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  Hats— everything from tricorns to a top hat that could have gone down with the Titanic— costume items from everywhen hang from pegs, with bags and costume jewelry carefully organized on shelves above, contemporary clothing mixed in with— dear God— rubber boots and sou’westers and beaded buckskins and early American colonists’ gear, hip-length vests and buckled shoes, everything catalogued and ranked like the detritus of lost civilizations. Or lost tribes.

  There’s Steele’s almost-whistle. “There’s things about me that you’ll never know…” That song.

  Or lost colonies. Her heart stops.

  He’s done, but the lyric has invaded her head. Her throat closes and her belly freezes. It takes all the strength she has left in her not to groan aloud.

  Then. Wait! The orderly ranks of abandoned eyeglasses and neatly shelved suitcases beyond the rack of discarded costumes could be the personal effects of …

  No, Merrill, don’t go there.

  Shit! We’re not the first people trapped here. Electrified, she sits upright.

  “Are you OK?”

  I moved! I can move! “I don’t know!”

  He clamps a hand on her arm. “Hush!”

  Startled, she yips. “Ow! Let go!”

  “Don’t. They’ll hear.” In the harsh overhead light, with that scowl, he looks like a god hacked out of a coconut husk. “I think it’s starting up.”

  “I said, let go! What’s starting up?”

  “Too soon to tell.” Then, concerned: “Are you all right?”

  Anchored by Rawson Steele, she tugs against him, jittering like a helicopter trying to take off. “I don’t know what I am!”

  “What you are is waiting,” he says, and does not say why or what he means when he adds, “I think this will be over soon.”

  “What will?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  Fragment, song fragment, “I know the secret of the sphinx…” They sit without speaking until, as if he senses a change in her, Steele lets go. “OK, they’re gone for now.”

  “Who is?” No answer. God, it’s cold in here. Pressing her back to the wall, with her head up and her shoulders straight for once and no parts of them touching, Merrill asks, “Are you working for them?”

  Wait! He looks hurt. Everything in him lets go— expression, tone, manner, when he says, “No. No Ma’am. I’m not.”

  But the rest of that line: “Nefertiti told me so…” “Who are you,” she says, pressing. “Who are you really?”

  He sidesteps it with the nicest smile. “Whatever you want to make of me.”

  “That’s not fair!”

  “Face it.” He squints as though it hurts to allow it. “We’re none of us who people think we are.”

  “Then who are we?”

  That sweet, touching grin: “Ourselves. That’s what keeps us going, you know?”

  At least they’re talking. There’s no reason for her to trust Rawson Steele, but there’s the tintype: two rebel kids. She’s not sure she trusts him, but she likes him. No. She’s drawn to him— echoes of that boy in high school that you know is bad for you. “OK, what are you really doing here?”

  “Waiting, same as you.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean. This place. You got here— how?”

  “Same as you. Snatched up, whatever that was. Blindsided and thrown for a loop.”

  She thought she was getting somewhere with him but they aren’t anywhere. It’s infuriating. “If they’re gone, why are we still sitting here!”

  “Who says they’re gone. Trust me.” He reaches for her hand and she’s grateful for the warmth. “It’s safer.”

  “Safer than what?”

  “Not sure.”

  She turns his hand over and leans hard on his exposed wrist. “Who are you, Rawson fucking Steele. Who are you anyway?”

  He doesn’t shake her off or try to pull free; he lets her hand stay where it is so naturally that they both forget about it. He answers willingly, disarming her with names as familiar as that tune, falling into the soft, down-home rhythm as though he learned it by heart forever ago. “I’m just Archbold Rawson Rivard, Ma’am, from the low country Rivards, although I grew up in the North.” He adds, “Us Rivards left the territory after … It’s been a while. But you probably knew.”

  “So you were named for him.”

  “If you want to think of it that way.”

  When she least expects it, the rest of the verse comes back. “I’ve walked the whole wide universe, above ground and below.”

  “Why’d you change your name?”

  “Oh, Ma’am, Ma’am!” He sounds flat-out Southern now. Sweet Tidelands whine. From around here, she thinks, forgetting that she is no longer back in the here that she knows. Gentling her, or trying, he says, with down-home ease, “Nobody wants to be called Archbold.”

  “No. The Steele part.”

  Nice smile, even in the dismal lights from the LEDs overhead. “You don’t always want people to see you coming.” He sighs. “Our families didn’t exactly part friends.”

  Like he knows something I don’t know. It’s sweet, but he’s elusive. “Why are you here?”

  “You mean here here? God only knows.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean in Kraventown.” Still sitting, she makes a half-turn and plants her hand in his chest, coming back at him again with the question that’s hounded her ever since the night their lives split in two. “It’s like you were hunting down something you could claim or build or take from us, and you never said what. What do you really want?”

  This time he answers— more or less. “I just came looking for what’s mine.”

  “Son of a bitch!” She is less angry than confused. “In my back-yard?”

  “Oh, Merrill, don’t let it bother you.” He removes her hand and puts it in her lap like an old-time Southerner returning a missing glove. “I was just digging up the rings. Two Citadel class rings, Ma’am, tied up together in a handkerchief and buried behind Russell Kraven’s barn.”

  “That burned in the ’90s. Eighteen nineties. But you knew.”

  “One way to end a property dispute,” he says, leaving her to take it any way she wants. “Rivards are kind of famous for it. Milt Kraven subdivided the land where it stood…”

  “And built my house. For a Northerner, you know a hell of a lot about us.”

  “Lady, it’s all up there on the Web. Any damn fool could find it,” he says easily, and holy hell, the cadencing is, what? Authentic. “The past is a powerful thing and yes Ma’am, it’s crazy, but I took leave without pay and came all the way down to Kraven to find my Citadel ring.”

  My ring? “Like the secret treasure map’s inside it or some other damn thing, like every crap novel I’ve ever read.”

  “This!” He slaps the floor and sand flies up. “This is not a crap novel.”

  “Sorry!” In the time it takes him to resume, Merrill gnaws the inside of her mouth, studies her nails, tries to shake the sand out of her hair. When he does speak, words come out of him all rough and ragged and at great cost, like the truth being dragged naked over rocks. It’s such a relief to have somebody else’s grief to think about that Merrill lets him talk on, and it’s none of it anything she expected. She’s been alone in this new, bleak life for so long that— stop it, lady. Don’t.

  The first words cost him. Coughed up like a hairball. “OK, before me, there was just…” He swallows hard and rethinks. “My mom was the last living Archbold Rivard’s second v.p. in his holding company before she had me. You know, the one his great-great set up to handle the money he took from Luke Kraven in the property dispute.”

  She does.

  When she doesn’t acknowledge this, he goes on. “She was the last in a long line of pushovers, you know? One more sweet, deluded girl bowled over by the Rivard profile and the good old family name, so what does that make me?”

  “His…” She stops before bastard.

  “He already had a d
amn family. A whole ’nother family. Wife and two little girls stashed in Alexandria, big brick house with long wooden porches, right there on St. Asaph Street. I went and studied it, but I wasn’t about to go in. His real true family, you can see where I am with this.” He fixes her with those eyes that will not stay the same color. “So, the ring?”

  Who are you? Squinting, she would like to reconcile this face with the tintype image, but Father threw it on the fire so long ago that she forgets. “The ring.”

  “It’s pretty much all I’ll ever have.”

  And all the breath in her lets go. “I see.”

  “So that’s it.” Steele’s gesture reminds her of the time and puts her in this place, under the cold, colorless overhead light, on the cold floor with the sand sifting down at such a rate that she wonders whether they are even what passes for safe. Then he adds, “For now.”

  “Don’t,” she says. Because he’s whipped them into an unbreakable circle, she slips into childhood rhythms to bring him down, “Don’t do me like that.”

  “In the end,” he says, “you might want to have Hampy’s one. They knotted the two rings in a handkerchief from Archie’s house, two rebel officers, just kids.”

  “Oh, please!” Merrill gestures at the unseen and unknown forces beyond the shed, at everything inside the rim and everything above and below the surface of the desert floor and asks once more. “What are you?”

  “What I am is, I’m stranded. Stranded and confused, same as you.” He moves to take her hand, thinks better of it. “And fuck no, I have no idea how we got here.”

  “Here here?” Yes, she is goading him. “Or stranded in this damn desert?”

  “Either. I was out cold when it happened, same as you.”

  “Out cold now, or back then on the first day we got here?”

  “Both.”

  They are sawing back and forth and Merrill doesn’t know how to make it stop. “How do you know I was out cold?”

  “They do that. Gas. Go easy, Merrill Laneuville Maxwell Poulnot.” How does he … “We’re in here for the long haul and nobody knows how long that is or what it will turn into, so will you let it be? Just let it be.”

  … know these old names? “I have to know.”

  “Believe me, you don’t want to know.” He stands abruptly. Paces the length of the shed. “We can’t stay here. We need to find a way out.”

  “I thought you said…”

  He cuts her off. “In case.”

  Troubled, she gets to her feet. The effort is tremendous. Shaking her hands as if to thaw them, she scuffs the sand underfoot to start the blood moving and takes out after Steele, walking where he walks, going faster, faster as her blood runs higher and her muscles respond, pacing the length and breadth of the shed. As they go she is thinking, thinking faster now that she’s up and moving. “There’s got to be a door. I mean, how else did we get in?”

  “I don’t know how we got in.”

  He either does know or he doesn’t know; it’s troubling. All Merrill knows is that where they are now, there’s sand on the floor, sand in her hair, but no sand coming in through the tightly fitted planks in the walls. She looks up. “Me either,” she says, “unless there’s a hatch.”

  He says, too fast, “No way. There would be stairs,” and busies himself at the far end of the shed.

  Merrill persists, craning at the ceiling overhead as though she’ll find daylight leaking in around the hatch. Afterimages from the LEDs blind her. If there’s an opening overhead, it’s hard to identify from here. How would they reach it?

  Pile up all these suitcases from Treblinka and Manzanar, the clothes and belongings left behind by the Vikings who vanished in Greenland, the missing settlers of Roanoke, passengers on drowned ships, the lost tribe of Israel and all the other lost colonies represented here? Claw their way up the discarded shells of lost lives until they make it to the top?

  Would that be sacrilege? Ray would know. She wishes to hell it was steady, dependable Ray locked in with her and not Steele, gorgeous and changeable as scenes in a kaleidoscope. She might not know where she was, but with Ray, she’d know where she stood. Steele is volatile, half dynamo and half wounded youth; she’d like to ask him about all this but he’s distracted, rapping his way along the far wall, stopping to listen and moving on as though at some point it will sound hollow, and he’ll find their way out.

  There’s a subtle shift, as though something big has begun to move. Startled, Steele looks up.

  He groans, “Right.” As if this is inevitable.

  Seconds later she hears it. They are many, and they’re running this way. The vibration sets off a little sandfall overhead. Merrill jumps back. The wooden ceiling of the shed where they sat for so long is indeed its roof, with sand coming in faster, revealing a square of light. The hatch.

  “Rawson, look!” Her voice goes up in a little shriek. “Look for the ladder.”

  “Not now,” he says, but she’s too excited to care.

  Never mind the growing mob-sound overhead. Merrill parts the heavy coats to feel her way along the wall behind. Shaking with excitement, she works her way along the clothes rack, parting hangers to see, closing the gaps and moving on to the next rank so fast that empty costumes go by like pages in a child’s flip book. Hidden so cleverly behind a tier of fur coats that the maker thought she’d never find it, there is a ladder. She calls, “Over here!”

  He hisses, “Shhh!”

  The first heavy feet pound across the concealed roof above them, disturbing the protective layer of sand, but Merrill doesn’t care. She wants what she wants. “I found the ladder!”

  “Don’t!” He is behind her in seconds, locking protective arms around her, swaying to keep her in place. “Be still. If they find us…” He doesn’t have to finish.

  She backs into him so they are clamped together, one on one, and stops. Whoever he is, whatever this is, it feels right. Now she is aware of footsteps directly overhead— too many, running too fast. “My God!”

  A shudder runs through him. “If you pray, you’d better pray that they don’t stop.”

  Possibilities chase each other through her head so fast that she waits, holding her breath until it hurts.

  Then he adds, “This time. Hang in.” His grasp on her is so steady, his voice so sure that she would do anything. “I think I can get you out before they come back.”

  22

  Dave

  Friday into Saturday

  “I have to go back,” Dave said when Earl put him down here in the back bedroom, filled with photos and trophies from some old war.

  “Not while they’re still out there. You got people after you.” Earl pushed him into place on the bed like a medic on the battlefield and threw a blanket over him.

  Dave could not stop thinking, thinking, thinking. “I’ll need your raft.”

  “You’ll lay low, asshole. When it’s time, I’ll carry you.”

  The long afternoon blurred into a long evening. Davy slept through most of it. The hard days’ nights since he lost her piled up like boxcars in a train wreck and ran right over him. This is what it boils down to. He lost her. He lost Boogie too, and he thinks it was sheer carelessness.

  Like this whole mess is something he did.

  When he most wanted to light out and fix everything he’d done wrong, Earl warned, “Lay low,” which he did in the Pinckneys’ back bedroom, where no light came. Until the last cop car crunched down the road and the last of Poyntertown’s knuckle-dragging supernumeraries crunched through the woods corralling off-islanders, there was no leaving this room. Earl’s father slept here from the day he collapsed until he died of something Theda wouldn’t talk about. She closed the paneled storm shutters the day his eyes glazed over and he fell out, and when they brought him home from the hospital she put him to bed in here and closed the shutters for good. She locked them down with Gaillard Pinckney Three’s fancy wrought-iron latches— proof against hurricanes and tidal waves, whatever came. Ne
ver mind that Earl was too young to divine the future as it pertained to his mother, particularly not the one Theda’s mind is wandering around in now. His own mother, and he never saw it coming.

  Maybe she did. As they took Felix Pinckney away she said, “When I look like I’m fixing to die, lay me down in there.” That day she nailed the shutters tight so they would stay latched, as though anybody can batten down and keep death from coming in.

  All they keep out is the light. An ideal place for Dave, short on sleep and looking like he does. Fuck, why didn’t he grab his damn clothes out of the closet when he was back at Merrill’s; he looks like a Necco wafer in Ray’s things. Pastel store-dummy laid out on the bed in the Pinckneys’ dying room in another man’s clothes.

  He left everything behind on Kraven, including Boogie Hood.

  The dark, sad bedroom is like the Island of the Lost, lined with Felix Pinckney’s books and photos from some old war— Nam, Dave thinks, although Earl never said. It’s still just how he left it, probably because for Felix, it was the Last Good Time: one of those places where the past moves in to stay, getting so big that it crowds out everything else. There’s no space in that room for unrelated objects— or for new thoughts, which Dave thought was fucking appropriate. With rednecks beating the bushes for him, followed by armed bounty hunters cross-hatching the channel on Jet Skis, the dying room seemed like the right place for him.

  Beached in the old man’s bed, Dave tossed and sweated, hounded by possible futures. Scenarios flashed on and off like lights in a hurricane, never the same thing twice. The dead man’s remote past was a lot easier to live with than whatever was going on out there— or what went on back then, before the stupendous … what?

  Vanishment.