“That was in a novel. In the real world, people don’t curse each other with giant hissing cockroaches. Anyway, Ed is evidently losing it, but he’s not a bad guy.”
“If he doesn’t come back for a year, will you really put it in a barrel with cement and drop it in the ocean?”
Her father shrugged. “I sort of promised.” He sat at the table, smiled ruefully, and shook his head. “Seventy-six billion dollars.”
“You don’t really think anything that fits in such a little box could be worth so much, do you?” Amity wondered.
Snowball would fit in the box. Because she loved the little dude, he was worth a lot more to her than what they had paid for him, though he wasn’t worth thousands of millions of dollars. No offense intended toward the beloved mouse or toward mousekind in general. On the other hand, Daddy was for sure worth that much. If someday her father was kidnapped, and if the bad guys demanded seventy-six billion, and if by then Amity had that much money, she would pay the ransom; she really and truly would. However, unlike Snowball, Daddy wouldn’t fit in this box.
“Whatever it contains,” her father said, “it’s not worth ten cents to anyone but Ed. The poor man is losing his way. His mind has turned traitor on him. From things he’s said . . . I think maybe he was a college professor once, probably a great one. But now . . . he’s a very sad case. Well, whatever this thing is, he’ll be back for it tomorrow or the next day or a week from now.”
Amity took Snowball from her shoulder and cradled him in her hands. He was just a mouse, but he was hers to keep safe in a world where nothing lasted forever, not even who you were.
6
Throughout the night, Jeffy dreamed of the box. The dreams were fluid, each withering into the next, with no narrative coherence. In some, he desperately searched for the package but couldn’t find it—or he found a variety of boxes that were not the one with which Ed had entrusted him. In one scene, he entered the kitchen and turned on the lights and saw the pasteboard walls of the small container bowing outward and the string taut as something strained to escape those confines, something from which issued a needful keening as chilling as any sound he’d ever heard. Later, much like Alice in Wonderland after she sipped from the bottle labeled Drink Me, Jeffy found himself very small, perhaps one inch tall, trapped inside the box; he sensed that something larger than him, something hungry and vicious, was clinging to the underside of the lid, high above, able to see him in the dark, though he could not see it . . .
He woke before dawn and shaved, showered, dressed. When he went into the kitchen and turned on the lights, the box sat in the center of the breakfast table, precisely where he’d left it. It was not distorted, and no sound came from it.
Jeffy didn’t find Ed threatening. He remained certain that the box contained an ordinary item that the old man thought significant only because of his delusions. How curious, therefore, that Jeffy’s subconscious should torment him with disturbing dreams—some almost nightmares—involving this innocuous package.
The Art Deco kitchen conveyed him to a time when the world had seemed more welcoming, and his lingering uneasiness faded. A floor of large white ceramic tiles joined by small black diamond-shaped inlays. Glossy white cabinetry. Stainless-steel countertops and backsplash. A restored O’Keefe and Merritt stove with its several compartments. A replica of a 1930s Coldspot refrigerator. A Krazy Kat cookie jar, black with huge whites of the eyes. A poster of a Charm magazine cover from 1931, featuring a coffeepot and cup.
As the first light of the day brought a pink blush to the sky over the canyon, Jeffy poured a freshly brewed cup of a Jamaican blend. Standing at the kitchen sink, gazing out at the lane that curved up canyon, he had taken two sips when a rhythmic mechanical sound rose in the distance, quickly swelled in volume, and began to shudder through the house. He looked at the ceiling as a helicopter passed overhead, then glanced at the window in time to get a glimpse of the chopper above the oak trees: larger than a police helo, two engines, eight- or ten-passenger capacity, high-set main and tail rotors, maybe ten thousand pounds of serious machinery. It seemed menacing because it was far below minimum legal altitude for this area and moving fast, as if on an attack mission.
In the wake of the aircraft came the sound of big engines. One, two, three, four black Suburbans raced past on Shadow Canyon Lane, without flashing lights or wailing sirens, but with the urgency of an FBI contingent in a movie about terrorists armed with a nuke.
As the sound of one rotary wing receded, another racketed louder in the distance. Jeffy put down his coffee mug and hurried through the house to the front door. He stepped onto the porch just in time to see a second helo approaching from the west, out of a cloudless sky, the morning sun painting a pink cataract on the advanced glass cockpit.
Maybe fifty yards away, where Shadow Canyon Lane connected with Oak Hollow Road, a fifth Suburban stood alongside the pavement, and a sixth angled across the roadway to form a blockade. Six men had gotten out of the two vehicles and were conferring.
Barefoot, wearing Rocket Raccoon pajamas, yawning and blinking sleep from her eyes, Amity came out of the house and onto the porch as the second chopper passed low overhead. The palm fronds tossed, and the limbs of the live oaks shuddered. The enormous oaks were green throughout the year, though perpetually shedding their browner leaves, a swarm of which now beetle-clicked down through the black branches, small oval forms as crisp as cockroach carapaces.
Amity said, “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know.”
She said, “Something big.”
“Sure looks like it.”
“Are you freaked out? I am, a little.”
“A little,” he agreed.
“Who are they?”
“Maybe FBI. The Suburbans are black, the choppers were black, but no markings on any of them.”
“Don’t police cars and stuff have to be marked?”
“I thought so.”
After a silence, Amity said, “I better get dressed.”
“Good idea.”
On the doorstep, before returning to the house, she said, “And maybe you better hide the package that Ed left.”