The Shadow Constant Read online

  He leaned forward, his elbows resting one on the fake, protected document and the other on the copy Kayla and Ivy had made for the museum. He looked at Kayla and Ivy this time, too. “If it’s incredibly unlikely that anyone had another nearly identical print and that someone mistakenly switched them, then we have a bigger problem on our hands. The only other option I can think of is that this is a fake they purposefully gave to us.”

  Reenie blinked. “What?! You’ve gone nuts.” She threw her hands up in the air, and made a face Kayla didn’t understand. But it didn’t look good.

  Evan didn’t react. He’d perfected that over the years. “A fake added to the fact that we had someone here wanting to see the plantation—but clearly lying to us—is very concerning.”

  Kayla nodded.

  Reenie’s breath escaped her as though it were fleeing hell. Kayla thought it might be . . . She’d liked this woman once.

  Gesturing dramatically, Reenie shouted. “All of this is based on what Kayla says! Kayla says the document is a fake. Kayla says this man is lying, Kayla says Docket Street is foreclosed, Kayla says people shouldn’t wear nice shoes or park away from their destination. Since when did Kayla—of all people—become the arbiter of social mores?”

  Evan nodded, “You’re absolutely right. Kayla has no concept of what’s socially acceptable, which is why she catalogs what people normally do.”

  Thanks, Evan. She didn’t let the sarcasm roll off her tongue like she wanted to. There were rules: No more than two sentences at a time. Three or four only if the person was leaning toward you and had their focus on you. When there’s an argument, stay quiet.

  It wasn’t enough that she had to fake her way through the system. It wasn’t enough to have her brother out her. It was that he was explaining to Reenie how she tried to fit in. That she made this into math, too, because that was the only way any of it made any sense. But Evan kept talking. “If someone is out of the norm, Kayla notices. He did several things out of the norm. Statistically, he’s off.”

  “People don’t act by statistics, Evan. Maybe your precious sister does, but regular people don’t.”

  He didn’t even flinch.

  “Reenie, go. Check it out. I believe Kayla, but you don’t. So go over to Docket Street. If anyone lives there, if this guy might, I’m sure Kayla will apologize.”

  She wasn’t going to have to apologize. She wasn’t wrong.

  “You can get empirical evidence on that one, Reenie. Get it. Take your phone; if you see anything damning, get a picture for us. And we’ll all try to work this out.”

  Reenie nodded. “What I’m going to show you is that there’s nothing to work out. And I’m going to get pictures of how normal it is, so you all don’t hunker down and form some sort of shotgun militia because she thinks things are wonky.”

  She stomped down the hall and Kayla heard Reenie’s purse slide off the kitchen counter. She heard the screen door slap shut and a moment later gravel kicking as Reenie sped down the driveway. Off to gather evidence against Kayla’s mental stability.

  Kayla sometimes doubted her own mental stability. But she didn’t doubt her facts.

      

  Evan looked cautiously up at Kayla and Ivy. Still standing there in front of him, they had very different looks on their faces.

  Kayla’s was blank. She probably had no doubt that Reenie would find exactly what Kayla had described on Docket Street. In fact, his sister was likely right now calculating the odds that someone had started work on Docket, or that they’d overturned the highway ruling and had sold off the houses in the last . . . however long it had been since Kayla had gone exploring. Evan put that guess at less than a week.

  She’d always liked to go for walks. As a toddler she screamed for her stroller. Parked it by the door and rocked it, yelling until someone took her out around the block. Later, as a disenfranchised teen, she’d confessed that walks were soothing and that she catalogued the changes since the last time she’d passed. She could walk every day, point out which toys in which yards had been played with and which hadn’t. She noticed right away when someone repainted, replaced a window, or just trimmed the hedges.

  Ivy, on the other hand, did not look blank. She looked like she could chew iron and spit nails. He did what he could, shut his eyes and started. “If either of you ever repeat this, I’ll say you’re lying.”

  Kayla would never tell. But Ivy was an unknown quantity—an angry unknown quantity.

  “Reenie is just as handicapped as she calls Kayla. But she’ll never see it.”

  Ivy’s eyebrows rose at that, and for the first time she didn’t look like she needed to be kept away from all sharp objects.

  He said things that made his throat catch, but since he believed them to be true, he said them anyway. “She simply doesn’t fathom how anyone could think otherwise. And because she was raised this way, told she was good and perfect by a whole community, there’s not been a reason for her to shift her views. This is hard on her, too.”

  Ivy’s brows rose again and her mouth started to open, but she closed it quickly, looking a little fishlike.

  Kayla’s face was still blank. She’d heard the “Reenie” speech before. And probably didn’t care to hear it again. “Can we talk about the diagram?”

  “Sure.”

  Even Ivy seemed willing to let the conversation shift, although Evan wouldn’t put it past her to come back in here and let him have it later. For a woman who was so often quiet in groups she had no qualms about ripping him a new one when they were alone. He wondered if she was always like that or if he was special.

  Kayla paid no attention to the undercurrents between the other two; she just leaned over the nearly identical documents, her hair spilling over her shoulder in a straight waterfall of red-gold. She was pretty, he knew, and plenty smart. Maybe too smart. If she weren’t like she was, she might be married with a young family by now. If she weren’t like she was, he might be married with a young family by now. The friction between him and Reenie might not exist at all. But Kayla was Kayla, and he was her only family. And he loved her more than he loved anything else on earth. So he waited while she examined the oilcloths and he tensed when Ivy reached out and pulled back Kayla’s hair, pushing it familiarly out of the way so she could see.

  “Here.” Kayla pointed to one then the other. “A small rod is missing, and . . . this bar—which I honestly can’t figure out what it does anyway—it’s different here.”

  The change was so miniscule, he didn’t know if he’d see it even if he’d been told to look. The bar, originally octagonal with perfect corners, was now slightly rounded.

  Evan blinked.

  “Here, too.” She pointed to the largest gear. “I think it acts as a kind of flywheel, though I’m not sure why. But look. These lines are doubled.”

  In the version Kayla had drawn, the lines appeared to represent insets into the outer circumference of the wheel. In the returned, protected copy, there were two lines—as though the insets were in insets themselves. He frowned. “That’s confusing.”

  Kayla smirked. “The original is confusing. And it doesn’t work.” She looked at her watch.

  “Why do you keep checking the time?” Ivy asked.

  A shrug was belied by the confidence in her voice. Not only could Kayla not lie, she didn’t even fudge the truth very well. “I’m trying to figure out when Reenie will get back.”

  When she would get vindicated. But Evan knew there was no watch in the world that could predict that. He bit his tongue.

  Luckily, Ivy stepped up. “Okay. I’m going to start with this: If we trust what Kayla says—”

  She was cut off by Kayla’s jerking to attention, the sheer hurt on her face, and it took Ivy and Evan talking over each other to soothe the wound that had been opened.

  “I believe you!” Ivy jumped in.

  Evan spoke on top of her. “Ivy is posing hypotheticals!”

  “Oh. Okay.” The words were
soft, and her eyes were more wary than they had been a moment before. And though he walked on eggshells, missteps were unavoidable. Evan couldn’t correct everything, so he motioned for Ivy to continue.

  “There are two options. One: that we trust Kayla’s drawings and two: that we don’t.” She turned to Kayla, casually laying her hand over his sister’s. “I trust them. But we have to look at both possibilities.”

  And just like that the clouds in her face disappeared and she was ready to listen with an open mind. He’d have to remember that trick.

  “If she’s wrong, then there’s no reason to believe anything other than a mix-up. We do need to figure out why that man was here, but that will be resolved—hopefully to everyone’s satisfaction—when Reenie gets back.”

  Evan nodded.

  “Here’s option two—” Ivy looked at them both pointedly, and he figured he wasn’t going to like option two very much. “Kayla’s right. Let’s say this isn’t the original. Let’s assume this document is forged and it’s altered. That’s a lot of work for someone to go to for an old document.”

  Evan nodded. It was a lot of work. He’d been trying to figure that out himself. “I believe Kayla, but I can’t come up with any good scenarios that explain why on earth someone would go to that kind of trouble.”

  One deep breath told him that Ivy had an ugly one.

  “I’m sure we can come up with more options if we think on it, but here’s what I suspect: if they took the real copy, it must be worth something. Worth more than the cost and trouble of replacing it with a fake so we don’t even come looking for it. My guess is that Reenie is right: it was done by Eli Whitney.”

  “Thank you.” Reenie’s voice came from the doorway, clean and clear, with her usual edge of sophistication despite the fact that she was obviously out of breath. She came further into the room, faking having herself together and faking it well. “Kayla, I’m sorry.”

  It was bestowed upon his sister, as though by some royal decree. But Evan knew what it cost Reenie to apologize in general. It wasn’t that she was a know-it-all or a control freak, she just stuck to what she knew, what she believed with all her heart. Apologies came with an uneasy look and a hard push from somewhere deep within.

  And that was the end of it. Error admitted, she turned to the group. “Docket Street is shut down. The houses were foreclosed about four months ago. There’s no way anyone lives there or would even claim to.”

  “Shit.” It was low and disappointed. Ivy’s shoulders sagged almost imperceptibly. He wondered if maybe she’d wanted Kayla to be wrong. What she said next confirmed it. “Kayla, it’s not just that they went to the effort to replace the diagram, they altered it.”

  Kayla shrugged. “It doesn’t even work. Sure, replacing the whole document means they expect to have time to sell the original before we notice. But I have no idea why they would do such tiny changes. There are a few radii that are altered, too.” She pointed to a couple of different places. Evan would need a ruler to confirm that, but he didn’t doubt her.

  Kayla couldn’t figure out why they would change it, because she didn’t have a devious bone in her body. She couldn’t think like a liar. But apparently Ivy could.

  “In that case, maybe it isn’t the document itself that’s important. Maybe it’s the machine that is. They altered it so Kayla couldn’t make it work.”

  His sister spoke again, emphatically. “It doesn’t work.”

  Ivy’s smile concerned him.

  “It will.” She pointed to the places where the new copy was altered. “Focus here, here and here. They altered these, because changing them ensures failure. Figure out what they covered up, and you’ll make it work.”

  8

  A Store in Savannah

  Kayla could tell that Ivy didn’t like something. What exactly that might be was a mystery.

  Maybe she didn’t like that she’d been pushed into chaperoning this odd supply run. Maybe she thought they should have searched the Internet first. Kayla conceded that point even though Ivy hadn’t actually made it. They could have just done an online search for parts for the machine, but Kayla had become paranoid—and probably rightly so.

  The document was a fake, which meant someone was paying attention. How they were doing it and how much, she didn’t know. For an Aspergers patient, being paranoid was about the worst thing that could happen. She had no clue what was truly going on. No idea if the couple in the far corner were looking at her funny because they were keeping an eye on her or if they just thought her T-shirt was stupid. Or maybe they didn’t get the joke. Or maybe they desperately wanted to understand the Schrödinger’s cat reference and simply couldn’t read it through rheumy eyes.

  There were a thousand scenarios that were plausible. She might be simply misinterpreting things, and lord knew, she was good at drawing wrong conclusions. Statistically, the highest probability was that they were eyeing her, but for completely non-nefarious reasons. They were an elderly couple, and it was extremely unlikely that they were spies sent to follow her and unearth bad nineteenth-century generators designed by one Eli Whitney.

  Which was why Kayla decided that if she ever had to tail someone, she’d send the elderly. No one suspected them.

  Turning away, she pushed her focus back to the racks in front of her. The magnets were round, and many were in blister packs. That was about the stupidest thing ever. It wasn’t like they didn’t attract anything because they were in plastic. After she and Ivy struck out at Home Depot, Kayla hadn’t known what to expect. She’d thought they would find those cardboard bins lining a row of shelves and she would reach in, wipe off the chalky dust that always permeated that place, and count out how many she needed. She loved Home Depot. She certainly hadn’t expected to wind up in an electronics store, doing short order math to figure out how many blister packs she had to buy. Didn’t expect to feel her friend’s bare skin against her arm as she counted, or the warm fingers that curled through her own, lacing their hands tightly together. And she hadn’t expected the soft tendrils that steadily crept their way through her system at the touch.

  She almost yanked her hand back.

  She’d had her hand held before. She rather liked it. But it had its own time and place—like a walk maybe. Not in the electronics store. Not when she was counting magnets. And she’d never had it slip in and scramble her thoughts. She started counting again.

  Ivy’s mouth came close to Kayla’s ear, warm breath reaching out like heat from a fire. She felt her own breath hitch, tried to pull away. But Ivy’s hand had hers in a firmer grip than it appeared and she couldn’t pull back.

  The whisper stole into her soul before it permeated her brain. Then Kayla’s thoughts flipped suddenly on.

  “Grab them all. Pay cash. Now.”

  Kayla tried to turn her head and look at Ivy in response to the missive, instead she was greeted with a firm kiss against her cheek and the embarrassing knowledge that she was being led, not seduced.

  Ivy’s hand released hers and began quietly loading the magnet packs into the basket she carried. In an effort to ignore the flush that had stolen onto her face uninvited, Kayla aimed her focus on the display and she, too, began slipping pack after pack in with the others.

  It still took all the cash they had, and Kayla handing back two of the least-likely-useful packs in order to not use a card at all. The clerk told her that she wasn’t putting back enough, but Kayla had accounted for the tax and assured him that she had. They had seventeen cents left between the two of them when they hauled the heavy, triple-bagged sacks of magnets to the car, their loot congealing click-by-click into blocks.

  Kayla waited until they were pulling out of the parking lot before she asked, “What was that about?”

  Teeth clenched, Ivy looked one way then another. She glared in the rearview mirror and didn’t answer until they were turning onto the main road. “Do you see that green sedan in the parking lot? The slightly older one?”

  “Yes.”
<
br />   Kayla was cranking her head over her shoulder for a better view when Ivy’s hand nearly slapped her back. The accompanying hiss commanded, “Don’t look.”

  “Then why. . . ?”

  She didn’t finish the question.

  “I saw it behind us back in Ebenezer. They didn’t follow us all the way here, but they’re here now.”

  Kayla frowned. She’d only gotten the one look at the car, but it was an older model Chevy, heavyset with silver handles. “That car isn’t that uncommon.”

  “But the long scratch down the left-hand side is. And so is the man who climbed out.”

  Kayla called the image in her head. “He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, work boots and a long flannel shirt over it.”

  “Oh shit.” Even Ivy could see that was wrong. “Do you think he had a gun?”

  There was a shrug that Ivy somehow managed to choreograph with turning the wheel and leading them onto the main road. She took the direction away from Ebenezer. “Why else would anyone wear a flannel overshirt in seventy-plus weather?”

  She sighed and went with the flow of traffic, away from the plantation, away from the machine, away from Evan and Reenie. “Should we call?”

  Ivy shook her head. “I need to think for a bit.” Her eyes darted to the rearview mirror then around the car in a distinctive pattern that said she hadn’t found what she was looking for. “I’m afraid to use the phones. I’m getting really paranoid right now.”

  Kayla didn’t say anything. What could she say? That she thought Ivy was right to be paranoid?

  “Did the green car follow us in Ebenezer?”

  Ivy shook her head. “It seemed that way. But I thought I was just being overly suspicious, so I didn’t say anything. Ebenezer isn’t even a town, it’s a fistful of stop signs. So it makes sense that everyone there was headed the same way—out of town. Then the car disappeared and I thought I was being silly. I was glad I hadn’t said anything and made an idiot out of myself. But now . . .”