Legacies

9.

Jack bought a good compass and started in his own apartment. He marked the truck's starting point at the downtown end of his living room and ran a string to where it ended up against the uptown wall. He checked that and found that the string ran a few degrees west of due north. He unfolded his brand-new map of New York State and drew a line from mid Manhattan up along the Hudson through Albany and Troy, through a little town called Elysium in the Adirondacks, then onto Lake Placid and into Quebec. Theoretically, the line could be heading all the way to the Arctic Circle and beyond. Jack hoped it stayed in New York State.

He didn't feature trekking all the way out to Sag Harbor again, so he took his next reading in the little park on the Flushing side of the Whitestone Bridge. This time the line traveled a more westerly path, crossing the first line in Ulster County.

Could be good news or could be a fluke. The next reading would tell.

The lower left corner of Jack's New York map showed a portion of North Jersey. He took the Lincoln Tunnel into the lovely paved vistas of the Garden State and followed Route 3 to where it crossed the Parkway. Since that particular intersection was on his map, he stopped in a nearby strip mall parking lot and let the chassis take another run.

Jack smiled when he checked the path with his compass: this time it headed east of due north. Good. At least they wouldn't have to go to the north pole to find the transmitter.

The third line met the others in Ulster County, a little west of New Paltz.

If he was right, if the receiver was designed to point the way to its power source, then the transmitter was somewhere in the vicinity of intersection of those three lines.

Looked like he and Alicia would be on their way to the Catskills tomorrow—if Sam Baker and his boys didn't interfere. Jack had told Sean to call Thomas's lawyer and start the paperwork to sell the house. Hopefully that would keep Kemel off balance enough to allow Jack and Alicia to sneak out of town.

Alicia… he'd been so wound up about this broadcast power thing that he'd almost forgotten about the filth in those envelopes. A big part of him was pushing to build a fire and reduce them to ash, but another part said that it might make Alicia's world a brighter place if she could watch those negatives curling and blackening and smoking in the flames.

But giving her the envelopes meant he'd have to be there when she realized what was in them. He didn't want to see her face, didn't want to imagine what she'd be feeling at that moment. Because he could never imagine.

Still undecided, he headed back to New York.