Chapter 1:
Monday~
Only four blocks from the furnished apartment in Philadelphia, with more than three thousand miles to drive before they joined Tess in San Francisco, Ellie began one of her games. Ellie thrived on her games, not those with required a board and movable pieces but those which were played inside the head-word games, idea games, elaborate fantasies. She was a very garrulous and precocious fourteen year old with more energy than she was able to use. Slender, shy in the company of strangers, and she wasn't much into sports. She could not exhaust herself in a fast game of football, for sports bored her. She was an intelligent kid, an avid reader, and she found her own games more fun than football. Kneeling on the front seat of the big car and looking out the rear window at the home she was leaving forever, she said, "We're being followed, Joel."
"Are we now?"
"Yeah. He was parked down the block when we put the suitcases in the trunk. I saw him. Now he's following us."
Joel Miller smiled as he wheeled the Thunderbird onto Lansdowne Avenue. "Big black limousine, is it?"
Ellie shook her head, her thick auburn ponytail wagging vigorously. "N, it's some kind of van. Like a panel truck."
Joel looked in the rear-view mirror. "I don't see him."
"You lost him when you turned the corner," Ellie said. She pressed her stomach against the backrest, head thrust over the back seat. "There he is! See him now?"
Nearly a block behind them, a new Chevrolet van turned the corner onto Lansdowne Avenue. At five minutes past six o'clock on a Monday morning, it was the only other moving vehicle in sight.
"I thought it was always a black limousine," Joel said. "In movies, the heroes are always followed by a big black limousine."
"That's only in the movies," Ellie said, still watching the van, which remained a full block behind them. "Nobody's that obvious in real life."
The trees on their right cast long black shadows across half the street and made dizzying, flickering patterns on the windshield. The first sun of May had risen somewhere to the east, still too far down the sky for down the sky for Joel to see it. Crisp spring sunlight bathed the old two-story frame houses and made them new and fresh again.
Invigorated by the early-morning air and by the spray of green buds on the trees, almost as excited as Ellie was about the journey ahead of them, Joel Miller thought he had never been happier. He handled the heavy car with ease, enjoying the quiet power at his disposal. They were going to be on the road a long time in terms of both hours and miles; but as imaginative as she was, Ellie would provide better company than most adults.
"He's still back there," Ellie said.
"I wonder why he's followin' us."
Ellie shrugged her thin shoulders but did not turn around. "Could be lots of reasons."
"Name one."
"Well...He could have heard that we were moving to California. He knows we'll take our valuables with us, ya' know? Family treasures, things like that. So he follows us and runs us into a ditch on some lonely stretch of road and robs us at gunpoint."
Joel laughed. "Family treasures? All you have is clothes enough for the trip. Everythin' else went out on the moving van a week ago, or it went with your sister on the plane. And I assure you that I've brought nothin' more valuable than my wristwatch."
Ellie was unperturbed by Miller's amusement. "Maybe he's an enemy of yours. Someone with an old grudge to settle. He wants to get hold of you before you leave town."
"I don't have any real friends in Philly," Joel said. "But I don't have any real enemies, either. And if he wanted to beat me up, why didn't he just catch me when I was putting our bags in the trunk?"
Fluttering laces of sunshine and shadow flipped rapidly over the windshield. Ahead, a stoplight turned green just in time to spare Joel the inconvenience of braking.
After awhile Ellie said, "Maybe he's a spy."
"A spy?" Joel asked.
"A Russian or something."
" I thought we were friends with the Russians these days," Joel said, looking at the van in the rear-view mirror and smiling again. "And even if we aren't friends with the Russians these days-why would a spy be interested in you or me?"
"That's easy," Ellie said. "He has us mixed up with someone else. He was assigned to tail someone living on our block, and he got confused."
"I ain't scared of any spy who's that inept," Joel said. He reached out and fiddled with the air-conditioning controls, brought a gentle, cool breeze into the stuffy car.
"He might not be a spy," Ellie said, her attention captured by the unimposing little van. "He might be something else."
"Like what?"
"Let me think about it awhile," the girl said.
While Ellie thought about what the man in the van might be, Joel Miller watched the street ahead and thought about San Francisco. That hilly city was not just a geographical identity so far as Joel was concerned. To him, it was a synonym for the future and a symbol for everything that a man wanted in life. The new job was there, the innovative advertising agency that recognized and cultivated talented young commercial artists. The new house was there, the three-bedroom Spanish stucco on the edge of Lincoln Park, with its spectacular view of the Golden Gate area and the shaggy palm outside the master-bedroom window. And Tess was there, of course. If she had not been, the new job and the house would not have meant anything. He and Tess had met in Philadelphia, had falen in love there, had been married in the city hall on Market Street, with her sister, Ellie, as honorary best man and a woman from the Justice Department steno pool as their required adult witness. Then Ellie had been packed off to stay two weeks with Joel's brother Tommy in Boston, while the newlyweds flew to San Francisco to honeymoon, to meet Joel's new employers to whom he had spoken only over the telephone, and to find and buy the house in which they would start their life together. It was in San Francisco, more than Philly, that the future took shape and meaning. San Francisco became the future. And Tess became inextricably entwined with that city. IN Miller's mind, she was San Francisco, just as San Francisco was the future. She was golden and even-tempered, exotic, sensuous, intellectually intriguing, comfortable yet exciting-everything that San Francisco was. And now, as he thought about Tess, the hilly streets and the crisp blue bay rose clearly on the screen behind his eyes.
"He's still back there," Ellie said, peering through the narrow rear window at the van.
"At least he hasn't tried to run us into a ditch yet," Joel said.
"He won't do that," Ellie said.
"Oh?"
"He'll just tail us. He's a government man."
"FBI, is he?"
"I think so," Ellie said, grimly compressing her lips.
"Why would he be after us?"
"He's probably got us mixed up with someone else," Ellie said. "He was assigned to tail some-radicals. He saw your long hair and got confused. He thinks you're the radical."
"Well," Joel said, "our own spies are just as inefficient as them Russians, aren't they?"
Joel's smile was too large for his face, a generous curve that was punctuated at each end with a dimple. He held the smile both because he felt so damned fine and because he knew that it was the best thing about his face. In all his thirty years, no one had ever told him that he was handsome. Three months after they met, when they were sleeping together, Tess had said, "Miller, you just aren't a handsome man. You're good looking, sure, but not handsome. When you say that I look smashing, I want to reciprocate-but I just can't lie to you. But your smile...Now that's perfect. When you smile, you even look a little bit like Andrew Lincoln." Already they were too honest with each other for Miller to be hurt by what she'd said. Indeed he had been delighted by the comparison: "Andrew Lincoln? You really think so?" She had studied him a moment, putting her hand under his chin and turning his face this way and that in the weak orange light of the bedside lamp. "When you smile, you look exactly like Lincoln-when he's trying to look ugly that is." He had gaped at her. "When he's tryin' ta' look ugly, for Christ's sake?" She grimaced. "I meant...Well, Lincoln can't really look ugly, even when he tries. When you smile, then, you look like Lincoln but not as handsome..." He watched her trying to extricate herself from the embarrassing hole she'd dug, and he had begun to laugh. His laughter had infected her. Soon they were giggling like idiots, expanding on the joke and making it funnier, laughing until they were sick and then settling down and then making love with a paradoxically fierce affection. Ever since that night Miller tried to remember to smile a lot.
On the right-hand side of the street a sign announced the entrance to the Schuylkill Expressway. "Give your FBI man a break," Joel told the girl. "Let him tail us in peace for awhile. The expressway's coming up, so you better turn around and buckle your seatbelt."
"Just a minute," Ellie said.
"No," Joel said. "Get yer' seatbelt on." Ellie despised using the seatbelts.
"Half a minute," the girl said, straining even harder against the back of the seat as Joel drove the car onto the approach ramp leading up to the superhighway.
"Ellie-"
The girl turned around and bounced down onto the seat. "I just wanted to see if he followed us onto the expressway. He did."
"Well, 'course he did," Joel said. "An FBI man wouldn't be restricted to the city limits. He could follow us anywhere."
"Clear across the country?" The girl asked.
"Sure. Why not?"
Ellie laid her head back against the seat and laughed. "That's be hilarious. What would he do if he followed us clear across country and found out you weren't the radical he was after? Probably shit down both legs."
At the top of the ramp, Joel looked southeast at the two empty lanes of blacktop. He eased his foot down on the accelerator and they started west. "You gonna' put yer' seatbelt on?"
"Oh, sure." Ellie said, fumbling for the buckle. "I forgot." She had not forgotten of course. Ellie never forgot anything. She just didn't like to wear the belt.
Briefly taking his eyes from the empty highway ahead of them, Joel glanced sideways at the girl and saw her struggling with the seatbelt. Ellie grimaced, cursed the apparatus, making problems with it so Miller would know just what she thought of being tied down like a prisoner.
"You might as well grin and bear it." Joel said, grinning himself as he looked ahead at the highway again. "You're gonna' wear that belt the whole way to California, whether you like it or not."
"I won't like it," Ellie assured him. The seatbelt in place, she smoothed the wrinkles out of her red T-shirt. She tightened her ponytail. "Thirty-one hundred miles," she said, watching the gray roadway roll under and behind them. The Thunderbird's power seat elevated high enough to give her a good view. "How long will it take to drive that far?"
"We won't be lollin' around," Joel said. "We ought ta' get into San Francisco Saturday morning."
"Five days," Ellie said. "Hardly more than six hundred miles a day." She sounded disappointed by the pace.
"If you could spell me at the wheel," Joel said, "we'd do better. But I wouldn't want to handle much more than six hundred a day all by myself."
"So why didn't Tess drive out with us?" Ellie asked.
"She's gettin' the house ready. She met the movers there, and she's arrangin' for drapes and carpeting-all that stuff."
"Did you know that when I flew up to Boston to stay with Tommy while you two were on your honeymoon-that was my first plane ride?"
"I know," Joel said. Ellie had talked about it for two solid days after she came back.
"I really liked that plane ride."
"I know."
Ellie frowned. "Why couldn't we sell this car and fly out to California with Tess?"
"You know the answer to that," Joel said. "This car's only a year old. A new car depreciates the most in its first year. If you want to get your money out of it, you keep it for three or four years."
"You could afford the loss," Ellie said, beginning to beat a quiet but insistent rhythm on her knees. "I heard you and Tess talking. You'll be making a fortune in San Francisco."
Joel held one palm out to dry it on the hushed breath of the air-conditioning vent on the dashboard. "Thirty-five thousand dollars a year is not a fortune."
"I only get a three dollar allowance," the girl said.
"True enough," Joel said. "But I've got nineteen years of experience and training on ya'."
The tires hummed pleasantly on the pavement.
A huge truck hurtled by on the other side of the road going in tward the city. It was the first traffic, besides the van, that they had seen.
"Thirty-one hundred miles," Ellie said. "That's just about one-eighth of the way around the world."
Joel had to think a minute. "That's right."
"If we kept driving and didn't stop in California, we'd need about forty days to circumnavigate the earth," Ellie said, holding her hands around an imaginary globe at which she was staring intently.
Joel remembered when the girl had first learned the word "circumnavigate" and had been fascinated with the sound and concept of it. For weeks she did not walk around the room or the block-she "circumnavigate" everything. "Well, we'd probably need more than forty days," Joel said. "I don't know what kind of driving time I can make on the Pacific Ocean."
Ellie thought that was funny. "I meant we could do it if there was a bridge," she said.
Joel looked at the speedometer and saw that they were only making a moderate fifty miles an hour, twenty less than he had intended to maintain on this first leg of the journey. Ellie was good company. Indeed, she was too good. If she kept distracting Joel, they'd need a month to get across the damn country.
"Forty days," Ellie mused. "That's half as long as they needed when Jules Verne wrote about it."
Though he knew that Ellie had been skipped ahead one grade in school and that her reading ability was still a couple of years in advance of that of her classmates, Joel was always surprised at the extent of the kid's knowledge.
"You've read Around the World in Eighty Days, have ya'?"
"Sure," Ellie said. "A long time ago." She held her hands out in front of another vent and dried them as she had seen Miller do.
Though it was a small thing, that gesture made an impression on Miller. He, too, had been a shy, nervous kid whose palms were always too damp. Like Ellie, he had been shy with strangers, hadn't been into sports, an outcast among his contemporaries. In college he had begun a rigorous weight-lifting program, determined to develop himself into another Charles Atlas. By the time his chest filled out and his biceps hardened, he grew bored with the weight-lifting and quit bothering with it. At five-ten and a hundred-sixty pounds, he was no Charles Atlas. But he was slim and hard, and he was no longer the skinny kid, either. Still, he was awkward with people whom he had just met-and his palms were often damp with nervous perspiration. Deep inside, he had not forgotten what it was like to be constantly self-conscious and never self-confident enough. Watching Ellie dry her slender hands, Joel understood why he had taken an immediate liking to the girl and why they seemed so comfortable with each other from the day they met eighteen months before. Nineteen years separated them. But little else.
"He still back there?" Ellie asked, breaking into Joel's thoughts.
"Who?"
"The Van."
Joel checked the mirror. "He's there. FBI don't give up easily."
"Can I look?"
"You keep your belt on."
"This is going to be a bad trip," Ellie said morosely.
"It will be if you don't accept the rules at the start," Joel agreed.
Traffic picked up on the other side of the expressway as the early-bird commuters began their day and as an occasional truck whistled by on the last lap of a long cargo haul. On the westbound lanes, their own car ad the van were the only things in sight.
The sun was behind the Thunderbird, where it could not bother them. Ahead, the sky was marred by only two white clouds. The hills, on both sides, were green.
When they got on the Pennsylvania turnpike at Valley Forge and went west toward Harrisburg, Ellie said, "What about our tail?"
"Still there. Some poor FBI agent tracking the wrong prey."
"He'll probably lose his job," Ellie said. "That'll make an opening for me."
"You wanna' be an FBI agent?"
"I've thought about it," Ellie admitted.
Joel pulled the Thunderbird into the left lane, passed a car pulling a horse trailer. Two boys, a little younger than Ellie, were in the back seat of the car. They pressed against the side window and waved at Ellie, who blushed and looked sternly ahead.
"It wouldn't be boring in the FBI," Ellie said.
"Oh, I don't know about that. It might be pretty boring when you have to follow a crook for weeks before he does somethin' exciting."
"Well, it can't be any more boring than sitting under a seatbelt all the way to California," Ellie said.
God, Joel thought, I walked right into that one. He took the car into the right hand lane again, set the automatic accelerator for an even seventy miles per hour so that if Ellie got too interesting they would still make decent time. "When that guy followin' us gets us on a lonely stretch of road and runs us into a ditch, you'll thank me for making you wear your belt. It'll save your life."
Ellie turned and looked at him, her green eyes big. "I guess you aren't going to give in."
"You guessed right."
Ellie sighed. "You're more or less my father now. Aren't you?"
"I'm your sister's husband. But...Since your sister has custody of you, I guess you could say I have a father's right to make rules you'll live by."
Ellie shook her head, tightened her ponytail. "I don't know. Maybe it was better being an orphan."
'Oh, you think so, do you?" Miller asked, full of mock anger.
"If you hadn't come along, I wouldn't have gotten a plane ride to Boston," Ellie admitted. "I wouldn't get to go to California either. But...I don't know."
"You're too much," Miller said, ruffling the girl's hair with one hand.
Sighing loudly, as if she needed the patience of Job in order to get along with Miller, the girl smoothed her mussed hair and tightened her ponytail again. She straightened her shirt. "Well, I'll have to think about it. I'm just not sure yet.
AN: I am back bitches! Well, let me know what you thought by hitting that little review button. This story is going to be a little longer than my other stories, so just sit back and wait for the next chapter.
Also, if you're interested, you should check out the beginning of my wife's story, Made To Suffer. Her Pen-name is Terminated1. But I guess this is goodbye until next time. Adios.
~Exangellion