Page 88 of Ringer
Turn the page to continue reading Lyra’s story. Click here to read Chapter 23 of Gemma’s story.
TWENTY-FOUR
FOR A SHORT TIME, THE firefighters waited with them on the road, pacing in the quiet and talking into their radios, casting cautious glances at Lyra and Caelum from a distance, as if they were fish and too much attention would cause them to startle away.
Then a cop arrived to replace them, a woman with a high forehead and a long nose that reminded Lyra of a hanging fruit. She wanted to talk, to understand, to hear Lyra’s side of the story.
But though the woman was kind to her, and though Lyra liked the look of her face and the slope of her nose, she didn’t want to talk to anyone but Detective Kevin Reinhardt. She didn’t even want to get into the police car: she was tired of strangers and their doors.
So instead, she and Caelum sat on the curb, with the police car parked a dozen feet away, watching the lasttrickle of car traffic out of CASECS. Dr. O’Donnell and the other CASECS employees weren’t in trouble, exactly, because the trouble couldn’t be reported or understood when neither Caelum nor Lyra would talk, as the policewoman explained to them more than once.
But they weren’t exactly not in trouble, either. CASECS wasn’t invisible anymore. She kept her hands in her pockets, touching the drift of words, notes, telephone numbers. Proof.
And so the employees who had lingered to work late, or to catch a glimpse of Lyra and Caelum, spilled into their cars and flooded the exit gates, and tried to vanish. Lyra thought of cockroaches flooding from a clogged drain.
She tried to pick out Dr. O’Donnell’s car in the sixty or so that passed. But the cars looked the same, and the drivers, inside of them, looked the same too: hunched shadows, leaning over the steering wheels as if that would make them go faster. As if they could escape whatever was coming, just by leaning forward.
He arrived an hour or so before sunrise, when the darkness was like a scowl that had folded deep into itself.
They waited for him in the car while he spoke to the policewoman who had by then sat with them for hours. It was hot. An empty cup of coffee in the cup holder hadscented the whole car with hazelnut.
Finally, he returned, and put the car in drive without saying anything except, “I brought you snacks.” At Lyra’s feet was a bag of gas station food and water. Caelum ate three bags of beef jerky, and Lyra drank two bottles of water.
Then Detective Reinhardt said, “Do you want to tell me your real name, at least?”
Inexplicably, the question—how kind it was, how gentle, and how difficult it was to answer—made tears come to Lyra’s eyes.
“Which one?” She turned to the window, swiping her tears away with a palm. “I’ve had three so far.”
And then, after hours of silence—after years of it—she talked. Detective Reinhardt was listening quietly, not saying anything, not interrupting to ask questions, just listening. She told him everything: Haven, all the replicas, Jake Witz, Nurse Emily Huang, Gemma Ives and how she’d saved them. Dr. O’Donnell and CASECS; a world full of places where people could be manufactured, like furniture, for different uses. About Rick Harliss, her real father, and the people who’d taken him away.
Afterward, he was quiet for a long time. Lyra couldn’t tell whether he believed her, and was too tired to ask.
When he finally asked a question, it wasn’t the one she expected. “Do you have any idea where Gemma might be?”
Lyra shook her head. “I heard that she was missing.”
“Missing,” he said. He appeared to be choosing his words carefully. “And in quite a bit of trouble.”
Caelum spoke up for the first time. “What kind of trouble?”
Detective Reinhardt appeared to be chewing the words. Lyra liked that about him. Too many people used words without thinking. “I’m out of my element here,” he said finally. “I’m flying blind.”
“What kind of trouble?” Caelum repeated.
“The Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office is looking for Gemma,” he said, with some difficulty. “I got a call about an hour before we talked. Because you’d given me her name,” he added, and sighed. “Funny coincidence.”
Lyra looked down at her hands. “It was the only name I could think of.” Then: “Gemma’s my friend.”
“That’s what the sheriff’s department figured, too. They thought you might be a clue.”
“A clue to what?”
Detective Reinhardt hesitated. “Several people were hurt—badly.” He cleared his throat. “They were killed. There was a witness. He described a girl Gemma’s age, matching her description.”
“It wasn’t her,” Caelum said, and leaned back.
“The witness got a good look at her,” Detective Reinhardt said. “He was very specific. And—” He broke off. Now his whole face corked around his mouth, like therewas a wrestling match between them.
