Part 25 (1/2)
”Let me get this straight,” said Walker. ”Are these the reasons why you shouldn't have done it, or why you did it?”
”I was twenty-two. I'd finally gotten out of school, and was going to have the great American adventure of going off to work, independent and free. After two months at it, I could see the future: all of it, from then until I turned sixty-five. It wasn't that nothing exciting had happened yet, but that it could never happen.”
”So Gochay was an adventure.”
”Part of what an adventure is, is throwing in your cards for a reshuffle. It wasn't that I wanted to stay with Gochay forever, but that if I was there, anything could happen. As for him, he had much more work than he could do. He didn't think he could turn his best customers down. So he offered me a deal. I would pick the jobs I wanted to do. I would get seventy-five percent of the pay. He would get twenty-five to cover all of the overhead and his risk. I thought about it for a week, and then gave two weeks' notice. I dreamed up the name Serena because it seemed to fit. You weren't surprised that Constantine Gochay would have a girl around named Serena, were you?”
”No,” he said. ”I guess not.” He thought for a moment.
”It was fun. Being in a school and then a job with mostly men was a lot of trouble. When I'd walk into a room, I'd feel stares like laser beams moving across various body parts. I guess in my own small way, I'm kind of an exhibitionist-but I like a limited audience. Working with Constantine, I wasn't a girl, I was a revenue center. I could be anybody at all, and when I wanted to, I was anybody I felt like being.”
”Why did you terminate your agreement with him?”
She looked down at him, and he could see amus.e.m.e.nt in her eyes. ”You want me to say it's because I've changed my ways, my heart is in your hands, and I would crawl across the continent to nuzzle up to you in a cheap hotel, don't you?”
Walker knitted his brows and made a thoughtful face, as though he were having trouble deciding. ”It's not so cheap.”
”Admit it.”
”Well, yes. I was hoping it was something like that,” he said. ”It would be a sound basis for a relations.h.i.+p, certainly.”
”Did I say I wanted one?”
”Don't you?”
She said carefully, ”I left the company-decided to be a bad girl-because I never got to decide before. It felt good. When I met you that night, I thought, 'Why not? What's stopping me?' and decided that whatever had stopped me before, I shouldn't let it. That turned out to be a good idea, because it felt even better. Yesterday I left Gochay because what you're doing seemed to be the most interesting thing that was going on.”
”But what you're interested in isn't really me?”
She shrugged. ”You're a man. What you do is look at somebody you find attractive, somebody you don't know at all, and decide you'd like to have s.e.x with her. You aren't deciding you're in love with her. You're not thinking that far ahead, and you don't feel guilty about it. You did that when you met me. Why can't I do that with you?”
He said, ”I guess I can't think of a logical reason.”
”Well, if I had stopped being interested in you, I wouldn't have come,” she said. ”What I know so far, I like. I haven't thought about more than that. I'm enjoying doing as I please.”
She flopped backward on the bed and lay still, staring at the ceiling. He crawled over and looked down at her, but she shut her eyes.
Walker said, ”Well, that's fun. But let's get back to this nuzzling business. I liked talking about that.” He lowered himself and began to brush her neck with his lips.
She s.h.i.+vered and pushed him away. ”That tickles.”
”I'm not sure, but I think that's part of the point of it. Not much after your crawl across the continent, but-”
”I didn't say that was true,” she interrupted. ”I said it was what you would like to believe.” She sat up and pulled the covers up to her neck. ”Actually, I took a plane, and the rest of the nuzzling can wait ... for now.” She couldn't keep the corners of her lips from turning upward a bit, but she said, ”I have something to tell you. I've been trying to find out who James Scully was, and who his distant cousin was.”
”How are you doing that?”
”I figured that the FBI is doing all of the routine, likely, logical things. So I have to do something else. The lab report I intercepted made me think of genealogy.”
”You mean you're doing his family tree?”
”It had to be something I could do on a laptop and a phone in an airplane. Genealogy is America's second-biggest obsession, after their lawns. So there's plenty of information available. You always start with the Mormons.”
”You do?”
She sighed. ”Yes. It's an article of the Mormon faith to try to find out who their ancestors were, and baptize them retroactively to get them into heaven. They've been at it for a long time, and they share. So you start with the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. They also have the International Genealogy Index, the Social Security Death Index, and the Military Index.”
”Those guys didn't seem religious, foreign, or retired, and if they'd been in the military, wouldn't their fingerprints have-”
”It's not for them,” she said. ”Their common ancestor is at least a generation back. So I tried the Library of Congress Local History and Genealogy Index.”
”Did any of this get you anywhere?”
”Everywhere, and that's not where I need to go. It got me quite a few Scullys, and if you add in their cousins, it's an astronomical number. It hasn't gotten me a sure way to know which one is yours.”
Walker lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. ”Another dead end.”
”It isn't,” she said. ”I just need a shortcut. I've got thousands of Scullys: maybe a hundred families in New Hamps.h.i.+re, and an unknown number of others on the list whose recent locations aren't given. By 'recent' I mean this century.”
”What's the shortcut?”
”Coming here. I think your James Scully didn't move to a rural village in New Hamps.h.i.+re from Chicago or New York.”
”Why not?”
”It doesn't feel right,” she said. ”If you want to be invisible, small towns are poison. If he was some kind of nut-say, an extreme survivalistracistmad bomber type-he probably wouldn't pick Coulter. Those guys move to the south or west, where there's more real estate that's really empty and less concern about gun laws. I suspect that he felt safe here because he was born around here. That would mean his relative probably was too.”
”And coming here is the only way to find out?”
”What I want isn't available any other way. The Health and Welfare Building in Concord has a Bureau of Vital Records. They've kept track of every marriage, birth, and death in the state since 1640, and every divorce since 1808. If you give me the right lead, I can find not only James, but any relative who was born here-meaning the other dead guy.”
”It sounds as though it could take months.”
”It could,” said Mary. ”If you go into those places acting like a skip-tracer-or an insurance investigator-it would. You just have to endear yourself to somebody who knows the system and get them interested in helping. I've already started being endearing, and it's gotten me my first introduction.” She squinted at the clock, then looked a second time. ”I'd better get going.”
Walker sat on the bed and watched her with the same sense of bereavement that he had felt while he'd watched her prepare to leave his hotel room in Los Angeles. Seeing her pull clothes over that smooth, white body was like watching the moon being obscured by dark clouds.
She said, ”Don't sit there ogling. Get up and get dressed so you can buy me breakfast.”
When they left the hotel room they walked past Stillman's door. It opened and he emerged. He nodded to them without a change of expression and said, ”Morning, Serena.”
She answered in the same tone, ”Always a pleasure, Max.” She was Serena again.
He walked with them to the restaurant, then selected a booth along the far wall. As soon as they had menus in their hands, he looked over the top of his and stared at Serena. ”Did you bring something to the party?”
She said, ”I'm trying to find out who the cousin was, so you can see what's in his house. Is that what you want?”