Chapter 28

 

Jared

 

 

And now the house was emptied of all but the two of them.

Jared sat down on the end of the bed, and Cara sat down beside him, arm still around him. "Terry caught the fly," she said, laughing, and he nodded and grinned.

"Terry caught the fly," he agreed.

"And who was that man?" Cara said, looking out through the screen into the night.

"That was the man Gina saw before," said Jared. "She said –" He paused, thinking. "She said that he was her father, and Terry's," he said, and Cara lifted her head to look at him. He looked back, trying to sort it out, force it to make some sort of sense. "And I've seen him before," he said. "He was down the alley from Frank's office, last Friday. When we came in, he was at the corner at the end of the alley; when I carried you out, he was still standing there with his arms folded, watching us. I thought it was odd, but I had other things on my mind at the time."

"Really? You saw him? The same man?"

Jared searched his memory; yes, it was the same man. He nodded. "And I have no idea what it means," he said.

"And Gina said it was their father," said Cara, thoughtful. "Hers and Terry's; that must be why Sofi wanted to have the conference when Terry isn't there. He's only ten. This can't do anything but confuse him. You know," she added, "he was worried about Terry's hand. Like a father would be. I thought Terry's father was on Linden's World."

"His legal father, certainly," said Jared "This man is nothing like Eugene McIntosh. I've seen him on the screen." She nodded, deep in thought.

"I've seen him too," she said suddenly. "This blond man."

"You have? Where?"

"Remember I told you how Ann and I went to see Long Twilight? The seat right beside me was empty, and he was in the next seat. I'm sure it was him. I noticed him, because he looked so cross when I put our coats on the empty seat. I wondered if he thought I was saving it for someone, or putting my things down in someone's way, but there wasn't anyone there. If it was reserved, someone didn't use their ticket. He went to sleep during the second act."

"He went to sleep? During Long Twilight? What's the matter with him?"

"Everyone," she said, eyes dancing, "is a critic."

His own thoughts left the mystery of the stranger and continued, relentlessly, to the next logical connection involving a much nearer subject. He lifted his free hand and touched her hair. "And we do have the fly," he said; and, as he had done earlier in the evening, when he opened the subject of Maud, when he took that chance, he took another chance. "You could," he said, "if you wanted, go back to your house."

"Do you want your house to yourself again?" asked Cara after just the least hesitation.

"No. No. I like my house the way it is right now," said Jared. "I would miss you too much if you left. But you might like your own place."

Cara let her breath out and held him a little tighter. "I would miss you too much if I left," she said. "Although I would like some of my own things."

He allowed himself a single moment of relief and joy. "We could get a truck," he said, trying to sound calm and matter-of-fact. "We could hire movers, but there's no shortage of helpers around here, as you may have noticed, and we'd hurt their feelings if we hired help. Only I don't think there's room for that big desk in this living room."

"There isn't room for it in that living room," said Cara. "Maybe I can sell it or something. And that great big buffet in the dining room. I can't imagine using it."

"We could just leave them in the house for now. And those brown and grey dishes," said Jared, "unless you and Sofi want to throw them at the fly." Cara giggled. "So we can pack up what you want and close up your house for the time being. See what happens," he said, and when she smiled at him, he felt like himself again. "Did I happen to mention," he inquired, "that I like that nightgown?"

She looked down at herself; she was still wearing Jared's shirt over the negligee, which must have caught on something; the left side was ripped from hem to ribbon ties. The nightgown underneath was intact, but stained with wet grass and mud from the back yard.

"No, you didn't mention it," she said. "And it's brand new. The mud, too."

"Very nice mud. It adds something. But I think I'd like the nightgown better if it were off," said Jared, brushing his shirt off her shoulders and beginning to untie the bow that held what was left of the negligee just under her breasts.

 

It was raining when Jared woke the next morning, the settled kind of rain that lasts all day, and it was chilly, but it smelled sweet and clean through the window they had left ajar last night. Cara slept curled against him; it was odd, he thought, how quickly one got accustomed to waking with another person in the bed. It had been just past one week, and already he could not imagine waking alone in an empty house.

Ollie and Evvie had, separately, privately, told him how glad they were to see Cara with him. She is so happy; she laughs now, they said. He supposed with her mother in the back bedroom there hadn't been that much to laugh about, but if it had anything at all to do with him, that she laughed now, he was pleased. She gave herself so entirely to him; he wanted to give her something in return. Happiness was the least of it.

And into this joy came these strange hints about Maud; he could not understand it, and for the first time in his life he found that he resented Maud's intrusion, even as an illusion created by someone else, which of course it must be.

Because if Maud were still alive –

He thought of Cara's suggestion, plots and suspense and narrow escapes at dawn – there had been, at various times, odd happenings related to Maud's multiple business interests. There had been a summer enlivened by her hired security, guarding her, watching him, too, in spite of his objections, to be sure no one got at either of them. They had been a great nuisance, these unseen watchers; they had even seeded his apartment with watching devices, and his car, and he had spent a good deal of time locating and getting rid of these bugs.

So there was a history of peculiar occurrences, but he knew of nothing that had happened in the last few years, had picked up no unusual activity, certainly saw nothing to drive her to so desperate an action, to pretend a heart attack, to go to the hospital, to fake her death, Carter in tears. Her will, in Trudy's hands, steered toward probate; all of her credits tied up in that. Her clothes given away, her jewelry sold; Carter had handled that. She would own nothing at all.

Leaving him without a word, to mourn her passing.

He could not believe that of her, that in the end she could have held him and his love for her – and hers for him; he had depended upon that for years – so lightly that she could leave him so cruelly. He could not accept it. If it had happened, he didn't think he could ever forgive it.

And he could not forgive this interference in his joy with Cara, hers with him; she should not have to deal with this, with leftovers from his past. She should not have to feel a moment's concern about him, his feelings for her. He wished he could reach her, as he could reach Sofi and Issio and Gina, that he could show her what was in his mind and his heart.

As if she heard him thinking of her, she stirred and opened those amazing blue eyes, still blurred with sleep; she put her hand on his chest and nestled closer, and he closed his arms around her and thought of ancient tales, the sort of thing Gina was reading, knights doing battle for their ladies, driving off the evil enemies, Earthian and otherwise. He thought he could understand what those long-ago men were feeling as they raised their lances at the noses of the fire-breathing dragons.

He thought about the fly in the jar in Issio's basement, and that brought to mind the tall pale man, an unknown; what his powers were, if any, Jared had no way of measuring. He had vanished into thin air; in the rainy daylight that seemed ridiculous to contemplate. It just couldn't happen. Had he come into the yard the same way he left it, with a little pop as he stepped through nothingness?

If he was connected to the children, as Gina evidently believed, his actions toward them weren't incomprehensible. His appearance by Dr. Frank's office, on the other hand . . . and what about the theater, the play he cared about so little that he slept through the second act? Coincidence? Maybe. But he seemed to have an interest in the McIntosh children and, apparently, Cara, too.

Maud had been bored with stage plays; she preferred the rapid action of vids, and she had been known to doze through the second act of plays she attended with Jared. He couldn't think of anyone else inclined to do this.

Jared looked down at the pale blond hair of the woman lying against him. She did not much resemble the holo of Dr. Lindstrom in the biology wing of the Institute. Of course, they had no idea what her father looked like, but if he were looking for resemblances, he would be more apt to compare her to the McIntosh children, all three of them.

Of course, in coloring, Cara also resembled Maud. . . Rapunzel; she got her hair cut, and the witch changed her name. Held prisoner in an ivory tower. . .

When Gina got to be Cara's age, she would be small and delicate in appearance herself, a fragility that he already knew was deceptive. He thought of Cara, sitting on her bed, the picture of helplessness before she flung the pillow at the fly; it was going to be one of his favorite memories of her, he believed.

"What are you smiling at?" she asked him, looking up at him with a smile of her own.

"I'm thinking," he said, "how much I like waking up with you."

"It's wonderful, waking up together," she said. "But it makes it hard to think about getting out of bed."

"It's Saturday," he pointed out. "We don't have to be in any rush."

"That's true," she agreed. "We could stay in bed until noon, if we wanted." She twinkled up at him. "Do you want?" she asked him.

He did.

 

Terry's music club meeting wasn't until two-thirty; Phyllis would take him, and then return to the gathering in the Hardesty living room. Meanwhile, leaving Cara to the contents of her briefcase, making another stab at getting ahead of her work, Jared crossed the lawn and Issio let him into their house, where Sofi was reprogramming the cleaner and the dishwasher was chewing its way through its load. It sounded as if it could use a little attention from Lillian.

Once in the house, Jared could hear the voice in the basement, a steady, vicious snarling muffled by the glass jar and the closed doors between upstairs and downstairs. "Did she go on all night like that?" he asked his neighbors, and they both nodded, emphatically.

"But with the bedroom door closed," Sofi said, "it was not so bad. We slept very well."

'"Have you had a chance to look at her?" Jared asked Issio, who shrugged.

"Only superficially," he said. "She looks like a fly. She has six legs, wings."

"I didn't notice a mouth," said Jared, "or any other features."

"No, but we assume that they are there," said Sofi.

"Something certainly is," Jared admitted, listening to the voice in the basement. "I want to see her," he told them. "I want to talk with her, if I can. Ollie and Evvie and Cara are convinced it's her mother. That's why Cara didn't come with me; she said she had nothing to say to her."

"This is just as well," said Sofi.

Jared nodded. "But I want to talk to her myself."

"Can you tell if she is Dr. Lindstrom?" inquired Issio. "You wish to question her about her profession? Biology is not your field, is it?"

"I would welcome an opinion from a professional standpoint, if you were willing," said Jared, "but I know a few things about Dr. Lindstrom myself, from my own work."

"She most likely will not talk rationally to either of us," said Issio, but he led the way to the basement stairs, which opened off the kitchen, as it did in Jared's house and Clyde's. Sofi put down the cleaner and started after them, and Issio pointed at her and shook his head, firmly.

"Issio," she protested, and he shook his head again.

"No," he said. "Stay here. Stay quiet. I will tell you everything when we are done."

"Twelve spitting devils," she said in Zamuaon, and sat down on the floor with a thump beside the cleaner, glowering.

"No stress," said Issio to Jared, on an explanatory note, and Sofi muttered behind them.

"And I helped to catch this evil fly thing last night," she informed the cleaner. "It was all very well last night. I was allowed to help last night."

"Only because I did not find out until this morning," said Issio.

"By using your Ears where you were not invited," she said, and Issio shrugged and spread his hands; that's the way it is.

"Oh!" said Jared, abruptly catching on to what was simmering in the air. "So that's what it is! Congratulations, you two." Sofi dipped her head in a sort of shy appreciation, and Issio managed to look embarrassed and proud all at the same time. "Issio's right," Jared told Sofi, who sighed and shook her head. "You need to take care of yourself; you don't want to risk the baby."

"The baby," said Sofi, "will die of boredom before birth, if Issio has his way."

"That," said Issio, "I will risk. You stay here. We will return."

He swept Jared through the door and closed it behind them. The lights came on as they passed the sensors; the basement smelled of old soil and new lumber. The basements in the little houses had all been unfinished, and previous owners had not done much with the space, but Issio had put up a partition to close off the generator and pipes and connections into their own area, and the laundry appliance stood next to the partition, the jar on top.

The noise level was much higher down here.

"She has had two miscarriages," Issio said quietly, under the uproar. "The last one was very bad. I thought we might lose her also, with the baby. I do not wish to risk this again. I would rather have no baby at all than lose Sofi." And that, for a Zamuaon, was a huge admission, but Jared had known Issio and Sofi for four years now, and he had had time to observe the quality of their relationship, and he was not at all surprised.

"I don't blame you," said Jared, thinking of Cara.

"I have suggested even the prebirth tanks at Fetal Management," said Issio, "because Sofi wants a baby very greatly, but Sofi does not wish to do this; it is not according to our way, as you know, except in unusual situations, such as Sofi herself, her mother killed before a family could be started. That was not entirely as her father wished it to be, and now our marriage – we have broken tradition already too much for her father and his beliefs."

Seeing them coming, the fly fell silent, hovering in the air in the middle of the jar, face towards them. Issio tapped the wall switch and brought up the light right above the laundry appliance. Jared saw that someone had draped a silver necklace over and around the jar. "My wife," said Issio, flicking the chain with one claw, "is superstitious."

"Silver?" said Jared, amused, and Issio nodded.

"This," he said, "evil things cannot pass. A primitive idea held by both your species and ours in previous days."

"Vampires. Werewolves. Evil ghosts." Jared thought briefly of Maud, shoved the thought away. "I don't know about talking flies."

"I remember no stories of talking flies," said Issio. "With or without silver."

Jared bent his head to look more closely into the jar, and the fly snarled and banged sharply against the side of the jar as if trying to get at him; he had expected this and did not duck, and she drifted back toward the center of the jar with an air of disappointment. "Got a chair?" he asked Issio, and Issio reached back by the partition and came up with a pair of old stools, which looked as if they had been left behind by the previous tenants. Setting one stool a few meters away from the laundry appliance, Issio perched on the top and folded his arms, and Jared sat down on the stool within arm's reach of the jar.

The fly hung, watching them, shifting from Issio to Jared, from Jared to Issio, and then back to Jared.

"So," said Jared. "Have a good night in your jar?"

The fly briefly compared Jared to a trisected D'ubian surface scum sucker; she did it, for clarity, he assumed, in Trade.

"Do you speak any D'ubian?" he inquired, and she buzzed furiously and banged against the side of the jar again. "You shouldn't wear yourself out like that," he said. "Save your strength. You can't get out of that jar, you know."

Man whore! the fly snarled, and settled on the bottom of the jar, on the top of a slice of overripe berry Issio or Sofi had apparently offered for her breakfast. It didn't look as if she had touched it.

"You talk pretty well for a fly," said Jared, resting an elbow on the laundry appliance, by the Cycle Finished chute. "And scream. For what good that will do you."

You don't know what I can do, gutter boy.

"Can you remember that old proverb about sticks and stones?" Jared inquired, and she buzzed furiously. "You might want to be polite," he said. "Clyde has already suggested sticking you on a pin and pulling your wings off. And Al likes the idea about insecticide."

Try it. See how far you get.

"I might be tempted," he said. "But Cara is still a little too sentimental; she thinks you are her mother, you know. She can't bring herself to let us kill you. Now personally, I'm not sure of that. You sound like her mother, I gather, but if you were hanging around you could easily have picked up her language and her attitudes. You could give an excellent imitation of her, I'm sure."

"That," said Issio abruptly, struck by the idea, "would be a way to protect herself. She would know that Cara would not lift a hand to her mother. Also she would not let others do so."

"That's true," agreed Jared. He smiled his best smile at the buzzing thing in the jar. "So just what are you?" he inquired. "Not being Dr. Lindstrom."

You're sure of that, lover boy? What do you know when you're not fucking?

"I know," said Jared, "the odds are against your being Dr. Fuck-'em Lindstrom."

Issio cocked his head and looked at Jared with curiosity; a science teacher on the secondary school level would not have the clearance to examine the records from Or2, and the truth of Dr. Lindstrom's last adventure had never been publicized, although Jared would not lay credits on complete secrecy. He would lay credits on the matter not being disseminated to the insect world, however, and he watched with deep interest as the fly froze in midair inside her jar, and then drifted down to the bottom, next to the overripe berry.

But she conceded nothing. What do you think you know? In that over-sexed excuse for a brain? You're nothing but a hired boy. You're useless. Sex machine, that's all you are.

"You're sure?"

That's what you were doing last week, she said, when we stopped you. All over her like a drooling chimpanzee on a female in heat.

"You stopped us?" he said, taking note of the plural she had used; "we" stopped them.

We would have stopped the bitch permanently, if you hadn't interfered.

He forgot about Dr. Margo Lindstrom and the mysteries of Or2. "How would you have done that?" he inquired, very quietly.

The fly buzzed discontentedly. Think I'm going to tell you? Think you can stop us? Forget it, shit-for-brains. You have no power. We'll have her sooner or later.

"Who," said Issio, "is this 'we' you speak of?"

Wouldn't you like to know, you misbred mongrel?

"I'd like to know," said Jared, "what your problem is with Cara. If you are Dr. Margo Lindstrom, you must know she took care of you in her own house for five years. At great inconvenience. You weren't an easy patient."

You're a misbred mongrel like your friend, said the fly. And a fucking whore. Stay out of our way, or we'll have to get rid of you too.

"This is interesting," said Jared to Issio. "This little fly, about as big as my thumbnail, thinks she can get rid of us. I wonder how she plans to do that."

Well, I guess you'll find out, man whore, said the fly, and she erupted into shrieks of laughter just as you might expect, Jared thought, if you were a fan of horror vids, evil laughter from the evil villain. The evil villain being trapped in a jar with an overripe berry and a tangle of netting somewhat spoiled the effect, he thought, but he had to give her credit for trying.

"She's bragging," he told Issio. He refused to think about the wreckage in Cara's back bedroom. He refused to remember the crack in the window.

"Perhaps," said Issio, "she intends to buzz us all to death. A very horrible fate."

"No, she's going to bore us all to death with her ranting," said Jared, and the fly turned her back on him and lit on the berry at the bottom of the jar, rubbing her front legs together.

"Let us go upstairs," said Issio, "and have coffee. It is late. Terry will soon be leaving for his club meeting. We will have other opportunities to talk with this insect."

"Yes, I," Jared told her, "will be back.