Resonance - J. B. Everett (best novels to read for students TXT) 📗

clench. His heart plummeted when he saw that Landerly was standing inside their office. Well, those were his feet anyway. It took Jordan to the full count of ten to force himself to look up to Landerly’s face.

 

The voice was old and soft, and anything but calm. “You two have some serious explaining to do about a signature of mine that I don’t remember being on the continent to sign for.”

 

The world was going to hell.

 

There was a long lull, then they both began speaking. “Dr. Landerly, we had so much evidence-”

 

“We tried so hard to get in touch with you-”

 

His leathery hand, palm out, put an end to the words frothing from their mouths. “I’ll talk to you separately.” He pointed to Jillian. “In my office, now.”

 

As Jordan watched, she stood as though pulled by strings. Her expression that of sheer horror. And then she walked out the door followed by Landerly, who didn’t so much as glance Jordan’s way.

 

For long minutes, he sat there, unmoving, still digesting what had happened. Landerly shouldn’t have gotten in until tomorrow. Had someone tipped him off? Had he come back early to corral his renegade peons?

 

Jordan knew he was going to get fired. That was all there was to it. He considered himself too much of a man to get up and start packing his belongings, not until he was actually told that he was fired. But it wasn’t beneath him to let his gaze wander around the office, falling on various objects and cataloguing what was his.

 

The phone buzzer shocked him to life, his heart missing several beats before picking up a steady rhythm again. Gingerly he lifted the receiver from the cradle, “Hello?”

 

“Abellard. Get in here.”

 

He winced, “Okay,” but it was too late. Landerly had already hung up and Jordan was holding a phone that was softly buzzing a dial tone at him. He hadn’t been this afraid of getting spanked since elementary school. At least then he had put smoke bombs behind the toilets in the girls’ room and the whole thing had been fun.

 

The hall felt long, and Landerly’s office was closed, forcing Jordan to grip the knob and open the door on the scene of his own demise. Jillian sat in the visitor chair across from where Landerly lorded behind his desk.

 

She was ashen and looked like she had early stage Parkinson’s, fine tremors snaked their way down her arms and out her fingers. Anger broke in a tidal wave as Jordan looked her up and down. Landerly had tormented her. He turned to let the old man have it, but was brought up short by the bark that Landerly leveled at him.

 

“Is it true, what she tells me?”

 

He had to force himself to take a deep breath. “I’ve never heard Jillian lie.”

 

That put the old man’s eyebrows up. “So you orchestrated all this? By yourself?”

 

“I realize that I am not the genius here, and that this ploy may seem a bit above me. And, no, I didn’t ‘orchestrate’ the whole thing. But Jillian didn’t speak any lies to anyone. Jillian has many talents. Lying isn’t one of them.”

 

Landerly snorted. “Forgery apparently is.”

 

“Apparently.” Jordan knew he was shoveling the hole he was standing in. But he couldn’t stop himself. “Tell me if that paper was three years old you would have recognized that it wasn’t your signature.”

 

Jillian gasped, but at least it earned him a respectable nod from Landerly, who then began talking right over Jordan’s thoughts. “If you’d like to not get fired effective immediately, you had damn well better explain this and why you couldn’t wait until I got back, and it had better match Dr. Brookwood’s story exactly.”

 

Jordan thanked God Jilly couldn’t lie worth shit. He knew their stories would match word for word. So he took a moment to gather himself, watching her visibly relax as he did. They would be here a while.

 

Eventually Landerly interrupted. “Same thing she said. The two of you using company policy to support your illegal trip …”

 

Jillian paled a bit at that, and Jordan put his hand over hers where it gripped the spindle arm of the chair. They’d at least be fired together. “Are you going to hear us out or not?”

 

Landerly nodded and managed to not interrupt again for the remainder of the story. He was silent for several minutes after Jordan finished. Finally he placed his soft leather hands on the desk and leaned forward, somehow managing to invade Jordan’s personal space from over three feet away. “One: we never had this conversation. I don’t know about that signature. I assume someone else okay’d your trip. Two: one slip from either of you and I will suddenly find that paper, and recognize the forged signature and you’ll be out so fast your head will spin.”

 

Jordan digested that. It actually sounded like they weren’t getting fired.

 

“Three: you drive out tonight. There’s another case that sounds like the same thing in the Appalachians.

 

You’re going to an area just south of Knoxville, McCann County.”

 

“Another case?” It was Jillian’s voice, though hard to recognize, it was shaky and soft and lacked all her normal confidence.

 

“Yup.” Finally Landerly leaned back, “We’ll name the disease after you two as punishment for this escapade. Now get out of my office. Go home. Pack and get your asses back here by five so I can hand you the paperwork.”

 

“Yes, sir.” His voice was strong, even if his belief wasn’t. And Jilly was falling all over herself to thank the man whose name she had so expertly forged less than a week ago. She was gesturing wildly and Jordan reached up to pluck one of her hands out of its flightpath and used it to drag her out of the office.

 

She trailed him down the hall, hand still tucked in his, getting tugged along. When they got to the office she released herself from his grip and sank like pudding into her wooden swivel chair, leaning it back and bringing her hands to her head as though she could hold all the thoughts in. “I can’t believe he didn’t fire us.”

 

“Yes, and we’re not waiting around to let it happen either.” Jordan grabbed her purse and handed it to her, before yanking her up out of the chair. “I’ll drive, you’re in no shape.”

 

In seconds he had pulled her down the hallway, waving the ID card miraculously still in his possession at each coded entry and finally emerging into the bright sun. Jilly raised her hand to shield her face, then pawed inside her purse for a moment before producing sunglasses and keys.

 

He pulled the keys from her hand and dropped them back into the leather bag. “You shouldn’t drive. I’ll drop you off then swing by and get you on the way back.”

 

“No, really, I’m-” She cut herself off when she saw how badly she was shaking. “All right, thank you.”

 

He settled her into the passenger seat of the crappy little Cavalier, then closed her in and jogged around to the driver’s side.

 

“Do you think-”

 

“Landerly said-”

 

“You go first.” He braced his arm on the back of her seat and looked out the rear window while he backed out of the spot doing all he could not to lay some serious rubber on the pavement in his hurry to be away.

 

“Do you think we’re really onto something? That there really are more cases?”

 

Jordan sighed. “It has to be. The only alternative I can figure is that Landerly is sending us into the mountains and a hitman will follow us. You know, so no one will ever find the bodies.”

 

“So, we’re going up into the Appalachians.”

 

“I have to say I’m freaking out about that.”

 

Jilly looked sideways at him again. “Why?”

 

“I’ve seen Deliverance.”

 

Jillian listened to the deep sigh Jordan heaved into the door of the car. In sleep, he had wedged himself between the seat and the window, stuck at an awkward angle that seemed to bother only her.

 

His remark about being sent to McCann County to meet up with Landerly’s hitman ricocheted in her brain.

 

But it morphed as it went. Landerly wouldn’t need a hitman; McCann was itself Purgatory, or so it would seem.

 

The Rav-4 bounced along the horrid road, and Jillian had thoughts about not getting reimbursed for the damage to her car. She tempered them with thoughts about not getting fired. Darkness had come to cover them like smog while she drove, along roads that needed little instruction. Blinking to keep her eyes open, she was assaulted by the bright glare of a green interstate sign bouncing her brights back at her. McCann, 1 mile, population 232. That was telling. That they included the population on the sign. And that the population included a significant digit in the ones spot. Ouch. Jordan had been right about Deliverance.

 

Jillian looked at the glowing digital numbers on the dash, they were going to arrive early, and she wondered how that could be possible. The drive had seemed interminable; she couldn’t even sing to the radio to stay awake, not with Jordan sleeping in the passenger seat.

 

Their turn was highlighted by a small brown sign atop a metal post, with one word “McCANN” and an arrow pointing the only direction there was to go down the dirt trail. She had the distinct feeling she was entering a land where a sixth grade education would be considered intelligent.

 

Jordan bounced around in his seat, his shoulders and head periodically knocking about. Surely he would wake right up, keep her company. But he didn’t. When she felt the frown cross her face she realized that she had been anticipating his presence. Landerly had done a good job putting the two of them together. They communicated well about what needed to be done, and they worked well together to be certain that it was achieved. She hadn’t ever felt that Jordan wasn’t pulling his own weight, nor had she felt she’d been carried.

 

And he was good company. Which was more than she had expected. Most people had found her cold and distant, and she understood that.

 

Pretty much she was cold and distant; she lived in her own world where the need to achieve drove her every waking moment.

 

Funny how Jordan had become her personal life now. He had other commitments and friends in the outside world of Atlanta. In the few weeks he had been here, he had made more connections than she had in all her five years at Grady and in Atlanta combined. On the way out he had taken time to call his friend Martin and cancel his Wednesday night racquetball game. For a brief moment she had regretted that she didn’t have anyone to call.

 

The road went on forever, made worse by the fact that it was little more than ruts in the hard-packed earth and any sort of speed was an unattainable goal. At least it had been used recently. Small bushes and grasses had been flattened in the middle of the parallel ditches that had yet to pop back up and look alive.

 

Beside her, Jordan finally stirred, his eyes opened, his jaw worked and his voice uttered a soft, What?

 

Before he shook himself fully awake and realized that he knew exactly where he was. In that moment he began apologizing for sleeping through such a long portion of the ride.

 

“So make it up to me by checking out the map to James Hann’s place so we can get the key to the house where we’re staying.”

 

Jordan complied, looking over the hand-drawn lines that Hann had faxed to Landerly earlier today. Google had come up with nothing. Not surprising since McCann itself didn’t register on most maps.

 

According to the shakily scrawled fax there were five roads in McCann. Parson, Main, Lintle, Shields, and Squirrel. Jillian had to admit that ‘Squirrel’ bothered her. And that, of course, was the road where the rented house was marked with a wavery X on the map.

 

Jordan turned the map one way then the other, “I take it we’re on