FORTY-ONE

WRONG, THOMAS TEXTED THE NEXT DAY. YOU’RE WRONG. FLAT WRONG. COME OVER.

Lately, escape from home had been tricky.

Griff’s living room looked like a freshly exploded tourist trap. His mother was doing a shop reorganization and half the contents of Shoreline Gifts had washed up in their living room. Spinning wire greeting card racks. Books about enlightenment, Buddhism, mindfulness, Jewish rituals, Oregon history. Dead sea horses and sand dollars and sea stars lying in drawers like open caskets. Box of agates.

“Geez, Mom!” Griff said. “It’s like the beach of the damned in here.”

“Where are you going? Thomas’s again?” she said. He picked his way through, leaning back to avoid postcards, seeking the door handle—

“Griff, stop,” his father said.

Oh no.

“What, Dad?”

“You’ve been spending a lot of time over there,” his dad said. “What are you boys doing?”

“Tutorials,” Griff said. “Earning hours for the Gap.”

His words spat out ticker-tape robotic. Griff’s postmortem autopilot brain occasionally still took the wheel.

The I’m Fine Machine. Sometimes it talked all on its own.

Griff took a step toward the door. His father looked at his phone.

“By my count, SubWatch has you ahead of schedule. You’ve got all year. We’re concerned about how much time you spend in that basement.”

Griffin exhaled. His hand curled around the doorknob.

creak

“He’s a stoner, Griff,” his mom said.

Griff stared at his mother. Didn’t know where to start. He let go of the doorknob.

“It’s true,” his father said. “I’ve heard things.”

“People respond differently to loss,” Griff said to his dad. “Some people drink.”

“Some smoke copious amounts of marijuana,” his father said.

“Copious,” his mother said. “That’s a stoner word. Like myriad.”

Silence hung in the air.

His mother turned the rack of greeting cards, all ocean-themed. Birthday cards were footprints in sand, lighthouses, sailboats. Sympathy cards: footprints in sand, lighthouses, sailboats. Like Spawn Drive Peak, small-town greeting cards just had to wear two hats and do more.

“Stoner or not,” Griff said, “he invented EARS. He does a million other useful projects.”

“Myriad projects,” his mother said. “Copious projects.”

His father sighed.

“Okay,” Griff said. “I’ll be careful. Love you guys!”

The perfect words for blastoff. Out the door. One more time.

“It’s not the ocean,” Thomas said. “It’s the desert.”

He spun his laptop so Griff and Charity could see.

First shot: A vast, prickly wasteland. Another shot, 30,000 feet up. Undulating mountains fell like crooked shadows over a broad palette of beige. Salt deposits pocked the landscape like sores. The next shot—a road straight to nowhere. It began broad and gray. Narrowed to the width of a thumbtack in the blazing blue horizon.

“Death Valley,” Thomas said. “Once an ocean, then a lake. Now a desert with the lowest elevation in America at 282 feet below sea level. Same dimensions as Leo’s map. Same topography. It maps with all his notes. As far as I can tell, your brother had the broadcast site narrowed to about 200 square miles.”

“You think there’s a concert in the middle of Death Valley?” Charity said.

“No,” Thomas said. “Death Valley has the highest recorded ambient temperature on the planet. It’s not a fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk place. You could fry an egg in midair. Like, the air—as in, the same place your face occupies—is hot enough to cook food. So no, I don’t imagine there is a giant stadium concert happening in Death Valley.”

“Then how is this theory better than Atlantis?” Griff asked.

“I didn’t say better,” Thomas said. “I said more accurate. And I never expected the Band to be playing where they broadcast. This thing is on a repeater somewhere. You know, beaming from this satellite dish to that trailer to that chicken shack—but even finding a repeater would be huge. From there we could track it.”

Griff looked at the map mounted on the pegboard.

“If Leo got it down to 200 miles,” Griff said, “we can triangulate the signal.”

“Sure,” Thomas said. “We just need to know when they broadcast next. Last time it took nine months.”

“Maybe we just drive out there,” Charity said.

They both looked at her.

“I’m serious,” she said.

“I can tell,” Griff said. Him and Charity in a car—a thrill in the blood, a forgotten feeling, whipped up and stirred inside him.

“If you two idiots want to drive to Death Valley to fall in mine shafts and get your faces melted off, you can. Godspeed.”

Thomas’s eyes looked dark and heavy on the undersides. He’d not been sleeping.

“Can we analyze the recording?” Griff asked.

“There are no more clues in the tape we’ve got. We need more material,” Thomas said. “How far have you gotten in your stacks?”

“I’ve listened to four,” Griff said. It had been agony. Song fishing was thrilling with some measure of control, but a tape with someone else’s choices—where they chose to linger or tried to penetrate ear-shredding static—was torture. The novelty of listening to Leo’s Sound Expeditions had worn out halfway through the first tape.

“I’m five in,” Charity said. “Should finish tonight.”

“And I’m done,” Thomas said. “Got anything yet?”

They shook their heads.

“You know what I think is on these tapes?” Thomas said.

CLACK. CLACK. CLACK.

“Nothing,” Thomas said. “It’s a diversion. A hoax.”

Charity and Griff stared at him. Thomas whistled. Got down on all fours, whistled again.

“If there’s nothing on the tapes, why keep them?” Griff asked.

“Who knows? He’s your crazy brother. He coded his own maps and wrapped them in tamper-proof tape. If he’d gotten a good recording, he would’ve kept it somewhere special.”

Thomas whistled again, knelt down. Neapolitan came bounding into his hands.

“Aww,” Charity said.

“The TOE Box was the most special place,” Griff said.

“Maybe you didn’t know him as well as you thought,” Thomas said.

He was being mean. Thomas stroked the rat. Charity walked over. Touched her behind the ears.

“Anything else you remember him saying, Charity?” Griff asked.

“Leo knew exactly when they were going to play. He wouldn’t leave me alone about coming that night. I even stayed home sick just to stay away from him.”

“I remember,” Griff said.

Her eyes went distant, back to October.

“Kept saying—I need you to hear this. After the show, he kept texting and texting and I—”

“It’s okay,” Griff said.

“I got the texts the morning you went,” Charity said, like she couldn’t stop. “I got them. I read them all, you know? To please come. To get the coat from your house—”

Griff tried to touch her. Her jaw clamped shut, she shook her head. Wiped her eyes. Stayed still.

“I didn’t say anything,” she said. “Not a word. Didn’t respond—”

“It’s okay,” Thomas said.

“No! He’d be alive,” Charity said. “What I’m trying to tell you is that he’d be alive right now if I’d said yes, or if I’d said anything.”

Loss did this. Hid in plain sight, then pounced.

“Or if I’d asked him to stop for coffee,” Griff said. “If I’d let him go—”

He hovered on an edge of a deep, dark plunge and Thomas pulled him back, physically by the shoulder.

“Stop, Griff,” Thomas said. “Both of you. Not useful. If Leo had a recording, he’d want us to have it.”

“You’re sure?” Griff asked.

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Griff said. “I’ll look again. Will you two be around tonight?”

“I’m going to be on lockdown,” Charity said. “But you can throw a pebble at my window. First floor, second to the left.”

Griff smiled. Did she mean it?

“Do people actually do that?” Thomas asked.

“I’ve always wanted to,” she said. She laughed, wiped her eyes.

“For me go ahead and use the phone,” Thomas said. “Where are you going?”

“To find the tape.”