“Yes. Years ago. ”
“But … but Nix said that it was just her and her mom. ”
“Nowadays, sure. But everyone has family somewhere, Ben. Nix had a father and two older brothers. ”
“First Night?”
“First Night,” Tom agreed.
“God! Does Nix even know?”
“That’s hard to say. If Jessie told her, then either Nix has chosen not to say anything to her friends or she’s blocked it out like everyone else does. ”
Benny shook his head. “Nix would have told me. ”
“Are you sure?”
“She would have told me. Especially after I told her …”
Benny’s voice trailed off and Tom nodded. “After you told her about our trip to the Ruin?”
“Yes. ”
“It’s up to her what she chooses to tell you, but as far as what I’m about to share, that’s confidential. Family business. You can’t tell her about this. ”
“But—”
“We never break a client’s confidence. I need your word on this. ”
Benny finished his tea as he thought it through. He didn’t want to agree, but he couldn’t construct a single reason why not.
“Yeah,” he said, “okay. ”
“Good. Now we get to what you want to hear, because the story of Nix’s family is tied to the Lost Girl. ”
“Wait!” said Benny, “In the story the artist guy told me, there was a woman who had a baby. Was that baby Nix?”
Tom sat back and cocked his head to one side. “How long ago was First Night?”
“Almost fourteen years ago and … oh. Right. Nix will be fifteen in a couple of months. Can’t be her. ”
“My brother, the ma
th genius. ”
“Sorry. ”
“There is a connection, though, but it’s not a blood link, not a family tie,” Tom said. “I was doing the closure job for Jessie Riley. Rob had done erosion portraits of Mike Riley and the boys, Greg and Danny, and Jessie said that when she fled her house, she’d slammed the door behind her. Very few zoms can turn doorknobs, and most of them don’t have the coordination to climb out of a window. So unless someone else opened the door, there was a good chance they’d still be there. ”
“How long ago was this?”
“About five years ago. Remember the first time I left you with Fran and Randy Kirsch? I left on a Sunday, as I remember, heading northeast. There were a lot more zoms roaming free back then, and the farther I went from Mountainside, the more of them I saw. Most of them were singles, walking along, following some movement—a deer, a rabbit, whatever—but there were groups of them, too. Biggest group I saw was about fifty, standing in the middle of an intersection. Probably they’d come down different roads and met at the intersection and had nowhere else to go. Sounds weird, doesn’t it? But that’s what happens if there’s nothing for them to hunt and nothing to attract them. They just stop. ”
“What about the noms?”
“Good question and I don’t have a good answer. They’re different. The nomads keep wandering and never seem to stop, but they’re rare. Maybe one out of every couple thousand will roam. ”
“I thought all zoms were the same,” said Benny, unnerved by Tom’s story.