Burn(68)

“I may have to have a talk with Miss Archer,” her father said, looking into the night.

“No, Daddy, please!” Grace was suddenly passionate. “I love her so much! She’s only doing it to make me smarter!”

“You’re already pretty smart, pumpkin.” But he was smiling again. “Some eight-year-olds might read a phrase like ‘corpse of Pinedale.’ You’re the only one I know who’d actually say it out loud.”

She flushed again, and it was in this rush of good feeling that she asked the question that had tripped in her mind since the shape had flown over her house the first time.

“Was it a dragon, Daddy?”

He didn’t answer at first, which was almost answer enough. “It sure looked like one, didn’t it?” he finally said.

“Where did it come from?” she asked. “Out of the mountain?”

It wasn’t a foolish question. She knew about volcanoes. She knew Mount Rainier would blow up one day, maybe soon, maybe in ten thousand years, maybe after one of the other volcanoes in the Cascades—Adams, perhaps, or St. Helens—did the same. Volcanoes were explosions of fire and lava. So was the thing that had killed the town.

“No, honey,” her father said. “We don’t think it did.”

“We?”

They passed an Oldsmobile heading their way, one that looked an awful lot like the one her father was driving. Her father looked in its windows to see if he knew the person behind the wheel.

“We think maybe there are other worlds,” her father said. “We don’t know for sure. It’s only a theory.” He saw her not get this word. “A story, kind of. A way of describing something you don’t have proof for yet.”

“There are worlds full of dragons?”

“Maybe.”

“You said Scenario 8.”

“That’s a phrase I never want to hear you say out loud again,” he said, strongly but not angrily. “That’s a phrase even a girl as clever as you should not have heard or remembered, and it could be dangerous for you to say anywhere at any time. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Good girl.”

“But it means you must have thought of dragons.”

He laughed to himself, she hoped at her persistence. “There have been . . . hints. Things we found that weren’t quite evidence. Sounds on unusual frequencies. It was a theory. One of ninety-four.”

“What were the other ninety-three?”

“I’ve already said far too much and you know it. Get some sleep. We’ll be at Grandma’s tomorrow. You’ll like that.”

Her clear-eyed father who heard sounds on unusual frequencies had one terrible blind spot: how much Grace liked his own mother. Grace liked her the exact amount that her grandma liked Grace, the living reminder of “that woman” who had hurt her son so. It was a home of doilies and heavy perfumes and the air was filled with unsaid things.

Grace looked out the window. The forest was white in the snowfall, but still seemed to hold more secrets than she had ever thought possible.

That was when she started to shake.

“Don’t worry, honey,” Agent Dernovich said, gripping all of his daughter’s little body in his arms, on his lap. “This is called shock. It’s perfectly normal.”

He had pulled over to the side of the road the instant she had said, “Daddy?” with alarm. He had kept the motor running, kept the heater on, and taken her into his arms, holding her as she trembled.

“What’s shock?” she said, through chattering teeth.

“Something humans do when they see something too big to really understand.”

“There was a dragon, Daddy.”

“I know.”

“It tried to kill us.”

“I know.”

“It killed people in town.”

“I know that, too.”

He held her while she cried. She never saw how angry his face was. Not at holding her, of course, she was his moon and stars. No, his anger was for the thing that did not belong here. The thing that had killed probably two hundred people in a little under ten minutes. The thing that had made his perfect, beautiful, strange, brainy daughter shake in his arms.

He had met Grace’s mother when she was a secretary and he a junior agent. He’d been ordered to Havana—in fact, with a female agent he had long admired for her savvy and resourcefulness—but when he went to the Washington, D.C., office for his final briefing, well, that had turned out to be the day the Canadian spy scandal erupted. The Soviets had an entire network infiltrated into the Canadian Service. This was not a good thing. His Havana trip was canceled, and he had been stuck for the next three days mopping up the mess, aided by a brand new secretary who had started that morning.

If the scandal hadn’t broken that day, he’d never have known her other than the few seconds he saw her in passing as he went out of his Havana briefing. Were all relationships like this? So predicated on absolute chance? He had moved Linda from the East Coast where she’d grown up all the way over to the “other” Washington. Not even a city like Seattle, a tiny field office in his hometown in the East where remote stations had been established in the search for a theorized Soviet satellite that could launch anytime in the ensuing decade.