Lionel’s other hand sealed our handshake. “My stars! He looks like Val, Ken. My boy, you look just like your mother.”
These unexpected words, this warm welcome—it was all I could do not to start sobbing. As if in sympathy, his own eyes filled with tears. His arthritic hands gripped harder.
“Honored,” he said. “Honored.”
“Lionel, easy,” Harnett sighed. “He needs that hand for digging.”
Lionel chuckled. He took a step back and regarded us both. He drove his cane into the dirt.
“What a treat! Come in, come in!”
He began hobbling back toward the house. Harnett and I followed.
“I’ll have Lahn make up the spare room,” Lionel said.
“We can’t stay,” Harnett said.
“What? That’s idiotic.”
Harnett glanced at me and again I felt guilty. “The kid’s got school.”
“Hmm.” He yanked at the ungreased door. “Well, I’ll have Lahn make up the room just in case.”
The normality of his home was heartbreaking. There were no stacks of papers, no ash-stained hearth, no hastily assembled bedding alongside the sink. There was a sofa and end tables with coasters. There were framed pictures. There was an aquarium in which bright fish waggled. There was a TV. With a grunt, Lionel leaned over and picked up a phone. A phone! I shot a yearning look at Harnett, feeling like a little kid inside a pet shop.
“Lahn, two very special guests have arrived at my home,” Lionel said pleasantly. “Would you mind terribly coming by and fixing up the spare room?”
“Lionel, look—” Harnett began.
“Oh, thank you, Lahn. We won’t be here when you arrive, so just let yourself—That’s right. Oh? That might be nice, too. Yes, let’s plan on it. We’ll see you then.” He hung up the phone. “Lahn will be fixing us dinner. You remember Lahn’s dinners.”
Harnett swallowed his protest. “Fine. Dinner. But then, really, we have to leave. The kid’s got some test he says is important.”
“Then I’m certain it is.” Lionel gave me another long look. “Well. We can discuss it during our walk.”
“What walk?”
Lionel indicated a closet. “Joey, get yourself a good coat. It gets cold on the beach.”
The ocean—it was impossible to conceal my grin. I sorted through the coats, only for a moment remembering the one I had abandoned in my locker before fleeing the school.
“You shouldn’t be walking,” Harnett said. There was a note of genuine concern in his voice. “You can barely make it across the room. We’ll drive.”
“Hogwash.” Lionel rapped his cane against the floor. “And where we’re going you can’t drive.”
Properly gloved and hatted, we exited through a rear door, passed through a backyard dominated by off-season flower patches and a freestanding porch swing, and picked up a faint trail leading into the trees. Harnett hovered over Lionel, tensed to catch the old man’s fall, but the probing cane seemed to know the location of every rock and root.
Harnett recounted the relocation, Boggs’s surprise appearance, and the contents of the Rotters Book. As he spoke I tried to envision my father as a little boy, looking up to his teacher much as I looked up to mine. Lionel took the news stoically, his brown eyes squinting through the fading light.
“And he looked bad,” Harnett finished. “Really bad, and he wasn’t making sense. He might be on something.”
“His has always been an addictive personality. It’s what made him such a Digger.” Lionel kept his eyes on the trail. “Part of me isn’t surprised he’s acting out. He blames me for a lot; blames you for even more. But the way he’s chosen to go about it, it’s the worst thing he could do. You know what would happen if that book got out? Or, how do you say it, computerized? And sent out through the computers?”
“He’s left evidence in every single coffin,” Harnett said. “Someone gets exhumed for an autopsy and they start finding these? Hundreds of years of history up in smoke.”
“It’s just another sign,” the old man said. “You can only fight so much, Ken. Are you going to fight the turning of time? Not sure I see the use of it anymore. How many of us are left now? Less than a dozen?”
“We need to do something. Don’t we?”
Lionel paused. “What exactly would you do?”
The prospective murder of Boggs, their brother and son, hung in the air.
Harnett kicked at the ground. “I don’t know.”
“If you’re expecting me to issue some magnificent edict, I’m afraid I will disappoint,” Lionel said. “No Monro-Barclay Pact would work now, not with what Baby has become.”