Sleepwalk (36 page)

Hodges, though, understood immediately, and grasped his shoulder reassuringly. “It’s hard,” he said. “How’s that girlfriend of his doing? The teacher.”

“Okay,” Jed replied. Then he gazed directly at Hodges. “I didn’t really come down here about Dad,” he said. “What I need to do is get a job.”

Hodges looked at him in surprise, then repressed his automatic urge to ask Jed if he’d talked to his father about going to work. He nodded firmly. “Well, as you know, we’ve been laying men off all week, but I think maybe we can make an exception in your case. I mean, given the circumstances,” he added, sounding flustered.

Waving to Jed to follow him, he returned to his desk, pulled a form from the bottom drawer and handed it to the boy. “You might start filling this out,” he said. “Let me just call upstairs.” He punched three digits into the phone on his desk, then waited.

“Mr. Kendall?” he said a moment later. “Charlie Hodges, downstairs. I have someone here looking for work.” He was silent for a moment, nodding a couple of times as the other man spoke. “I know that,” he said after Kendall had finished speaking. “But I think this may be a special case. It’s Frank Arnold’s boy—Jed.” He listened again, then winked at Jed, and after a moment hung up. “Just as I thought,” he said. “One thing around
here hasn’t changed this week. The company is still doing its best to look after its people.”

Jed looked up from the application form he was filling out, his lips twisted in a wry grin. “How about the guys who are getting laid off?” he asked.

Hodges shrugged. “It’s only temporary,” he said. But as he read the doubt in Jed’s eyes, he added, “Look, I know what your father thought about what’s happened, but he’s wrong. UniChem has big plans for this company. Within two years the refinery is going to be twice the size it is now, and there are plans to build a factory, as well.”

“A factory?” Jed echoed. “Come on, Mr. Hodges. What kind of factory would they build out here?”

Hodges shrugged. “All I know is it’s some kind of real high-tech deal. They’re talking about new kinds of fusion, and that kind of thing. Three years from now there are going to be more jobs out here than we can fill.”

The application form completed, Jed pushed it across the desk. Could what Hodges had just said really be true? Had his father been wrong? But then an image of his father flashed into his mind, followed by another, this time of Gina Alvarez.

His father, he decided, had not been wrong, but nothing in Jed’s expression revealed his doubts as he faced the personnel director. “Sounds great,” he said. “Maybe I’m getting in on the ground floor of something terrific.”

Hodges’s head bobbed enthusiastically, and he handed Jed a card. “Take this over to the hospital. Then report to Bill Watkins tomorrow morning, up at the dam.”

Half an hour later, at the small hospital on the edge
of Borrego, Jed sat uneasily facing Dr. Banning for the second time that day. This time, instead of studying Frank Arnold’s tests, the doctor was looking at Jed’s own. Jed had already produced a urine sample, and the nurse had taken a blood sample as well. Jed had felt uneasy as the needle had slipped into his vein, and had had to fight down an urge to jerk away from the instrument in the nurse’s hand.

“Well, I guess that’s it,” Banning told him at last. “We’ve got all the specimens we need, and you don’t seem to have any problems at all. And according to your records at school, you got your flu shot last week, so I guess we’re covered.”

Almost automatically, Jed opened his mouth to correct the error in his school records, but then quickly shut it again. If they thought he’d already had his shot, he certainly wasn’t about to tell them otherwise. “Then that’s it?” he asked, standing up.

Banning smiled. “That’s it. Not too bad, was it?”

Jed shrugged, said good-bye, and hurried out of the hospital into the warmth of the late afternoon. As he started home, he felt a twinge of uneasy excitement.

The answers to all his questions were somewhere within the company he now worked for.

And somehow he would find out what those answers were.

The man in the dark blue Chevy parked across the street from Frank Arnold’s house slouched low in the passenger seat as the glare of headlights swept his windshield. He hated having to sit by himself in a car in the middle of a residential neighborhood; he always had the feeling that eyes were watching him from every home. But his instructions had been explicit—as long as there was a light on in the Arnold house, he was to remain posted where he was, and he wasn’t to leave for at least an hour after the last light in the house went off. Well, maybe the teacher and the kid were the kind who went to bed early.

The source of the headlights turned out to be the same pickup truck with the broken windshield that had left half an hour earlier, and the man in the car relaxed as he saw Jed Arnold, now accompanied by a girl he was sure must be Gina Alvarez, get out of the truck and disappear through the front door. When they were safely inside, he left his car and strolled up the street, glancing into the window of the house as he passed it.
The two kids were talking to the Sheffield woman, but it didn’t look like any big deal—they just seemed to be chatting. He wandered on up the street, crossed, then walked back along the other side until he was even with his car. Glancing around, still with the uneasy sense that he was being watched from every window on the block, he got back in his car and decided it was time to ignore his orders.

He turned on the engine and drove away. From now on, he would keep an eye on the house from a distance, driving by every half hour or so. But in a dumpy little town like Borrego, he didn’t really think there was much likelihood that the Sheffield woman would be going anywhere that night.

The three of them were sitting in the small living room, Jed and Gina side by side on the sofa, Judith in Frank’s big easy chair. Almost half an hour had gone by since Jed had brought Gina into the house, and as the minutes had ticked away, Judith had become more and more frightened.

Everything about Gina seemed to have changed Gone were her expressive voice and animated gestures.

Her eyes, always sparkling with interest in everything around her, had lost their luster, as well as their movement. Her gaze seemed to fasten on objects from time to time, but Judith had a strange feeling that Gina wasn’t truly seeing whatever she was looking at. It was as if her whole mind had simply gone into neutral. For the most part she sat silently next to Jed, answering questions only when they were directed specifically to her, seeming lost in some private world of her own.

Except Judith had the eerie feeling that there was nothing whatsoever in that world. The girl seemed to be existing in a void.

“Gina,” Judith said, leaning forward in her chair, her voice rising, as if she were speaking to a deaf person. “I want you to tell me if anything happened Saturday night. Anything strange, or out of the ordinary.”

Gina shook her head.

But what if she doesn’t think whatever happened was strange? Judith suddenly thought.

“All right, let’s try it another way. What time did you go to bed?”

Gina frowned. “About ten o’clock, I guess.”

Judith nodded encouragingly. “All right. Now, did you go right to sleep or did you read for a while? Maybe listen to the radio?”

“I read,” Gina said. “I was trying to read
The Deerslayer
, but I couldn’t concentrate on it. And I fell asleep.”

“Okay,” Judith said. “And did you sleep all night?”

“No. I woke up when the fire truck went by, and I went to look out the window. Then I tried to read some more.”

She fell silent again, and Judith began to feel like an inquisitor, painfully dragging information out of a subject, bit by bit. “How much longer did you read?”

Gina shrugged. “Not much. I kept sort of drifting off.”

“But you didn’t actually go back to sleep?”

There was a silence while Gina seemed to think. “No,” she said finally. “That’s when I started to smell something.”

Judith cocked her head. “Smell something? Like what?”

“I—I’m not sure,” Gina stammered. Then: “It smelled bad. Like garbage.”

“And it woke you up?”

Gina nodded. Her nose screwed up as she remembered the odor. “It was really bad.”

In her mind Judith heard an echo of Reba Tucker’s voice, barely audible, croaking out words one by one: “Smells … bad. See things … bad.”

“Gina,” Judith said, her voice quavering, “I want you to think very carefully. When the smell came, did you see anything? Anything at all?”

Gina’s eyes narrowed and her brows furrowed as she concentrated. Finally she nodded. “There were colors,” she said. “And something else. There were things around me. I couldn’t quite see them, but they were there.”

Judith felt her heart beating faster. “All right. Anything else? Did you
feel
anything?”

Gina thought again, then slowly nodded. “Something funny. It was one of those spasms, you know? Like when you’re just about to go to sleep, and your whole body jerks?”

Judith nodded. “That happened Saturday night too?”

“Just as I was going back to sleep. But it was funny. Usually when that happens to me, I’m wide awake again. But Saturday, after it happened, I just felt real relaxed and went right to sleep.”

“Okay,” Judith told her. “That’s very good, Gina. And yesterday and this morning, you woke up feeling fine. Is that right?”

Gina nodded.

“Now, I want you to think once more, Gina. I want you to try to remember what time all this happened. We
know it was after you heard the fire truck, which was around eleven-thirty.”

“Well, it had to have happened before twelve-thirty, because that’s what time Mom gets home. And it seemed like I tried to read for about half an hour after I heard the sirens.”

Judith’s whole body tensed.

Midnight.

Whatever had happened to Gina Saturday night had happened at the same time that Frank had had his stroke the night before.

And Reba Tucker had had her seizure.

An hour later, when Jed came back to the house after driving Gina home, he found Judith sitting pensively at the kitchen table, staring at a piece of paper. Jed slid into the chair opposite her, then turned the sheet around to look at it.

It was a list of names, starting with his father’s and Reba Tucker’s.

Below that were more names.

There were three more names, but Jed skipped over them, for at the bottom of the list a single name jumped out at him.

His own.

And next to his name, Judith had placed a large question mark, underlined twice. After a few seconds his eyes left the sheet of paper and he looked questioningly at her.

“I’m trying to find a common denominator,” Judith said. “There has to be a pattern.”

Jed’s eyes scanned the list again, and suddenly he thought he saw it. “It’s the company,” he said. “All these kids? Every one of them has a parent who works for Borrego Oil.”

Judith frowned. “Gina? Her father’s gone, and her mother works at the café.”

“Her uncle,” Jed replied. “Carlos.”

“But what about Reba Tucker?”

Jed studied the list again, and then realized that there was something else the names on the list had in common. “Troublemakers,” he breathed. “That’s what it is!”

Judith stared at him quizzically. “Troublemakers?” she echoed.

Jed nodded. “That’s got to be it—look. The kids? Christ, every one of them has been in trouble except Gina, and she hangs out with the rest of us. And you know what Greg Moreland and Otto Kruger think of Dad. Hell, he made life miserable for Kruger, and didn’t want Max to sell the company.”

“But what about Reba?” Judith said again. “I still don’t know how she fits in.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jed replied. “Well, I do. She was making all kinds of trouble at the school. She was always after them to fix the place up and get better equipment. She screamed about the books, the pay, everything. And last spring she got so mad she decided to try to get the
teachers to form a union. Christ, she was over here all the time, talking to dad about it.”

Judith stared at him. Could it possibly be true? It seemed so crazy, and yet …

And then she remembered something Frank had told her.
UniChem’s put two of its companies into bankruptcy, just to bust the unions. They want everyone to shut up and do their jobs and not make trouble. But it won’t work—they won’t shut me up
.

But they had.

And then another thought struck her. Jed.

As far as anyone except the two of them knew, Jed had had one of the shots too. If he was on their list …

And then she knew what had to be done. “You have to do something tomorrow, Jed,” she said. She talked for almost five minutes, telling him what she had in mind. “Can you do it?” she asked at last.

Jed said nothing for a moment, then nodded slowly. “I guess I’ll have to,” he said. “If I don’t, they might just kill me, like they did Dad.”

Jed negotiated the dirt track along the canyon’s edge the next morning almost automatically, most of his mind occupied with what Judith Sheffield had told him the night before. After they’d gone to bed, he’d lain in the darkness, wide awake, wondering if he could actually pull it off. Despite what he’d told Judith, he wasn’t sure he could. For a while he’d even considered not showing up for work at all.

Quitting the company now, on his very first day, would be like a red flag to Kendall—for Jed was certain that Paul Kendall was behind whatever was being done as much as Greg Moreland. But he managed to keep himself under control yesterday, about Greg Moreland sending his father to The Cottonwoods, and he’d do it again today, with Kendall watching him.

And so, all night, he’d thought about what he had to do. He remembered Gina, and Randy Sparks, and a few of the other kids he’d seen at school. And he kept in mind that he too was supposed to have gotten one of the murderous shots.

Now, as he parked the truck in the lot above the dam, he looked at himself in the rearview mirror. He let the muscles of his face go slack, making his features expressionless. Then he let his eyes lose their focus slightly, so they took on the strange, blank look he’d seen in Gina Alvarez’s eyes last night and the night before.