The Shadow Constant Read online

  In the back of her mind, she wondered if there was a way to check up on the restoration shop. They claimed they had never lost anything before the Eli Whitney diagram. But if the shop employees or owners were stealing things then they could legitimately state they’d never lost anything. Also, the Hazelton House piece would never ultimately be claimed as a lost item, because eventually it had been “found.” It might even be a single employee feeding information to someone who could fence the items.

  She wondered what kind of a journey her original document had gone on, where it might be now, who might have it. But the fact remained, if she and Ivy could make a reasonable facsimile to show in the museum, then anyone could.

  The road changed as she exited Ohio, the new asphalt creating a sound that mimicked the clop of horse hooves beneath the tires. The light out here was limited to that provided by trucks, as the moon had lost even the sliver it had shown them a few nights ago.

  Glancing at her roadmate, Kayla saw that Ivy slept on. Even the hard beat of the pavement didn’t disturb her. To Kayla the sound was a pulsing reminder of where she came from, the visit to Charles a hint of what she’d given up. They hadn’t spoken to each other since she’d left. But Charles had Aspergers, too and he was thrilled to see Kayla, though she hadn’t called ahead. He’d readily dropped the project he was immersed in to help her with her gears.

  That was how Kayla measured their friendship. Not by calls and emails, but by how high they ranked to each other in attention. It had taken him five full minutes to even see that she’d brought someone else with her. And Ivy, soundly ignored in the frenzy of ideas that had spilled forth between them, had seen to food and drinks. She’d texted Evan that “buying the groceries” would take a little longer than expected. She’d read a book on her phone when she wasn’t able to participate at all. And now she slept, cradling the big gear as if it were her child.

  It had been lightly oiled and wrapped in canvas, and it had to be cutting off some of the circulation to her legs, as she hadn’t moved since she passed out about three hours back. But Kayla didn’t have the heart to wake her, didn’t need her to drive, only needed her to be Ivy. To be willing to step back and let Kayla be Kayla. Something neither of her parents had ever quite gotten the hang of. Only Evan had been able to hold on to her without strangling what she was.

  Though she wasn’t tired, Kayla sped up, altering her rate until the thump of the tires on bad road matched the beat of the song on the radio. The second song was too slow, and though she changed the stations several times, she couldn’t find anything that matched the road so well. Kayla turned her thoughts inward.

  Evan and Reenie had reported the day as fine and simple. No one had come to call, they had not left the plantation and they didn’t see anything suspicious. They were all monitoring their conversations out in the space between the buildings now. Because Kayla was able to recount the conversations she’d been involved with in that space and a few she had overheard, they’d reached several reasonable conclusions.

  One—no one had unknowingly given away any details about the machine or what it did. Two—leave the bug and let whoever it was go on idyllically monitoring it. Kayla had also swept the house with a radio-frequency detector she’d rigged and found nothing. Reenie had worried, but Kayla pointed out that the man had come into the courtyard area and placed a device where he put his hand. He’d never made it into the house. Someone would have had to break in to do something like that. And while Kayla didn’t think anyone had, it didn’t stop her from spending three hours tinkering with the detector then sweeping the place.

  Kayla didn’t stop the whole way back. Pulling into the long, rutted drive brought the unexpected sensation that Hazelton House was “home.” Cleveland had never been that. It had been a place to explore. A location with a job she liked. The next in a line of square-built apartments with white walls.

  As Ivy bumped awake, Kayla stayed silent, watching the big house grow in size as they approached. She like the squareness of it. She’d measured the outsides and squealed with delight the day she found out the base had golden rectangle proportions. Even Reenie had liked that one. The house boasted both internal and external lateral symmetry, something Kayla found soothing.

  In that moment, as Ivy awakened and whispered, “Are we back?” Kayla decided that if she was home, she needed an office.

  “Yes, we’re home.” She spoke it in the same hushed tone that Ivy had used, an old trick of trying to blend in. Speak as the other person speaks, say what you wish, but mimic the volume and cadence.

  Ivy was gathering herself, rubbing her eyes, looking around the car for trash and handing wrapped gears to Kayla. But Kayla’s thoughts were upstairs on the second floor. The far right window fit a smaller room. It had another window on the side of the house, lending a nice symmetry within the room, too. She could watch out the front drive as she worked.

  Following Ivy up the steps, she mimicked the wave Evan gave them as he stepped back into his own home, able to sleep now that they had returned safely. It was 3:17 a.m. and he had waited up. Kayla smiled to herself, but she was debating whether to start the machine or start on her office.

  After tucking the gears safely out of sight under Ivy’s bed, she listened to the cadence of Ivy’s toothbrush, and the pattern she was familiar with that signaled Ivy was about to climb into bed and fall dead asleep. But Kayla went into the front room, shadows wrapping around her. Hands on hips, she surveyed the layers of paints that had colored the room, first deep green, then later lighter blue, and at one point a disturbing burnt orange. Newspaper covered all the upstairs windows after Reenie had freaked out about someone watching them.

  Mentally, she placed her furniture around the room . . . a desk, a drafting table, a deep swivel chair. Though she loved the idea of the office—an office of her own without a bed in it—she pushed the plans aside; She had to start the machine. It was logical really, if she did the office first, the machine would sit stagnant. Putting the machine before the office would mean she could collect data while she decorated.

  She was still standing there in the dark, smiling, when Ivy’s voice came from behind her, “Kay, you have to come to bed. It’s nearly four a.m. and I won’t sleep until you’re in here.”

  She was turning to say she was plenty wide awake, but Ivy caught her off guard. Ivy was neurotypical, the dark circles under her eyes indicative of less than seven hours of sleep in the last day. Her face bore that slack look of exhaustion, and Kayla’s heart tugged a bit. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Mmm hmmm” seemed to be all Ivy could muster. Soft, dragging steps shuffled back into the bedroom and Kayla kept looking at her new office, seeing a design station and a building station, a communication spot with a phone, computer, etc. But in her head, her mental count of time ran out, and she turned to get ready for bed.

      

  Evan stared. His hands dripped oil, his knees ached, his eyeballs felt like he’d rubbed dirt into them, but his heart sang. Kayla smiled up at him, much the way she had as a kid building architecturally sound sand castles on their beach vacations. The other kids and parents had admired her skill. His mother worried that her only daughter didn’t run and play, didn’t try to surf or collect shells like the other kids. No, Kay had been building even before she could speak.

  He felt the turn of a circle inside him somewhere. His sister looked much the same as he. She was dirty—filthy, really—with oil smears on her jeans and on her legs where her skin peeked through the rips in the denim. These were not trendy tears, but wear in spots where Kayla put them through the most paces. She often worked on her own lap, creating stains and thin spots. The lower part of the butt had worn through, and Evan had seen a peek of the plaid boxers she’d slipped under rather than just getting a different pair of jeans.

  Her shirt looked better than his, but only because his was white and betrayed his tasks to the world. She’d worn an old favorite tee bearing the logo �
��I failed the Turing Test.” She’d probably put it on special this morning to commemorate the new gears going into the machine.

  They’d run it for four hours and thirty minutes before stopping it. They’d eaten a sandwich lunch that Ivy had brought them. Luckily, Reenie had been right behind her with antiseptic hand wipes. She’d monitored both Kayla and Evan like children, checking their faces before letting them eat. But even Reenie hadn’t complained that they were starting to get behind on the plantation schedule.

  It wasn’t anything they couldn’t fix. The business licenses had been filed, the custom paints ordered. The company that specialized in washing historic buildings had Hazelton House on their calendar for three weeks from now, and the cotton had gone into the ground. Reenie had a strict plan, but they hadn’t lost anything they couldn’t catch up. At least he didn’t think so.

  The machine was running again while they ate. Kayla didn’t like to leave it stagnant; just because she wasn’t doing anything with it during lunch didn’t mean it couldn’t be doing something. And she’d become quite adept at starting it. She would grab the bar and rest her hand on the wheel, then twist both at the same time, watching it spring to action, running without further input from her.

  After lunch, they all went their separate ways, and he left her to check on the cotton field. He wanted to see the soil, be sure it was wet enough, dry enough, right enough. He really didn’t have a feel for what cotton needed. Hell, previous to this, he had trouble keeping his houseplants alive. But he’d done okay with a patch of corn and beans one year, so he had reason to hope.

  The black earth sifted nicely through his fingers, still moist from the watering he’d done the other day, praying that rain didn’t come. It hadn’t. The water had been the right choice.

  Footsteps behind him caused him to turn around. Ivy approached with her hand up, shielding her eyes from the bright glare of midday. “Is everything going okay out here?”

  He smiled and was getting ready to tell her that it was, when he glanced to the edge of the field. “Come here.”

  Uncertain of what was to come, Ivy followed him. He’d told Reenie about the prints, but they hadn’t made a decision to do anything about it and thus had done nothing. There was no need to worry everyone further, when the prints were likely just leftovers from one of them. “Could this be Kayla?”

  “No way.” Ivy tilted her head. “Those are men’s shoes.”

  Shit. “That’s what I thought.”

  “Are they recent?”

  And with that worried tone in her voice, he’d done exactly what he’d intended not to do. “No. I’m hoping they’re just old tracks that didn’t get stomped or plowed . . .” He sighed, knowing that wishing didn’t make it so.

  Then Ivy pointed. “What about those over there? Are they yours?”

  And there, in between some of the rows, was a second set of tracks. His stomach clenched.

  Silently, they looked at each other and followed the path set by the strange prints. He didn’t say it—he suspected Ivy already knew—but there was no way these were his tracks. They were in dirt he had turned two days before, leaving only a narrow window for when they might have arrived. In a moment, it was pretty clear that the footsteps had come out of the wood area, walked over and looked at the plants, then headed for the barn.

  “They go under the door.” Ivy pointed to where the steps backtracked and then disappeared, showing that the man had stopped to let himself inside.

  Furious, Evan reached for the door—he didn’t lock it, and looking back that had been an incredibly stupid decision. But it had been one he’d made before the lying man had planted the bug and aside from the blacksmith’s Evan hadn’t revisited the idea of leaving the outbuildings unsecured. His stomach turned with the combination of anger and fear, but Ivy’s hand on his arm stopped him. “Wait.”

  His breathing passed through the forced rhythm that his emotion created, but he clenched his fists and tried to be logical.

  It seemed forever before she said, “Okay, I see steps leading away. I didn’t want you to barge if someone’s still in there.”

  But he already had the door wrenched open before she finished her sentence. In the darkness, he scanned his equipment. It didn’t appear that anything had even been moved. Yanking the flashlight from his back pocket, he tracked the footsteps around one large farming machine then another. It looked like their intruder had stopped and looked under a tarp here, checked a box there. The dust had been disturbed, or there were obvious fingermarks and sometimes he just had the deep sense that the space had been violated.

  “Is anything missing?” Ivy managed to remain calm through so much. From the looks of her—the visible, dark bra straps and tight jeans—he would have expected her to squeal over a new top or nail polish color. Instead, she was almost sedate. She held her tongue until she had something important to say and she rarely spoke without meaning. That she’d spent a good part of her life on the pole just made her a bundle of contradictions that Evan didn’t think he would ever sort out. But he shook his head.

  Without a word, they continued following the footsteps back out of the barn. As soon as the man stepped out of the dirt and into the grass, all was lost. Evan could only make out a general direction—if he kept going straight, he’d walk right into the slave cabins.

  Ivy’s voice was soft but firm. “We need to tell the others.”

  He shouldn’t have discounted the first set of prints when he’d seen them the other day. These were clearly the same—someone had a pair of “trespassing at Hazelton House” boots. His face must have displayed his frustration, because Ivy threw out a gambit at obvious distraction. “So, I didn’t understand Kayla’s shirt and I looked up the Turing Test online.”

  He just nodded again. As distractors went, it wasn’t much.

  But Ivy continued. “I didn’t know how to ask her if she gets the irony.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well . . .” Clearly Ivy didn’t really know how to ask him either. “Because of the Aspergers. She has social miscues, an almost Google-level of knowledge on some things, and some days she sounds like a computer. She really could fail the Turing Test.”

  Without warning, Evan threw his head back and laughed. Full from his belly, the sound nearly doubled him over, and he missed a few steps before he caught back up with Ivy. He was wiping hysterical tears from his eyes as he choked out, “You know. I didn’t get it, but I bet she does. I’ll bet she’s been wearing that shirt all this time just because of that.”

  He sobered up as they reached the blacksmith’s, but neither of them headed for the doorway. Without talking, he and Ivy started moving around the outside of the building, searching for prints. He didn’t find any, and Ivy rounded the last corner shaking her head no. He hoped that was good news.

  Inside, they found only Kayla; Evan and Ivy looked at her, speaking simultaneously.

  “What’s with the buckets?”

  “Is that a thermometer? Is the engine overheating?”

  Kayla grinned up at them, an evil sprite as she held up a screwdriver with a large bore drill bit that she’d converted to run a gear. “I’m testing the engine.”

  “Come again?” Ivy leaned forward.

  That brought a wider smile, Kayla loved explaining things. “So, I found out how long I have to run the screwdriver to start the engine. It’s approximately forty-five seconds. That’s because I’m not moving the bar at all. I didn’t want to touch anything and input extra power into the scenario.”

  Ivy nodded as though this made sense, and Evan followed. “So you’ve found a new way to start it?”

  “Yeah, a measurable way. I still don’t know the exact force I’m inputting, but forty-five seconds of the same speed of the drill should give me roughly the same input repeatedly. So I created a relatively closed system—” She pointed to the covered buckets, both with thermometers sticking out as well as a gear. “And I’m trying to see if I can measure tempe
rature change.”

  “Why are you trying to heat the water in the buckets?” Ivy frowned.

  Kayla shrugged. “It’s not that I’m trying to heat it, it’s that I’m trying to show that putting the same amount of energy into the machine produces more energy than putting the energy directly into the liquid.”

  “Oh.” Ivy didn’t sound like she understood, but Evan asked, “You’re looking for some proof of over-efficiency.”

  “Basically.” She turned to a post-it pad and noted the time. Then she wrote a few things down after looking at the pieces sticking out of the sealed lid on the bucket on the right. Next, she hooked the drill into some part of it and ran it while clocking time on her cell phone. After what Evan figured was a minute she stopped and recorded a few more things.

  He’d waited, because he knew better than to talk to her in the middle of an experiment, “You set all this up in—” he checked his watch, “under two hours?”

  “Ev. It’s two old paint buckets. I poked in holes and used a drill bit and an old gear. It’s pretty simple. I already ran a few trials.” She waved her hand at the bench.

  Ivy nearly choked. Maybe she wouldn’t after she knew Kayla longer, but she put her hand to her throat and walked over. “Is each of these a trial?”

  Kayla nodded.

  The surface of the bench was nearly covered in green squares, each with the same organization if not the same numbers.

  Kayla’s voice came to them. “Every single trial has showed the machine to be far more productive off the same initial input. And—you’ll see on each note—the machine was halted. It could have gone longer and given more output.”

  He didn’t want to stop her, but the day was waning. Every night, they would have to pull it apart and keep the pieces separate. Kayla’s data today made that even more important than ever.

  Three trials later, he stopped her.