Dave checked the paper again. “Near the cabin at Dyer’s field, this says.”
“Where’s that?” Lu asked.
“I don’t have the foggiest idea.”
“Middle of the park, it sounds like from the article. So not too far from you, but not so close. Where does Ted live?”
“In the neighborhood behind the Wilder Tower.”
Lu frowned. “Which one is Ted again?”
“The gay Republican,” I said. “Wears suits all the time. Calls you Louise and always has a get-rich-quick scheme. You’d know him if you saw him.”
“Oh yes, him. With the briefcase. Always talks like he’s selling something.”
I smiled and let them chat over breakfast, thinking that the less they asked me, the better. Fewer questions, fewer awkward evasions, less worrying on the part of my guardians. A good formula all around.
While they finished eating, I went to my room and loaded up my bag. I planned to be gone for the afternoon, and I didn’t want to have to run home for anything. Going up and down the mountain can be a real pain, depending on the traffic and the time of day. It’s better to leave prepared.
“Where are you going?” Lu asked as I made for the door.
“Benny’s place. Down in Red Bank. I’m helping him with a project he’s working on. We may catch a movie later on tonight with some people, so don’t wait up or anything.”
“All right.” She tossed me my cell phone from the end table by the couch. “Call if you’re going to come home past dawn.”
I was just glad she hadn’t asked me “What project?” “Will do,” I said, adding the phone to my already-stuffed bag and forcing the zipper closed. “Does anyone need anything while I’m off the mountain?”
“No ma’am,” Dave answered, propping his feet up on the coffee table and opening the newspaper. “We’re all good.”
I was almost to the door when Lu had to throw in another question. “Are you going to get your car looked at today?”
I cringed. The Nugget ran fine, so the body work could wait. “Not today. Maybe tomorrow. More likely next Monday.”
“Is the headlight okay?”
“It’s fine. I promise I’ll get an estimate soon.”
“You let us know, so one of us can come down the mountain with you. You’ll probably have to leave it for a couple of days.”
That was another reason I was putting off the inevitable. I hated the thought of being without my own transportation. The mountain was a boring-enough place when I had a car; the thought of being stuck there with no recourse but the kindness or whims of my aunt and uncle was too much to bear.
I made my exit a hasty one, before they could delay me with more queries. I’d told Benny I’d be over at his apartment by eleven. When I got to his front door, I heard a series of sharp digital explosions that implied he was shooting zombies on his gaming console, and not sleeping late.
I rapped on the brown-painted door with the back of my hand.
He pulled the door open and used his leg to hold aside a shaggy gray kitten with big gold eyes. “You’re early,” Benny observed. “Come on in, but watch out for Tiggy. She’ll make a run for it if you’re not careful.”
Assuming that Tiggy was the four-legged thing trying to climb up my shin, I picked her up and carried her into the living room. She wiggled with glee.
“New kitten?” I asked.
“Travis’s kitten. I’m kitten-sitting for the rest of the week.”
“Fun.” I scratched the cat’s chin and she purred.
Benny nodded. “Yeah, it is, kind of. I might get one of those once Travis reclaims this one. She’s pretty good company. Slept on my head last night.”
“On your head?”
“On my head. Fell asleep facedown in my ear, purring. It was cool. I think I want one now.”
I held the fluffy little feline up and bounced her gently, trying to gauge her weight. “It’s cool when she’s this small—she weighs about as much as a can of Coke. But once she grows up, you might prefer other sleeping arrangements.”
“Maybe,” he conceded. He reached down with one bare toe and turned the video game system off, then walked across the room to a dining nook that was occupied by a beat-up desk and a bookcase. With a sweep of his hand he indicated a sprawling setup of computer and electronics equipment. “You want to hear what we got at the battlefield?”
“Hell yes, I do.” But the haphazard amalgam of boxes, wires, and plugs made me wonder. “Are you going to play it on this? What is all this?”
He tweaked the corner of his glasses and sat down on what looked like an orphaned piano stool. “What did you think I was going to play it on?”
“I don’t know…the tape recorder?”
“Sure, I did that first. But it’s hard to make out what’s going on. This,” he said, cocking his head at the monitor, “is FrankenHal.”
“FrankenHal?”
“FrankenHal. ‘Hal’ for the computer in the movie—you know, ‘Open the pod bay doors, Hal.’ And ‘Franken’ for ‘Frankenstein,’ because this system is basically a highlights version of four other computers that I gutted and raided. It’s a lot more powerful than it looks. Don’t let the case from 1995 fool you. Early Bill Gates Beige is just a color. Many wonders lurk within.”
“Many wonders?”
“A fast-as-hell processor. Shit-tons of memory. A hard drive that could crack nuts. And best of all, for our purposes, some very expensive audio editing software that I did not pay for.”
“Ah. And the rest of this stuff—over here on the bookcase?”
“External drives. A CD burner. Extra parts. And that thing on the end that looks like a little hot plate is a mug-warmer my grandmother gave me for Christmas. So that’s not part of FrankenHal.”
I peeked into the mug that sat on the unplugged plate. “So this isn’t FrankenHal’s penicillin experiment?”
“Probably not.”
Benny jammed his thumb hard into a button. With a few awakening beeps, a promising bright line of jittering life, and the hum of cooling fans spinning into action, FrankenHal was in service. Benny picked a plain silver disc up off the edge of the bookcase and inserted it into an outstretched tray.
“I saved these as .wav files. We got several really good sound bites, and a bunch of lesser-quality ones, too. Maybe you can make some sense out of them. I cleaned them up as much as I could, but it still sounds like shouted Greek to me.”
“Shouted?”
He nodded, and the disc began to whir. “They’re shouting, trying to make us hear them. It’s wild. Next time we’ll know, though. We can tell them to speak more quietly so we can understand them. A lot of the more unclear bits sound like somebody screaming into a bucket.”
“Are they really that bad?”
“Sometimes, it sounds like the bucket is underwater.”
“Ah.”
Tiggy writhed out of the light hug in which I held her and squirmed her way to the floor so she could sit next to Benny. He patted the top of her head with one hand while he worked his mouse with the other.
Before long, he had all the right programs running and a black rectangular box in the center of the screen. “Pull up a chair,” he suggested.
I grabbed the nearest stray from the dining set and pulled it close. “Dazzle me,” I dared him.
“All right, I will. This first one is one of the best. At the beginning of the clip, you’ll hear Jamie asking, ‘Why would Green Eyes leave?’ And then someone tries to answer him. I’m not going to tell you what I think it said—I don’t want to lead you into drawing the same conclusions I did.”
“Fair enough. I’m ready. Hit ‘play.’”
He reached out and turned up the volume on a pair of speakers that loosely flanked the monitor. Then he clicked the mouse, and a bar at the bottom of the rectangle began to move in step with the clip.
“Why would Green Eyes leave?” That was Jamie’s voice, clear as day and very loud through the cranked-up speakers.
Bargainwasup.
“Whoa.” I leaned forward. The words were faint and fast, but firm, like they were being shouted from a great distance away. “Play that again.”
Bargainwasup.
A human voice, very far off. I remembered, though—the ghost had stood immediately in front of me.
Benny clicked the button again. Bargainwasup.
“What does that sound like to you?”
I picked up the kitten and moved her aside so I could scoot my chair closer. “It sounds like, ‘Bargain was up.’ The bargain was up. There was some kind of bargain? Is that what you hear, too?”
“Yeah, it is.” He was getting excited now. “So we agree on that one. Okay. This is another of the good ones. This is right after you told me to remember the recorder, because I’d let it fall down at my side. You said we had two more visitors. I held it up again. This is what it caught.”
Behindinthefield.
“Behind in the field,” I said quickly. I understood this one more clearly than the first. More of a frantic whisper, these four words might have been hissed directly into the microphone.
“Not the world’s most helpful message, though.”
“Or the most grammatical,” Benny agreed. “Behind in the field. I don’t get it. Behind what?”
“And in which field?” I added. “The whole place is made up of fields.”
“There are a lot of woods, too.”
“Well, yeah. That’s true. Still, that leaves about half the park.”
“We should get a list.”
“Where would we do that?”
Benny made a few clicks and drags, and another file readied itself. “At the visitors’ center, I bet. They’ve got a million pamphlets and brochures. We should go out there during the day—”