Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Milo

"Nobody in that store said my last name," Rhett said. "Not you, not me, not the girl at the register. My name tag says Rhett. That's all it says."

He had already loaded every bag into the bed of his truck and tied a tarp over them before I could help, and now he stood with one arm on the open driver's door while the wind tugged at his jacket. The parking lot of Westfield Mall was half empty. People were hurrying to their cars with their hoods up, and the sky over the roof of the old Sears had turned the flat, dull white of a refrigerator door.

"Maybe he heard it somewhere," I said.

"Where?"

I didn't have an answer, and he could see that I didn't.

"Get in," he said. "You're shaking again."

Inside the truck, he turned the heater all the way up and held his hands over the vent. I watched him from the passenger seat. When my father grabbed me, Rhett had crossed the store so fast I never even saw him move. Now he sat there rubbing his knuckles, and there was a fresh red scrape across the back of his right hand where my father's watch must have caught him.

"You're hurt," I said.

"That? That's nothing." He flexed his fingers. "Your old man's got a grip, I'll give him that. He hit you a lot growing up?"

"Not a lot."

"That's not a no."

I looked out the window. A woman two rows over was loading cases of bottled water into a minivan while her little boy held the cart steady with both hands. I wondered if she had heard the warning on the radio last night, or if she was just a careful person. I wondered if either of them would still be alive in February.

"Milo." He said it quietly. "I pulled you out from under a semi yesterday. I slept in a chair by your motel door. I just put my hands on your father in front of half the mall. I'm not asking you to tell me everything. I'm asking how a kid who's never been to this town knows who I am."

"I don't know," I said, and that was true. "But I think he knows a lot of things he shouldn't."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he leaned across my knees, opened the glove box, took out a granola bar, and dropped it in my lap.

"I told you yesterday to eat something," he said. "You didn't, did you?"

"I had coffee."

"Coffee isn't food." He pulled his seatbelt across his chest. "Eat that. Then tell me where we're going."

"Westbrook University. I'm supposed to sign papers for a job this morning."

"What kind of job needs a parka rated for minus sixty?"

"A research position at the agriculture field station up in Northfield."

He had his hand on the gearshift, and it stayed there a second too long before he put the truck in reverse. He didn't say anything else about it, but I saw the way his jaw moved, as if he were chewing on the word.

He turned on the radio as we pulled onto the highway. A man from the state weather service was explaining that the cold front which had hit the county last night was now holding north of the state line. He called it an unusual early cold snap. He said it might drift south again by the middle of next week, but most models showed temperatures recovering by the weekend.

"Recovering," Rhett said, and he turned it off.

"You don't believe him?"

"My dad worked with that guy for twelve years. He's the one who told the newspapers Dad was losing his mind." He changed lanes around a salt truck. "No. I don't believe him."

The granola bar was dry and tasted like cardboard, and I ate the whole thing because he kept glancing over to make sure I did.

The Westbrook campus looked the way it always did on the first of November. Somebody had left a carved pumpkin on the steps of the library, and it had frozen solid overnight, the face caved in on one side. Students were crossing the quad in hoodies and pajama pants, holding coffee cups, complaining loudly about the cold. A boy outside the student union was selling bags of leftover Halloween candy for a dollar. In my last life, I had walked past that same union fourteen months later. Every window had been broken, and somebody had burned the chairs inside for heat.

Professor Kim's lab was in the basement of the Ellis Agriculture Building. Rhett said he would wait in the truck. I told him it was too cold to sit in the truck. He said he had sat in worse, and I said that wasn't the point, and somehow we were both walking down the stairs together, him a step behind me, close enough that I could feel him there.

Professor Kim was at his desk with a mug of tea and a stack of student papers. He was sixty-two, with round glasses, gray hair that never stayed flat, and a brown cardigan with a hole in one elbow that I had seen him wear for two straight years. When he saw me, he stood up and came around the desk with both hands out.

"Milo. You actually came." He shook my hand hard. "I'll be honest, after you turned me down in September, I thought I'd lost you to that pharmaceutical place in Hartford."

"I was never going to Hartford."

"Good. They'd have wasted you." He looked past me at Rhett and raised his eyebrows. "And this is?"

"A friend," I said.

"Rhett Gallagher," Rhett said, and he held out his hand.

Professor Kim took it, and then he didn't let go. He tipped his head back to look up at Rhett's face. "Gallagher. You're not Frank's boy?"

Rhett's hand tightened a little. "You knew my father?"

"Knew him? He came to this office at least a dozen times in the last two years. Sat right in that chair." Professor Kim pointed at the old green armchair in the corner with the stuffing coming out of one arm. "He was the only person at the state weather service who ever read a single paper I published. He wanted to know which crops could survive a winter that never ended. I thought it was a thought experiment." He let go of Rhett's hand, slowly. "I was very sorry to hear he passed. I went to the service. I didn't know which one you were."

"I was the one who left early," Rhett said.

Nobody said anything for a second. Professor Kim nodded as if he understood exactly what that meant, and then he cleared his throat and went back to his desk.

The papers took twenty minutes. Housing agreement, research contract, a liability waiver for the greenhouse equipment, a form for the signing bonus. Professor Kim told me payroll would process the bonus on Monday, and I nodded and signed, knowing there was a real chance no bank would be open long enough for that money to matter. Then he opened his top drawer and took out a ring of keys with a green plastic tag that said Northfield Station House.

"The house is stocked with basics," he said. "Cots, a stove, some canned goods from last summer's crew. The geothermal system runs year round, so you'll never be cold. The well's a hundred and ninety feet deep. Greenhouses are on the east side, three of them, all dug in. I'll come up and walk you through everything on Wednesday after the faculty meeting."

"Wednesday," I said.

"The board's voting on something I need to be there for." He sat back and took off his glasses. "Actually, you should probably hear this, since it affects your project. A company approached the university last week about leasing the entire station for five years. Private research. They offered more money than this department has seen in a decade."

"What company?"

"Prescott Holdings. Out of Denver, I think." He rubbed his eyes. "They sent a man down here on Tuesday, very polite, very expensive suit. He asked how many people the dormitory could sleep, how much the geothermal system could heat, how deep the well went and whether the water was treated. He didn't ask a single question about the research. I thought that was odd."

Behind me, Rhett set his coffee cup down on the edge of the bookshelf, very carefully, as if he was afraid he'd crush it.

"Prescott," he said.

Professor Kim looked up. "You've heard of them?"

"Two weeks before my father died, Prescott Holdings bought every page of his research." Rhett's voice was flat and even, the way it had been yesterday when he told me about the heart attack. "Every model, every report, every data file on his computer. I found the contract in his desk after the funeral. He never said a word to me about it. He told me for two years that nobody would ever get his work unless they were going to warn people with it."

"Frank sold his work?" Professor Kim's face changed. "He told me he'd burn it first."

"Yeah," Rhett said. "He told me that too."

I sat in the chair with the keys in my hand and felt the metal go warm in my fist.

In my last life, the field station was taken over in December by a state emergency order. I had heard about it from a man at the Kroger who traded me two cans of beans for my good gloves. He said the military had moved into the university place up north, the one with the heat, and that they weren't letting anyone in. I had always assumed it was the government. I had never once wondered who asked them to take it.

"How is the board voting?" I asked.

"Most of them want the money." Professor Kim put his glasses back on. "I'm going to vote no, for whatever good it does. That's why I can't leave before Wednesday."

"Then leave right after the meeting," I said. "Don't go home first. Don't wait for the weekend. Get in your car and drive straight up."

He smiled at me, the patient smile he gave freshmen who were nervous about their first exam. "Milo, I've lived in this state for forty years. A cold snap doesn't frighten me."

"Please."