Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

“What would that do to our cover story about his decision to attend the Candler School of Theology?”

Adam signed again, and RuthClaire said, “It’s too late to enroll for summer term there, and fall semester doesn’t officially start until the last Monday in August.”

“So the alibi holds,” Niedrach said. “Take him with you, Mr. Loyd. We’ve got an agent in Hothlepoya County investigating the drug scene there. He’ll act as a go-between, relaying information from us to you and vice versa. So go on.”

“When?”

“As soon as he can get ready to go. Now, if possible.”

RuthClaire and Adam climbed upstairs to get him packed for his stay at Paradise Farm, and to tell each other goodbye. Bilker and the GBI agents, discreetly embarrassed by this turn of events, huddled in the kitchen drinking coffee and swapping companionable tall tales about their prowess as bodyguards and their expertise as sleuths.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” I told them.

Davison, who had draped his black jacket over his chair, blurted, “An hour ? Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“To tell somebody goodbye.”

I drove to Caroline’s—not in her little blue beetle, but in my big silver Mercedes. I arrived at 9:37 A.M., bleary-eyed, funky, and anxious about the deadline I’d set myself. An hour? I now had only forty-six minutes. It might take me that long to convince my hapless generative equipment that it could still pretend to that title. It might take me longer to convince the lovely Caroline to let me try to convince my equipment. Wasn’t I presuming too much?

Staggering along the walk to her porch, I felt that I was bound in a pair of tinfoil shorts. I itched. I had not slept all night. My stubbly beard seemed to be infested with microscopic lumberjacks sawing away at every follicle. Who— whom —was I kidding? I had no chance with this lady.

Forty-four minutes.

At last at her door, I leaned with one elbow and all my bathetic longing into the tiny button that rang her bell—her dear, melodious bell. Inside her apartment chimed the opening eight notes of “Tara’s Theme” from Gone with the Wind . They chimed over and over again because I was too weary to pull back my elbow.

Forty-three minutes.

“Who is it?” Caroline’s voice cried.

“Me.”

She opened the three inches her safety-chain allowed. “What do you want?”

“A friendly fee-fi-fo-fum.”

“Has anything happened? Have they found Paulie?”

I tried to alchemize my weary nonchalance into concerned sobriety. “Listen, Caroline, if you’ll—”

“That’s not my car,” she said, peering past me. “How am I going to get my car home?” She shook her head. “Damn! That’s not important. The important thing is Paulie. I’m still three-quarters asleep.”

“If you’ll let me in, I’ll tell you all I—”

Caroline unhooked the chain. The door opened, and she was standing against a backdrop of framed Broadway posters, porcelain flower vases, and at least two copper umbrella holders. The breath of the apartment’s air-conditioning rippled over me. As for Caroline herself, she wore a yellow dressing gown that seemed to be lined with layer upon liquid-thin layer of an even paler material. She looked and smelled like the demigoddess of a fragrant wheat field.

“You have to shower. And talk to me. And eat breakfast here.”

“Forty-one minutes,” I said. “I’ve got forty-one minutes.”

“Listen, Mr. Loyd, there’s a clock in every room but the bathroom. You can hang your watch on the shower spigot for all I care. If you have any sense, though, you’ll forget about your stupid forty-one minutes and put your watch in one of your shoes.” She pulled me inside and shut us both into her apartment’s Fundy Bay briskness.

As matters unfolded, I put my Elgin in one of my shoes and deliberately forgot about it.

I spent more than forty-one minutes at Caroline’s. I spent more than eighty-two minutes at Caroline’s. In fact, I didn’t make it back to Hurt Street until better than two hours after my departure—but neither Bilker nor the GBI agents scolded me, for Caroline, fetching in old jeans and a bright yellow tank top, had accompanied me. She had to pick up her VW, didn’t she? Further, as a witness to the crime, she wished to accommodate Niedrach and Davison by recounting the event from her point of view. Wouldn’t they have sought her out eventually, anyway? They admitted they would have.

“And RuthClaire might like having another woman around for a while today,” I said. “It won’t be easy for her with Adam gone and only Bilker’s shoulder to cry on.”

Bilker snorted, in agreement rather than indignation.

And when the Montarazes came downstairs, RuthClaire and Caroline embraced like long-lost siblings unexpectedly reunited, and as they did, Adam and I carried his belongings out to my car for the trip to Beulah Fork. Bilker lent a hand. Even on its high-performance shocks, the rear of my Mercedes began to sag. Adam had added to his own luggage at least three dozen of RuthClaire’s more recent paintings. Although fairly small, the canvases were still affixed to their frames, and Bilker and I had to struggle to wedge them into the trunk between the suitcases and the pasteboard boxes.

“Adam, what’s the point of taking the paintings?”

“ Remembrance ,” he gargled.

Because it hurt for him to speak, I did not question him further—but it occurred to me that he was preparing for a long separation from RuthClaire. This was not a surrender to despair, though, but an act of faith. If he and his wife were to be reunited with their child, they would have to accede to and endure the stipulations of the kidnappers. With luck, the GBI might break the case, but there was no guarantee.

These paintings—the drab acrylics she’d hopefully entitled Souls —still seemed to me the least distinguished work of RuthClaire’s career: blatant mediocrities. Only a uxorious husband could love them. I scratched my head. Adam was not the uxorious sort, but his fondness for this series—when, for “remembrances,” he could have taken better examples of his wife’s art—truly puzzled me.

We got away from Atlanta shortly after noon. On our drive down, Adam read. He had a stack of hardcover titles on the floorboard, and he seemed to pick up and peruse a new one every fifteen minutes or so. Does God Exist? and Eternal Life? by Hans Küng, God and the Astronomers by Robert Jastrow, God and the New Physics by Paul Davies, The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, The Reenchantment of the World by Morris Berman, Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson, an anthology entitled The Mind’s I by a pair of editors whose names escape me. I don’t know what all else. I had the impression that Adam was sampling these texts, checking passages that he’d underlined in previous readings, rather than trying to devour each volume whole for the first time—but even this formidable intellectual feat had its intimidating aspects. Out of respect for his admirable focus, I kept my mouth shut.

At Paradise Farm, unloading, I broke my quirky vow of silence: “Adam, you know the story you told RuthClaire to tell the reporter about your reasons for separating?” He raised his eyebrows. “The one about entering the seminary this fall?”

“Yes?” he croaked.

“That alleged fiction came to you so quickly, I wondered if… well, if it might really be something you’d like to try.”

“Oh, yes,” he managed. “I. Have. Thought. About. It.”

Livia George, Hazel Upchurch, and our latest little waitress from Tocqueville Junior College did not jump for joy on my return. An hour earlier, a tour bus from Muscadine Gardens had dropped off forty people at the West Bank. These people had descended like a flock of crows, eaten a dozen different menu items, left a skimpy collective tip, and flown away in their bus with a rude backfire.