Endings by Linda Richards (portable ebook reader .TXT) 📗

“Dr. Uxbridge, you’re on retainer with the San Pasado Police Department, are you not?” says the interviewer.

“Boom!” say I to the screen with a fist pump. Boom, indeed.

“That isn’t really the point,” says Uxbridge.

And I turn the television off.

For me, the time for data collection has passed. I know I’ve found everything I can by these methods and from a distance. Anything more will just be more words. It’s time for motion.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE EARTH IS always moving. Quickly. I know it’s childish, but that’s a fact that’s never really sat comfortably in my mind. Because of this discomfort, I’ve read a lot about it over the years: trying to comprehend what it all means. And what it all means to me.

For one thing, it’s super hard to calculate how fast we’re actually going. Taking into account the distance from the Earth’s center, speed of rotation in every full day, and other things like that, some calculations indicate that, at the equator, the Earth is moving at about a thousand miles per hour. A thousand. That’s L.A.–New York in two hours. I mean, we’re really just hurtling along.

That’s the part where we’re spinning. The Earth is also hurtling around in orbit at the same time, this at an estimated 67,000 miles an hour. But things get even worse: apparently—because I haven’t observed this with my own eyes—our galaxy whirls around the solar system at about 490,000 miles per hour. I can’t even come up with comparisons for that one. It would mean, countrywide, that you’d arrive almost before you left.

So, think about it: you get out of bed in the middle of the night to pee. You walk a few feet to your bathroom. You come back to your still-warm bed, half asleep, and plunge back down into slumber. Meanwhile, all this high-speed racing is going on. If you stop to think about it—which I don’t advise—it can make you nauseous.

But it’s motion; that’s the point. Do you see? Even with all of this going on, we still get up. Put one foot behind the other. Move forward.

Motion. It’s what I will need to track William Atwater down. Even dropping through space at high speeds won’t bring me closer. I have to get out and get on with it.

I look at the results of my research critically. It seems to me that the pins bristle most thickly out of a few spots in the Oro Valley, in the northeasternmost part of the county, nearly the opposite side from where Atwater had been born and where he grew up. It does not escape me that, in Spanish, Oro translates to “gold.” That’s not a lead, but it seems too strong a connection to be full coincidence. I start to move.

Before I do, I look over the system I have devised, realizing that it is imperfect and possibly even fatally flawed. Based on my system, there is no strong reason to think my method will yield results. It doesn’t matter. At this stage, I have nothing left other than a dead garden and rage. When I decide to head out, I’m not even aware that I’ve made a decision. What, after all, is there to lose? And it isn’t as though anyone will even care that I am gone.

I try not to feel pathetic with this thought.

Getting in motion means another shuttle, another flight out, another rental car when I arrive. None of that bothers me, even though this is not a paying gig.

Pro bono, I laugh to myself. A dark laugh. Pro bono like a lawyer who takes someone on for free, just because they need representation. Only in this case, it is society that will be better off, not the client. That’s what I tell myself. That’s what I need to feel in this hour. I decide to ignore the voice that questions the correctness of my saddling up as both judge and jury.

In the last few years, San Pasado has been labeled one of the happiest places in America. It isn’t happy now, though. Now it’s a small city pushed to the edge of its seat in mortification and worry. A hamlet that seems about to consume itself with concern over a product of its loins. A son no one would ever want to claim. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Even as the small commuter jet circles into the rural airport, I see flags flying at half mast, something I see more of when I pick up my rental car and drive the short distance to town. San Pasado is mourning and uncertain. Rocks and hard places. The small city scuttles on the edge. Used to being peaceful and beautiful, it doesn’t know what to do with the pall of sadness and silence that floats over it or the armada of newsies winging in from all over the world. It doesn’t know what to do with the feeling of being imperfect. Fatally flawed. You can see it even in the townsfolk, or so I imagine. The perfect streets. The carefully wrought civic architecture. This is a town not used to dealing with imperfection. And now here we are. No small imperfection: a mark so large it is beyond blight. A mark so intense it blemishes the spirit.

San Pasado is a hamlet, everything charming. Easy. Even the city streets seem half in the country. It is the sort of place where you imagine people smile a lot, and some of them even go to church on Sundays. They have barbecues and go to high school football games. They lean against fences and talk amicably with neighbors. Life is easy and sweet. There is a mall, but there is also a well-manicured town square with a bandstand and a lot of stores that don’t belong to franchises. People walk around the town and visit quaint shops featuring signs admonishing visitors to “shop local” in enough windows that you understand it’s some kind of cheerful conspiracy.

In