy chain” written on it.

There’s no question. Mom was stuck. Confused. Lost.

Opening her calendar, I note that she’d already met with the same DC reporters that I’d contacted. That’s a good sign that at least my approach was similar to hers, albeit more organized. I skim through dates from the first half of this year. Mom went into treatment in June. My eyes zero in on an entry early in that month: Elsworth v. Eden + Parallax archives.

Heart hammering impossibly hard, I stare at the words on the screen. Elsworth v. Eden? Someone tried to sue Eden?

“It doesn’t mean that Eden,” I mutter to myself, trying to be rational, trying to stop hyperventilating. But my gut is screaming that it sure as hell is that decaying, decrepit, and downright scary Eden.

As for Parallax, is it connected to Eden or are they two random, unfinished thoughts? The word “archives” makes me think of the never-ending digitizing job at Dad’s office. Mom helped out there occasionally. What if she means she stored physical research files there? Because she couldn’t have squeezed them into this tiny home.

I close the laptop and grab my keys. I have to find out.

…

“Alondra!” I’m so stunned to see her sitting on my front porch that I forget to sign. I drop my satchel and car keys. “How long have you been sitting out here? You should have texted me.”

In the cul-de-sac, little kids shout and play tag. A drone flies erratically, obviously someone’s new toy. I’ve been seeing more of them around lately. All shapes and sizes. I swear some are the size of a dining chair. This one’s motor makes an annoying, mosquito-like buzz.

“I wanted to get myself together before actually knocking on your door.” Her eyes are swollen and bloodshot. Her curly hair is bunched into a messy topknot. The laces on her boots are untied. She so does not look like she has it together. At her feet lies a bulging army surplus tote.

Alarm bells clang inside my head. “What happened? Did they…? Have you been abducted by those alien assholes again? Tell me!”

“It’s nothing like that.” Sniffling hard, she signs, “I had a fight with my family. Can I stay with you? Just for a night. Until everything settles down. I had nowhere else to turn.”

I squeeze her tightly. “Of course, stay longer. My dad’s away, so it’ll be good to have some company.”

“Thank you.” She points her toes at my satchel. “Are you on your way out?”

“Yeah, I have to go to my dad’s office and check something out. Come with me.”

By the time we reach the office, Alondra’s sniffles are gone. She used the cup of the frozen Coke we bought as a sort of icepack on her eyes.

I show her the kitchen and also the couch in my dad’s office where she can lie down. She’d refused to tell me what the fight with her parents was about, only to say things will get better once everyone cools their hot heads.

An hour later, I’m sitting on the floor beside Aunt Carole’s desk, surrounded by a forest of papers.

Alondra pads across the carpet in bare feet and yawns. “Are you looking for something?”

“A needle in a haystack,” I sign and grimace. I give her a shorthand version of what I’ve been working on to get my mother out of Eden.

When I finish, she signs, “So what does this Eden Estate have to do with Jane Flanagan?”

“Well, it doesn’t.” I push down another guilt pang. “But maybe if I find some dirt about the place, then it might finally convince her to check herself out.”

She gazes down at the stacks of folders I’d semi-sorted. “I want to help. What can I do?”

Standing up, I give my stiff legs a shake. At Aunt Carole’s computer, I click on a database and a desktop folder. “We’ve digitized a fraction of a trillion documents. Only got another trillion to scan. How about if you search terms like Eden Estate and maybe therapy? And Dr. Davis.”

Alondra nods as I write the terms on a sticky note. “Easy.”

“Great! And while you were napping, Jake texted. I asked him and Hayden to come by the office. I figure we can safely talk about the aliens here.”

She glances up at me. Her pink-stained mouth tightens.

“What is it?”

“That’s what the fight with my parents was about. Aliens.” Her face contorts, but she reins herself in. “They’re ashamed of me because they believe I’ve been telling people heinous lies. Science fiction.”

“But this is science fact, am I right?” I sign. She high-fives me. My phone buzzes. “The guys are here. I’ll have to go downstairs to let them in. Be right back.”

The elevator ride from the eighth floor down to the lobby seems to take forever. I lean against the cool, waist-high steel railing running along the mirrored walls. Green numerals tick down the floors.

The elevator doors finally slide open. But before I can take a step forward, a light explodes before me, turning everything brilliant white. Reeling backward into the wall, I try to shield my eyes from the painful glare. The phone slips out of my grasp.

Cold, leathery hands grip my arms. I know that touch. It’s not a comforting one. Then at the speed of light, those hands rip me out of the elevator so fast I barely have time to scream.

All the while, my aching brain registers one thing and one thing only—aliens.