Where (21 page)

Desperately, she replays the sequence. The sweep.
A physical manifestation of powers working behind the scenes,
Steele told her as the machine rolled past, but he wouldn't say which powers, or what scenes. What did she think when it ended, that Rawson Steele would open up and spill his soul? At the end he signaled that it was safe to talk. She spoke first.

One question. All she did was ask him that damn question. She didn't want much. Just an answer. Then she'd know whether to trust him or not.
What were you digging for?

She has no memory of what happened next.

Now they are here.

What happened in the long silence that he dropped into the space between them then? Did she fall asleep and this happened, or were they both gassed or poleaxed in a sneak attack? What force broke down their cardboard shelter, and who dumped them here? A flash of sense memory makes her shudder: her head bouncing against a dense, bony shoulder. They were carried here.

Or she was.

Drained by the long siege of dislocation and displacement, Merrill thinks,
They did something to us
. Unless it's simply that the air in the shed is cold and still, and the man by her side radiates heat.
I'm not weak, I'm just stupid.
God, she misses Ray. Ray would know what to do.

She tries to separate from him so she can stand, but her body won't respond. All her working parts are numbed, as though something put her whole body to sleep.
We were drugged.
Steele sits next to her with his head up and his back against the wall, and goddammit, she's still leaning against him— not for support— for the warmth, she supposes, thinking,
wrong
. Listening to his breath coming and going behind his teeth— that almost-whistle; she can almost catch the tune.

She needs to sit up straight, for God's sake, separate, but it's warm here and she's too numb, or is it drawn—
close,
she thinks,
oh, shit, we're sitting way too close—
to move away. There are things he said to her during that long night in the carton and things that have to be said. Yet here they are like a couple on a wedding cake, side by side. She needs to stand up and put the real question.
What were you digging up?
She needs to stand up, raise her fists and hammer the answer out of him with her fists if she has to, but she can't. Quite. Move.

OK, he doesn't need to know you're awake.

When he runs a light hand over her hair, she doesn't even twitch; she listens. A fragment of lyric comes back to her:
“I was born about ten thousand years ago…”

Leaning, she studies the wood-frame interior through half-closed eyes. After weeks spent roving the faceless streets of the compound, going back to her relentlessly spare and aggressively clean house, she is surrounded by so many foreign objects that she can't identify them.

The shed where they sit looks like the costume department for some makeshift country theater where kid actor-wannabes get together and stage
Little Orphan Annie
in the barn. Look at it long enough, and the jumble on the long wall opposite sorts itself out into masses of garments and personal effects, the kind you'd find in a thrift store or in the back room of a funeral home, but whose things are they, really?

How did they end up here?

The wall facing the one where she and Rawson Steele are parked like abandoned bikes is thick with ranks of clothing too rich and varied to identify at first. Garments hang on a rail that runs the length of the shed, fixed in brackets so not even the raccoon coats and officers' greatcoats drag the floor. Boots, shoes, sandals are neatly lined up on the floor below. The few bizarre outfits— costumes?— that Merrill recognizes range from fur-trimmed, obscenely grand velvets and brocades out of forgotten throne rooms to homespun dresses to timeless cotton shifts that she could have worn to work in Kraventown before the instrument of their exile snatched her out of her life and dumped her here. She sees masses of coats, capes, jackets too old to place in time, and the more items she can identify, the worse it gets.

Hats— everything from tricorns to a top hat that could have gone down with the
Titanic
— costume items from everywhen hang from pegs, with bags and costume jewelry carefully organized on shelves above, contemporary clothing mixed in with— dear God— rubber boots and sou'westers and beaded buckskins and early American colonists' gear, hip-length vests and buckled shoes, everything catalogued and ranked like the detritus of lost civilizations. Or lost tribes.

There's Steele's almost-whistle.
“There's things about me that you'll never know…”
That song.

Or lost colonies.
Her heart stops.

He's done, but the lyric has invaded her head. Her throat closes and her belly freezes. It takes all the strength she has left in her not to groan aloud.

Then.
Wait!
The orderly ranks of abandoned eyeglasses and neatly shelved suitcases beyond the rack of discarded costumes could be the personal effects of …

No, Merrill, don't go there.

Shit! We're not the first people trapped here.
Electrified, she sits upright.

“Are you OK?”

I moved! I can move!
“I don't know!”

He clamps a hand on her arm. “Hush!”

Startled, she yips. “Ow! Let go!”

“Don't. They'll hear.” In the harsh overhead light, with that scowl, he looks like a god hacked out of a coconut husk. “I think it's starting up.”

“I said, let go! What's starting up?”

“Too soon to tell.” Then, concerned: “Are you all right?”

Anchored by Rawson Steele, she tugs against him, jittering like a helicopter trying to take off. “I don't know what I am!”

“What you are is waiting,” he says, and does not say why or what he means when he adds, “I think this will be over soon.”

“What will?”

“It's hard to explain.”

Fragment, song fragment,
“I know the secret of the sphinx…”
They sit without speaking until, as if he senses a change in her, Steele lets go. “OK, they're gone for now.”

“Who is?” No answer. God, it's cold in here. Pressing her back to the wall, with her head up and her shoulders straight for once and no parts of them touching, Merrill asks, “Are you working for them?”

Wait! He looks hurt. Everything in him lets go— expression, tone, manner, when he says, “No. No Ma'am. I'm not.”

But the rest of that line:
“Nefertiti told me so…”
“Who are you,” she says, pressing. “Who are you really?”

He sidesteps it with the nicest smile. “Whatever you want to make of me.”

“That's not fair!”

“Face it.” He squints as though it hurts to allow it. “We're none of us who people think we are.”

“Then who are we?”

That sweet, touching grin: “Ourselves. That's what keeps us going, you know?”

At least they're talking. There's no reason for her to trust Rawson Steele, but there's the tintype: two rebel kids. She's not sure she trusts him, but she likes him. No. She's drawn to him— echoes of
that boy in high school that you know is bad for you
. “OK, what are you really doing here?”

“Waiting, same as you.”

“You know that's not what I mean. This place. You got here— how?”

“Same as you. Snatched up, whatever that was. Blindsided and thrown for a loop.”

She thought she was getting somewhere with him but they aren't anywhere. It's infuriating. “If they're gone, why are we still sitting here!”

“Who says they're gone. Trust me.” He reaches for her hand and she's grateful for the warmth. “It's safer.”

“Safer than what?”

“Not sure.”

She turns his hand over and leans hard on his exposed wrist. “Who are you, Rawson fucking Steele. Who are you anyway?”

He doesn't shake her off or try to pull free; he lets her hand stay where it is so naturally that they both forget about it. He answers willingly, disarming her with names as familiar as that tune, falling into the soft, down-home rhythm as though he learned it by heart forever ago. “I'm just Archbold Rawson Rivard, Ma'am, from the low country Rivards, although I grew up in the North.” He adds, “Us Rivards left the territory after … It's been a while. But you probably knew.”

“So you were named for him.”

“If you want to think of it that way.”

When she least expects it, the rest of the verse comes back.
“I've walked the whole wide universe, above ground and below.”

“Why'd you change your name?”

“Oh, Ma'am, Ma'am!” He sounds flat-out Southern now. Sweet Tidelands whine.
From around here,
she thinks, forgetting that she is no longer back in the here that she knows
.
Gentling her, or trying, he says, with down-home ease, “Nobody wants to be called Archbold.”

“No. The Steele part.”

Nice smile, even in the dismal lights from the LEDs overhead. “You don't always want people to see you coming.” He sighs. “Our families didn't exactly part friends.”

Like he knows something I don't know.
It's sweet, but he's elusive. “Why are you here?”

“You mean
here
here? God only knows.”

“That's not what I mean. I mean in Kraventown.” Still sitting, she makes a half-turn and plants her hand in his chest, coming back at him again with the question that's hounded her ever since the night their lives split in two. “It's like you were hunting down something you could claim or build or take from us, and you never said what. What do you really want?”

This time he answers— more or less. “I just came looking for what's mine.”

“Son of a bitch!” She is less angry than confused. “In my back-yard?”

“Oh, Merrill, don't let it bother you.” He removes her hand and puts it in her lap like an old-time Southerner returning a missing glove. “I was just digging up the rings. Two Citadel class rings, Ma'am, tied up together in a handkerchief and buried behind Russell Kraven's barn.”

“That burned in the '90s. Eighteen nineties. But you knew.”

“One way to end a property dispute,” he says, leaving her to take it any way she wants. “Rivards are kind of famous for it. Milt Kraven subdivided the land where it stood…”

“And built my house. For a Northerner, you know a hell of a lot about us.”

“Lady, it's all up there on the Web. Any damn fool could find it,” he says easily, and holy hell, the cadencing is, what? Authentic. “The past is a powerful thing and yes Ma'am, it's crazy, but I took leave without pay and came all the way down to Kraven to find my Citadel ring.”

My ring?
“Like the secret treasure map's inside it or some other damn thing, like every crap novel I've ever read.”

“This!” He slaps the floor and sand flies up. “This is not a crap novel.”

“Sorry!” In the time it takes him to resume, Merrill gnaws the inside of her mouth, studies her nails, tries to shake the sand out of her hair. When he does speak, words come out of him all rough and ragged and at great cost, like the truth being dragged naked over rocks. It's such a relief to have somebody else's grief to think about that Merrill lets him talk on, and it's none of it anything she expected. She's been alone in this new, bleak life for so long that— stop it, lady. Don't.

The first words cost him. Coughed up like a hairball. “OK, before me, there was just…” He swallows hard and rethinks. “My mom was the last living Archbold Rivard's second v.p. in his holding company before she had me. You know, the one his great-great set up to handle the money he took from Luke Kraven in the property dispute.”

She does.

When she doesn't acknowledge this, he goes on. “She was the last in a long line of pushovers, you know? One more sweet, deluded girl bowled over by the Rivard profile and the good old family name, so what does that make me?”

“His…” She stops before
bastard
.

“He already had a damn family. A whole 'nother family. Wife and two little girls stashed in Alexandria, big brick house with long wooden porches, right there on St. Asaph Street. I went and studied it, but I wasn't about to go in. His real true family, you can see where I am with this.” He fixes her with those eyes that will not stay the same color. “So, the ring?”

Who
are
you?
Squinting, she would like to reconcile this face with the tintype image, but Father threw it on the fire so long ago that she forgets. “The ring.”

“It's pretty much all I'll ever have.”

And all the breath in her lets go. “I see.”

“So that's it.” Steele's gesture reminds her of the time and puts her in this place, under the cold, colorless overhead light, on the cold floor with the sand sifting down at such a rate that she wonders whether they are even what passes for safe. Then he adds, “For now.”

“Don't,” she says. Because he's whipped them into an unbreakable circle, she slips into childhood rhythms to bring him down, “Don't do me like that.”

“In the end,” he says, “you might want to have Hampy's one. They knotted the two rings in a handkerchief from Archie's house, two rebel officers, just kids.”

“Oh, please!” Merrill gestures at the unseen and unknown forces beyond the shed, at everything inside the rim and everything above and below the surface of the desert floor and asks once more. “
What
are you?”

“What I am is, I'm stranded. Stranded and confused, same as you.” He moves to take her hand, thinks better of it. “And fuck no, I have no idea how we got here.”