“Did you start recording from the beginning?” Michelle asked as she pressed a button on the remote.
“Whatever goes into the monitor is recorded automatically unless the option is switched out,” Corfe answered.
After several seconds, Taki’s voice came over the audio. “Any luck?”
Michelle looked puzzled. “Is something happening? . . . What am I supposed to be seeing?”
“I’m still inside the bag,” Kevin reminded her.
“Oh, right.”
The voices on the tape continued.
Kevin: “Well, I’m through but mummified. Now I have to try and get out of this stuff.”
“Is there—”
“Shh.” Tones of a woman’s voice, muffled and unintelligible, then Kevin again: “I’m not anywhere in this house, and that’s for sure.”
“How could it not be in the house? That’s crazy.”
“Well, either it got taken out by mom, or it got taken out by Harriet. Nobody else has been here, have they?”
“Oh, okay. . . . I guess so.”
“Logic, Taki. Logic.”
The woman’s voice was still audible intermittently in the background. “I take it that’s Vanessa we can hear?” Michelle said.
Kevin nodded. Patches of light and shade shifted meaninglessly, but were getting brighter: the bow view from a whale coming up out of the abyss to check on the world. “Now I’m cutting my way out,” Kevin commented. A wedge of shadow sliced downward, and a dark blur opposite resolved itself into a claw hand pushing aside a curtain to let in a flood of color. At the same time, Vanessa’s voice was answered by a man’s, louder and understandable now. They were talking about whether to stay and have dinner in, or go out. The view through the curtains enlarged into a vista of massive geometric shapes, which proceeded through a series of jerky turning movements to transform into strangely leaning cliffs: Manhattan from the ground, painted in pastels and seen in a distorting mirror. “It’s the inside of a paper carrier bag full of folders and books,” Kevin supplied. “Taki remembered seeing it on the hall table.”
“This is Martin Payne with her that we’re hearing,” Michelle checked.
“Yes,” Kevin confirmed.
Michelle had filled in some background on Payne while she was waiting—nothing sensational: items on file in the local press and business news; listings of companies with their directors and chief officers; things like that. She’d even found a good picture of him from a black-tie banquet with the mayor and city officials held a little over six months earlier. He certainly looked more what she thought of as Vanessa’s type than Eric did.
She listened as Payne suggested getting business out of the way first. Vanessa’s voice replied, “I’ve brought copies of the QA reports that I told you about. The figures—”
Michelle stopped the tape with the screen showing the huge hand withdrawing a maroon file, and looked at the other two quizzically. “QA?”
Corfe frowned and rubbed his nose with a knuckle. “Quality Assurance. She must be giving him test results on Neurodyne’s latest models.”
“That’s what I figured too.” Kevin said it as if he were experiencing a sour taste. Michelle resumed playing the tape. The ensuing exchange between Vanessa and Payne confirmed Corfe’s guess, although somewhat garbled by the foreground sounds of the mec extricating itself from its wrappings and then being tipped out of the plastic bag.
“Very clever. Now how are you going to get back in?” Taki’s voice said.
“Shut up. If I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you.”
The view stabilized for a few seconds as the mec took in the surroundings from the seat that it had found itself on. “Oh yes, you can see it’s Vanessa now,” Michelle commented.
Corfe leaned forward to peer at the screen more closely. “Yes, that’s the main salon on the Dolores, all right. I can see where they are now.”
Kevin nodded. “It gets obvious later.” The scene turned like a view from a carousel, then halted to focus on the space between two cushions. The space grew larger and engulfed the viewer, and then gave way to an angle looking back out, as if from a cave.
“Getting under some cover, Kevin?” Michelle said.
“You bet.”
Then Vanessa said, “I don’t think he’s going to change his mind about it, and we can’t risk being too pushy. Honestly, I’ve made all the suggestions that I think would be prudent.”