Jeffery Deaver - Solitude Creek

He glanced around the restaurant. He wasn’t worried about being recognized. His appearance was very different from what had been reported. What a stroke of luck that the police had released his description to the public and not kept it to themselves. If the theater employee hadn’t given that away, he might be in jail now.

Or dead.

He was studying a family nearby. Parents and two teenagers, all looking like they should be enjoying the pier more. In fact, it was a little anemic. Shopping mostly. No rides, except fifty cents bought little kids a turn on a space ship, up and down, in front of a shell shop.

Family...

Antioch March’s father had been a salesman — yes, a real, honest-to-God traveling salesman. Industrial parts, American made (though maybe some components, tiny ones, had been teamed together in China. Dad, politically conservative, had been less than forthcoming about that).

The food came and he ate. He was hungry. It had been a long time since McBreakfast.

March’s father was never home, his mother either, though she hadn’t traveled much. She worked a lot, though young Andy could do the math. Shift over at five but not home till seven thirty or eight, for a shower, then downstairs to ask about her boy’s day as she made him supper.

Not every day. But often enough. Andy didn’t care. Mom could do what she wanted. He had what he needed. He had his video games.

‘How’s your calamari, sir?’ the young waitress asked, as if she really, really cared.

‘Good.’

She tipped him with a smile.

March used to think that was the reason he was drawn to, well, less healthy interests than his classmates: Dad never around, Mom tackling her own Get in her own special way. Plenty of free time as a boy. The solitary games.

Come on, Serena.

A little closer, Serena.

Look what I have for you, Serena...

Was he angry at their absence? March honestly couldn’t say if he would have turned out different if he’d spent his evenings curled up in jammies as Mom or Dad read Lord of the Rings to him.

No, not much anger. Sure, Markiatikakis became March but that just made sense. He kept Antioch, didn’t he?

Though I prefer Andy.

And he’d followed in his father’s shoes. Life on the road. Life in business. And he was a salesman in a way.

In the employ of the website.

And working for his main boss.

The Get.

He could recall the exact moment of coining the term. In college. Hyde Park, U of C, the week of exams. He’d aced a few of them already and was prepared, completely prepared, for the rest. But he’d lain in bed, sweating and chewing on the inside of his cheek with compulsive molars. He’d tried video games, TV to calm down. No go. He’d finally given up and picked up a textbook for his Myths in the Classical World as Bases for Psychological Archetypes. He’d read the book several times and was prepared for the test but, as he flipped through the pages, he came across something he hadn’t paid attention to. In the Oedipus story, where a son kills his father and sleeps with his mother, there was this line that referred to Oedipus as ‘the get of Jocasta and Laius’.

The get...

What did that mean?

He’d looked it up. The word, as a noun, meant ‘offspring’.

Despite his anxiety that night he’d laughed. Because in this context the word was perfect. Something within him, a creation in his own body, something he’d given birth to was turning on him. The way Oedipus would destroy father and mother both.

And — he couldn’t help but think of the pun — whatever this feeling was, it forced young Antioch March to do whatever he could to ‘get’ peace of mind, comfort.

And so the hunger, the lack, the edge was named.

The Get.

He’d felt it all his life, sometimes quiescent, sometimes voracious. But he knew it would never go away. The Get could unspool within you anytime it wanted.

It wanted, not you. You didn’t have a say.

And if you didn’t satisfy the Get, well, there were consequences.

Somebody wasn’t happy...

He’d talked to doctors about it, of course — well, shrinks. They understood; they called it something else but it was the same. They wanted him to talk about his issues, which meant he’d have to be open about Serena, the Intersection, about Todd. Which wasn’t going to happen. Or they wanted to give him meds (and that made the Get mad, which was something you never, ever wanted to happen).

March tried to be temperate on his jobs. But the Asian family’s death had been denied him, the theater disaster too.

What the hell?

‘Miss? A Johnnie Walker Black. Neat.’

‘Sure. Are you finished?’

‘I am, yes.’

‘A box?’

‘What?’

‘To take home with you?’

‘No.’ The Get made you rude sometimes. He smiled. ‘It was very good. I’m just full. Thanks.’

The drink came. He sipped. He looked around him. A businesswoman eating dinner accompanied by an iPad and a glass of grapefruit-yellow wine glanced his way. She was around thirty-five, round but pretty. Sensuous enough, probably Calista-level sexy, to judge from her approach to eating the artichoke on her plate (food and sex, forever linked).

But his gaze angled away, avoiding her eyes.

No, not tonight.

Would he have a family some day with someone like her? He wondered what her name might be. Sandra. Joanne. Yes, she would be Joanne. Would he settle down with a Joanne after he got tired of the nights of Calistas and Tiffs?

March — yeah, yeah, so fucking handsome — could have asked Joanne, sitting over there with her artichoke and wine, a bit of butter on her cheek, to dinner tomorrow, and, in a month, a weekend getaway, and in a year to marry him. It would work. He could get it to work.

Except for one thing.

The Get wouldn’t approve.

The Get didn’t want him to have a social life, romantic life, family life.

He thought of the attack, at Solitude Creek.

How was that for a sign? Though Antioch March thought this in a droll way: he didn’t believe in signs.

Solitude...

The family was preparing to leave, collecting phones, bags of chocolate sea otters, leftovers to be discarded in the morning. The father had the keys of his car out. Keys didn’t jangle any more. They were quiet plastic fobs.

And, in this damn reflective mood, he couldn’t help but think about the intersection. Well, upper case: the Intersection.

Serena had changed his life in one way but the Intersection had changed it most of all. Everything that came after was explained by what had happened where Route 36 met Mockingbird Road. Reeking of Midwest America.

After Uncle Jim’s funeral, driving back.

‘Nearer My God To Thee’.

‘In Christ There Is No East Or West’.

The insipid, noncommittal Protestant hymns. They had no passion. Give me Bach or Mozart any day for gut-piercing Christian guilt. March had thought this even then, a boy.

It had been quiet in the Ford, the company car. His father, home for a change. His mother, being a wife for a change. Driving on the bleak November highway, winding, winding, pine turned gray by the mist, everything still.

Then around a bend, rocks and pines with stark black trunks.

Then: his mother gasping a brief inhaled scream.

The skid flinging him against the door, the brakes locking, then—

‘Sir?’

March blinked.

‘Here you go, sir.’ The waitress set the bill in front of him. ‘And at the bottom you can take a brief survey and maybe win a free dinner for the family.’

March laughed to himself.

For the family.

He doled out bills and didn’t tell her that after his business was concluded here he wouldn’t be coming back to the area again for quite a long time, if ever.