The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four (10 page)

The DVD case showed a sexy woman in a helmet of black hair and a shapeless fur coat, coolly watching a giant switchblade that may or may not have been moving her way. The redhead before me was watching the screen of her phone, which she held in both hands, punching buttons with both thumbs. She murmured, "Triangulate, damn you. Ah! There you are."

"Jesus Christ," said the next guy in line.

"Listen," I said, "I'm sorry for effing you, and you're probably right, but it's really none of your business, you know. Whether she comes back . . . or not." Suddenly sure she wouldn't, I slid the erotica volume off the counter, tumbled it into the lost-and-found box, cushioned by an old Betty Boop beach towel.

"Not yet it isn't," the redhead said. She tucked the boxed set under one arm, nodded at the DVD still in my hand and said, "So take a look. Tell me what you think." She headed for the mall entrance. "We can even talk about the book, if you want."

"Hey!" I called. "How do I find you?"

On the way out the door, she held up the phone-thing. "I'll find
you
. I've got your coordinates."

Disgusted, I flung the DVD into the box with Betty and the punk hotties. What the hell movie was I in today,
Let's Tease Jennifer To Death
? I'm not playing this game, I'm not. "Can I help you, sir?"

He slapped down a
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue and handed me a black Amex card. "And you don't get to keep this one, honey, if it's all the same to you."

The blonde in the scarf? Never came back. The weird-ass redhead—
that
was Destiny Creech. And what's really interesting about
The Seventh Victim
, I realized that night, the second time through, is the whole point of the movie, right, is supposed to be that Mary is looking for her sister Jacqueline, who's in desperate danger, OK? But once Jacqueline turns up, Mary barely notices. She's too busy hooking up with guys, even with Jacqueline's husband. So Jacqueline, at the end, is left to climb those stairs alone.

Next day the redhead turned up in the Yarns Ignoble café. I noticed her about one, and she sat there much of the afternoon, dawdling over a notebook and a latte, acknowledging me not at all. When the end of my shift finally came, I tore a nail in my haste to clock out, then walked over to her spindly iron table. The notebook pages she studied were filled with cramped handwriting: not words, but numbers.

"A-hem," I said.

She looked up.

"Well finally," she said, and stuck out her hand. "Join me. I'm Destiny."

I hooted. "Well, of course you are," I said. "I'm Jennifer, or Jenny, or Jen, depending on the mood."

"What mood are you in now?"

"Confused. I have your DVD."

She leaned abruptly forward, her eyebrows raised. Her right eye, I saw, ticked to the side. "Isn't it
good
?"

"How do you know I watched it."

"Oh, please." She sat back, looking disappointed. "Let's not
even
pretend. The only question remaining on that score—because there are so many more
interesting
questions, which we'll get to momentarily—is how many
times
did you watch it?"

"Two and a half. I fell asleep, and boy did I dream."

"I bet you did."

"Thanks a lot."

"You're welcome. Here's the first of those interesting questions. You want something to drink? I'm buying, unless you wage slaves eat here free, in which case I could use another latte, thanks."

"Answer another question first. What's that phone-thing in your bag?"

She hefted it, pressed a switch, waited a moment, then handed it to me. "Handheld GPS. Wherever you go, there you are—your coordinates, on screen."

"It says 'Acquiring Satellites.'"

"Isn't that great? That's my favorite part. 'Des, what are you doing out there, the bisque is served.' 'Just a minute, Mom, I'm acquiring some satellites.' Twenty-four medium-Earth-orbit Pentagon satellites, a constellation it's called. The same technology that guides attack drones to Afghan schoolhouses and lures Stephanie Abrams to your bedroom every morning with your local forecast, now turned into your own personal handheld Sherpa guide. Third wonder of the modern age, after the Pocket Rocket and a runner-up to be named later."

I laughed. "Do you
ever
shut up?"

"Yes," she said, with gravity, and then said nothing. I said nothing, either, just watched blue bars appear one by one on the little screen, like on the wireless commercial.

"So what do you do with it?"

Another lunge forward. "Ah! Another interesting question. I'll show you right now. How about a cache and dash?"

"A what?"

"There's a new cache in the north parking lot, a quick one. I got an e-mail update this morning. With luck, ours will be the first logbook entry. Got any treasure in your purse, just in case? Something to leave behind, to replace what we take. Anything will do: an old Metro stub, a Putt-Putt scoring pencil, an expired Nair coupon. C'mon, c'mon, we won't have the light for long."

I jogged alongside her through the café, past my register—where Sally threw me a "What's-the-story?" look—through the food court, around the corner of the Cold Gravy store. Only in the parking lot did she slow to a deliberate pace, studying her GPS unit as a dowser would a forked stick. I couldn't see the screen, so I read her instead, and came to anticipate her pauses, her minute course adjustments. She was wearing khaki shorts, and clearly did a lot of hiking. I heard someone slam on brakes and yell, "Assholes!" but he may not have meant us. Inside her right arm was a long narrow discoloration: a birthmark, or a scar.

Des spoke without looking up from her screen. "When I first spoke to you, Jen, at the cash register? I confess. I had seen you before. Twice."

"Really."

"The first time was about a month ago, out at Antietam. I was tracking a cache that was hidden in the Bloody Lane. I didn't want to be seen when I retrieved it, because the National Park Service, you know. So I had to wait around forever for this damn woman to leave. She was sitting on the bank, sketching in a big spiral notebook."

"I remember that! I was trying to include the observation tower in the distance, and I never could get the angles right."

Des snorted. "I thought you were going to pitch camp and wait on A.P. Hill's reinforcements. I almost said hi to you then, but you were so engrossed. I know
I
don't like to be interrupted when I'm engrossed."

"Are you engrossed now?"

She glanced at me then, and smiled. "What do
you
think?"

"I don't remember you at all at Antietam. I'm sorry."

"No one remembers me, when I'm lurking. I'm good at lurking."

The cars had thinned out. We were headed toward the far corner of the lot, beyond which a couple of windblown shopping carts rested at crazy angles in the scrub.

"And the second time you saw me?"

"That was quicker. You were on the other side of the gas pump at the Sheetz, out on the bypass. I'm surprised that Tracer is still running, by the way. You must call
Car Talk
a lot."

"I'm sorry, but I don't remember you then, either."

"No, well, you're a watch-the-pump person, aren't you, Jen? I'm a watch-everything-
but
-the-pump person. It was a windy day, but you just let your sundress blow, you didn't keep clutching at it like those poor timid souls. I always want to yank their hands away and say, 'You bought it short, now
wear
it short, no apologies.'"

"You see a lot, but again, you didn't say anything. How come?"

"Because it was only the second time. You ever read
Goldfinger
?"

"What, the James Bond novel? Is that the one with Pussy Galore?"

Des winced. "Don't remind me. I checked it out of the library in a stack of horse books when I was 12 because a boy at school said it was dirty, and at the end, when Pussy says, 'I never met a
man
before,' and renounces women, I burst out crying, right there in the treehouse. I was years sorting out why. Anyway, that was Goldfinger's motto. 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action.' So that's my dating rule. The battlefield? Happenstance. The Sheetz? Coincidence. The checkout counter? Time to say something to her, you schmuck."

"So that makes me your enemy?"

"No, it makes you my act—Whoop! Hang on. We've overshot it. Oh, I get it. Must be here." She dropped the unit in her purse and backtracked a few steps, to the last light pole in the lot, a rusty white pillar on a crumbling knee-high concrete base decorated with long-faded gang tags. "We must be talking a microcache," she said, kneeling and clawing at the chinks and cracks in the concrete. Little clots of it pattered to the asphalt like gray cereal. I knelt on the other side and did the same, not sure what I was looking for until I found it: A plastic canister like the ones film used to come in. Several somethings rattled when I hefted it. I offered it to Des, but she shook her head.

"Your first treasure," she said. "Open it, Jen, if you dare. Open it, and there's no turning back."

I popped the lid and shook onto my palm a Putt-Putt pencil, a polished orange rock the size of a marble, a paper clip, and an absurdly small glue-bound notebook, like a doll's. "Damn, two people beat us to it," Des said, rolling the rock between her fingers. "This is Terrapin Dave's. He beats me everywhere."

Inside the notebook was equally tiny writing, in two different hands. The first said:

FEB. 2. 1
^ST
FIND! ALL BOW B4 THE POWER OF MY ROCK—TERPDAVE

The second:

2/2/08—"No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge."

"Oh,
The Prophet
, fuck me," Des said. She stood, dusted her palms against the ass of her khakis, and said, "Go ahead, your turn. Write something. Anything you like. Be as creative as you want. No pressure. Just make it good. And personality-indicating. A summation of all that you are. And hey—if it's Kahlil Gibran? You and me? We're through."

As she babbled, I looked up at her. The light was going, the wind was picking up, and high clouds were scudding past. Des seemed to stand tall against the sky, hands on hips, the sunset wind rippling her jacket and toying with her long shock of red hair. She looked almost heroic.

I pressed the absurd notebook flat against the light pole, acutely conscious of Des' thigh at eye level, and printed as small as I could: TO CELEBRATE MY FIRST FIND, DES AND I HAD OUR FIRST KISS. When I was done, I just squatted there, one palm against the pole, looking at what I had written. Behind me, I heard a distant zap, like a bug gone a-sizzle, then more zaps, coming closer. The light directly overhead zapped then, and my hand tingled as the pole hummed with power and the bulbs flickered to life, casting a stark pool around us. Our shadows were like cartoons. Des slid the notebook from my fingers. I didn't watch her read it; I watched the concrete instead. "Oh, well done," Des said. "Come here."

"So how long has this hobby been going on?"

"Well, I was new at the high school, and her name was Leah, and soccer practice had just let out . . . "

"No, you ass." I snatched a pillow off the floor, swatted her with it. Bedding and clothing were everywhere, except on us. We had gone to my apartment, not hers, on orders from Des—"Because," she said, "yours is farther away."

"Not
this
," I said. "Geocaching. Is it new?"

"Oh, that. No, it's not new, not really. Well, the satellites, yes, that's new. But the basic principle, leaving caches and finding caches, that's been done in one form or another, I'm told, since 1854."

"No shit?"

"No shit. Dartmoor was a tourist attraction even then, long before
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. One of the guides placed a bottle way the hell out by Cranmere Pool, so the hardy souls who hiked out that far could leave their calling cards to prove they'd made it. A lonely, barren place. It's part of a missile range, now."

"Why bother hiking out there? The pool must have been lovely."

"The pool, so called, was a dry hole until it rained, whereupon it became a wet hole. The reason hikers went was that it had a story, of course." She twirled a lock of my hair. "You can lead people anywhere, my Jenny Jen, if there's a story attached." She rolled onto her side, facing away from me, facing the wall. "The pool was said to be haunted, you see. Cranmere Benjie, they called the ghost—the shade of Benjamin Gayer, who died broken by guilt because of all the seamen he had doomed. Benjie was a local businessman who had been entrusted a large sum of money, in case it was ever needed for a sailors' ransom. Well, pirates seized a shipload of Dartmoor men, and word was sent home, but was there any ransom to be paid? There was not. Benjie had spent it all, bit by bit—a sailor's right eye here, a sailor's left hand there. So his neighbors came back only in part, and Benjie's neighbors chased him onto the moor, with torches and axes but not with dogs, and so he outran them, wailing with guilt, until he collapsed by the side of Cranmere Pool, and submerged his head beneath the rank waters, and choked himself, and died unsaved and unmourned. And even today you can hear him out there of a night, wailing."

I heard the fan on the dresser, and cicadas, and a distant tractor-trailer on the downgrade. An unfelt breeze stirred the curtains, and the night light burned steady in the hall.

I wriggled closer, threw my arm around her, nuzzled into the back of her neck, which smelled like lavender, like sweat, like her. "If Cranmere Pool is such a dry hole," I murmured, "how did Benjie drown himself in it?"

"Well. I'll tell you how that happened. Things back then were just . . . wetter, that's all." She snorted, I burst out laughing, and she began to pummel me. "The fuck question is that?" she demanded as we wrecked the bed. "It's a fucking ghost story, OK? Work with me!"

We did lots of things together—not just that, and not just that. And we weren't even together all the time. She was sort of in graduate school at the Appalachian Lab in Frostburg, though at her level it was more of a hike-around-the-woods thing, graphing the connections among forest habitats at Antietam, than a go-to-class thing, and of course I had my job and all its delights, and my parents always after me to visit. Des had no such ties; she said her dad was dead, and she and her mom didn't get along, and that was that. Yet—this was odd—I remember that when I asked what her mom did for a living, she stressed to me that Mrs. Creech was a corporate vice president not of marketing, not some glorified
sales
job, but of product development. Like, she was in charge of actually designing and building the shit, whatever it was; I don't remember, now. Since my sales job wasn't even glorified, it sort of hurt my feelings. But later, of course, I wished I had blown off my own family, spent more time with Des when I had the chance.