| |
Once Darcy sat down, Luisa got up and shut her door quietly. Darcy still looked withdrawn, but at least she wasn't shivering any more.
"I found out what the deal was, Darcy."
Darcy looked up.
"What?"
"It's nothing bad. His name is Matt Méndez. He’s a newspaper reporter. He’s a nice guy. I know him. I'll tell you sometime how I met him. It was an accident, really. He never would have spoken to me otherwise. Anyway, the other day he was in the library and he noticed the books you were looking at. He was curious to see who would be interested in all those subjects."
"Oh," sighed Darcy. "I wondered about that. Sometimes the librarians would look at me funny when I asked for something. They never refused to get a book for me, but they seemed to think I was weird, for some reason."
"Well, I don't know about them, but Matt got really curious. He wondered why one person would be interested in all those different topics, and when he saw it was you, because you look so young, he really got interested. But he was too timid to walk right up and ask you. “Believe it or not, he’s shy around women, even though he’s a reporter. Later, when he saw you in town, he finally got the nerve. When you ran off, that clinched it. He had to find out more about you.
“I didn't tell him a thing. I only said I'd try to find you, whoever you were. But I kind of need to tell him something, so...what do you want me to tell him?"
Darcy sighed.
"I don't know. I've been thinking about that, a lot. I told you I found something in the sky that was important. You see, well, one of my hobbies is astronomy. I discovered two meteoroids whose fragments are almost certain to collide into earth in the near future and probably do a lot of damage. I tried to convince Dr. Harcroft at the observatory, but he didn't believe me. I think he thought I was out of my mind.
“I told the people who captured me too, before I got away from them, and they didn't believe me either. But it's true, Luisa! There are ways to stop it from happening, if someone will just go to work on it!"
She looked down at her hands.
"Maybe I ought to try again to talk with someone, like Matt. He might be able to talk to Dr. Harcroft or somebody else and convince them where I couldn’t. This whole thing is too important for me to keep hiding indefinitely. If they throw me in prison, then at least I'll have tried. What do you think, Luisa?"
Luisa clasped her hands between her knees. "Golly, I had no idea. I thought you were just a Canadian on the run. I never dreamed it was more serious."
"It is. It's more serious and more complicated than I've let on. I'm sorry. I was scared."
Luisa moved to the bed, sat next to Darcy, wrapping her arms around her and hugged her.
"This is totally out of my depth, my friend. I don't know what the best thing to do would be. But like I said, Matt is a good guy, and he's been around a bit. He knows all kinds of people. Plus, you can trust him. I do. If you make him promise not to turn what you tell him into a newspaper story, he won't. It'd be a place to start. Do you want me to set up a meeting?"
"I guess so," she said.
She stared blankly at the opposite side of the room. She couldn't think of anything better herself. She was tired of running. Maybe it was time for her to do something on her own again, right or wrong.
