Solomon's Sieve (6 page)

“Yes,” Sol said with exquisite simplicity.

Farnsworth breathed in a big sigh that made her chest heave. “I guess it looks simple from your vantage point.”

“Yeah. I’m not you. I get that. I know mistakes can’t always be corrected, but sometimes some of the sting can be soothed.”

“You think I should look for her?”

“You curious?” She smiled and nodded as a couple of tears slid away from her eyes. “Well,” he said as he placed little kisses on both sides of her face, “it just so happens that I work for an outfit that can pretty much find out anything.”

She laughed. “Yeah. I might have heard of them, but you didn’t answer my question. Do you think I should look for her?”

“Yeah. I do.”

The next day they got up determined to make their last days of vacation so special that the memory would last a lifetime. If necessary.

Sol looked out at the Atlantic while he sipped his coffee. The surf was high. The wind wasn’t just noisy, but pushing against the piers and posts that the elevated house was built on. He was looking at the high surf and thinking that it had been hard to get any sleep with the house moving around. Still, he wasn’t complaining.

He knew he couldn’t fully enjoy the sensations of being cuddled next to Farnsworth’s warm body when he was asleep. So he took pleasure in holding her in his arms, feeling her breath on his chest, and listening to the phenomenon of a howling Atlantic wind.

A slight rustling alerted him that she was coming up behind him. He turned and gave her a big grin.

“Let’s go rent a dune buggy and then fly a kite.” He set down the coffee, grabbed her and twirled her around.

“Have you lost your mind?” He shook his head like a little boy, still grinning. “You can’t charm me into doing something insane. I’m too old for that.”

He grabbed his crotch and said, “I’ve got somethin’ right here that says that’s not true.”

She looked from his face to his crotch and back to his face. He wiggled his eyebrows, which was so cheesy it made her burst out laughing in spite of her determination to draw a boundary in defense of his outrageous behavior. Outrageous behavior that was both fun and unexpected.

“Come on. Get dressed. Let’s go get bacon and eggs and pancakes at that diner up the beach and then wake up the dune buggy guy.”

“Sol, it’s too cold out there. The dune buggy guy isn’t going to open up until June.”

He stepped back and looked serious. “Where is the Farnsworth who can perform miracles?” She blinked slowly and opened her mouth. “Okay. Just pretend with me. I’m one of the knights. I’m standing in front of your counter telling you that I have one day off and it’s my fondest desire to get a dune buggy rental on Cape May. Today. What are you going to do?”

She continued to stare for a couple of beats, but then smiled sheepishly. Her pride in her work trumped her bluff and bluster. “I guess I’d find a way to make it happen.”

He laughed. “And that’s my girl.”

Two and a half hours later they were bundled against the cold, full of diner pancakes, and flying down the sand in a glittered magenta fiberglass dune buggy. Sol whooped and hollered every time they hit a bump that temporarily lifted them out of their seats. It wasn’t her favorite recreational activity, but he was having such a good time that she wouldn’t put a stop to it even if she turned into a popsicle.

She turned to look at him just as he let out a huge whoop. Then the horizon was turning the wrong direction and the ground was coming toward her like it was falling down on top of her. When she landed on the wet hard pack sand, her breath was knocked out of her and every last nerve ending was frozen in shock from the impact. Lying there, she had no way of predicting whether that paralysis was temporary, permanent, or some sort of prelude to dying.

After an agonizing minute that felt like hours, she was able to rake in a breath. It took longer to mentally check over her body for injuries. She felt stunned, but not seriously injured. At least not in terms of bleeding or breakage.

She’d landed on her front side with her head turned toward the water. From that position all she could see was the ocean and sky. The wind was cold, punishing, and relentless. When she was able to lift her head and turn it the other direction, she saw that the dune buggy was turned over. She tried to call for Sol, but with the wind so high she wasn’t sure she’d actually made a sound. All she’d managed to do was get a mouthful of sand.

With nothing to help her but will and determination, she managed to get to her hands and knees. She started crawling toward the wreck while spitting sand out of her mouth. If it was June the beach would be populated with people walking dogs, jogging, building sand castles with their children. But the beach at Cape May in March seemed as deserted as the Siberian tundra. There was no one to help.

She couldn’t see Sol so she assumed he was on the other side of the dune buggy. When she got close enough to touch it, she got a grip on the undercarriage frame and used it to pull herself to an upright position. Her body protested loudly, letting her know that she needed to prepare to be one solid bruise for a while.

She tested her ability to walk with a small step, still holding onto the buggy’s frame. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was possible. She continued gingerly inching her way around to the other side.

“Sol,” she tried calling again. “You’re scaring me.”

She thought she heard him answer, but couldn’t be sure. So she kept going that direction.

There was nothing that could have prepared her for the trauma of what she saw when she came around the front and could see the other side. Sol lay on his back, his leg pinned underneath the buggy where a monstrous pool of blood had formed. His face was white as snow.

The sight swept her off her feet as surely as if she’d been physically knocked down. She fell to her knees and crawled the rest of the way. She heard a strange hiccupping sound through the wind. When her muddled mind put together that the sound matched the jerking of her chest, she realized it was coming from her, that and sheets of tears blown dry by the wind almost as soon as they fell.

When she reached him, she saw his eyes cut to her face. He opened his mouth and tried to say something, but nothing was coming out.

“I’ve got to get help. Got to get help.” She started jerking her outerwear off and covering him up with it. The whole time she was chanting, “Got to get help,” in between sobs. She couldn’t leave him and couldn’t help him without leaving him. Finally, the cloud in her mind cleared away enough for an image of a phone to form. “Phone,” she said out loud.

She started looking around and spied the red crocheted bag she’d brought along on their outing. It must have fallen out of the vehicle when it started to roll because it was lying on the sand about thirty feet away. She pulled herself up and tried to make her body run for it. She fell twice on the way, the second time she was close enough to scramble on hands and knees.

The phone was in the bag and perfectly fine. She called 911.

“911. What is your emergency?”

“My… my fiancé is caught underneath a dune buggy. I think his leg is… is…”

“Where are you?”

“On the beach. We’re… I don’t know.”

Someone in one of the nearby houses had finally looked out and seen what was happening. He’d come running as fast as seventy-year-old bones could bring him and arrived just as she was telling the 911 operator that she didn’t know where they were. She couldn’t hear the man come up behind her in the wind, but she was in too much shock to be startled when he took the phone out of her hand and began speaking.

“Near Spirit of Cape May. Beach patrol knows where that is.”

She didn’t know how long it was before the ambulance arrived, but he was dead before they got there. She overheard one of the paramedics say to the other that, if she had applied a tourniquet that, it wouldn’t have saved his leg, but it might have saved his life.

The resident who had come to her aid asked if he could take her somewhere. It was easy for him, with no medical training whatever, to recognize shock by the glazed and distant expression on her face.

“Look here,” he said to the paramedics. “The young woman is in shock and needs to go to the hospital herself.”

“Yes sir. Another unit is on the way.”

“All right,” he said. “How long will that be?”

“Hard to say.” They handed him a blanket from the ambulance. “Keep her warm until they get here.”

The ambulance drove away. When no one had come an hour later, the good Samaritan said, “I’m going to get my car and drive it as close as I can. Stay here until I get back. I’m going to take you to the hospital myself.”

On the way to the emergency room, he tried to get her to name someone he could call to come and help her. When she didn’t speak, he resorted to calling contacts on her phone.

Sol had fought to keep his eyes open as long as he could. When they finally closed of their own accord and refused to reopen, he’d been freezing cold, lying on wet sand, with the worst imaginable sounds ringing in his ears, the combination of howling wind and Farnsworth weeping. He’d been angry about the entire turn of events and ready to take names.

When he opened his eyes again he saw sunlight filtered through gently rustling leaves in a tree overhead. Looking around he saw that he was lying on grass so green it looked fake. He heard tinkling wind chimes and people nearby laughing like they were playing. Playing like children. The sound of a flute might have been coming from a distance, but he hoped he was imagining that part. The flute was just enough maudlin overkill to make him want to beg to be put out of his misery.

He checked himself for pain, but no. There wasn’t any. Matter of fact all physical sensations were pleasant. Maybe even nice. Or they would be if the flute would find something else to do.

He thought about sitting up and found himself jacking to a sitting position quickly and smoothly without feeling any muscle strain at all, which was a little weird because, on his best day, a sit up could still be felt.

From a sitting position he could see idyllic pastoral scenes in every direction. Flora and fauna abiding in a state of otherworldly perfection, Spring-time harmony on steroids. Grassy hills, flowered paths, trees with silver-dollar-shaped leaves danced in the little breeze and birds sang in a way that would probably be pleasing to most people.

Sol had already been losing his battle with flute irritation. The birds just ratcheted his annoyance up several notches. He was trying to remember how one gets birds to shut it or move on, when his attention was pulled toward the sheep. They were fat and fluffy, snowy white, with pretty black faces and shiny dainty hooves. And one of them was staring straight at him instead of being down with the phony-looking grass like his brethren. Sol tried staring the sheep down and eventually concluded that the animal was too stupid to realize that Sol had just alpha’d the crap out of him.

“Hey. Eyes to the grass!” Rather than having the desired effect, Sol’s instruction to the curious sheep seemed to make him more interesting to the creature. That, added to the irritation of the birds and flute was just too much.

“WHAT IS YOUR FUCKING PROBLEM? YOU ARE A HAIR’S BREADTH AWAY FROM BECOMING A LAMB PIE!”

In response the sheep bleated, but Sol knew all the way to the bottom of his core that it was intended as a raspberry.

He was in the process of standing with plans to throttle the errant ovine, when he noticed that he was wearing a toga. A white toga. Complete with one shoulder and a skirt that ended above the knee. No shoes, and a quick check confirmed that there was nothing underneath the toga either. Nothing supporting or protecting or covering the package, that is.

The bad news was that he was shoeless and naked except for a short ass toga. The good news was that some of his anger dissipated when he realized that the sheep actually had a legitimate reason to be looking at him funny.

When Sol got to his feet, the sheep bleated again.

“Yeah. That’s what I think, too,” he grumbled.

Looking in the direction of voices, it seemed the most logical possibility for determining where he was, how he got there, and, more importantly, how to recover his clothes and get the hel out.

CHAPTER 3

Jefferson Unit, Fort Dixon, New Jersey, Loti Dimension

“Hello?”

“Hey.”

The caller didn’t need to identify himself by name. Litha knew his voice very, very well. Well enough to hear every layer of weariness and to note the absence of his usual exuberance.

“Hi, Glen. How are you? Haven’t heard from you for a while.”

“Yeah.”

Litha was nothing if not patient. She could wait him out no matter how long it took, but as the silence stretched, she felt a maternal need to rescue him from awkward conversation. “We’ve missed you.”

He cleared his throat. “Am I still invited to Thursday night dinners?”

She smiled at the phone. “I think you know the answer to that. Standing invitation for Thursday or anytime at all. Shall we expect you tomorrow?”