Морган Лливелин - Drop by Drop

After lunch they started in on Tilbury’s books. The printing in some was showing the results of the Change, with smeared ink and damp pages, but the older ones were still good.

“What do you like to read, Lila?”

“Almost everything; I told you, I’m self-educated.”

“You’re an autodidact. Some of the world’s most successful people have been autodidacts.”

“Don’t include me in that. The only real success I’ve had was with the computer and that’s not worth much anymore.” Lila thrust her lower lip forward and blew a coppery strand out of her eyes. She was letting her hair grow.

Tilbury said, “You never can tell, it might be valuable again someday.”

“This from a man who’s prophesying the end of the world and equipping a giant fallout shelter?”

“I’m hedging my bets, that’s all.”

Her green eyes filled with shadows. “You’re betting against all of humanity.”

At his direction she began stacking up books she had never read but thought she might like to read. Every now and then he would add one to the pile. “ Swiss Family Robinson ?” she queried. “This looks old.”

“It is, I know it belonged to my grandfather when he was a boy. It’s about a family who had to start over and build a life out of nothing. On an uninhabited island, as I recall.”

“You definitely want to keep this one close to hand, Edgar. Survival guide.”

“Don’t worry, I have plenty. Wait until you read Five Acres and Independence .”

A few minutes later Lila said, “Surely we’re not going to need all of those,” indicating the thirty-three volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica he was pulling from the bookshelves.

“No way of knowing when I might need to refer to them.”

“Can’t you download the information from the… Oops.”

“Yup. Oops. The same with the complete works of Shakespeare. Let’s get these big sets into cartons for safekeeping below.”

They were both aware that “safekeeping below” was a tenuous concept. So far nothing in the tunnels had been affected by the Change, though Tilbury could not explain why.

Over dinner Lila asked him, “How many guests can you accommodate in your hotel down there?”

“Hotel; that’s a good one. Bolt-hole, more like. Covers a lot of territory, but the resources are pretty limited.”

“How many people?”

“You and me.”

“We’re not Adam and Eve.”

“Certainly not, and I’m not a dirty old man. I thought we’d invite somebody nearer your own age.”

Lila put down her cutlery and pushed her plate away.

“What’s wrong?” he asked anxiously.

“Nothing, I’m just not hungry anymore.”

“Why not? You coming down with something?”

“An advance case of survival guilt, maybe. When you told me about the tunnels and your plans for them it sounded like a fairy tale. Like when I first started amassing money. But now I’m taking a look at reality. This is reality, isn’t it? You propose to rescue a very few people in your own version of the ark while God knows what goes on in the rest of the world?”

He frowned. “I wouldn’t put it like that.”

“I’m putting it exactly like that. And I can’t be part of it, Edgar.”

“If that’s true you’re not the girl I thought you were.”

Lila stood up and pushed her chair away from the table. “I’m not the girl I thought I was either.”

According to the local phone books—which had been superseded by computer search engines that had since surrendered to the Change—there were no beekeepers in the Sycamore River Valley and no commercial suppliers of honey. But a label on an almost empty jar at the back of the shelf in his aunt’s kitchen had given Jack a clue: “Privately Labeled for Benning Beekeepers Suppliers.”

When he drove to the neighboring town of Benning he learned the suppliers had been out of business for several years. “Everything comes through commercial distributors now, or it did,” the former proprietor lamented. “As I recall, the last guy I dealt with on a personal basis was an old grump with rural pretensions. We used to get them every now and then, starry-eyed dreamers who wanted to go back to nature and make their own honey, grow their own vegetables. Damned fools who thought they were too good to eat supermarket food like the rest of us.”

Jack could have pointed out that the quality and availability of supermarket food had declined drastically, but he didn’t. “Do you happen to remember where the old grump lived?”

Following the directions he was given, he drove almost back to Sycamore River before turning north onto a gravel road. He saw only a few small farms on a distant hillside. When he came to an unpaved lane identified by a rural mailbox atop a leaning post, he stopped the Mustang and got out. Looked around. Saw nothing of interest.

Whoever lived in this godforsaken spot probably died in his bed and had to be scraped off it.

Jack was unable to abandon a search without a conclusion. He got back into the car, put it in gear and jolted along the rutted laneway. At a bend in the lane he slammed on the brakes.

The woman walking toward him was carrying a large black cat in her arms.

He lowered the window. “Lila Ragland?” he called incredulously.

“Jack Reece,” she responded. “How are you?”

“Flabbergasted to see you out here. Is this where you live?”

“A friend of mine does. I come to read his books.”

“You bring your cat to the library?” Jack was trying to find a pattern in unrelated shreds of information.

“She’s not my cat, she’s a stray who wandered in here. I named her Karma; do you like it?” The long-haired black cat in Lila’s arms lifted her head and fixed Jack with blue-green eyes. “Edgar can’t keep her because he’s allergic to cats.”

“Edgar? Edgar Tilbury?”

“That’s right, do you know him?”

“I’d like to,” said Jack. “I’m looking for someone who can supply beeswax; I’m in the market for all I can get.”

“Then he’s your man; he has a field full of hives on the other side of the barn. Come to the house and you can talk to him about it. Do I tell him you’re a wholesaler?”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “What do I look like?”

She regarded him thoughtfully. “A pirate.”

“I can’t put my life together again, Mom!” Eleanor Bennett insisted. “Stop telling me to. It’s never going to be the way it was and… and I wouldn’t want it to be. But if you’re tired of having us living with you, just say so.”

Katharine Richmond looked offended. “I didn’t mean that, dear, you know I love having you here. All of you. I only meant it’s not healthy for you to keep on mourning Robert.”

“Is that what you think I’m doing?”

“Well, of course you are. In a way I’m still mourning your dad after all this time. But life goes on.”

Nell was exasperated. “Haven’t you noticed? Life isn’t ‘going on,’ it’s completely changed. The whole damned world’s changed.”

“There’s no need to swear.”

“There’s no need for clichés either.” Nell folded her arms across her chest. “Maybe we should start looking for a place of our own. Finbar feels certain the Nyeberger lawsuit will be hung up indefinitely, perhaps forever, so there’s no reason I shouldn’t access whatever funds I can.”

“Now, dear, don’t do anything drastic.”

“What’s happened to us has been drastic.” Nell knew there was no point in arguing with her mother, or even trying to explain. They lived in different realities. She went to the bedroom and began organizing her belongings.