TIME RESETS TO 1:16.
The situation is not as hopeless as it has seemed. Daniel has become more than a victim, a potential fatality who needs rescuing. He may well be an ally.
Zoe sees a garbage can in front of the store two doors down from Tops ’n Totes. She tosses her formerly precious folder of papers into it as she takes off running toward Independence Street.
Daniel denied working at the converted-into-offices Victorian place, the Fitzhugh House apparently, but she knows she saw him coming out of there. She bursts into the front hall and is faced with a sign listing the people who have offices: one law firm takes up the entire third floor; an evidently smaller law firm and a photographer share the second floor; and the ground floor is home to a real estate agent (Room 1A), an acupuncturist (1B), and someone (1C) described as “M. Van Der Meer, Designer,” though designer of what the sign doesn’t specify.
Zoe takes a second to pull her ponytail out of its elastic. She gives her blue hair a quick fluff-up, telling herself this is to look older and—by extension—more credible. Also, she suspects it’s more becoming. Pathetic, she chides herself.
A door on the second floor opens, and Zoe hears Daniel’s voice, saying thanks and good-bye to someone.
She runs to the staircase with its old-fashioned wooden banister in time to see him close the door labeled 2A, the office of Nicholas Wyand, Attorney-at-Law.
Racing up the stairs, she intercepts him on the landing between the first floor and the second, by the leaded glass window that is letting in the last of the sunshine before the rain will take over.
Daniel has already stepped aside to let her pass, his envelope of papers in one hand, sunglasses in the other.
“Daniel!” she says.
“Yes,” he answers, his voice bright to match the enthusiasm of hers, though he makes no attempt to bluff that he has any idea who she is.
“Armadillo,” she tells him.
“Excuse me?” he says.
Well, of course she knew it wasn’t going to be that simple:
ZOE: Daniel!
DANIEL: Yes.
ZOE: Armadillo.
DANIEL: Wow, you must be someone I met and trusted in an alternate reality. Tell me what you want me to do.
In place of that scenario, Zoe says, “My name is Zoe. We’ve never met—well, we have, but not exactly—but you said I should say armadillo.”
Daniel already looks like he’s having trouble keeping up. “I did?”
“It’s … sort of a code,” Zoe explains. She should have asked for more details, but had been too afraid of getting stranded on the wrong side of her allotted twenty-three minutes. Now she has to admit, “I’m … not sure what’s the significance of the word itself. But my saying it is supposed to let you know you can trust me.”
He’s amused and intrigued—an expression that very much suits his features.
Zoe hopes she isn’t looking at him in the drool-y sort of way she and Rasheena have caught Mrs. Davies looking at actors in those old black-and-white movies from the forties and fifties. Zoe remembers Mrs. Davies sitting in front of the TV. Rasheena asking her, “You like that guy?” Mrs. Davies nodding. Rasheena saying, “Don’t you know that guy been dead longer than we been alive?”
Dead guys is not a topic on which Zoe wants her mind dwelling.
So it’s a good thing when Daniel says, “I see. Well …” He looks around, but there are no chairs in the small lobby, so he sits on the floor of the landing, his feet on the next step going down. Apparently willing to trust her at least long enough to chat with her.
“That’s not your office up there?” she asks, just to make sure, in case Daniel was being evasive before because she was coming off as stalkerish. An office would be more comfortable, more private.
“Just visiting someone.” The way he chooses that moment to set down the envelope he’s been carrying, putting it behind him on the landing, suggests to Zoe that he was seeing the lawyer on the second floor about those papers—which still doesn’t mean he isn’t a lawyer, too. He asks, “You know about armadillo, but not where I work?”
He’s left room for Zoe to sit next to him, and she does.
It’s a bit of a tight fit. She squashes herself against the banister so as not to press against him, and she tells herself not to get flustered by his eyes. Or his hair. Or his smile.
“No,” she admits. “Why armadillo?”
He hesitates, and she’s about to tell him never mind when he says, “When I was … maybe ten, and I’d been spooked by stories of kids being snatched by strangers who claimed to be sent by parents—that was the code word I told my family to use: If they absolutely had to send a stranger to pick me up from school or wherever, make sure the stranger said armadillo, so I would know they had really sent him.”
Zoe suspects Daniel’s parents were not the kind of people who ever sent strangers to pick up their son from anywhere. Zoe often had strangers pick her up—though more often didn’t have anyone show when she needed fetching—and yet she never even thought of having a code word. She can’t imagine her mother having the patience.
“Why armadillo?” Zoe asks. “Are you originally from Texas?” Not that she would have ever thought so from his speech.
“No, I’ve always lived here,” Daniel tells her—which is what she would have guessed. “I suppose it takes someone from Rochester, New York, to think an armadillo is cute.”
“OK,” Zoe says in the same deliberate manner she’s heard him use—just, not yet.
Daniel asks, “So … how did we meet—but not exactly—and why did you and I need a code word?”
The whole purpose of having a code word was to get things moving faster, so Zoe jumps right in. She says, “I had just told you something that—on the face of it—seemed impossible. But something happened that made you believe me. That’s when you gave me the word.”
He’s watching her, not closed-faced as when they’d sat in Dunkin’ Donuts, but trying to take this all in.
He says slowly, piecing it together, “So you and I have met … and it’s not that you’ve changed your appearance …?”—she shakes her head—“but I don’t remember meeting you … and you knew I wouldn’t remember you …” His blue eyes are scrutinizing her, which is disconcerting. He doesn’t sound challenging, just looking for information, when he asks, “Why don’t I?”
It’s to avoid the intensity of his eyes that she glances away from them, from his face. Sitting has caused his jacket to gap, and a glint beneath the jacket catches her attention.
Zoe freezes.
He has a gun.
Damn. He has a gun.
Her thoughts ricochet around in her head. He can’t be a police officer. He never identified himself as one. And surely he would have. Maybe not that first time in the bank. Conceivably he might have thought that would have just complicated things, with the robber already all freaked out at the bank guard. But surely this last time, when they were talking in the doughnut shop. He would have said, once he believed her: “Zoe, I’m a policeman. I can handle this.”
But he didn’t.
Who else carries a gun?
Well, her mother did that one time, but Zoe doesn’t want to think about that.
Yeah, right. A lot of good not wanting does. The thoughts come anyway …
The impossibly long ride to the Family Counseling Center, with her parents bickering and sniping all the way, her attempts at making peace only seeming to escalate their hostility playback through playback, her father, who simply would not stop shouting, even once they got into the office. Her mother, finally quiet, pulling the gun from her purse. The family counselor (who would have guessed such a fat old man could move so fast?) diving for cover behind the couch. And she herself too stunned to move, despite the clear hints anybody with any sense would have picked up on. Continuing to sit like a pathetic, useless lump. Like a target, if that had been her mother’s intent. Like her mother’s accomplice, for all the help she was to Dad.
And there’s Delia’s ex-boyfriend, the one before the one at the bus stop, the reputed drug dealer. Zoe had given him the benefit of the doubt, not believing what the other girls said about him because she’d thought he looked—well, not exactly upstanding, but not exactly disreputable either. Until that time, watching a pick-up basketball game, he’d pulled out a gun and took a shot at a guy for hogging the ball. Never mind that he’d hit the nearby Dumpster instead of the player, or that he claimed the Dumpster had been his target all along: Zoe has clearly demonstrated she is not good at reading people.
But still. In Zoe’s experience, people who have guns fire them.
Who brings a gun to a family counseling session?
Or to a basketball game in a city park?
Who brings a gun to a bank?
Zoe’s mind refuses to accept the obvious.
Till suddenly things fall into place.
Daniel can’t be trusted. Any more than her mother. Or Delia’s ex-boyfriend.
That look? That expression that flitted across Daniel’s face when he first saw the bank robber, that emotion or feeling she wasn’t able to give a name to? She has a name for it now. That was recognition. Daniel recognized the robber. And now Zoe realizes: The robber recognized Daniel. That was why the man started shooting. He knew Daniel could identify him. That was why he wanted to take Daniel hostage, and why Daniel balked, why he was so sure he would never survive should he be taken away from witnesses. He’s never going to let me go, Zoe remembers him saying. He’s never going to let any of us go. So you might as well just shoot him now.
They recognized each other.
And yet Daniel isn’t a cop.
But he’s carrying a gun
She had called him Mr. President after William Henry Harrison, bad luck president extraordinaire.
How much more bad luck can you have than to be inside a bank, planning to rob it—at the exact same time another robber of your acquaintance walks in to hold up that same bank?
If there are other reasons for Daniel to be carrying a concealed weapon, another explanation for why he recognized the robber, Zoe doesn’t have time to try to figure them out.
“Crap!” she says.
She tries to scramble to her feet. But her position is awkward, what with sitting on that step so her knees are higher than her waist, and what with being more or less wedged between Daniel and the banister. Somehow her legs get tangled in his and she teeters on the edge of that top stair.
And all the while, she’s still saying, “Crap crap crap!” knowing she’s about to fall the entire length of the staircase.
Except that Daniel has caught hold of her wrist. This keeps her from tumbling backward, but also keeps her from being able to transport herself with the playback spell.
“What is it?” he asks. “What’s wrong?”
She just barely manages to keep from falling fully onto him by twisting so that—almost as bad—she lands back exactly where she started from, sitting hard, her thigh brushing against his, which, just a few heartbeats ago, would have caused her distress for an entirely different reason.
“Zoe?” he says. Calmly. Gently. Concerned. “What’s happened? What’s frightened you?”
“Let go of me!” she shouts at him. Once more she tries to stand, tries to yank her arm out of his grasp. Uses her other hand to beat at his hand holding her. “Let go of me!”
Still looking at her with that mixture of confusion and … and something that certainly looks like the desire to help—he tells her, “Careful. I’m letting go.” And then—once he’s sure releasing her won’t catapult her backward down the stairs—he does: He lets go of her arm.
But he can’t be trusted.
She manages to step back onto the less precarious footing of the landing. Away from his touch.
“Zoe,” he says, sounding as reasonable as she could have ever wished for, “Don’t be afraid. Whatever kind of trouble you’re in, let me help you.”
But he’s the trouble.
She puts her arms around herself and wishes herself away from him.