The Twice Lost (7 page)

“Be really careful, J’aime, please? Keep hidden.”

“Great advice. You stay away from the rest of the tribes out here, okay? If you’re not willing to do anything
positive,
you’ll just get them killed.”

“But . . . someone has to warn them, J’aime!”

“I’m on it.”

J’aime was gone.

She had a point. And even with her sliced tail she could go faster than Luce now, anyway.

But if Luce was really that useless, so marked and hunted that she’d do more harm than good even by spreading the alarm, then . . .

Then what reason was there for her to live at all?

Someday, dearest Luce, I will find you again
. . . The voice in her head was Nausicaa’s, and Luce tensed for a moment before the bright blue patch in the dimness above melted in her tears.

“Nausicaa,
please,
” Luce said out loud. “Please find me soon.”

Why do you think I left you, Luce?
Nausicaa retorted. She hadn’t said those words in real life, though. Why could Luce hear them so clearly?
I can only find you once you learn for yourself where you are.

5

On a path high above the ocean a man was walking. His hair was shorn within half an inch of his scalp, stubble covered his face, and a backpack thudded on his shoulders. He walked as if he were in a hurry, but then he would stop, sometimes for several minutes, as if he was searching for something in the long silvery grass. At first the path looked down on a harbor where sea lions sprawled, but after a while it bent back and ascended still higher over open sea. Tall cliffs plunged to knife-sharp rocks and the tumbling slopes of enormous waves.

It had happened somewhere around here. The man half expected a spike of cold anger to let him know when he was passing the exact spot, but all he could feel was the cool spring wind and the feverish determination crowding his thoughts.

He might go to prison for this, of course. Even if they bought his story—and there was no reason to think they would—the law didn’t make allowances for the kind of justice he had in mind. But that was okay with him. It wasn’t like he had anything better planned for the rest of his life. Luce was probably lost to him for good.

After another mile the dusk was dotted with golden squares and oblongs. Shining windows stood out against the blue evening and glowed through the spruce trees on the hillside behind while to the right a rolling silver-blue meadow dropped abruptly down into the waves.

Almost there, now. His heartbeat clattered in his chest like a handful of coins dropped on a hard floor. He climbed the steps up to the back door of a small brown house.

Through a gap in the curtains he could see a grubby pea green kitchen. A patch of bare wood showed where the floor’s linoleum had split and peeled away. Two heavy sock-clad feet were resting on the wood, but that was all the man could make out. It was enough, though.

He knocked. No response. Maybe the jerk had passed out. He knocked louder, sharper, making the loose windowpanes clack in their frames.

A moan, a shuffling noise, a fan of golden light where the door swung open. Eyes on his, blank and bleary. Definitely drunk. “You got a problem?”

“I got a whole
bunch
of them, as it happens, Peter.”

There was a long pause, a few panting breaths. Then recognition landed like a stone. The man on the outside step couldn’t help grinning as he watched his brother reeling back into the kitchen, too scared and shocked to muster a response at first. After another uncertain moment it came. “You’re
dead.
”

“Tell me about it. But I’m not half as dead as I used to be, brother. Shoulda seen me a couple months ago.”

“Andrew. You’re
not
. . . Christ, man, how did . . .”

“Gonna ask me in?”

“Oh. Yeah. Good to . . . good to see you. Didn’t think I’d ever . . .”

Andrew Korchak stepped into the house. It was almost too easy. He shut the door at his back and locked it then dropped his backpack. “Got anything to eat?”

“There are . . . I’ve got some cans in the cupboard. Go ahead and help yourself. Whatever you want. Andrew, how did . . .” Peter’s eyes suddenly turned skittish as if there was something in the room he hoped his brother wouldn’t notice. His body was bloated and saggy, and a web of broken blood vessels reddened his face. A half-empty bottle sat on the table.

Andrew Korchak didn’t move to get the food he’d asked for. Instead he paused in the center of the kitchen, slowly and deliberately looking around. He kept on examining the room, walking back and forth, his face carefully composed into a look of mystification.

“Something missing here, Peter? Feels like you moved some things around.”

“It’s about like when you left.” A pause. “Want a drink? It’s got to be a hell of a story. How you
got
here and everything.” Peter moved to sit back down at the kitchen table, but once he was sitting he didn’t look comfortable.

“Oh, I’m all right. But thanks. Or maybe someone? Isn’t somebody else supposed to be here?” Andrew was still peering around, down the dim little hallway, into the corners.

Peter’s face was just getting redder. He stared down, obviously straining to pull himself together. “I . . . You mean Luce? About that. I got some bad news.”

“I guess it is Luce I’m missing here, isn’t it? Yeah. How’s my little girl doing? Is she out with friends?”

“Andrew. About that. It’s a terrible thing . . . I don’t know how to break it to you, but . . .”

“She ain’t been doing good in school, or something? I’ll straighten her out.”

“She . . . Andrew, sorry, Luce passed on. To a better worl— She just . . . she got in with a bad crowd, drugs and everything, and she wound up going over the cliff. Got ruled a suicide. I’m real sorry.”

Andrew stopped searching the kitchen and paced over to his brother’s sagging figure. For a long moment he simply stood over him, too close, staring down into Peter’s worried eyes. “Well. That is bad news, Peter. My sweet little Luce a suicide.”

Peter slumped a little deeper with what looked like relief. “I didn’t know how to break it to you,” he agreed.

“I can see it would be a hard thing to say. But you manned right up and told me the truth. I appreciate that.”

Peter was nodding eagerly. “Had to do it.”

“Yeah. Now it’s my turn. I’ve got some even worse news I need to tell you. I’m afraid it’s gonna hurt.” Andrew was standing even closer to his brother. His arms were swinging lightly.

“I . . . What news?”

“Luce didn’t die.”

A swarm of conflicting expressions buzzed through Peter’s face. At first they were mostly variations on confusion, but as he felt his body heaving out of the chair and crashing backwards onto the floor, there was a lot more terror in the mix. Then Andrew was on top of him, knee on Peter’s chest, fists slamming down into his rubbery cheeks. Andrew punched again, feeling a few teeth break, while Peter’s heavy body flopped and grunted below him. It would have been more satisfying if only Peter had done a better job of defending himself. He tried to swing at Andrew’s head, but his blows were limp and disjointed, slapping like damp frogs.

It should have been a great moment, Andrew knew, making his creep of a brother pay for what he’d done to Luce. He’d been looking forward to it. But somehow in practice it came as a disappointment. His revenge felt as mushy and pathetic as his brother’s doughy flesh jiggling under his knuckles. Andrew hit Peter again, harder, hoping that savagery would help cancel out the disgust he felt. The bridge of Peter’s nose snapped.

In fact, Andrew felt more like vomiting than anything.

He stopped punching and stayed where he was for a minute, half kneeling on his brother’s chest, staring around the room. He’d faked looking for Luce before, but now he searched for her in earnest, desperately wishing she’d walk out of the shadows—
walk
out, on legs, the way a young girl ought to do—and gently pull him to his feet again. Peter was gasping, struggling uselessly. Andrew toyed with the idea of strangling him. He’d pretty much planned on it. He didn’t doubt that his brother deserved to die, and he didn’t care at all about the consequences. It was just . . .

It was just too sad.

Killing Peter would be too sad, too senseless.

“I should rip your throat out,” Andrew said to the twitching mass under his knee, but his voice didn’t have much conviction. “I should throw your dirtbag of a corpse off the same damn cliff where you left my little girl after you tried to
rape
her. I should . . .” There was a rivulet of blood dribbling from Peter’s swollen lips, pooling on the green linoleum. At least, Andrew thought, he’d accomplished
that
much before punking out.

Andrew got up heavily, walked to the cabinets, and picked out a can of chili. He started poking through the drawers for a can opener. Behind him Peter made slobbery noises and spat out his teeth. Andrew didn’t bother turning around.

“Andrew . . .” The tone wasn’t what Andrew would have expected. It was high and soft.

Andrew still didn’t look back. “Yeah?”

“She’s . . . really alive? Luce is really . . . she’s really alive? You’re not
shitting
me?”

“I just saw her. About four-five weeks ago, now.” He dumped the chili into a pot and fired up a burner, flicking the match into the sink. “She was a lot less dead than I am, for sure.”

The slobbery noise got louder. “Where the hell
is
she, then?” Peter’s voice kept getting higher, whinier. “Little girl just
ran
off and made me think . . . Didn’t even call. Is she coming home?”

“Is that what you call this dump? I’d bleed you like a pig before I’d let you get anywhere near her, Peter. No damn way you’ll ever see her again. You don’t even deserve a chance to
apologize
to her, you hear me?” He wasn’t about to explain
why
Luce wasn’t coming back. It was enough to know that the words hurt Peter more than the beating did.

Even without turning to look Andrew knew his brother was sobbing on the floor. He stood at the window eating his chili from the pan and watching the distant roil of the waves. A film of Peter’s blood clung to his knuckles, sticky and red.

Luce was out there. Somewhere. But how was he supposed to find her?

***

He slept in Luce’s old bed that night in her tiny room with books heaped on the dresser and postcards from cities they’d traveled to together tacked around the bed. High on the wall were two photos: a snapshot of Alyssa holding a three-year-old Luce on her lap, a big white sunhat casting a slanting shadow across both their faces. The photo next to it was much more recent, an official school portrait that Andrew guessed had been taken not long after his boat wrecked. In it Luce appeared unsmiling and scared, her eyes wide and otherworldly, wearing a navy sweater that was getting too small for her. She looked lovely and horribly vulnerable, and he ached to hold her and tell her that everything would somehow be okay.

Alyssa was dead. That was understandable,
natural,
even if it ripped his heart to think about it. But the way he’d lost Luce, on the other hand . . . that was too surreal, too impossible. There was just no coming to terms with something that made so little sense.

He woke up to a silent house. Peter must have actually gone in to work, then, even with his busted face. Everyone would just figure he’d had a nasty fall while he was drunk. Apart from the endless hiss of the waves there was no sound at all. After a minute Andrew pulled himself out of bed, stretched and moaned. If he wasn’t going to kill Peter, then he also wasn’t going to be spending the next twenty years locked up. Looked like he’d have to think of something
else
to do, if rotting in prison was off the table.

He’d clear out after breakfast. Leave Peter a note and never come back. For all he knew Luce could be anywhere along the continent’s west coast, so there was no reason to stay put.

The photos of Luce and Alyssa almost hummed to him; he could feel their nearness, hear a wisp of their mingled voices. He pulled both pictures off the wall and slipped them into his backpack, then got dressed in the old clothes people on the islands had been kind enough to give him when he’d shown up wrapped in filthy sealskins. They’d been awfully good to him, the mad, tattered castaway who’d insisted at first—until he got his head together, anyway—that he’d been brought there by his daughter, Luce, and that she was a mermaid.

Andrew stumbled out into the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee, stepping over the blotch of crusted blood on the linoleum. He’d been knocking through the cupboards for a few minutes before he noticed the dark silhouette floating on the door’s sunlit curtain. Somebody was standing there, dead still, watching him through the gap. Andrew swung around and saw a sliver of a tan-skinned, thickset man, his neat silver hair like a glaze in the pale daylight.

Once the man saw Andrew looking he knocked as if he’d just arrived. But Andrew was sure the guy had been standing there for a while.

“Yeah? Help you with something?” Andrew didn’t try to keep the annoyance out of his voice as he opened the door.

“Peter Korchak?” The man on the step had warm, sympathetic brown eyes, but his mouth was tense.

“That would be my brother, actually. Want me to tell him you were looking for him?”

“Your
brother.
” The tan-skinned man stared for a moment as if he weren’t sure whether or not to believe it. “And your name is?”

“You’re the one on the
outside
of the door. That means you might want to think about introducing yourself before you go asking
me
anything.”

In reply the man folded back his coat. His badge gleamed in the pallid day. “Ben Ellison. FBI.”

“All right.” That didn’t make too much sense unless Peter had gone and turned criminal. But there it was. “And I’m Andrew.”

Ben Ellison made a conspicuous effort to stay calm. “Do you have any identification?”

“No.” Andrew stared for a second. “Peter can vouch for me, I guess, if you’ve got some reason you need to know. What’s your business here?”