Текст книги "Thr3e"

Автор книги: Тед Деккер

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

2

WITHIN THIRTY MINUTES the crime scene was isolated and a full investigation launched, all in the purview of one Detective Paul Milton. The man was well built and walked like a gunslinger—a Schwarzenegger wannabe with a perpetual frown and blond bangs that covered his forehead. Kevin rarely found others intimidating, but Milton did nothing to calm his already shattered nerves.

Someone had just tried to kill him. Someone named Slater, who seemed to know quite a lot about him. A madman who had the forethought and malice to plant a bomb and then remotely detonate the device when his demands weren’t met. The scene stood before Kevin like an abstract painting come to life.

Yellow tape marked a forty-yard perimeter, and within it several uniformed police officers gathered pieces of wreckage, labeled them with evidence tags, and stacked them in neat piles on a flatbed truck to be transported downtown. The crowd had grown to well over a hundred. Bewilderment was fixed on some faces; other spectators wildly gestured their version of the events. The only injury reported was a small cut on a teenage boy’s right arm. As it turned out, one of the cars Kevin had clipped in his mad dash across the street was none other than the impatient Mercedes. Once the driver learned he’d been following a car bomb, however, his attitude improved significantly. Traffic on Long Beach Boulevard still suffered from curiosity, but the debris had been cleared.

Three news vans were in the lot. If Kevin understood the situation correctly, his face and what was left of his car were being televised live throughout the Los Angeles Basin. A news helicopter hovered overhead.

A forensic scientist worked carefully over the twisted remains of the trunk, where the bomb had clearly resided. Another detective dusted for prints on what was left of the doors.

Kevin had spilled his story to Milton and now waited to be taken down to the station. By the way Milton glared at him, Kevin was sure the detective considered him a suspect. A simple examination of the evidence would clear his name, but one minor fact haunted him. His account of events omitted Slater’s demand that he confess some sin.

What sin?The last thing he needed was for the police to begin digging into his past for some sin. Sin wasn’t the point. The point was that Slater had given him a riddle and told him that phoning the newspaper with the riddle’s answer would prevent Kevin from being blown sky-high. That’s what he’d told them.

On the other hand, willfully withholding information in an investigation was a crime itself, wasn’t it?

Dear God, someone just blew up my car!The fact sat like an absurd little lump on the edge of Kevin’s mind. The front edge. He smoothed his hair nervously.

Kevin sat on a chair provided by one of the cops, tapping his right foot on the grass. Milton kept glancing at him as he debriefed the other investigators and took statements from witnesses. Kevin looked back at the car where the forensic team worked. What they could possibly learn from that wreckage escaped him. He stood unsteadily, took a deep breath, and walked down the slope toward the car.

The forensic scientist at the trunk was a woman. Black, petite, maybe Jamaican. She looked up and lifted an eyebrow. Pretty smile. But the smile didn’t alter the scene behind her.

It was hard to believe that the twisted pile of smoldering metal and plastic had been his car.

“Whoever did this had one heck of a chip on his shoulder,” she said. A badge on her shirt said she was Nancy Sterling. She looked back into what was left of the trunk and dusted the inside lip.

Kevin cleared his throat. “Can you tell me what kind of bomb it was?”

“Do you know bombs?” she asked.

“No. I know there’s dynamite and C-4. That’s about it.”

“We’ll know for sure back at the lab, but it looks like dynamite. Leaves no chemical signature that ties it to a specific batch once it’s been detonated.”

“Do you know how he set it off?”

“Not yet. Remote detonation, a timer, or both, but there’s not too much left to go on. We’ll eventually get it. We always do. Just be glad you got out.”

“Boy, no kidding.”

He watched her place tape over a dusted fingerprint, lift it, and seal the faint print on a card. She made a few notations on the card and went back to work with her flashlight.

“The only prints we’ve found so far are in places where we would expect to find yours.” She shrugged. “Guy like this isn’t stupid enough not to wear gloves, but you never know. Even the smartest make mistakes eventually.”

“Well, I hope he made one. This whole thing’s crazy.”

“They usually are.” She gave him a friendly smile. “You okay?”

“I’m alive. Hopefully I don’t hear from him again.” His voice shook as he spoke.

Nancy straightened and looked him in the eye. “If it’s any consolation, if this was me, I’d be in a pool of tears on the sidewalk. We’ll get this one, like I said; we always do. If he really wanted to kill you, you’d be dead. This guy’s meticulous and calculating. He wants you alive. That’s my take, for what it’s worth.”

She glanced up to where Detective Milton was talking to a reporter. “And don’t let Milton get to you. He’s a good cop. Full of himself, maybe. Case like this will send him through the roof.”

“Why’s that?”

“Publicity. Let’s just say he has his aspirations.” She smiled. “Don’t worry. Like I said, he’s a good detective.”

As if on cue, Milton turned from the camera and walked straight for them.

“Let’s go, cowboy. How long you here for, Nancy?”

“I have what I need.”

“Preliminary findings?”

“I’ll have them for you in half an hour.”

“I need them now. I’m taking Mr. Parson in for a few questions.”

“I’m not ready now. Half an hour, on your desk.”

They held stares.

Milton snapped his fingers at Kevin. “Let’s go.” He headed for a late-model Buick on the street.

The station’s air conditioner was under repair. After two hours in a stuffy conference room, Kevin’s nerves finally began to lose the tremble brought on by the bomb.

An officer had fingerprinted him for comparisons with the prints lifted from the Sable, then Milton spent half an hour reviewing his story before abruptly leaving him alone. The ensuing twenty minutes of solitude gave Kevin plenty of time to rehash Slater’s call while staring at a large brown smudge on the wall. But in the end he could make no more sense of the call than when it had initially come, which only made the whole mess more disturbing.

He shifted in his seat and tapped the floor with his foot. He’d spent his whole life not knowing, but this vulnerability was somehow different. A man named Slater had mistaken him for someone else and very nearly killed him. Hadn’t he suffered enough in his life? Now he’d fallen into this, whatever thiswas. He was under the authorities’ microscope. They would try to dig into his past. Try to understand it. But even Kevin didn’t understand his past. He wasn’t about to let them try.

The door banged open and Milton walked in.

Kevin cleared his throat. “Anything?”

Milton straddled a backward chair, slapped a folder down on the table, and drilled Kevin with his dark eyes. “You tell me.”

“What do you mean?”

Milton blinked twice and ignored the question. “The FBI’s bringing someone in on this. ATF wants a look, CBI, state police—the lot of them. But as far as I’m concerned, this is still my jurisdiction. Just because terrorists favor bombs doesn’t mean every bomb that goes off is the work of terrorists.”

“They think this is a terrorist?”

“I didn’t say that. But Washington sees terrorists behind every tree these days, so they will definitely go on the hunt. It wouldn’t surprise me to see the CIA picking through the files.” Milton eyed him, unblinking, for a few long seconds, and then blinked three times in rapid succession. “What we have here is one sick puppy. What confuses me is why he picked you. Doesn’t make sense.”

“None of this makes sense.”

Milton opened the file. “It’ll take a couple days for the lab to complete their work on what little we found, but we have some preliminary findings, the most significant of which is nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing? A bomb about blew me to pieces!”

“No evidence of real investigative value. Let me summarize for you—maybe it’ll shake something loose in that mind of yours.” He eyed Kevin again.

“We have a man with a low, raspy voice who calls himself Richard Slater and who knows you well enough to target you. You, on the other hand, have no idea who he could possibly be.” Milton paused for effect. “He constructs a bomb using common electronics available at any Radio Shack and dynamite, rendering the bomb virtually untraceable. Smart. He then plants that bomb in the trunk of your car. He calls you, knowing that you’re in the car, and threatens to blow the car in three minutes if you can’t solve a riddle. What falls but never breaks? What breaks but never falls?Right so far?”

“Sounds right.”

“Due to some fast thinking and some fancy driving, you manage to drive the car to a relatively safe location and escape. As promised, the car blows up when you fail to solve the riddle and phone it in to the newspaper.”

“That’s right.”

“Preliminary forensics tell us that whoever planted that bomb left no fingerprints. No surprises there—this guy’s obviously not the village idiot. The explosion could have caused significant collateral damage. If you’d been on the street when it blew, we’d have some bodies at the morgue. That’s enough to assume this guy’s either pretty teed off or a raving lunatic, probably both. So we have smart and we have teed off. Follow?”

“Makes sense.”

“What we’re missing is the most obvious link in any case like this. Motivation. Without motivation, we’ve got squat. You have no idea whatsoever why anyone would want to harm you in any way? You have no enemies from the past, no recent threats against your well-being, no reason whatsoever to suspect why anyone on this earth might want to hurt you in any way?”

“He didn’t try to hurt me. If he wanted to kill me, he could’ve just blown up the bomb.”

“Exactly. So we’re not only clueless as to why someone named Slater might wantto blow up your car, we don’t even know why he did. What did he accomplish?”

“He scared me.”

“You don’t scare someone by nuking their neighborhood. But okay, say he just wanted to scare you—we still don’t have motivation. Who might want to scare you? Why? But you don’t have a clue, right? Nothing you’ve ever done would give anyone any reason to hold anything against you.”

“I—not that I know of. You want me to just make something up? I told you, I really don’t know.”

“You’re leaving us high and dry, Kevin. High and dry.”

“What about the phone call?” Kevin asked. “Isn’t there a way to track it?”

“No. We can only track a call while it’s being made. What’s left of your cell is nothing more than a lump of plastic in an evidence bag anyway. If we’re lucky, we’ll have a shot next time.” He closed the file folder. “You do know there’ll be a next time, don’t you?”

“Not necessarily.” Actually, the thought had plagued him, but he refused to give it any serious consideration. Freak occurrences like this happened to people now and then; he could accept that. But a deliberate, drawn-out plot against him was unfathomable.

“There will be,” Milton said. “This guy went to great lengths to pull this trick. He’s after something, and we have to assume he didn’t get it. Unless this was random or some kind of hellacious mistake, he’ll try again.”

“Maybe he mistook me for someone else.”

“Not a chance. He’s too methodical. He staked you out, wired the car, knew your moves, and blew it with careful deliberation.”

True enough. Slater knew more than even the police knew. “He scared me. Maybe that’s all he wanted.”

“Maybe. I’m open to anything at this point.” Milton paused. “You’re sure there’s nothing else you want to tell me? We don’t have much on you. Never been married, no record, college grad, currently enrolled in seminary. Not the kind of person you’d expect to be involved in a crime of this nature.”

Slater’s demand crossed his mind.

“If I think of anything else, trust me, you’ll be the first to know,” Kevin said.

“Then you’re free to go. I’ve put in an order to tap your phones as soon as we can clear the red tape—the boys should be out first thing tomorrow morning. I may also place a black and white outside your house in Signal Hill, but I doubt we’re dealing with anyone who would approach your house.”

“Tap my phones?” They were going to dig, weren’t they? But what was he afraid of, as long as they didn’t start prying about his past?

“With your permission, of course. You have any other cell phones?”

“No.”

“If this guy makes contact in any other way, I want to hear about it immediately, you understand?”

“Of course.”

“And pardon my insensitivity, but this isn’t just about you anymore.” His eyes twinkled. “We have reporters all over the place and they want an explanation. You might have some media attention. Don’t talk to them. Don’t even look at them. Stay focused, capice?”

“I’m the victim here, right? Why do I get the feeling I’m the one under investigation?”

Milton placed both of his palms on the table. The air conditioning kicked in above them. “Because you are. We have a monster out there and that monster has chosen you. We need to know why. That means we need to know more about you. We have to establish motivation. That’s the way it works.”

Kevin nodded. Actually, it made perfect sense.

“You’re free to go.” The detective handed him a card. “Call me. Use the cell number on the back.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Do you always stare people down while you’re talking to them, or are you hiding something?”

Kevin hesitated. “Has it ever occurred to you that you have a tendency to terrify your witnesses, Detective?”

The man did one of his flash-blink routines—four this time. Paul Milton might have political aspirations, but unless the people decided to turn the country over to vampires, Kevin didn’t think the detective had a chance.

Milton stood and walked out.

3

Friday

Afternoon

A FRIENDLY COP NAMED STEVE ushered Kevin out the back and took him to the Hertz rental-car agency. Twenty minutes later Kevin held the keys to a Ford Taurus, nearly identical to the Sable that was no more.

“You’re sure you’re okay to drive?” Steve asked.

“I can drive.”

“Okay. I’ll follow you home.”

“Thanks.”

The home was an old two-story that Kevin had purchased five years earlier, when he was twenty-three, using some of the money from a trust fund established by his parents before the car accident. A drunk driver had slammed into Ruth and Mark Little’s car when Kevin was only one—their deaths had reportedly been immediate. Their only son, Kevin, had been with a baby-sitter. The insurance settlement went to Ruth’s sister, Balinda Parson, who received full custody of Kevin and subsequently adopted him. With a few strokes of a judge’s pen, Kevin ceased being a Little and became instead a Parson. He had no memories of his real parents, no brothers or sisters, no possessions that he knew of. Only a trust account beyond anyone’s reach until he turned eighteen, much to Aunt Balinda’s chagrin.

As it turned out, he had no need to touch the money until he turned twenty-three, and by that time it had grown into a sum in excess of three hundred thousand dollars—a small gift to help him build a new life once he got around to discovering he needed one. He’d called Balinda “Mother” until then. Now he called her his aunt. That’s all she was, thank God. Aunt Balinda.

Kevin pulled into the garage and stepped out of the Taurus. He waved as the cop drove by, then closed the garage door. The timed light slowly faded. He stepped into the laundry room, glanced at a full hamper, and made a mental note to finish his laundry before he went to bed. If there was one thing he hated, it was disorder. Disorder was the enemy of understanding, and he’d lived long enough without understanding. How meticulous and organized did a chemist have to be in order to understand DNA? How organized had NASA been in reaching out to understand the moon? One mistake and boom.

Mounds of dirty clothes reeked of disorder.

Kevin walked into the kitchen and set the keys on the counter. Someone just blew up your car and you’re thinking about doing laundry. Well, what was he supposed to do? Crawl into the corner and hide? He’d just escaped death—he should be throwing a party. Let’s toast life, comrades. We have faced the enemy and we have survived the bomb blast down by the Wal-Mart.

Please, get a grip. You’re babbling like a fool here.Still, in light of the past several hours, it was a blessing to be alive, and gratefulness was warranted. Great is thy faithfulness. Yes indeed, what a blessing we have received. Long live Kevin.

He stared past the breakfast nook with its round oak dinette, through the picture window that overlooked the front yard. An oil pump sat dormant on a dirt hill beyond the street. This was his view. It’s what two hundred thousand dollars bought you these days.

On the other hand, there was that hill. Kevin blinked. With a pair of binoculars, anyone with a mind to could park himself at the base of that oil pump and watch Kevin Parson organize his laundry in complete anonymity.

The trembles were suddenly back. Kevin rushed over to the window and quickly lowered the miniblinds. He spun around and scanned the main floor. Besides the kitchen and laundry room, there was the living room, the bathroom, and sliding glass doors, which led to a small lawn encircled by a white picket fence. The bedrooms were upstairs. From this angle he could see right through the living room into the backyard. For all he knew, Slater could have been watching him for months!

No. That was stupid. Slater knew of him, maybe something from his past—a demented motorist he’d hacked off on the highway. Maybe even—

No, it couldn’t be that. He was just a kid then.

Kevin wiped his forehead with his arm and stepped into the living room. A large leather sofa and a recliner faced a forty-two-inch flat-screen television. What if Slater had actually been inhere?

He scanned the room. Everything was in its place, the coffee table dusted, the carpet vacuumed, the magazines in their rack beside the recliner. Order. His Introduction to Philosophytext sat on the dinette beside him. Large two-by-three-foot travel posters covered the walls in a hopscotch arrangement. Sixteen in all, counting the ones upstairs. Istanbul, Paris, Rio, the Caribbean, a dozen others. An unknowing person might think he ran a travel agency, but to Kevin the images were simply gateways to the real world, places he would one day visit to broaden his horizon.

To expand his understanding.

Even if Slater had been here, there would be no way to tell, short of dusting for prints. Maybe Milton should send out a team.

Easy, boy. This is an isolated incident, not a full-scale invasion. No need to tear the house down yet.

Kevin paced to the couch and then back. He picked up the remote control and turned on the television. He preferred to spin through the channels on the huge Sony picture tube rather than settle on any particular channel for long. The TV was yet another window into life—a wonderful montage of the world in all of its beauty and ugliness. Didn’t matter; it was real.

He flipped the channels, one every other second or so. Football, a cooking show, a woman in a brown dress showing how to plant geraniums, a Vidal Sassoon commercial, Bugs Bunny. He paused on Bugs. I say, what’s up, doc?Bugs Bunny had more truth to speak about life than the humans on the tube. “If you stay in the hole too long, it becomes your tomb.” Wasn’t that the truth. That was Balinda’s problem—she was still in the hole. He flipped the station. The news . . .

The news. He stared at the aerial images, fascinated by the surreal shots of the smoldering car. His car. “Wow,” he mumbled. “That’s me.” He shook his head in disbelief and ruffled his hair. “That’s really me. I survived that.”

What falls but never breaks? What breaks but never falls?He will call again. You do know that, don’t you?

Kevin clicked the tube off. A psychobabblist once told him that his mind was unusual. He’d tested with an IQ in the top one percentile—no problems there. In fact, if there was a problem—and Dr. Swanlist the psychobabblist certainly didn’t think there was a problem at all—it was that his mind still processed information at a rate normally found in others during their formative years. Age normally slowed down the synapses, which explained why old folks could be downright scary behind the wheel. Kevin tended to view the world through the eyes of an adult with the innocence of a child. Which was really psychobabble for nothing of any practical value, regardless of how excited Dr. Swanlist got.

He looked at the stairs. What if Slater had gone up there?

He walked to the stairs and took them two at a time. One master bedroom on the left, one guest bedroom that he used as an office to his right, and one bathroom between the two. He headed for the guest bedroom, flipped on the light switch, and poked his head in. A desk with a computer, a chair, and several bookcases, one with a dozen textbooks and the rest heavy with over two hundred novels. He’d discovered the miracles of stories in his early teens, and ultimately they had set him free. There was no better way to understand life than to live it—if not through your own life, then through another’s. There was once a man who owned a field. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Not to read was to turn your back on the wisest minds.

Kevin scanned the fiction titles. Koontz, King, Shakespeare, Card, Stevenson, Powers—an eclectic collection. He’d read the books eagerly in his recent renaissance. To say Aunt Balinda didn’t approve of novels was like saying the ocean is wet. She would feel no better about his philosophy and theology textbooks.

The travel posters in this room boasted of Ethiopia, Egypt, South Africa, and Morocco. Brown, brown, green, brown. That was it.

He closed the door and walked into the bathroom. Nothing. The man in the mirror had brown hair and blue eyes. Gray in bad light. Somewhat attractive if he was any judge, but generally average looking. Not the kind of person stalked by a psychopath.He grunted and hurried to his room.

The bed was made, the dresser drawers closed, the shade open. All in order. You see, you’ve been hearing ghosts.

Kevin sighed and peeled off his dress shirt and slacks. Thirty seconds later he’d changed into a pale blue T-shirt and jeans. He had to get back to a semblance of normalcy here. He tossed the dress shirt into the laundry bin, hung up his trousers, and headed for the door.

A flash of color on the nightstand caught his eye. Pink. A pink ribbon peeked out from behind the lamp.

Kevin’s heart responded before his mind did, pounding into overdrive. He walked forward and stared at the thin pink hair ribbon. He’d seen it before. He could swear he’d seen this ribbon. A long time ago. Samantha had given him one exactly like it once, and it had gone missing years ago.

He spun around. Had Sam heard about the incident and driven down from Sacramento? She’d phoned recently but hadn’t mentioned coming to visit him. The last time he’d seen his childhood friend was when she’d left for college at age eighteen, ten years earlier. She’d spent the last few years in New York working in law enforcement and had recently moved to Sacramento for employment with the California Bureau of Investigation.

But this ribbon was hers!

“Samantha?” His voice echoed softly in the room.

Silence. Of course—he’d already checked the place. Unless . . .

He snatched up the ribbon, ran for the stairs, and descended them in three long strides. “Samantha!”

It took Kevin exactly twenty seconds to search the house and rule out the possibility that his long-lost friend had paid him a visit and was hiding like they had as children. Unless she had come, left the ribbon, and then departed, intending to call him later. Would she do that? Under any other circumstance it would be a wonderful surprise.

Kevin stood in the kitchen, perplexed. If she’d left the ribbon, she would have left a message, a note, a phone call, something.

But there was no note. His black VTech phone sat on the kitchen counter. Number of messages: a big red “0.”

What if Slater had left the ribbon? He should call Milton. Kevin ran a hand through his hair. Milton would want to know about the ribbon, which meant telling him about Samantha, which meant opening up the past. He couldn’t open up the past, not after running from it for so long.

The silence felt thick.

Kevin looked at the pink ribbon trembling slightly in his hand and sat slowly at the dinette. The past. So long ago. He closed his eyes.

Kevin was ten years old when he first saw the pretty girl from down the street. That was a year before they met the boy who wanted to kill them.

Meeting Sam two days after his birthday was his best present. Ever. His brother, Bob, who was really his cousin, had given him a yo-yo, which he really did like, but not as much as meeting Samantha. He would never tell Bob that, of course. In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d tell Bob about Samantha at all. It was his secret. Bob might be eight years older than Kevin, but he was a bit slow—he’d never catch on.

The moon was full that night, and Kevin was in bed by seven o’clock. He always went to bed early. Sometimes before supper. But tonight he’d been under the covers for what seemed like an hour, and he couldn’t sleep. He thought maybe it was too bright with the moonlight coming through the white shade. He liked it dark when he slept. Pitch-dark, so he couldn’t even see his hand when he put it an inch from his nose.

Maybe if he put some newspapers or his blanket over the window, it would be dark enough.

He climbed out of bed, pulled off the gray wool blanket, and hefted it up to hook over the rod. Wow, it was really bright out there. He glanced back at his bedroom door. Mother was in bed.

The shade hung from a spring-loaded roll at the top, a smudged sheet of canvas that covered the small window most of the time. There was nothing to look out at but the backyard anyway. Kevin lowered the blanket and lifted the bottom edge of the shade.

A dull glow shone over the ashes in the backyard. He could see the doghouse on the left, like it was day. He could even see each board in the old fence that ran around the house. Kevin lifted his eyes to the sky. A bright moon that glowed like a light bulb smiled down at him and he smiled back. Wow!

He started to lower the shade when something else caught his eye. A bump on one of the fence boards. He blinked and looked at it. No, not a bump! A—

Kevin dropped the shade. Someone was out there, staring back at him!

He scrambled off his bed and backed to the wall. Who would be staring at him in the middle of the night? Who would be staring at him period? It was a kid, wasn’t it? One of the neighborhood boys or girls.

Maybe he just thought he saw someone. He waited a few minutes, lots of time for whoever it was to move on, and then he worked up the courage for just one more peek.

This time he barely lifted the shade so that he could just see over the sill. She was still there! Kevin thought his chest might explode from the fright, but he kept looking. She couldn’t see him now; the shade was too low. It was a girl; he could see that much. A young girl, maybe his age, with long blonde hair and a face that would have to be pretty, he thought, although he couldn’t really see any details of her face.

And then she dropped from sight and disappeared.

Kevin could hardly sleep. The next night, Kevin couldn’t resist peeking out, but the girl was gone. Gone for good.

He thought.

Three days later he was in bed again, and this time he knew he had been lying awake for at least an hour without being able to sleep. Mother had made him take a very, very long nap that afternoon and he just wasn’t tired. The moon wasn’t as bright tonight but he had covered up the window to make it darker anyway. After a long time he decided that he might be better off with more light. Maybe if he could trick his mind into thinking it was the next morning already, it would be tired after not sleeping all night.

He stood, tore off the wool blanket, and sent the shade flying up with a flip of his wrist.

A small, round face had its nose against the window. Kevin jumped back and rolled off the bed, terrified. He scrambled to his feet. She was there! Here! At his window! The girl from the other night was right here, spying on him.

Kevin almost screamed. The girl was smiling. She lifted a hand and waved as if she recognized him and had just stopped by to say hi.

He glanced at the door. Hopefully Mother hadn’t heard. He turned back to the girl in the window. She was mouthing something to him now, motioning for him to do something.

He could only stand there and stare, frozen.

She was motioning for him to lift the window! No way! And he couldn’t anyway; it was screwed shut.

She didn’t look frightening, really. In fact, she was actually very nice looking. Her face was pretty and her hair was long. Why was he so scared of her? Maybe he shouldn’t be. Her face was so . . . kind.

Kevin glanced again at the door and then slid back onto the end of his bed. She waved again, and this time he waved back. She was pointing at the window sill, motioning again. He followed her hands and suddenly understood. She was telling him to unscrew the window! He looked at the single screw that fastened the sash in place and for the first time realized that he could take it out. All he had to do was find something to turn the screw with. Something like a penny. He had some of those.

Suddenly energized by the idea, Kevin grabbed one of the pennies from an old tin can on his floor and placed it in the screw. It came loose. He unwound it until it was out.

The girl jumped up and down and motioned for him to lift the window. Kevin gave his bedroom door one last look and then yanked on the window. It flew up silently. He knelt on his bed, face to face with the girl.