Sleepwalker Read online

  Which would leave me with no job, no insurance, and no prospects for anything resembling a normal life. Until George came along, I’d spent my whole life trying to figure out how to get away from Faris. Now it seemed like I was doing everything I could to figure out how to live here.

  3

  “ARE YOU ALL RIGHT, Web?”

  I took a careful breath and oriented myself. Dinner table. Fork in one hand, knife in the other, and a mouthful of Salisbury steak. Alex’s wife. Damn it. Known her since I was fourteen and couldn’t think of her name. Which wasn’t even the worst part—I’d never told them about the way George took words out of my brain and tossed ’em out the window. They weren’t going to quiz me. But the fugues, the stretches where I would sleepwalk without the benefit of sleep for minutes, even hours at a time—those were harder to write off.

  “Yeah, good,” I said, not quite a lie. I wasn’t bad, after all—I hadn’t flung the green beans against the wall or tried to swallow my steak knife while I was out. I just wouldn’t remember her name ’til I looked it up in my notebook. “Dinner’s great.”

  “That’s the third time you’ve said that,” Alex muttered. It sounded strangled, like he wouldn’t have commented if he’d had any control over it, but the words had forced their way out. And he couldn’t blame George, like I could.

  “Because it’s really, really great.” I smiled at what’s-er-name, and she gave me a wan return smile. She used to think I was charming, back when she was an undergrad at U of I, and I was Alex’s cute little gay cousin. Now she mostly felt sorry for me. “There, I said it again.”

  “So tell me this, Space Captain,” Alex said. “When did you zone out?”

  “Who said I—?”

  “What were we talking about, then?”

  “The MAHPS Grant,” I said. “From the Mid-American Historical Preservation Society.” No reaction. So we had been talking about the grant. I’d wow ’em with the slogan, then. “Mapping to the future by preserving the past.” I eyed both of them to see if either of them bought my “fully conscious” act, but given that Alex had a vein throbbing at his temple and...his wife...was sitting up far too straight, I was guessing not.

  Alex said, “You know I pulled a bunch of strings and got Thursday off for you.”

  No, I didn’t know. “How many times do you want me to thank you for that? They’ll pay you, y’know.” If he was lucky, the check wouldn’t bounce.

  “You on your meds?”

  “Why do you always think I’m skipping my meds?”

  “Web doesn’t skip his meds,” Alex’s wife said. Bless her heart, whatever her name was.

  “I can never tell if you’re really here or not. You’ll ask me for the wi-fi password, head upstairs, then come back down ten minutes later and ask for it again. It’s like Groundhog Day, but you’re the only one stuck in it. It’d be different if you at least acted funny when you’re out to lunch—but you don’t. It’s creepy.”

  Try living with near-constant déjà vu like I did, then come and tell me about creepy. “Neurontin is for seizures.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “I haven’t had one in eight months. So there you go—I’m taking my meds. Happy?”

  Alex glared at his plate. “Tickled pink.”

  His wife made a weird sound, a hiccup thing that I took for a laugh, until she clapped her hand over her mouth, said, “I’m sorry,” into her palm and took off into the living room.

  “It’s fine,” I called after her. “I’m fine.” Damn it. I knew her. I had loads of memories of watching movies and eating dinner and hanging out together. If only I could remember her name.

  I pulled out my notepad, wrote told Marvin next to Cave FArt, then wrote, Alex working Thursday, tell Luke beneath it. Then I flipped back a few pages until I spotted something useful: Pick up Kathy’s dry cleaning. Kathy. Kathleen. It flooded back all at once like it did every time, ten years of saying her name. Kathy. Kath. I knew her name, I did.

  What a relief.

  Alex stabbed his potatoes so hard his fork clacked into the plate. “And then she goes and gets all worked up about it....”

  “You know, look. I appreciate everything you guys have done for me—more than I can ever say—but this is too stressful for everybody. Maybe I should move.”

  “Don’t say that.” He nailed me with a fierce look. “We’re family, and we stick together. You stay here—ignore me, all right? I’m an asshole.”

  He wasn’t, though. He was just pissed off. Anger—I’d moved through that stage a long time ago, and currently I hovered somewhere between acceptance and bemused derision.

  WATCH, PILLS, NOTEBOOK, leftovers. What more could an eager young man like me need for a wild night in a museum? I passed the dry cleaners where I’d picked up—Kathy, her name is Kathy—where I’d picked up Kathy’s down comforter a week ago. It was closed now for the night, and security gates were drawn. All the businesses in New Faris had security gates now, not because it was particularly wealthy, but because the number of abandoned houses had skyrocketed with the latest recession. Back when the new part of town had been built, fifteen years ago, no one had realized what a ghost town it would turn into.

  I let myself into the Center’s east entrance and made my way toward the staff break room to drop off my midnight lunch and my overcoat, but stopped dead at the top of the stairwell as I saw the second-floor lights were on. Not just the Admin offices this time—all of them. Bright as regular open hours. I checked my watch to make sure it wasn’t me who’d gone and turned them on while I was sleepwalking. 10:55 pm. Nope—not me, not unless I’d been running really fast.

  Theresa, the second-shift guard, walked out of the office door pulling on a ratty hooded sweatshirt. She’s a twenty-something girl with hips so big she looks like her top and bottom halves came from two different people. She also looks like she could kick my ass. “Taxidermy guy’s here,” she said. “Don’t mace him.”

  Theresa and I didn’t have a routine like Marvin and I did. Theresa didn’t wave. She also always made sure to leave the second I got there, whether I was early or not. Maybe she did it on purpose, maybe not. Hard to say—I’ve never once seen her check her watch.

  Not one of us was thrilled to be there—I could personally vouch for that—but Theresa didn’t even try to fake it. She used to make her living doing nails, and I guess she was good at it. But then one of her kids broke his arm and the trip to the emergency room convinced her that she needed to give up a job she liked for a job with...health insurance.

  Given her situation (and mine) I couldn’t exactly throw stones. Even so, as I watched her high-tail it toward the exit, I couldn’t help but thinking that she never moved that fast while she was making her rounds.

  I sighed, pulled out my notepad, and wrote, Taxidermy guy here. I’ve forgotten weirder things, after all.

  Once my leftovers were stowed in the fridge and I’d tried for the umpteenth time to mash my khaki baseball cap into the semblance of something that fit, I headed up to the third floor to start my rounds.

  The guy standing at the edge of People of the Plains gazing at the beaver didn’t look like some old guy from Iowa to me. He was young, younger than me probably, with a black bandanna over wavy brown hair that hung down to the middle of his back. He was wearing big, low-slung jeans and a flannel shirt. The way he stared at that beaver, you’d swear he was watching a Blink-182 encore.

  I flicked on my flashlight and bounced a beam of light off the beaver’s case to get his attention. “Are you the, uh, taxidermist?”

  He turned and shot me a look over his shoulder, and whoa damn, he was way too hot to be a taxidermist. Probably straight, given the skater getup, but like I always say—no harm in looking.

  “Jesse Ray Jones.” He seemed like he should’ve had a twang, but he didn’t. Midwestern accent, soft-spoken, even shy. I was suddenly painfully aware that I hadn’t gotten laid in months. And I was wearing a clip-on tie.

  “Da
n Weber—call me Web.”

  He cocked his head at the display. “This guy’s got a plastic nose. Shame. Good cape, otherwise. And big.”

  The Rock River Beaver never made it to the U of I biology department. Too special to be manhandled by students. “I didn’t know they made plastic beaver noses. Can’t imagine where I’d shop for one.”

  “Mail order, back when he was mounted. These days it’s all online.”

  “You local? I heard we were outsourcing to Iowa for a specialist....”

  He smiled. Dimples. He had dimples in that strong-featured farm boy face. I was such a goner. “That’s my old man. He’s at a conference in Alaska, and you guys couldn’t wait a week, so you get me instead.” Good thing I hadn’t quoted Luke directly—thought I didn’t remember if Jesse Ray’s father was supposed to be a hillbilly or a redneck. One thing for sure, he’d fathered one fine-looking kid. “You got the key to this case? The one Theresa gave me sticks. I don’t want to break it off in the lock.”

  I sorted through the keys on the heavy ring attached to my belt—he loves me, he loves me not—and opened the case. You’d expect a dead animal to smell, but taxidermies don’t. Not like dead animals, anyway. They smell like attics.

  “I’ll see to him right here instead of hauling him down to preservation. Got my work cut out for me if I want to get everything buffed up for Thursday.” He flicked open a roll of canvas and unzipped a duffel bag. “You show me where I can plug in my extension cord and I’ll let you get back to what you were doing.”

  Which was wandering around the museum and seeing where else a bored twelve-year-old had penned something stupid. “If you need any help...” I shrugged. “I’ve cleaned these before.”

  I’m not sure if Jesse would’ve taken me up on my offer or not. The shoosh-shoosh of rubber-soled shoes on marble alerted me a fraction of a second before Bridget entered my airspace. I never saw her at the Center that late, never. Just like I’d never seen Luke there so early.

  I planted my hands on my hips and turned toward her. Bridget Barker was the great-great-great granddaughter of Isaac Faris, the town’s founding father. I’d put her age around fifty or so. She was squat and solid with a no-nonsense silver bob. Tonight she had on a navy pantsuit with a brooch on the lapel. I’ve never seen anyone else in a brooch. “I see you’ve met Mr. Jones,” she said. “Help him bring the ladder up from the basement when he gets to the Denizens of the Sky.”

  “All right.”

  “But keep out of his hair. He’s got a lot of ground to cover over the next three days, and it’s critical he finishes before the MAHPS representative gets here.”

  Keep out of his hair. There was one hell of a mental image to ponder—burying my face in that long hair and seeing if it smelled like Iowa sunshine. Feeling it tickle my shoulders as we moved together, skin to skin. “All right,” I repeated, just as inflectionless as the first time.

  “You got a phone on you?” Jesse asked me. “I can call you if I need anything.”

  “That’s a great idea,” Bridget said. “Give him your phone number.”

  I pulled out my notepad, jotted down my cell number, tore it out and gave it to Jesse. He dimpled slightly as he took it—and time expanded for once, rather than mysteriously compressing.

  He’d just angled for my phone number, him, the longhaired skater-kid from Iowa.

  4

  IT WAS TWO O’CLOCK in the morning. First floor, local history. To my left, Isaac Faris discovered lead while mining for silver—and the great lead rush of 1848 began. Beyond them, a bunch of pathetic framed newspapers bridged the diorama to a fiberglass representation of a tornado’s path of destruction. To my right, the slim mannequin, who was supposed to be local legend Ty Robson, lunged over the finish line in the 1937 Olympics to take the gold. In my pocket, my phone rang. The display showed a number with an Iowa area code. I hit the on-button.

  “Hope I’m not bothering you,” Jesse said, “But I think the boss is gone and—”

  “You sure? She has a tendency to ‘forget’ things so she can come back five minutes later and check up on you.”

  “Fine by me. I got nothing to hide. Listen, maybe you can help me out. I’m trying to figure out a plan of attack and make sure I hit all the most important exhibits, but I’m not a hundred percent clear on the building’s layout. You got one of those visitor maps?”

  “Yeah, I’ll dig one up for you. But it was printed ten years ago and half the stuff isn’t where it says it is.”

  “I guess I’ll take what I can get.”

  Once I disconnected and keyed him into my address book, I took the elevator to the third floor and found the Rock River Beaver was encased again on his small stretch of riverbank, looking lustrous, though still evil. I spotted Jesse over by a family of foxes on the cross-section of the Illinois River, and our eyes met across a dimly lit room full of dioramas and plexi cases.

  I walked over and did my best imitation of nonchalant. He eyed me for a minute while I stood there and tried not to look like I’d been thinking salacious thoughts about him. “Listen,” he said, “I was gonna shower at the Petro, but it’s forty-five minutes outside Faris—”

  “You’re showering at the truck stop? Don’t you have a room?”

  “Why blow money on a room? I’m only here for three days. I can sleep in the truck.”

  “Don’t sleep in your truck. I have a couch.”

  He shrugged, but that damn dimple was back, like he knew how adorable he was. “I don’t want to be any trouble. I was just hoping to save myself some driving.”

  No trouble at all...though after my shift, I did hurry home to make sure my apartment wasn’t as much of a wreck as I thought it was. I had three hours between the end of my shift and his, since he was bound and determined to stay until ten so he could work right up ’til the doors opened to the sparse public. That left me three hours in which to notice the thick layer of dust on the blades on the ceiling fan, or the shower curtain that was streaked with mineral deposits, or the weird smudges around my doorknob—as if I pawed all around the door with filthy hands while I was sleepwalking, but only noticed it now.

  The doorbell rang. I went downstairs and found Jesse leaning in the doorframe with a box of donuts in one hand and a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew in the other. “I brought breakfast.”

  I’d eaten the usual two-egg special at Pat’s Diner for $2.99, but there’s always room for a donut. Jesse followed me up to my flat and threw his beat-up jean jacket over the back of a kitchen chair.

  I set out a couple of plastic tumblers. Jesse cracked open the new bottle, which let out a carbonated sigh, and poured. “’Course I heard about the way exactly half the town got flattened,” he said. “Everyone knows the story—but I didn’t know how weird it would look, one side of the street old and the other brand new. Like the twister just plowed down Main Street in a straight line.”

  “That’s pretty much the size of it. There’s a whole alcove dedicated to it on the first floor. Old Faris, New Faris.”

  “Any taxidermy in it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He pulled the old map I’d given him out of his pocket and turned it over a few times. “Not much to see in terms of displays on the first floor. That seem funny to you?”

  Funny wasn’t exactly the word I would have picked, not in either sense of it—funny-weird or funny-ha ha. “There used to be restaurants down there, and tables under the big skylight where you could hang out with your friends—so my cousin tells me. But now there’s a whole lot of nothing. The Center is just like everything else in Faris. It’s trying so hard to prove how it’s bigger and better than ever after the tornado by putting off this act that everything’s great—only it’s all just a big empty shell with nothing inside. One wrong move and it all comes crashing down again.” I shrugged. I wasn’t very comfortable with the way the analogy was going. I figured I should shut up before I dug myself in any deeper, and focus instead on looking charming and
available.

  Jesse eyed me over the rim of his Mountain Dew. He seemed shrewd enough to know that something was going on, but once he gave it some thought, he decided to steer the conversation into safer waters. “So, you live alone?”

  Was that a come on? A year and a half ago, I would have known, and it would have been second nature for me to take that ball and run with it. I’d done it all the time, picking up guys. It was as easy as picking up a six-pack at Harley’s Grocery and Bait.

  “Yeah, I uh...downstairs, my cousin Alex and his wife....” Damn it. Maybe someone should re-introduce me to her so I could store her name in a different cluster of brain cells.

  My brain took umbrage at me thinking about it directly.

  There was no warning, no telltale halo, no buzzing in my ear, no flash of light or lance of pain. The kitchen turned abruptly into the living room, and Jesse was right there in front of me, brushing my hair back from my forehead and tucking it behind my ear. “What’s your middle name?”

  “Anthony. Why?”

  “And who’s Governor?”

  “Pritzker. I was sleepwalking, wasn’t I?”

  “Don’t know about that. Your eyes were tracking funny and you thought Arnold Schwarzenegger was your elected official.”

  “That’s just George. He put in an appearance before I had a chance to introduce you.” I checked my watch. Jesse’d only rung the doorbell five minutes before, and we’d talked for maybe two. I’d lost three minutes, then. Not bad—though plenty of damning things can be said in three minutes.

  “George?” Jesse asked.

  “Temporal lobe meningioma.”

  “Dude, you got a brain tumor and you named it George? That’s messed up. In the best possible way.”

  The few people I tell about George usually have trouble keeping eye contact. Then they tell me about how chemotherapy worked for someone they know, or how I should get a fourth and fifth opinion before I decide against surgery once and for all. Jesse was the first one who ever laughed.