NOT WITH A BANG

Chapter 9 Despondent Dork

Luke was used to be taken for granted. For much of his life he had been overshadowed by a flamboyant firstborn brother and a sister who required attention. Later it had been a matter of health: the brother had been paralyzed in an accident and the sister had been afflicted by Lyme disease, while Luke was healthy and self-sufficient. And while he believed in a God as a Creator of the universe, he had felt that the deity was too abstract to show emotion for Luke.

But now things were worse. Luke felt not only neglected, but betrayed. God had used him to deliver the crucial message, then left him to deal with the consequences. And Grace, when it came to a crucial decision in her life, had left him behind. Of course it made sense from a logistics point of view -- Luke could not ride a horse on his own, and they would have had difficulty obtaining a second mount if he did -- but he wished that she had entrusted him with her plans.

His father's nightmare scenario still haunted Luke. He remembered that wonderful night, during which Grace had let him behold her breasts and even touch them, followed by even more intimate activity. If Grace fell in love in some other boy and granted him the same privileges, Luke thought that he could put up with it; he was not naturally jealous. But the possibility that some rapist or pimp could force her to surrender them, or to do something more extreme, was agony.

Luke reacted to the crisis as he always did, by throwing himself into science work. At least he had his work cut out for him. His new interest, biology, was not at all like physics. In physics the big focus was on finding the Theory of Everything which, once discovered, would unlock many of the mysteries of the universe. It was a single goal, one might even say a Hold Grail. But in modern biology the fundamental idea was the genome, the total of an organism's DNA code, consisting of thousands of genes. There was no simple rule behind it: it had evolved over millions of years, changing in response to near-random events. You just had to learn what was there and work out the consequences.

Early in the afternoon Luke's sister banged on his door, urging him to search the Internet for somebody named Mary Wallace. Luke refused. If she needed that information for a mission, she could ask God for it. Luke was no longer involved.

Later Mom had come upstairs with the news that they had found Grace's horse. A farmer near the town of Moretown, Maryland reported that a "ditzy rich girl" had ridden onto his property shortly before sundown the previous day, saying that she was lost. She offered him money if he would drive her to the nearest motel and put up her horse for the night. The next day, when she failed to show up, the farmer examined the horse and its attachments and found the Beghs' home address on the saddle. He called the professor, who repeated the news to the rabbi and the Girardis. Will tried to follow up, showing around Grace's picture, but Grace had been clever again. At the motel Grace had eaten a dinner and used the bathroom, then caught a cab to another hotel. It took Will hours to find the cab, and by then she had checked out of the second hotel, destination unknown. Grace was no ditz.

Luke went back to the genome.

Towards suppertime he heard his mother call out: "Luke! Joan! There's something on TV!"

Something in her tone cut through Luke's lethargy, and he raced his sister down the stairs.

There was a news show on. Onscreen was a dilapidated-looking house, and a logo on the screen said JANUARY 28, 2006, ARCADIA, MARYLAND.. That in itself was unusual; Arcadia was not large enough to support its own TV news station, and the local channels simply echoed the Baltimore news. There were police cars and ambulances around, each with its own flashing lights, and somebody was removing body bags out on stretchers. A number of body bags.

"Eight dead in all, each a suspected member of the Third Street All-Stars Gang," said the announcer. "It's the largest mass murder in Arcadia history. For the second time this week, the spotlight is on Arcadia as a location of a bizarre crime. We have asked Captain Lucy Preston, a member of Homeland Security, to give her opinion."

A small, middle-aged blonde stepped forward to the microphone, and Luke was startled to hear his mother mutter "that little whore."

"Captain Preston, do you think this shooting and last week's bombing are connected?"

"It's tempting to speculate that, but I think the nature of the crimes are too different. The bombing seems to have been a symbolic blow against government. This shooting seems to be more like a vendetta carried out by a rival gang, an execution-style slaying. I would tend to let the local police handle it."

Local police meant Dad, and it sounded faintly condescending. There was definitely something ugly between Dad and Captain Preston.

"Might it really be a form of execution?" asked the newsman. " That somebody thought the gang was responsible for the bombing and took matters in their own hands?"

Luke noticed a slight quaver of Captain Preston's expression. Apparently she hadn't thought of that angle.

"It seems unlikely," she said, "but of course we'll look into it."

"'We' means Dad," commented Joan. "That means he'll have to stop looking for Grace."

-----

The next morning, the beginning of a new school week, Mr. Price called for a school-wide assembly in the gym, "and this means everybody". And apparently everybody came, except for those known to be away from school, like Maggie Begh and Grace. Not because they were particularly obedient to Mr. Price, but because they could guess what was at stake.

"The police know that somebody in the school had advance notice of the bombing and sent a warning," announced Price. "If we do not find out who it is, they may send investigators into school. None of us want that. So I'm asking for the caller to come forward. This may be the last chance. So speak up."

Price was not a very convincing Good Cop, but Luke knew he was telling the truth. He remembered the commotion two years before when a girl student gave birth to a baby on school property and abandoned it nearby. Dad had wanted to investigate the school, but Mom had pointed out that the targets of suspicion would be the oddballs -- and Joan was odd enough to be on the list. This time even Dad's moderating influence would be missing, Mom no longer had clout, and boys as well as girls would be suspected. Maybe Luke had to come out, though he had no idea how he would explain how he had come by the knowledge.

"It was me," said a squeaky female voice.

Everybody turned to look at Glynis Figliola struggled to her feet. Struggled, because she was heavily pregnant with Friedmann's child. Her husband, when Luke scanned the stands for him, looked as stunned as everybody else, but he was nowhere near his wife and nobody else noticed him.

"You knew about the bombing?" demanded Price.

"Yeah. I was surfing the web looking for discussions of 'V FOR VENDETTA'--"

"V what?"

"It's a movie where a rebel blows up the Houses of Parliament in the future," spoke up one of Price's assistants.

"-- when suddenly I came across blogs talking about blowing up a real, local building within an hour. So I sent a warning."

"That was an admirable thing to do," said the assistant. "Why be so secretive about it?"

"Because I'm giving birth within three months! I don't want to get entangled in a big criminal case."

"Tell us where you found the blogs," ordered Price.

"I can't. I erased the whole record while trying to conceal my identity online. Please don't let the police get me!"

Ms. Lischak sprang to her feet. "If you let the police touch this girl for an instant, I quit."

Mr. Harbison, Joan's law teacher got up as well. "And so will I."

Old Mr. Driesbach got up. "I also."

Price looked around in terror as his own staff seemed to be defying him, and what was worse, doing it in front of the entire student body. "All right -- all right. I'll tell the police what you told me, and say I got the information under promise of anonymity. But for the story to hold up, everybody must stay silent. All right?" No answer. "All right. Back to classes."

But they didn't go back to classes. Everybody sought out everybody else for gossip about Glynis' revelation. A lot of them probably sought out Glynis herself, but Luke was one of the few people who knew her well enough to guess her hiding place. She was in the biology closet at the back of Lischak's classroom.

"Glynis, what the hell happened? You know perfectly well that you didn't find a blog, or send a warning either."

She glared at him, which was scary because Glynis normally tended to look unfocused, even with glasses.. "Of course not. I could guess that Grace found out about the bomb from some of her crazy friends, and you sent the warning."

That wasn't the entire truth, but close enough. "OK. But why make the confession?"

She shrugged. "I was bound to be suspected anyway, being known as a computer nerd. And I owed you and Grace a favor. I'm still ashamed of the way I threw myself at you a couple of weeks ago, calling Grace a bitch, and trying to undermine your loyalty to her. And I gambled that I could hide behind this," she added, laying a hand on her swollen stomach. "It worked."

"Yeah. It worked."

It did more than work: it shook Luke out of his own lethargy. It was time to stop feeling sorry for himself, and to make a positive effort to solve the ongoing crisis without griping about who was responsible.

With that in mind, he finally focused his mind on the question of where Grace was headed, rather than why she left him behind.

And he realized where he would find Grace.

(Author's Note: The incident that Glynis was referring to, trying to win Luke from Grace, occurred in a previous story, LUKE LOOKS FOR ANSWERS)

(Author's Second Note: To avoid keeping everybody in suspense about Luke's solution, I'm including an excerpt from two chapters ahead:

Grace was exhausted: she had no adrenaline left after three days of flight. Her journey had had a lot of low points. Having to obey the call of nature in a patch of woods halfway between Arcadia and Moretown, which necessitated dropping her jeans and panties in freezing weather. Having to listen to a drug-addicted reactionary radio announcer spout lies about her political ideals, because a cab driver wanted to listen and she didn't want to cross him. Spending hours in Washington's Union Station waiting for a southbound train and terrified of being recognized; to her Washington was like Mordor, the stronghold of the Enemy. Unable to fall asleep in cheap motel rooms, in spite of fatigue, for fear that police would band on her door in the middle of the night. But at least she seemed to have left her pursuers far behind.

Now she was on the final leg of her journey to her destination: the Cavalo farm where she had vacationed last summer and worked during "Christmas" vacation. Once there, she would do anything -- beg, offer money, promise work -- to get the Cavalos to hide her. She did not know what she would do if they turned her down. She had no Plan B. There was nobody else outside of Arcadia whom Grace knew and trusted.

The cab dropped her off in front of the Cavalo farmhouse, and grace walked to the front door to ring the bell. Who would answer? The Cavalo's were a middle-aged couple with a teenaged son; the last was probably at school at the moment. And at the last minute Grace remembered that Bonnie McLean, who have offered to let the Cavalos adopt her illegitimate child, might still be here with her baby.

The door opened, revealing none of the above. Instead she found herself facing a very familiar bespectacled nerd.

"Hello, Grace," Luke said coldly.