The Presence Page 2

  This afternoon, when he started feeling like maybe it might be better just to die if he couldn’t get away from the pain, he’d cut out after school and driven around for a while, until a cop stopped him and gave him a ticket for having a broken muffler. So now what the hell was he going to do? He couldn’t afford to pay for the ticket, let alone get the damn muffler on the car fixed. Besides, what was the big deal? It didn’t make that much noise, and hardly stank up the inside of the car at all. But his mom was going to give him hell for the ticket anyway, and his dad would only launch into an endless lecture about how much it costs to raise two families if he asked to borrow the money to fix the muffler.

  What a mess!

  Turning into the tree-lined block on which he’d lived all his life, he pressed the button on the sun visor that would activate the garage door opener while he was still two houses away, and turned into the driveway just as the door opened fully. Automatically starting the game he played against himself every afternoon, he pressed the button again, trying to gauge it so the descending garage door would just clear the back end of his car as he pulled it inside.

  Today he missed, and the car jolted sharply as the garage door glanced off the rear bumper. So now there would be scrapes on the car and the garage door, as well as the ticket and the bad muffler.

  And he still hurt.

  Maybe, instead of going into the house, he’d just sit here awhile.

  Sit here and see what happened.

  A feeling of warmth began to spread through him, washing away the pain he’d been enduring, and suddenly everything began to seem better.

  Maybe he’d finally found the answer to his problems.

  Without his mother.

  Without his coach.

  Even without his doctor.

  The boy closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and for the first time in weeks felt no pain.

  For the woman, the day had been no better than it had been for her son, starting with an early call from her ex-husband suggesting that they renegotiate his child support payments. Translation: the bimbo he’d run off with wanted more money to spend on herself. Well, she’d disabused him of that idea pretty quickly. At noon she’d discovered that an associate who was a full year junior to her was going to get the partnership slot that should have been hers. So now she was faced with a decision: Sit it out for another year, or start job hunting? But she knew the answer to that one: she wasn’t going to be made a partner, ever, so she might as well start checking with the headhunters.

  Then, when she’d decided things couldn’t get any worse, the doctor called to recommend a good psychiatrist for her son. Well, before she sent him off to a shrink, she’d have him checked out by someone else. Except the HMO probably wouldn’t pay for it, and the trip to Maui at New Year’s had strained the budget as far as it would go.

  Still, she’d figure out something.

  Turning into the driveway, she jabbed the remote on the visor, bringing the car to a complete stop as she waited for the garage door to open.

  It was the noise of the engine more than the fumes that poured out of the garage that told her something was wrong. Slamming the gear lever into Park with one hand as she opened the door with the other, she slid out of her car and ran into the garage.

  She could see her son slumped inside his car, his legs up on the front passenger seat, his back resting against the driver’s door. His head was lolling on his chest.

  Stifling a scream, she grabbed the driver’s door handle.

  Locked!

  She ran around the car and tried the other door, then called her son’s name.

  Nothing!

  Wait!

  Had something moved inside the car?

  She cupped her hands over her eyes and peered into its shadowy interior.

  His chest was moving! He was still breathing!

  Coughing as the fumes in the garage filled her lungs, she fumbled for the extra key that hung from a nail under the workbench, shoved open the door to the kitchen, and grabbed the phone. “My son!” she cried as soon as the 911 operator answered. “Oh, God, I need an ambulance!”

  A carefully measured voice calmly asked for her address.

  Her address!

  Her mind was suddenly blank. “I can’t—oh, God! It’s—” Then it came back to her and she blurted out a number. “On North Maple, between Dayton and Clifton. Oh, God, hurry! He locked himself in the car in the garage and—”

  “It’s all right, ma’am,” the calm voice broke in. “An aid car is already on its way.”

  Dropping the phone on the counter, she raced back to the garage. She had to get the car open—she had to! A hammer! There used to be a sledgehammer at the end of the workbench! Squeezing between the front of her son’s car and the wooden bench, she uttered a silent prayer that her ex-husband hadn’t simply helped himself to the big maul. He hadn’t—it was right where she remembered it. Grasping its handle with both hands, she hoisted it up, then slammed its huge metal head into the passenger window of her son’s car. The safety glass shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, and the woman dropped the hammer to the floor, snaked a hand through the broken window, and pulled the door open. Reaching across her son’s body, she switched the ignition off, and the loud rumble of the motor died away, only to be instantly replaced by the wail of a fast-approaching siren. She grasped her son’s ankles and tried to pull him out of the car, but before she’d managed to haul him even halfway through the door, two white-clad medics were taking over, gently easing her aside, pulling the boy out of the car and clamping an oxygen mask over his face. As he stirred, her panic at last began to ease its grip.

  “He’s coming around,” one of the medics assured her as they carried him out of the garage and put him on a stretcher. “Looks like he’s going to make it okay.”

  Her son began struggling as the medics put him into the ambulance and started to close its rear door.

  “I want to come,” the woman begged. “For God’s sake! He’s my son!”

  The door to the ambulance reopened, and the woman scrambled inside. With the siren wailing, the ambulance raced toward Cedars-Sinai Hospital, nearly twenty blocks away.

  The ride seemed to take forever, and the woman watched helplessly as her son struggled against the two medics, one of whom was trying to hold the boy still while the other kept the oxygen mask pressed firmly over his nose and mouth. Clutching her son’s hand, the woman tried to soothe him, and finally his struggles eased. But just as the ambulance pulled to a stop at the hospital’s emergency entrance, she felt his hand suddenly relax in hers. His whole body went limp on the stretcher.

  She heard one of the medics curse softly.

  Her body went numb, and when the doors were yanked open from the outside, she climbed out of the ambulance slowly, as if she’d fallen into a trance.

  The crew rushed her son into the emergency room, where a team of doctors waited to take over for the medics.

  She followed the stretcher into the hospital.

  Silently, she watched the doctors work, but already knew what was coming.

  And in the end, she heard the same words she’d heard first from her son’s doctor, then from the ambulance crew: “I don’t understand—he should be doing fine!”

  But her son—her sweet, handsome only son—wasn’t doing fine.

  Her son was dead.

  CHAPTER

  1

  NEW YORK CITY

  “Whatcha tryin’ ta do, Sundquist? Kill ya’self?”

  A harsh laugh followed the mocking words, ricocheting off the bare concrete walls of the high school gymnasium, echoing louder in Michael Sundquist’s ears as it resonated. What should he do? Abandon the bench presses he was doing and confront the jerk?

  Not a good idea. The jerk, whose name was Slotzky—first name unknown, at least to Michael—was about a foot taller than he, and outweighed him by maybe fifty pounds, all of it solid muscle. Confronting Slotzky would be a good way to get his ass whipped, and
getting his ass whipped was definitely not high on Michael Sundquist’s priority list this morning.

  Finishing the bench presses, however, was very high on the list, as were doing fifty push-ups and fifty chin-ups, followed by as many laps around the track on the gym’s mezzanine as he could manage before the ten-minute bell sent him to the showers. If he ignored Slotzky, avoided a fight, and kept his mind firmly on his work, he could easily achieve his goal.

  A varsity letter.

  That was all he really wanted.

  He would never be tall enough for basketball, or heavy enough for football. He suspected it was way too late for him to take up baseball. That left track. And the thing he’d always been best at was running. Even when his asthma had been so bad he could barely breathe, he’d still been able to beat the rest of the kids in his class in short sprints. In fact, it had been kind of a joke: don’t bother trying to beat Sundquist off the block, just keep trotting along behind him and sooner or later he’ll run down like a broken watch.

  The joke had been all too true. Only a year ago he’d often found it impossible to run more than a quarter of a mile. Though he invariably led at the beginning of races, he never quite managed to win a fifty-yard dash, and in the hundred he always came in dead last.

  But even when the asthma was at its worst, he never ever gave up. When his mother claimed it was no big deal—that no one on either side of his family had ever been an athlete—it only made Michael more determined. What did she know, anyway? It was a guy thing. The kind of thing his father would have understood if his father were still alive.

  Whenever Michael ran, battling for breath, forcing his body beyond its capacity, determined to conquer the frightening condition that had held him in its power ever since he’d been a little boy, he imagined his dad cheering him on. Though his father’s face was becoming cloudy, and sometimes he could barely remember that deep, booming voice, Michael clung to his vision of his dad. And kept at it until finally, last year, he’d begun to outgrow the asthma.

  Finishing the bench presses, he dropped to the floor to do fifty quick push-ups—still barely breathing hard—then started toward the high bar to begin his chin-ups, glancing as he passed at his reflection in the wire-mesh window that separated the gym from the coaching room. Yes, his chest was deepening—he could see it.

  Every day, bench press by bench press, push-up by push-up, lap by lap, his work was paying off.

  The other guys weren’t laughing at him anymore, except for Slotzky. And even Slotzky would stop tormenting him if he could actually make the varsity track team.

  And not as a sprinter, either.

  No, Michael had set his sights on a higher goal—long-distance running, where endurance counted every bit as much as speed, if not more.

  He finished the last of the chin-ups and checked his respiration again. He was breathing a little harder than at the start of the hour, but he wasn’t anywhere near panting, no sign of the onset of those terrible attacks that used to grip him in clammy, gasping terror. He loped over to the metal stairs leading up to the track that was suspended from the walls twelve feet up, just below the rafters and well above the basketball hoops. Taking the stairs two at a time, he glanced at the clock on the far wall.

  Twenty minutes left. He could run a couple of miles before heading for the showers.

  He broke into an easy jog, pacing himself carefully so he wouldn’t have to break his stride as he approached the sharp turns at each of the gym’s four corners. There was no one else on the track; the rest of the class was on the floor below, some of them playing a game of basketball, a few lifting weights, but most of them just sprawled out on the floor, waiting for the hour to end.

  “Hey, Sundquist,” Slotzky yelled, an ugly grin splitting his lips. “Ain’t ya afraid ya might pass out up there?” As Slotzky’s friends laughed obediently, Michael, stopped by Slotzky’s shout, spontaneously raised the middle finger of his left hand.

  Big mistake.

  Slotzky’s grin disappeared. He rose from the floor and started up the stairs, three of his friends following him. As he searched for an escape route, Michael wondered what misguided impulse had led him to do something so stupid.

  He also wondered if there were any truth to the rumor that Slotzky had once thrown someone off the roof of a building.

  As Slotzky and one of his friends approached him from one direction, the others circled around the opposite way, catching him in a heavy-duty pincers.

  “Whatcha gonna do, chickenshit?” Slotzky taunted as he advanced on Michael, closing the distance between them.

  Michael glanced at Slotzky, then at the bully’s friend. There was only one way out. Dropping down onto his stomach, he swung his legs out over the edge of the track, then lowered himself until he was hanging by his fingers. Slotzky was running toward him now, and though the bigger boy was still thirty feet away, Michael could already feel the soles of Slotsky’s Nikes grinding down on his fingertips. Without so much as glancing down at the floor below, he released his grip and let himself drop, falling into a rolling tumble the moment his feet touched the hardwood planks.

  A twinge of pain shot through his shoulder, but he ignored it, scrambling to his feet and looking up to see what his pursuers would do.

  Slotzky leaned over the rail, glowering at him. Then, with a skill perfected by years of practice, he spat on Michael. “See ya after school,” he said.

  Wiping Slotzky’s slimy glob from his face, Michael backed away a few paces, then turned and trotted off toward the showers.

  He wondered if Slotzky would be carrying a knife or a gun after school today.

  Or both.

  Katharine Sundquist knew she should be concentrating on the work at hand. Before her, on the desk in her office in the Natural History Museum, was a fragment of a hominid jaw that had arrived from a dig in Africa a week ago. Not that there was much work to be done: she had tentatively identified the specimen as Australopithecus afarensis the moment she’d seen it, and her subsequent examination failed to suggest that it might be anything else. It had been discovered in an area where Australopithecus afarensis was, if not common, certainly not unheard of, and excavated at a depth that, barring something unusual turning up in the carbon dating of the site, generally corresponded to the level where that particular precursor of Homo sapiens might be found. The problem was, she kept getting distracted by a series of photographs that had arrived the day after the australopithecine jaw.

  There were half a dozen pictures, along with a letter describing the site more fully. The name on the letterhead—Rob Silver—had caught Katharine’s attention immediately, for though she’d seen Silver only a few times in the twenty-odd years since they’d been in graduate school together, she still had a clear mental image of him: tall, muscular, with an unruly mop of light brown hair and blue eyes that had—at least for a while—never failed to set her heart beating faster every time she saw him. The romance, though, had quickly faded when his interest in Polynesian culture and hers in early man had sent them in opposite directions, putting not only a scientific gulf between them, but an entire planet as well. Within four years she’d met and married Tom Sundquist and given birth to Michael.

  When Michael was six, Tom Sundquist had died.

  Died in Africa, on a perfect summer morning, a decade ago. But the image of it was as clear in her mind now as if it had happened only yesterday. Tom was leaving for Nairobi to catch a flight to Amsterdam, where he was scheduled to read a paper on the dig they’d been developing together for the past five years. She and Michael were staying on at the dig, where Katharine would supervise the work in Tom’s absence while Michael happily played with the African children with whom he’d made fast friends. She and Michael had stood together, hand in hand, as Tom’s single-engine Cessna accelerated down the dirt landing strip and rose into the morning sky. As always, the pilot swung around to pass over them one final time, but that morning he’d decided to show off.

  As Kathar
ine and Michael watched—she with growing apprehension, he with growing excitement—the pilot put the little plane through a series of twists and loops, then sent it straight up until it went into a stall, flipped over, and plunged toward the earth in an accelerating nosedive.

  Katharine had seen it before—it was one of the pilot’s favorite stunts—and it always terrified her. At the last second the pilot would pull out of the dive, waggle his wings, and head off toward Nairobi, flying low enough to send the herds of animals below him into panicked stampedes.

  But that morning, as she and Michael watched, the plane smashed nose first into the ground, instantly exploding into a ball of fire.

  She and Michael had left the dig that day and never returned.

  Within a year Michael’s asthma attacks began, triggered, Katharine was convinced, by what he’d seen on the morning his father died. In the years since Tom’s death, Katharine had concentrated on only two things: her son’s health and her work. For most of that time, it had been enough. But lately, especially the past few months, when Michael seemed finally to have freed himself from the crippling attacks, she’d been wondering if she wasn’t turning into just another of the fossils she spent so much of her time studying.

  And then, last week, the letter from Rob Silver arrived, along with the photographs. The site, he explained, was on the flank of Haleakala, on Maui. For the last five years he’d been working in Hawaii, studying the evolution of Polynesian architecture as it moved from the South Pacific into the Hawaiian Islands. But the site in the photographs, he wrote, bore no resemblance to anything he’d ever seen in Hawaii. He had money in his budget for a consultant, and wanted to know if Katharine would be interested.

  She kept returning to the pictures, peering at the images of the site that had been discovered beneath a thick layer of vegetation.