Part 7 (2/2)

”Your colleagues, co-workers, a.s.sociates, head researchers.”

Abbey watched as Sabrina dialed the phone. The conversation grew animated, with lots of flicks of her slick ruby nails. Abbey looked away, and then risked swiveling her eyes back. Sabrina hung up the phone and made a show of busying herself at her desk, while glancing to her left toward a door in the hallway. A pocket door slid out from the wall and sealed off the entryway from which they'd come.

”We should go,” Abbey said.

Caleb didn't seem to notice that the entryway had been closed off. ”I think there might be something important here to help us figure this out. Look at the tree.”

Abbey grabbed at his arm, trying to draw his attention to what was happening in the reception area. ”I don't think this looks good.”

Simon had seen, though. ”Just keep it cool, Ab,” he mouthed.

A burly man with a gray sweep of hair in a security uniform came through the door to Sabrina's left. Sabrina rose immediately with her hands full of white cloth and came to the door of the waiting room, followed by the security man-who, Abbey noted, carried a firearm. ”Dr. Forrester will see you. Frank will escort you, as you have to pa.s.s the vaccine-testing unit, which is a high security area with the fly flu and all. You must wear these masks.”

Abbey felt a s.h.i.+ver pa.s.s down her body to her sweaty feet. Dr. Forrester. The name had to be a coincidence. It couldn't be Mark...or could it? They each took a mask and put it on.

Frank provided a reasonable facsimile of a smile and started walking. They moved into formation behind him, each glancing at the others as they moved down the hall, away from the entryway. The entryway that was now blocked off.

”So, Frank,” said Caleb, scurrying to catch up. ”You been at Livingstone long?”

”Long enough,” answered Frank.

”We're making a sales pitch to Dr. Forrester. Any tips you could give us? Likes, dislikes,” said Caleb.

Known a.s.sociation with men named after insects, Abbey thought.

”Only thing I know is that Dr. Forrester's mother is a real character. Lives with my mom at the Seniors' Home and still smokes a pipe,” said Frank.

Abbey shot Simon a panicked look. He mimed tripping the security guard and running away, but then flashed a helpless, upturned palm gesture. Even if Simon did trip Frank, they'd never find their way out of the labyrinth and then the maze before someone caught up with them.

They walked for several minutes. Frank made no further effort to make conversation. The wind had picked up and was rippling the epidermis above them. It made no noise, like a tent would, but it was disconcerting all the same. The sun had dropped in the sky and it was now noticeably darker than it was before. Abbey wondered if Elijah, their ride home, was readying to leave. She envisioned her parents arriving home to find them absent, Wallace circling around his cage looking for dinner, and Farley in a wet heap by the door.

Down the hall she saw two doors. The door on the right looked like a regular office door with a doork.n.o.b. The one on the left had a large metal bar across it and a green, glowing exit sign above it. The main hall banked to the right, into an open laboratory area, and Abbey could hear the murmur of voices.

”Now!” mouthed Simon. He reached forward with his long limbs and stuck one directly between Frank's. The older man fell into a heaving sprawl on the floor.

”Run!” yelled Simon. ”Take the left door!”

Caleb and Abbey launched forward and ran down the hall with Simon behind them.

”Wait! Kids!” Frank yelled as he scrambled to his feet.

Caleb yanked open the door. Abbey felt stunned relief to see the sky bathed in dusk. She ran faster, thighs snapping as she pulled every shred of speed out of them. As she crossed the threshold, her eyes flicked to the door on the right. The periodic table caught her attention. It was an ornate Essential Elements one, Abbey's favorite, with extra details about the periodicity of each element, including its cubic radius, melting and boiling points, uses, and a drawing of the atomic structure. Above the periodic table was a nameplate with the name Dr. A. Livingstone embossed upon it.

And then Abbey saw the stones, and she was running through wet, dark forest.

Chapter 6.

To Be an Elephant

The two backpacks rested against the bathroom cabinet. Mark hadn't wanted to leave them in his room, just in case. A tube containing one neatly rolled map leaned against the blue backpack that belonged to Abbey. He brushed each tooth with the circular movements the dentist had shown him, darting glances at the backpacks to make sure they were still there. The tube of Aim toothpaste, with the end folded over on itself several times, perched on the pink and gray speckled countertop (his mother, thankfully, had gotten her own tube after the last incident). When he was young, he thought he could see elephants in the shapes on the countertop. His mother had flown him to India when he was ten to undergo elephant therapy for autism. He'd liked the elephants, but it hadn't helped him understand people. In fact, he'd decided he really would have preferred to be an elephant.

Mark wiped his sweaty palms on a towel and reviewed the order in which the objects in the backpacks had appeared. He'd returned them to exactly the same arrangement, except he couldn't quite achieve the same careless disarray that had marked Caleb's pack. Caleb's protractor was stuck to the outside of a binder with what looked like jam, and crumpled papers nudged their way out of the binder's sides. Mark's hands had twitched as he'd flipped through the papers, fighting the urge to bring the edges into alignment, to smooth the uneven ripples. Putting everything back in the pack just as it had been nearly made Mark pa.s.s out, and the odor of warm salami in the bottom had caused bile to gather in his throat. He'd been forced to sit on his bed and study the scalloped sh.o.r.eline of eastern Oahu for several minutes to clear his head.

Abbey's backpack had been a relief. The blue pack contained heavy Physics and Chemistry textbooks, blue and red notebooks with rows of methodical notes, a calculator, a package of pH testing paper, pens, a couple of empty Petri dishes, and an empty lunch bag. The slim orange-and-pink-striped journal had made his heart pound. He'd slipped it open with shaking fingers. But it contained only physics equations, diagrams, chemistry formulas, and numbers in Abbey's cramped but neat script-except in the margins, where Abbey's pen had made a few furtive strokes: hearts and trees, Abbey Livingstone, AS and SL.

The ALICE notes in Abbey's backpack had been interesting. He'd made a copy of Abbey's notes (with his Canon PC-170 copier) and filed them in the Protex fire-resistant burglary safe with the programmable combination he'd received for his twenty-first birthday. He'd tried not to pull out the photo when he opened the safe-the photo he'd found in his mother's sock drawer under the pink-and-gray-striped socks with the individual toes that she never wore. The photo of his mother, smiling, with a young blond girl and a funny-looking man with wild hair. (Mark always tried to avoid looking at the man, as it looked, from the photo, as if he may have had poor dental hygiene.) Mark managed to slam the safe door shut just before his fingers folded around the edge of the photo, and focused instead on rotating the safe driver wheel, breathing shallowly through his nose. Combination number 09-27-12. Mark said it in his mind now. It was a tidy number. Three times three was nine, three times nine was twenty-seven, two plus seven was nine, three to the third power was twenty-seven, three times four was twelve, one plus two was three. Threes and nines. If you counted in that he got it for his twenty-first birthday, and three times seven was twenty-one, that made it doubly lucky. Three was also his favorite Horton-Strahler number for the bifurcation ratio of rivers. Making it triply lucky, which was three again. 09-27-12. And now that date had come and gone-three weeks ago-and yet he was no closer to understanding what would bring him to kill Abbey, or how he could stop it.

Abbey scrunched her eyes against the suggestion of morning filtering through her blinds. The dank smell of the forest still surrounded her. A scatter of leaves lay on her pillow-leaves that had caught in her hair as she ran blindly down through the trees on Coventry Hill last night. Her heart sc.r.a.ped the bottom of her ribcage. Yesterday hadn't been a dream either. She reached for her cell phone, which she usually kept on her nightstand, but her fingers brushed wood instead of plastic. She opened her eyes a crack and saw nothing but her lamp on the table. She no longer had a cell phone. It was lost somewhere in endless dunes of sand.

It had taken them several seconds last night to realize it was their forest they were running through, hints of dusk drifting through the branches like a blanket of black tulle. Even though none of them could understand how they had gotten home, why the stones had appeared just outside the door, they didn't slow their pace until they slammed the door of their house behind them. The blue and silver car was no longer across the street and the Forrester house sat in darkness, save for lights in Mark's room and the kitchen. Their parents had not yet returned home from the evening's campaign event.

They had conducted a quick search of the house to make sure it was empty. Farley galloped from room to room behind them, his large brown body quivering with excitement. The check complete, they ate sandwiches and potato chips in silence. After eating, Abbey lay on her bed in the dark. When the van lights streamed into the driveway, she flicked on her light and sat at her desk staring at a textbook until bed. Her parents poked their heads in with inquiries about her day. Abbey indicated she had to work on her science fair project and couldn't talk.

The house now sat still, the final breaths of night not yet giving way to the stirrings of morning. Abbey slipped her hand under her pillow and pulled out a crumpled photo of smiling kids from Science Camp 2012. She had the rise and fall of the heads etched in her mind. The sun had peeked out from behind the clouds at the second the camera clicked, illuminating Abbey's red hair in a fiery halo. Next to her, with his arm draped over her shoulder, his smile brilliant, stood Sam Livingstone. Sam Livingstone, the physicist, who lived exactly 2,435.64 kilometers away.

She shoved the photo back under her pillow. The floorboards creaked outside her room. The day had started. As she rose, a small yellow leaf drifted down from her forehead to her pink pillow. She looked in the mirror on the wall above her bed. The veins of the leaf had left an imprint on her skin. They mirrored the pattern of the tree from yesterday-a perfect Horton-Strahler ratio of three.

Mark arrived on their doorstep with their backpacks and a map tube just after their parents pulled out of the drive. His hair was slicked back, a sweep of black strands covering the bald patch on his crown. His blue cardigan gaped over the fleshy expanse of his stomach. He wore a toothy grin, but his eyes widened as he spied Farley's saliva-coated tongue and the dog began the opening maneuvers of his overly exuberant greeting ritual. Abbey grabbed Farley and pulled the Chesapeake Bay Retriever into a sit.

Caleb and Simon stared at Mark. They crowded the doorway side by side to block him from entering the house. Mark continued to smile. n.o.body said anything.

”It was nice of you to return our backpacks,” Abbey finally ventured from behind her brothers. She tried to see if the knife remained on his belt, but the cardigan was too long. Surely the three of them could take him down if necessary, but not if he had the knife.

Mark thrust the backpacks and map tube at Caleb and started to speak at a brisk pace. ”Your sh.o.r.eline contains areas of long fairly straight coastline with no headlands and bays. That results when you have a sh.o.r.eline where the rocks are very similar or just one type. Most sh.o.r.elines consist of many rock types and they vary in their resistance to erosion, forming a more jagged sh.o.r.eline.” Mark drew a breath and prepared to continue his speech.

”Whoa, slow down man,” Caleb said. ”Are you saying you've figured out where it is?”

Mark made puffing noises out his nose and rocked from one foot to the other, keeping his eyes focused on the stoop, except for occasional glances at the wall over Abbey's shoulder.

Mark drew his lips back again into the strained toothy arrangement that was beginning to remind Abbey of Donkey from Shrek. ”It would be very helpful if you would not interrupt me. I do not deal well with interruptions. The proximity to sh.o.r.e of the two islands that appear on your map was critical to my a.s.sessment. I have accounted for slight rises in sea level and storm erosion patterns on the current substrate type of the area, presuming that ocean currents do not flip as a result of climate change.”

”And if they do?” Caleb interrupted.

Mark made the nose noise again. Farley's tail thumped the floor. ”Then sh.o.r.elines around the world would be so altered that we would have no way of knowing where you were.”

Caleb laughed. ”Where we were? That's funny. Didn't we say it was just a school a.s.signment? We didn't go anywhere. We really appreciate your help. We'll take it from here.”

Abbey and Simon stood mute.

Mark's grin lost some of its enameled intensity and he staggered backward a step, breathing heavily in and out through his nose, nodding his head with each breath. Abbey wondered if it was going to be a repeat of the bed incident.

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