Discord's Apple

3

Frank dropped a spoon on the floor while lifting it from the drawer to his cereal bowl on the counter, and Evie jumped out of her chair, her heart racing.

“Dad, are you okay?” She rushed to grab the spoon and hand it to him before he could stoop to reach it.

He straightened, scowling as he took it from her. “I just dropped a spoon.”

Pouting, she clenched her hands.

He said, “I’m not going to drop dead in front of you. You’ll have some warning, trust me.”

Turning away, she pinched the bridge of her nose to stop herself from crying again, then stalked back to the table and her own bowl of cereal.

They’d kill each other before he could die of cancer if they kept this up. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come.”

“No, I’m glad you’re here.”

It was just as well she had to rewrite the entire script for the May issue of Eagle Eyes. It would give her something to do instead of staring at her father, watching for symptoms.

She insisted on clearing the dishes, asking all the while if there was anything else he needed, if there was anything else she could do to help. Did the garbage need to go out? (No.) Did the dog need walking? (Mab had a pen out back and walked herself.) Cleaning? Cooking? Anything?

“Evie, I’ve lived alone for five years. I can take care of myself.”

This left her with her eyes watering, yet again.

He closed his eyes and seemed to be counting to ten. “Why don’t you run to the store? I’m almost out of eggs and bread. I probably need to stock up since there’s two of us.”

She jumped at the chance to do something, anything. And to get out of the house. She hadn’t even been back a day, and she was feeling claustrophobic.

He tried to give her money to pay for the groceries.

“No, I’ll get it.”

“Nonsense. You had to travel all this way, you’re staying here as a guest—take it.”

The starving-artist days when she’d struggled to make ends meet with a part-time data-entry job were still vivid in their memories. He wasn’t used to her being able to pay, much less offering to do so.

“There’s little enough I can do while I’m here—let me buy groceries for you.”

“Evie—”

Take a deep breath, count to ten. Like father, like daughter. “You can buy next time.”

After a moment, he put the bills back into his pocket. “Okay. My ration book is on top of the microwave. At least take that.”

She’d have to make sure to really stock up, so that next time didn’t happen for a while.

Hopes Fort had seen its heyday when her grandparents were teenagers. The sugar plant and steel mill had been in operation then. They closed down after World War II. Work dried up, and most of the agriculture became unprofitable. None of the buildings downtown had been constructed later than about 1960.

Another high school classmate who hadn’t left town was a manager at the Safeway. Evie had caused a mild scandal after graduation when she went to Los Angeles for college. Most people who left town went into the military, or if they went to college at all it was to one of the state universities before moving to the Denver suburbs to raise their 2.5 kids. Everyone was convinced she’d get shot on the L.A. freeways within months. They wanted to know if she’d have to wear a bulletproof vest to go to class.

She traded a few pleasantries with the manager, who asked how Frank was doing. Evie said fine because she didn’t want to explain in any more detail—and more than that, she didn’t want to start crying.

The store was almost empty. Many of the shelves were also empty. Evie piled her cart with what she could, mostly canned staples and dry goods. She pushed her cart to the only open checkout lane and started unloading. Between her father’s ration coupons and her own, she was able to cover the haul.

A man stepped into place behind her. She felt bad that he’d have to wait while the clerk rang up her cart. He only had a candy bar on the conveyor belt.

He stood too close to her. She inched forward, away from him. And he inched forward, right up to her again. She tried to ignore him.

“You’re Frank Walker’s daughter,” said a voice in her ear.

She turned around to stare straight at him. He might have been a classmate from high school; he seemed about the right age. But she didn’t recognize him. He looked back expectantly. Slightly shorter than she, he had an olive complexion, tanned, with dark eyes and brown hair, thick and tousled. Clean-shaven. He wore a blue felt pea coat over a white oxford shirt, unbuttoned at the neck.

“You a friend of my dad’s?”

“Not really.”

“Then how do you know that?” She took careful note of his features and tried to interpret his casual smile. She wondered if her father had reported his prowler to the police, or if he had gotten a description.

“It’s a small town. Not hard to find things out.”

“What do you want?”

“I only wanted to meet you.”

The clerk glanced up, then returned to swiping food over the sensor. Each item passed with a beep. Evie turned away from the stranger and dug in her pocket for her debit card. Strange, definitely strange. Strange the same way that guy in the duster back at the house yesterday was strange. His look was likewise unplaceable, his accent unidentifiable.

She paid as quickly as she could and started putting the bags in her cart. The man paid for his candy bar, walked past her and out of the store without a second glance. She sighed, relieved.

He was waiting for her at her car, standing by the rear bumper, hands in his pockets, watching for her. She stopped, gripped her cart hard, and considered going back into the store and calling the police.

Before she could make a decision, he came toward her and spoke. “Can I help you with your bags?”

He was short, and while she couldn’t judge his build under the coat, she thought she could take him if it came to that.

“Are you stalking my dad?” she said.

“Not at all. But I am looking for something. I think it might be in your father’s basement.”

“That’s it, I’m calling the police.”

“Please don’t, Evie.”

Her heart pounded. He wasn’t threatening her. He didn’t move any closer. He spoke kindly, with psychotic calm. The neighbors would say how nice and quiet he always seemed.

“Who are you?”

“Call me Alex.” He raised his hand, as if offering it to be shaken, but paused midmotion, hand outstretched, elbow bent, gaze studying her. Then he turned and walked away.

Civil defense posters decorated the outside of the supermarket. They were the same ones she saw everywhere in L.A.: the wickedly surreal poster of the bug-eyed face emerging from a cloud of gas demanding, DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR MASK IS? and the shadowed figure stalking behind a quaint family home, labeled REPORT STRANGERS! It seemed a little laughable finding them in Hopes Fort. Nothing ever happened here, no one knew the town existed, it surely wasn’t a target. But the schools still ran attack drills. Evie knew where her gas mask was: in its bag under the front seat of the car. In L.A., she carried it everywhere in her backpack, like everyone did. Here? It would be like locking her car doors in the driveway.

But as Johnny said, the rules were still in effect, even here.

She pulled onto Main Street and stopped at the police checkpoint. Johnny wasn’t there today. The deputy in charge was about twenty years older and surly.

She rolled down her window and offered her ID. “Where can I find Johnny Brewster?”

“Back at the station. Pop your trunk, please, ma’am.”

“You have the phone number?”

“Yeah.” The guy had to look in every single grocery bag.

“Can you give it to me?” she said after the pause made it clear he wasn’t going to answer.

He looked her up and down, then glanced at the California plates on the car.

“Look,” she said. “We went to high school together. I just have to ask him something.”

Finally, he gave her the number and let her through the checkpoint.

She dialed the number into her mobile phone. “Johnny? It’s Evie.”

“Hey, what’s up?”

“I just had a run-in with somebody, and I wondered if you knew him. He said his name was Alex.” She told him about the encounter and gave him the stranger’s description.

“That doesn’t ring any bells, but I’ll keep my eyes open.”

“Thanks.” Report Strangers! Damn straight.

Evie stayed up late that night, tucked half under the covers of the guest bed, laptop perched on her lap, amazingly enough, and delved into the adventures of the Eagle Eye Commandos.

Crammed in the back of the unit’s Blackhawk, Sarge and Matchlock were arguing about weapon caliber again. (“.60 all the way.” “Overkill, man. That’s so inelegant. You wanna do this pretty, don’t you?”) In the cockpit, Tracker and the pilot, Jeeves (as in “Home, Jeeves”), rolled their eyes. Talon—Captain Andrew Talon, hero of this outfit—reminded them that they were on a mission and asked them to be quiet. He ordered them, really, but with Talon, it never sounded like an order. It was like he was asking a favor, one gentleman to another, and you couldn’t help but want to comply.

The plan was for Jeeves to drop off the others near Moscow, retreat outside of Russian radar surveillance, then return to pick them up in six hours. Sarge and Matchlock were ex-Special Forces, with specialties in covert ops, sniping, demolitions, the whole nine yards. They covered the landing and their entry into the city perfectly. Talon brought up the rear.

Tracker, the intelligence expert, moved watchfully ahead of Talon. She kept her blond hair tucked under a black bandanna and smudged her cheeks with paint. Sexy, if you liked that sort of thing. Tracker was the embodiment of some of Evie’s more outlandish teenage daydreams.

They had just started on their route to the Kremlin when they heard a plane, the drone of an engine sailing overhead, Dopplering to a higher pitch as its altitude decreased, faster and faster. A moment later, a massive explosion rocked the world. A pillar of flame erupted from the aptly named Red Square; then the shock wave hit. The four soldiers dropped to the ground and covered their heads.

In a strange twist, the team helped with the rescue effort, which included digging out Talon’s counterpart in the Russian version of the Eagle Eyes, the Company of the Gray Bear. In gratitude, Agent Slovsky did more than give them the evidence about the missing spies—he told them the exact location in Siberia where they were being held. Moreover, the team promised to hand over any information they found regarding the terrorists who had perpetrated this act. An event of this magnitude could only bring the rival powers of the world closer together.

All the lessons of history to the contrary. Evie’s idealism astonished her sometimes.

She e-mailed that much of the reworked script to Bruce, who had probably chewed all his pencils to pieces with worrying. While she was online, she opened a Web browser and did a search on prostate cancer. In fairly short order, she learned that the standard treatment for advanced stage prostate cancer was a procedure called an orchiectomy. Medical castration. She didn’t get much further than that before shutting down her machine. She just didn’t want to know. She turned off the lamp on the bedstand and hoped for sleep.

A hard wind blew, rattling the windowpanes. The Eagle Eye storyline turned back and forth in her head—there was always so much more than she could get into a script: thoughts, expression, the little pieces of the characters’ backgrounds that might come into play at certain moments. She wrote novels in her head and grew frustrated that she hadn’t yet found the patience to put a novel to paper.

She couldn’t sleep.

She went to the kitchen to find some tea or a glass of water and passed the doorway to the basement.

When her grandparents lived in the house, the basement had been off-limits. She could play anywhere in the yard, read any of the books—fascinating fairy stories and ancient histories—on the dozens of shelves in the living room, but the basement was for grown-ups. When she was old enough to think about it, she assumed that meant power tools and cleaning solvents. By the time her father moved into the house, she was out of college and never spent more than a weekend at a time there and never took much interest in the basement.

Now she assumed that the prohibition no longer applied.

A bare bulb hanging from the ceiling lit the stairs. The basement was unfinished, framework and heating ducts exposed, a second room blocked off with bare drywall. At the foot of the stairs was a workroom with a rack of tools, a table saw, and a nebulous unfinished woodworking project propped against a set of metal shelves.

In the middle of the drywall at one end of the workroom was a closed door.

Stocking-footed, robe wrapped around her T-shirt and bare legs, she crept down the stairs to that door and opened it.

It was a storage room: shelves crammed with troves of objects, crates stacked as high as the ceiling, boxes piled to create the narrow walkways of a maze through a room whose edges were lost in darkness. The air smelled dusty, with a bite of cold seeping from the cracked concrete floor.

She looked for a light switch or a cord dangling from a ceiling bulb, but couldn’t find anything. Back in the workroom, she retrieved a flashlight, then entered the storage area, feeling like she was spelunking.

She couldn’t see much in the beam of light: the shadows and angles of boxes, tarps draped over a few corners, forming weird lurking shapes. She felt six years old again, on an adventure in her own house simply because she was sneaking around past midnight.

Passing the flashlight beam back and forth, she identified some items: a thick hammer, like a sledgehammer, on a short handle, the wood shiny from use; an old-fashioned broom, brush stalks wrapped around a dark staff; a cup made of chipped clay; a sheepskin folded on a shelf. In the flashlight’s sickly glow, the fleece looked yellow, shiny almost. No dust dulled it, even though it must have lain there for years. She ran her hand over it. It felt soft, fresh, and sent a charge up her arm, a static shock.

All the objects looked archaic and out of place, but none of them looked old. On the next shelf over, she found a musical instrument, strings on a vertical frame. Not a harp, but a lyre. She plucked a string. It gave back a clear tone. She bet it was still in tune. The note seemed to echo. She shivered.

This was a museum. The stuff here must have been worth a fortune. Her grandparents might have gathered such a collection over the course of their lives. But why hadn’t anyone told Evie about it?

A stack of papers rested on the shelf by the door. Hoping it was some kind of inventory, something that might tell her what exactly all this was, she picked up the pages and leafed through them. The handwriting on them belonged to her mother, Emma. These were the loose-leaf pages she made her notes on. Emma Walker had been a travel writer, mostly articles for magazines. It was a hobby she’d maneuvered into a part-time career. Evie supposed she’d learned to write from her, though she’d taken the impulse in an entirely different direction.

Emma had been in Seattle doing research when she died.

The first page was a description of a garden. Evie couldn’t guess where or when; it didn’t have a label. It didn’t matter. The pages held her mother’s voice. Evie put them back on the shelf, where they looked out of place and lonely.

She left the room, closing the door softly, as if an infant slept inside. It was precious, wondrous. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end.

She made tea and sat at the kitchen table with a pen and sheet of paper to write longhand, which she hadn’t done in ages. It helped sometimes, making the words physical. Not much story happened. Mostly, she made lists, character sketches, snippets of description for if, when, she ever got around to writing the novel.

She was asleep with her head on the kitchen table when her father emerged for breakfast in the morning.

“Trouble sleeping?” he said, standing on the other side of the table, amused.

Stretching the kinks out of her back and neck, she rubbed her face. “Yeah. No. I don’t know, I just meant to get some tea.” She didn’t remember falling asleep; her body still felt like it was midnight.

“It was the wind blowing last night. Rattles the whole house. It kept me awake, too.” He didn’t act like it. He was already dressed for the day. He poured a glass of orange juice and drank it while he pulled his coat from the rack by the door.

She wanted to ask him about the storeroom, but realized he was getting ready to go out. “Where are you going?”

“I’ve got a Watch shift this morning.” He was on the local Citizens’ Watch, had been since her mother died. The local police didn’t have enough people to staff the checkpoints and continue their usual workload. Citizens’ Watch took up the slack.

“Are you sure—I mean, are you sure you should still be doing that? I didn’t think you’d still—”

“I’m not dead yet,” he said cheerfully.

“But what if something happens?”

“Nothing’s going to happen.”

“But—”

“Evie, I plan to keep things as normal as possible for as long as I can. I like the Watch. It gets me out. I’ve got everyone in town looking out for me. I’ll be fine.”

This was like when she was in high school, with her parents standing in the kitchen, listing all the reasons she shouldn’t go out after the game, with all the drunks on the road, and her insisting that she’d be fine.

He put the empty glass in the sink. He’d reached the door when he looked back and said, “You want to come along?”

“I should try to get some work done. I don’t want to leave Bruce hanging.”

“I’ll see you after lunch, then.”

“Dad?”

He hesitated, hand on the doorknob.

“I went downstairs last night.” She let that hang for a moment, waiting for him to offer a response, wondering what he would say without her prompting him.

“Oh?” was all he said.

She wet her lips and tried again. “The storeroom—has the stuff in there ever been cataloged? Do you have any idea what all is down there? What it’s worth? You could have your own antique show.”

A slow smile grew on his lips, and the look in his eye told her before he even spoke that he wasn’t going to answer her question.

“I’ll see you this afternoon,” he said, then was gone.

Figured. Though she wondered why a roomful of antiques demanded such deep dark secrecy. Had someone in their family’s history been a master thief? Run a pawnshop in the last century and never bothered to sell off the assets? Was a budding museum curator? At least he hadn’t gotten angry at her for invading the forbidden storeroom.

She set up her laptop in the living room, on the coffee table, and sat on the hardwood floor in her robe and stocking feet. She’d shower and change later. Who did she have to impress?

Curled up in the middle of the carpet, napping politely, Mab kept her company. When Evie got up for a glass of water or to stretch her muscles, Mab always looked at her, ears cocked, alert. When Evie relaxed, so did Mab. Evie worked up the courage to scratch the dog’s ears; Mab acknowledged the attention with a couple thumps of her tail. Her father must have kept the stray dog for company.

Bruce had already e-mailed her sketches of the new pages. He must have been up all night, too. Once colored, the Cessna explosion was going to be spectacular. He had it covering a two-page spread.

So, what to write next. They had a formula that demanded a certain number of shots fired each issue, and she was in danger of running short. She needed a battle scene.

The crew barreled across the tundra in a stolen Jeep, racing against an execution order sent out for one of the men they were supposed to rescue. The Blackhawk was out of commission for now—sabotage in the fuel tank. The Russians were supposed to be helping them, but someone on the inside didn’t want them to succeed. A three-way battle ensued, and no one was sure who was siding with whom.

Usually, Evie wrote things like “chase scene” and “fight,” and let Bruce’s capable imagination construct the details in four-color panels that splashed across entire pages.

But something about this battle tickled her story instincts. Throw out a clue, a hook that could carry the plot to the next issue. An enemy chopper ran them down. Matchlock managed to steer them into a gully and under cover, but not before Talon saw a face he swore he knew, a man he thought he had left behind to die in the arctic years before. Talon had had to make a decision—stay to save his platoon-mate, or leave and ensure the success of the mission. Talon had abandoned him. The memory still haunted him.

And there the issue ended, centered on the expression of stark disbelief on Talon’s face.

Next issue: He’ll want to follow the enemy chopper. He’ll want to learn what had happened to his friend, how he’d survived. Tracker argues with him. Her mind is on the spy imprisoned in Siberia. On the mission. She’ll go alone if she has to, she’ll defy him—

Someone knocked on the door.

Evie couldn’t see who it was out the kitchen window. Mab wasn’t barking. She opened the door.

An old woman stood on the porch, looking at Evie with a patient, expectant expression. Mab turned a circle and wagged her tail, as if asking for praise, or forgiveness, or any acknowledgment of her canine presence.

“Can I help you?” Evie felt awkward in her unwashed, half-dressed state, not worthy to appear before this kind old woman.

“Perhaps,” she said. “I’m looking for something, and I thought it might be here.”

Her skin was wrinkled like old linen, and her hair was ash gray and tied in a bun at her neck. Her eyes were clear and green.

She might have been anyone, from anywhere. Someone from town, from down the street, from the next farm over, looking for a stick of butter, or wanting to borrow a hammer. But Evie’s blood rushed in her ears. She felt electrified, like when she’d touched the fleece in the storeroom.

Her words seemed to come from some other lips. “What are you looking for?”

“Shoes. A pair of slippers, like you might wear with a ball gown.”

Evie didn’t know where the words came from. She spoke on a hunch. “Glass slippers?”

The woman smiled, lighting her face. “Yes, exactly.”

“Come in.” Moving softly, Evie led her to the basement. She stopped the woman outside the storeroom. “Wait here.”

She didn’t even need the flashlight this time. She stepped around the stacks of crates and warrens of shelves. Dozens of boxes, a hundred objects wrapped in cloth and packed away, and Evie knew where to go. Only her second time in this room, and she knew. Against the side wall was a wardrobe made of oak with beveled edges and brass knobs. Inside hung gowns—rich, amazing gowns that seemed to sparkle with their own light, shimmering and changing color when Evie tilted her head. At the bottom of the wardrobe, shoes were stacked. Iron shoes that might be put in a fire until they were red hot. A tiny pair of boots that might have fit a cat. Sandals with leather wings stitched to them. Gold slippers, silk slippers. Glass slippers to fit a pair of small feet—blown glass, etched with ribbons and lines to make them look as if they’d been sewn. Flashing, they caught the scant light, which seemed to shine deep within the glass. Evie picked them up; they were light, fragile. She couldn’t imagine dancing in them.

Then, without her own volition—like a character in a story, she thought wildly—she was walking to the door. The glass slippers were drawn to the old woman. They led Evie back to her, and Evie let them guide her. She didn’t have a choice.

Holding them in both hands, she presented them to the woman. With both hands, the woman took them from her.

“Oh! Not even a scratch on them. They might have been made yesterday. Better than I had hoped.” She cradled them to her breast and turned a wondering gaze on Evie. “Thank you so much.”

“You’re welcome.”

Evie saw the woman to the door. Scratching Mab’s ears, she watched her walk down the driveway to the road, but turned away rather than see if the old woman was going to walk all the way to town, or if she’d simply disappear into thin air, back to where she came from. Evie didn’t want to know. Her hands were shaking.

Like something from a story. A golden fleece. A pair of glass slippers. The slippers knew that the old woman had come for them, as if they had a sentience of their own. Did every object in the storeroom have that same sense of knowing?

She didn’t even know how to ask that question.

When her father returned, she was sitting at the kitchen table, hands pressed flat to its surface. It was how she finally got them to stop trembling.

“Evie? What’s wrong.”

Carefully, she explained. “An old woman came to the door. She asked for glass slippers. I found them in the basement, so I gave them to her. Is that okay?”

He sat across from her. “That isn’t the right question. Tell me: Could you have not given them to her?”

She shook her head. “They wanted to be with her.” She winced, knowing how odd it sounded, knowing it made no sense, but she had no other words to say. She could still feel the shoes pulling at her grasp.

“Then it’s okay.” He reached across and touched her hand.

“It wasn’t me, Dad. It was something else, like someone was moving my arms and making me talk—”

His lips thinned. His eyes were sad, though, making his whole expression grim, resigned. “I knew there was a reason you needed to come home. The Storeroom will be yours when I’m gone.”

No. She wanted to deny it, but there was a power pressing down on him. On her. The same sense, the same charge that led her to the glass slippers prevented the word no from leaving her mouth. She had her own life, she didn’t want this . . . this weight.

She didn’t want her father to ever be gone.

“I don’t understand,” she said simply.

“You will, in time.” He sounded like a mystic sage. A wizard, not her father. Another character from a story, and she couldn’t turn the page to see what happened next.

When Irving Walker left Saint Louis with his wife, Amelia, they took only three horses—two to ride and one to pack. What the packhorse couldn’t carry, they didn’t bring. The folk who saw them off thought it scandalous, Irving Walker putting his wife through that, not giving her the safety of a wagon train, making her ride in the open, exposed to the elements and all the dangers inherent in the crossing of the Great Plains. But they didn’t know it was Amelia’s idea. Irving asked her what she needed to bring, and she showed him one bag. “That’s all?” he said. “All the important things, yes.” They’d have a freedom they wouldn’t have with a wagon and oxen. They needed to be free, away from people and civilization. That was why they were leaving Missouri in the first place. It had gotten too crowded.

Along the Arkansas River, where the Santa Fe Trail turned south to Mexico, an enterprising businessman named George K. Hope built an adobe fort to serve as a base of operations for his trading company, made up of fur trappers, Mexican merchants, and Indian traders. Within twenty years, Hope’s Fort became a primary way station for explorers heading west, merchants serving the pipeline between the United States and Mexico, and settlers looking for their fortunes beyond the Great American Desert.

When George Hope saw Irving and Amelia Walker approaching the fort with nothing but three horses and the packs they carried, he swore that even after all his years on the plains and all he’d seen in that time, he’d never seen anything like it.

Ten miles or so up the river, where a village had started to put down roots, Irving built a farmhouse with a massive cellar, which Amelia filled with the contents of the one bag she carried with her.