Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(68)
He sensed he was being watched—some hint of movement from the corner of his eye, perhaps—just as he’d managed to open the door. He stood up and turned to his left.
In the neighbor’s yard, well back from the chain-link fence, a black girl, maybe nine or ten, with beaded cornrows, stared warily at him. She wore a sunflower dress and white plastic sandals with Velcro straps.
Control smiled and waved. In some other universe, Control fled, abandoning his mission, but not in this one.
The girl didn’t wave back, but she didn’t run away, either.
He took that as a sign and went inside.
* * *
No one had been here in months, but there was a kind of swirling movement to the air that he wanted to attribute to a fan he couldn’t see, or an air-conditioning unit that had just cut out. Except that Grace had had the electricity turned off until the director returned, “to save money for her.” The rain was coming down hard enough now that it added to the gloom, so he turned on his flashlight. No one would notice—he was too far away from the windows, and the glass doors had a long dark curtain across them. Most people would be at work anyway.
The director’s neighbors would have known her as a psychologist in private practice, if they had known her at all. Was the photo in Grace’s office an anomaly, or did the director often eat barbecue with a beer in her hand? Had Lowry, back in the day, come over in a baseball cap, T-shirt, and torn jeans for hot dogs and fireworks on the Fourth of July? People could double or triple themselves to become different in different situations, but somehow he thought the director probably had been solitary. And it was here, in her home, that the director, over time, against protocol, and in some cases illegally, had brought Area X evidence and files, erasing the divide between her personal and professional lives.
Seen through the tunnel of the flashlight beam, the small living room soon gave up its secrets: a couch, three lounge chairs, a fireplace. What looked like a library lay beyond it, behind a dividing wall and through worn saloon-style doors. The kitchen was to the left and then a hallway; a massive refrigerator festooned with magnet-fixed photos and old calendars guarded the corner. To the right of the living room was a door leading to the garage, and beyond that probably the master bedroom. The entire house was about 1,700 square feet.
Why had the director lived here? With her pay grade, she could have done much better; Grace and Cheney both lived in Hedley in upper-middle-class subdivisions. Perhaps there was debt he didn’t know about. He needed better intel. Somehow the lack of information about the director seemed connected to her clandestine trip across the border, her ability to keep her position for so long.
No one had lived here for over a year. No one except Central had come in. No one was here now. And yet the emptiness made him uneasy. His breath came shallow, his heartbeat elevated. Perhaps it was just the reliance on the flashlight, the unsettling way it reduced anything not under its bright gaze to a pack of shadows. Maybe it was some part of him acknowledging that this was as close to a field assignment as he’d had in years.
A half-empty water glass stood by the sink, reflecting his light as a circle of fire. A few dishes lay in the sink, along with forks and knives. The director had left this clutter the day she’d gotten in her car and driven to the Southern Reach to lead the twelfth expedition. Central apparently had not been instructed to clean up after the director—nor after themselves. The living-room carpet showed signs of boot prints as well as tracked-in leaves and dirt. It was like a diorama from a museum devoted to the secret history of the Southern Reach.
Grace might have had Central come here and retrieve anything classified, but in terms of the director’s property theirs had been a light touch. Nothing looked disturbed even though Control knew they had removed five or six boxes of material. It just looked cluttered, which was no doubt the way they’d found it, if the office he’d inherited was any indication. Paintings and prints covered the walls above a few crowded CD stands, a dusty flat-screen television, and a cheap-looking stereo system on which had been stacked dozens of rare old-timey records. None of the paintings or photographs seemed personal in nature.
An elegant gold-and-blue couch stood against the wall dividing the living room from the library, a pile of magazines taking up one cushion, while the antique rosewood coffee table in front of the couch looked as if it had been requisitioned as another desk: books and magazines covered its entire surface—same as the beautifully refinished kitchen table to the left. Had she done most of her work in these rooms? It was homier than he’d thought it would be, with good furniture, and he couldn’t quite figure out why that bothered him. Did it come with the house, or was it an inheritance? Did she have a connection to Bleakersville? A theory was forming in his head, like a musical composition he could hum from vague memories but not quite yet name or play.
He walked through the hallway beside the kitchen, encountered another fact that seemed odd for no particular reason. Every door had been closed. He had to keep opening them as if going through a series of air locks. Each time, even though there was no prickle of threat, Control prepared to jump back. He discovered an office, a room with some filing cabinets and an exercise bike and free weights, and a guest bedroom with a bathroom opposite it. There were a lot of doors for such a small house, as if the director or Central had been trying to contain something, or almost as if he were traveling between different compartments of the director’s brain. Any and all of these thoughts spooked him, and after the third door, he just said the hell with it and entered each with a hand on Grandpa in its holster.