Staring at his hands, the older Shep said, ‘Shep is brave,’ in a voice that shook with fear. ‘Shep is brave.’ He seemed not to be speaking admiringly of ten-year-old Shepherd O’Conner, but to be encouraging himself to face the horror that he knew lay ahead.
‘Fold us out of here,’ Dylan persisted.
Shepherd made eye contact, and even though he was eye to eye with his brother, not with a stranger, this intimacy always cost him. Tonight, in these circumstances, the cost was especially high. His gaze revealed a terrible vulnerability, a sensitivity for which he didn’t possess the usual compensating human armor: ego, self-esteem, an instinct for psychological self-preservation. ‘Come. Come see.’
‘No.’
‘Come see. You have to see.’
The younger Shepherd stepped out of the dining room, into the living room.
Breaking eye contact with Dylan, the older Shepherd insisted, ‘Shep is brave, brave,’ and trailed after himself, man-child in the wake of child, out of the dining room, the inky puddles under his feet moving with him as he shuffled off the Persian carpet onto the blond maple tongue-and-groove floor.
Dylan followed, Jilly followed, into the living room as it had been on February 12,1992.
Younger Shepherd stopped two steps past the doorway, but older Shepherd walked around him and deeper into the momentous scene.
The sight of his mother, Blair, not yet dead and therefore seeming to be once more alive, rocked Dylan worse even than he had expected it would. Barbed-wire grief fenced his heart, which seemed to swell to test itself upon the sharpest points.
Blair O’Conner had been forty-four, so young.
He remembered her as gentle, as kind, as patient, with a beauty of the mind equal to her lovely face.
Here, now, however, she revealed her fiery side: green eyes by anger brightened, face by anger sharpened, stalking back and forth as she talked, with a mother-panther threat in every movement, in every pause.
She had never been angry without good cause, and never this angry in Dylan’s experience.
The man who’d struck these sparks of anger from her flinty sense of right and wrong stood at one of the living-room windows, his back to her, to all of them gathered here from this time and from across time.
Her ghostly audience unseen, not yet even aware of ten-year-old Shep watching from just this side of the dining-room doorway, Blair said, ‘I told you they don’t exist. And even if they did exist, I’d never give them to you.’
‘And if they did exist, who would you give them to?’ the man at the window asked, turning to face her.
Slimmer in 1992 than in 2002, with more hair than he would have in a decade, Lincoln Proctor, alias Frankenstein, was nonetheless at once recognizable.
34
Jilly had once described it as an ‘evil-dreamy smile,’ and so it appeared to Dylan now. The man’s faded-denim eyes had earlier seemed to be the lusterless lamps of a meek soul, but on this second encounter, he saw windows of ice looking out from a cold kingdom.
His mother had known Proctor. Proctor had been in their house all those years ago.
This discovery shocked Dylan so profoundly that for a moment he forgot to what dark resolution this encounter must progress, and he stood in semiparalytic fascination, a rapt listener.
‘Damn it, the diskettes don’t exist!’ his mother declared. ‘Jack never mentioned any such thing. There’s no point discussing this.’
Jack had been Dylan’s father, dead now fifteen years, dead five years on the February night of this confrontation.
‘He took delivery of them the day he died,’ said Proctor. ‘You wouldn’t have known.’
‘If they ever existed,’ Blair said, ‘which I doubt, then they’re gone with Jack.’
‘If they did exist,’ Proctor pressed, ‘would you give them to the unfortunate investors who lost money—’
‘Don’t prettify it. You cheated them out of their money. People who trusted Jack, trusted you – and you swindled it from them. Set up companies for projects you never intended to develop, funneled the money out of them into your stupid robot research—’
‘Nanobots. And it’s not stupid. I’m not proud of swindling people, you know. I’m ashamed of it. But nanomachine research takes a lot more money than anyone wants to invest in it. I had to find additional sources of funds. There were—’