Locust Lane(19)

Still, she should get a move on, just in case Hannah needed to be picked up. The girl was not built to handle emergency alerts. And Michel wasn’t coming back out now that things were picking up. As the seconds dragged on, she couldn’t escape the feeling that everyone was staring at her, especially the suspicious cousin at the hostess’s podium. The table was needed. It was time to go.

She drove by the school after leaving Papillon. As expected, the place looked as placid and protected as ever. She went straight to Geoff’s office when she got home. They needed to discuss Hannah’s lie. Coupled with her meltdown in the kitchen, it suggested that something serious was going on. Alice could hear raucous music as she approached—his door was open a few inches, which was unusual. Geoff usually kept it tightly shut, whether he was in there or not. His secretiveness about his work had become obsessive. He seemed to be laboring under the delusion that either Alice or Hannah had some deep larcenous interest in neural prostheses, agonist-antagonist muscle pairs, or myoneural interfaces.

She knocked, pushing the door open further, spilling music into the hallway.

And keep your money boys made of silver and gold.

He wasn’t inside. She checked down the hall. Light leaked from beneath the bathroom door. She looked back in the office, a room she hadn’t entered in months. There were books and papers; a framed photo of Geoff poised to skydive; another taken of him at that machine-gun camp in Arkansas. And of course one of him perched atop his beloved Indian Chief motorcycle. At the center of it all, his desktop computer, with its massive screen. Indecipherable hieroglyphics covered it, a cave painting from the future. The human brain, or at least a bite-size chunk of it, mapped and tagged.

You say your pain is better than any kind of love.

The table around the screen was littered with Post-its, index cards, scribbled-upon legal pads. There was a laptop as well. It was unprotected; the music had kept it awake. After a quick look down the hall—he was still in there—she stepped inside. Another forbidden thing. She had to lean forward slightly to read what was on the laptop’s screen. It was an email from his boss at Tactilitics.

Geoff—

So it failed, big deal. Stop sulking. You need to get your butt back in here so we can get this thing up and running before Bain come a knocking.

Sid

There was motion at the edge of her vision. Geoff, standing in the doorway. He looked at her and then he looked at his laptop. There was no reason to try to explain herself. She’d been busted.

“I didn’t know you were home,” he said stonily.

“We ate early,” she said. “You got the alert from school, right?”

“I talked to Hannah. She says it’s all quiet over there.”

“Do we know what it is?” Alice asked.

“Sounds like there was a murder in town.”

“A murder? Are you serious? Anybody we know?”

He shrugged and stepped into the office. She made way for him as he put his computer to sleep. The music cut off. He turned and looked at her. The office suddenly felt as small as an elevator trapped between floors. This was as close as they’d been in a long time.

“Failed?” she asked.

“Sid’s being a drama queen.”

“Okay. But.”

“Alice, it’s fine. I got a few bugs to work out. That’s all.”

“But what’s this about Bain?”

A question too far. Geoff did not like to talk about business, especially the venture capital side of it.

“Did you need something?”

“Yeah. I wanted to talk about Hannah.”

“Okay,” he said, his voice neutral.

“She wasn’t where she was supposed to be last night.”

“She got home at midnight.”

“No, I mean before that.”

“Where was she supposed to be?”

“At Jack’s. But she wasn’t.”

“Where was she?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m not really getting the significance of all this. They’re kids. They run around. She wound up back at the mother ship.”

“But she lied about it. As did Jack. And Christopher. Which means they were doing something they don’t want the grown-ups to know about.”

“How did you find this out?”

“I had lunch with Celia.”

Geoff nodded, his face blank. This guy definitely belonged in robotics.

“So what exactly do you want me to do about it?”

“Talk to her. I mean, there’s the lie, plus she’s so upset when I see her in the mid—”

“Okay, I got it.”

Alice, who loved nothing more than to be interrupted by men, held her ground, wondering what would happen if she slapped him in the face.

“Is there something else?”

Oh, fuck it, she thought. What’s the point?

“No,” she said. “There’s nothing else.”

She was halfway out of the room when he spoke again.

“And for future reference, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t come in here and look at my stuff.”

She froze. For future reference? Was he fucking serious? What was she, the woman from Mighty Maids? She turned to face him.

“Excuse me?”