15

The cabby dropped them off at the address Eddie had given him.

A narrow residential street, lined with parked cars; quiet as expected on a Tuesday afternoon in summer. The surrounding houses had small front yards sporting lawns and plantings that spanned the bell-shaped curve in terms of care and quality. A couple of Asian kids shot baskets in a driveway a few doors down. A woman in a sari wheeled a little shopping cart up from Roosevelt Avenue.

Jack stood on the front walk and stared at the house: Two stories tall, it sat cheek by jowl with its identical neighbors, with what looked like the original postwar, asbestos-shingle siding painted Broomhilda green.

“She rents Archie Bunker’s house?”

Eddie, a few steps ahead of him, stopped and stared for a second, then laughed.

“You know, I never saw it before, but you’re right. Not a whole lot of single-family houses around here. This is one of the few blocks that’s got any.”

Jack had been through Jackson Heights countless times over the years. It sat in northwest Queens—not as far north or west as Astoria where the Kenton brothers lived, but convenient to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and with good subway service in and out of the city. Back when Jack was born, white middle-class folks like Archie and Edith peopled its ubiquitous garden apartments. But then, like Astoria, it morphed into an ethnic polyglot, home of Little India with its myriad South Asian shops and restaurants, and loads of Africans and Latinos as well. And then, as real estate prices began soaring in Manhattan, the whites had started moving back. But not too many yet.

Mostly working folks in Jackson Heights, but gangs reared their ugly heads every so often. And more and more of those gang members seemed to be wearing Kicker Man tattoos.

Jack noticed Weezy’s windows. Heavy sunshades inside the glass screened the interior from view; wrought-iron bars protected all the first-floor windows—not all that unusual. Then he spotted more on the second floor over the front-porch roof.

He did a slow turn to check out the neighborhood again: seemed quiet enough. Why was Weezy’s house the only one secured like a jewelry store?

He caught up to Eddie at the front door as he was unlocking the second of three deadbolts.

Okay, Jack had multiple locks on his door too. Nothing wrong with that.

“What’s with all the window bars?”

“When you think you might go ‘missing,’ it’s only logical to take precautions, right?”

“True that. Nothing to do with the fact that she appears to be the only Caucasian on the block?”

Eddie gave him a sharp look and his tone took on an acid edge. “You should know better than that.”

“That’s just it—I don’t. I don’t know a thing about the adult Weezy.”

“Yeah, I suppose you don’t. But trust me on this: The grown-up Weezy is very much like the Weezy you knew before they started . . . medicating her. She doesn’t notice race—or at least that’s not the way she categorizes people. She has her own unique criteria.”

“As in the parts they play in the Secret History of the World?”

“Bingo.” He turned the key on her last deadbolt and looked at Jack. “Get ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“You’ll see.”

He pushed the door open and an unusual odor wafted from the dark interior. It threw Jack for a second until he recognized it. Old paper—it smelled like an antiquarian bookstore.

Eddie stepped inside and flipped a light switch. Jack followed but froze on the threshold.

“What the—?”

Eddie’s comment about Weezy having a lot of worldly possessions suddenly made sense.

The walls of the front room were lined—as in spackled—with books, but the shoulder-high piles of newspapers dominated the front room. Row upon row of stacks with narrow passages between forming the equivalent of an English hedgerow maze.

“Amazing, isn’t it,” Eddie said, navigating a lane toward the rear.

Jack closed the door and followed.

“Well, it’s not on the scale of the Collyer brothers—”

“Who?”

“Two recluse brothers who were found dead in their Fifth Avenue brown-stone with a hundred tons of junk, much of it old newspapers.”

“No junk here, as you will note.” Eddie sounded a little defensive. “And everything neatly stacked.”

Jack had noticed that. The tabloids were stacked together, as were the full-size papers. They weren’t tied into bundles. He wondered if they were in any special order. He stopped and checked out a few. A 1968 Post lay atop a 1975 Daily News. In the next stack a 1993 Times atop—

“Wow. Check this out—a Journal-American from nineteen sixty-two. Where’d she get these?”

“God only knows.”

“Looks like they’re all New York papers.”

“They might be. I wouldn’t know.”

The maze extended into the next room. Yes, she had a dining set, but the table was piled high with papers and more stacked beneath. The same with each of the four chairs. Her china cabinet was stuffed with books.

“It’s the same upstairs—the extra rooms, the hallway, even her bedroom.”

Jack glanced at the living room ceiling and thought it appeared to belly downward.

“She hasn’t filled the basement, but that’s not to say she couldn’t. It’s damp down there and she’s afraid the moisture will mildew the papers.”

“Well, she could get the walls and floor treated—”

“And let workers in? You must be joking.”

“Sorry. What was I thinking?”

“I’ve begged her not to store anything in the kitchen and apparently she’s listened. The thought of an open flame and all these papers . . .” He gave a visible shudder.

“ ‘Burn my house,’ ” Jack said, looking around at the astounding amount of paper. “As easily done as said.”

“Not that she does any cooking anyway.” Eddie stepped into the kitchen. “She lives on takeout and microwaveables.”

The kitchen looked more like an office—scanner and printer on the counter next to the microwave, computer on the kitchen table. Jack checked out the refrigerator: Lean Cuisine entrées in the freezer on top; milk, cheese, condiments below.

No beer. Damn. Could have used a beer.

He lifted the shade and peeked out the kitchen window into the wildly overgrown backyard. A well-weathered six-foot stockade fence ran along the perimeter.

“Doesn’t she ever cut her grass?”

“Not in back,” Eddie said. “I asked her once and she said she never went out there, so why bother?”

No sign of a bunny hutch—a long shot anyway—so Jack dropped the shade and looked back into the dining room at the piles of papers.

“Why would she want to burn all this? Must have spent half her life collecting it.”

“Only the last three years or so, actually. Started some time after Steve died.”

Jack shook his head. He’d assumed it was a longtime obsession. How had Weezy amassed this collection in only three years?

“Did she ever give you a reason?”

“She refused to say. As I told you, she said I could be in danger if I knew. She was pretty serious about it.”

“Ah. So then it’s a good bet that her perceived threat is linked to the newspapers.”

“That was the impression I got.”

Jack grabbed a copy from the nearest pile and handed it to Eddie.

“Okay, then. We’d better get started. I hope you’re an Evelyn Wood graduate.”

Eddie gave him a baffled look. “Huh?”

“Speed reading. We’ve got to go through every one of these to see why she’s been saving them.”

Bafflement turned to shocked disbelief. “Have you lost your mind?”

Jack held his gaze for a heartbeat or two, then said, “Psych!”

Eddie looked ceilingward and burst out laughing. “Oh, man, does that take me back!”

It took Jack back too. They had put each other on so many times growing up, always ending with Psych!

The laughter died and they looked at each other.

Eddie said, “If someone really was following us, it means they’re looking for this house.” He rolled his eyes. “Listen to me: ‘they.’ That sounds so paranoid.”

Jack hid his annoyance. He understood Eddie’s reluctance to believe and his difficulty letting go of the long-held conviction that his sister was cuckoo, but enough was enough.

“Maybe it’s time to stop second-guessing Weezy—and yourself, for that matter—and go with the possibility that she’s got something here that somebody else wants. That way we can focus on discovering what it is.”

Eddie looked out over the sea of paper with dismay. “But where to begin?”

Jack looked at the computer and remembered something.

“How about that flash drive?”

“Yes!”

He pulled it out of his pocket and seated himself before her computer. He reached toward the power button, then pulled back.

“Hey. It’s already on.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Jack said.

He left his on for days.

“This is Weezy we’re talking about.”

“Yeah. But this house is like Fort Knox.”

Eddie shook his head. “It just doesn’t seem like Weezy. A running computer is a hackable computer.”

Jack spotted a loose cable beside the box. The big jack identified it as a network cable. He grabbed it and held it up.

“Not if she’s cut off from all potential hackers.”

Eddie smiled. “That’s my sis.”

He plugged the flash drive into a USB port. A few mouse clicks revealed the contents: a single text file. Jack leaned over his shoulder as he opened it.

It contained URLs separated by blocks of text. They read in silence for a while, then Jack straightened.

“They don’t make a lot of sense.”

A little like reading the Compendium of Srem, where the author assumed the reader shared a context. But the Compendium had been written millennia ago. These were probably only days old, if that. They were riddled with mentions of the Trade Towers and al Qaeda and conspiracies. They were giving Jack a bad feeling.

Eddie shook his head. “Don’t you get the impression she’s trying to say something without really saying it?”

“Exactly. Let’s try some of these URLs and see where they take us.”

“They’re not live links,” Eddie said as he plugged in the network cable, “so I’ll have to block and copy.”

He launched Weezy’s browser—Firefox—and did just that with the first URL.

Jack winced as a 9/11 Truther blog popped up. He’d been afraid of that.

“Scroll down to the comments on Monday’s entry,” he said. “See if we spot anything familiar.”

Sure enough: A familiar chunk appeared as a comment by “Secret Historian,” posted yesterday.

Secret Historian . . . Jack had to smile.

Eddie tried three more URLs and found comments identical to excerpts from Weezy’s text file. Each site was a 9/11 Truther blog or conspiracy site, blaming either Clinton-Bush-Cheney if they were on the left, or the New World Order if they were on the right. Nobody was blaming Osama bin Laden except for being a tool of the former or the latter.

“I’ve seen enough,” Eddie said. “She’s become a Nine/Eleven Truther.” He rubbed his eyes. “This is so sad.”

“Could be worse,” Jack said. “She could be a Holocaust denier or converted to one of those Wasabi Muslims.”

“Wahhabi Muslim.”

“Or one of them too.” He shrugged. “Seriously, though, I’ve got to say I’m a little disappointed. I mean, this is Weezy we’re talking about—the gal who was wise to the Secret History of the World as a teen.”

A sad smile from Eddie. “Remember how she used to talk about that? I wish she still did.”

So did Jack—because crazy as she’d sounded then, she’d been right. But he couldn’t tell Eddie that.

“I would have expected better from her.”

Eddie looked at him. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, most people who pay attention to this stuff—I’m not one of them—seem to think the nine/eleven conspiracy theories are just a new rack for the Kennedy assassination doubters and their fellow travelers to hang their hats. The old-school, grassy-knoll true believers are now in the Nine/Eleven Truther movement, trading in The Warren Report for The Nine-Eleven Commission Report. Weezy always saw beyond that political crap, because when you come down to it, the political crap is trivial.”

“Oh, really? And what’s not trivial?”

Jack wished he could tell him about the Conflict, the cosmic shadow war waged out of sight and influencing everything, and about the approaching all-encompassing darkness, less than a year away. But Eddie already thought Jack a little crazy. Or maybe a lot crazy. Either way, he’d never understand.

“I’m just saying that I’d have figured Weezy to be delving into something more esoteric and elusive. The nine/eleven theories sound just like the December-seventh theories. Sure, there’s lots of circumstantial evidence pointing to FDR and his crew and how they deliberately made Pearl Harbor a sitting duck for the Japs, but after almost three quarters of a century no one’s been able to come up with anything definitive. Same with the Kennedy assassination. Almost half a century and nobody’s found the second shooter.”

“He could have been one of the many strange deaths and suicides connected to the investigation.”

Jack shrugged. “Yeah. Could be. I can see where you could maybe cover up an assassination conspiracy by strictly limiting the number of people in the know, but something as massive as what they say went into bringing down those towers—rigging the demolition charges and such . . . too many people had to be involved. The world has changed. There’s no code of honor and silence anymore. Someone would be talking. Someone would be on Oprah, telling the world and looking for a book deal.”

Eddie sighed. “Yeah, I suppose.” He jerked a thumb at the monitor. “Should we take a peek into her computer? Would that be snooping?”

Jack looked at him. “She’s in a coma, she feared she’d go missing, she wants her house burned, and we were followed after leaving her. What do you think?”

Eddie turned back to the keyboard. “Right. Let’s start with her documents.”

Her e-mail required a password, of course, but so did many of her folders. And the ones that didn’t contained documents that were nothing but gibberish.

“At the risk of being called Master of the Obvious,” Eddie said after repeated failures to find anything readable, “it looks like she’s using an encryption program.”

“Surprise, surprise.”

“That’s our Weezy.” He leaned back. “What now? No way we can sift through all—”

Jack heard a noise from the direction of the front room. He grabbed Eddie’s arm and shushed him. He listened and heard it again.

“Someone’s on the front porch.”