Invitation: The Call, The Haunted, The Sentinels, The Girl Read online

  The odor of decaying flesh was strong enough to overpower the tang of sea air, but after a while I grew numb to it. Numb enough that I was able to pick up a single bird, hold it in my gloved left palm, and bring it close to my face, using my right hand to probe its feathery little body. Like the fish, the bird had holes where his eyes should have been. In addition, this bird’s little beak appeared cracked and some sort of brown liquid dribbled from its nostrils. The little body felt like a feathery bag of air in my hand.

  When I heard the unexpected sound of a vehicle on the beach, I turned and looked behind me. A white van had pulled up near the lifeguard stand, and two men in hazmat uniforms had stepped onto the beach. Hazmats? Did these guys know something we didn’t?

  I dropped the little bird’s body into my bag and went over to check out the new arrivals.

  The van had no markings or identification on it, so for a while I simply watched the men dressed in white from head to toe. They walked over the sand as I had, but they used a long-handled tool to pick up the dead animals, then they put certain specimens into individual bags. After sealing each bag, they wrote something on it—probably date and time—and placed the sealed specimens in a cooler.

  I gave them space to pick up a few corpses, then pulled out my earbuds and walked up to the closest guy. “Hi,” I said, smiling. “Who are you and where are you from?”

  He blinked at me as if I were a Martian who’d suddenly come up and introduced myself. For a moment he seemed taken aback, then he fumbled with his hazmat helmet and pulled it off. “Steve Laughlin,” he said, his cheeks brightening as if he had suddenly realized how silly he looked in all that protective gear. “We’re from the University of Tampa.”

  “Oh.” I laughed. “I thought you were from the government.”

  He laughed, too. “Not by a long shot. The government’s probably been here and gone already, leaving us to clean up the mess. This thing has made our biology department curious, and since it happened in our own backyard—”

  “I get it. I’m curious, too.” I felt the corner of my mouth rise in a half-smile. Steve Laughlin looked like a professional geek—my kind of guy. “Don’t you feel a little overdressed? I mean, no one has even hinted that these animals died from contagion.”

  “No one has said they didn’t.” Steve smiled back at me, apparently recognizing a kindred spirit. “I’ve always found it better to err on the side of caution.”

  I nodded. “Listen, Steve—you got a pen?”

  He pulled one from his pocket, and I took it. “I’m visiting the area with my boss, Professor James McKinney. We’re keen to know more about this event, and if you learn anything, we’d appreciate it if you’d give us a call.” I grabbed his gloved hand and pulled it toward me, then wrote on the back of his white glove. “This is my cell number. Will you call me?”

  His eyes glinted with interest—more than a purely scientific interest, it seemed to me. “I’ll call if you’ll tell me your name.”

  “Andi.” I released his hand and held out his pen. “Don’t forget—I have friends who will be truly intrigued by whatever you learn.”

  His mouth curved in a slow smile. “Andi. Got a last name to go with that?”

  “Maybe.” I picked up my trash bag and waved. “Maybe you’ll find out when you call.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  I’d gone maybe a mile down the beach when I turned to check the time. The sun stood about midway down the horizon, so Safta would nearly be finished packing.

  Once my grandparents learned that I needed to invite several people to the house, they had graciously offered to leave us and spend a couple of days at their Manhattan apartment. Since Sabba had retired, Safta said, he didn’t get to New York as often as he wanted to.

  “I hate to put you out,” I told them. “After all, I came here to see you.”

  “Listen, bubeleh,” Safta said, “us you can see anytime. I see the shadows on your face, and I think your friends can help you now. Me, I will never understand the things you talk about, so you stay while we go. We will come back in a couple of days.”

  I reluctantly agreed to accept their offer.

  Since my grandparents were leaving us alone in the house, I planned to put Tank in my grandparents’ room, give the two guest rooms to the professor and Brenda, and bunk Daniel in Sabba’s den, which was close to where Brenda would be sleeping. I would remain in my old room, which still looked pretty much as it did when I left for college.

  Now I squinted at people on the beach. Dozens of strangers were walking along the water’s edge, but I spotted four familiar shapes coming from the house—little Daniel, Brenda, the professor, and Tank, who hobbled over the sand like a giant with a broken toe . . . because that’s what he was.

  I lifted Safta’s sunhat and waved it, then clapped it back on my head and strode toward them. I felt as giddy as a kid, and I couldn’t say why, but seeing the others made me feel a lot less melancholy.

  I dropped my trash bag in the sand and ran to hug them—Brenda first, then Tank, and then Daniel. I grinned at the professor, who gave me a grudging smile as if he, too, were glad to be a part of this inexplicable team.

  “Eew!” Brenda backed away, shaking her head. “I hate to say this, but you stink.”

  Tank was too much of a gentleman to say anything about the smell, but the strangled look on his face told me he was trying hard not to inhale.

  “Andrea,” the professor said, “I don’t know how you can stand it out here. Come back to the house, take a shower, and let’s talk. Your grandmother has ordered dinner, which should be arriving shortly.”

  “You bet.” I grinned around the circle of friendly faces. “Just let me dump my collection bag at the lifeguard stand.”

  An hour later I was clean, perfumed, and sitting at the head of Safta’s dinner table. She had ordered several Chinese dishes, which waited on a lazy Susan along with a selection of chopsticks and a note saying “Welcome to the Beach House.”

  “In a place this fancy, I know we’re supposed to use good manners,” Brenda said, glancing around, “so I’ll be good and not smoke in the house. But I’m starving, so if you’ll pass your plates, I’ll slap on some rice. Daniel, you want brown rice or white?”

  Daniel shifted his gaze from the sliding glass door to look at her, but didn’t respond.

  Brenda nodded. “Okay, white rice it is. Cowboy, what do you want? A bowlful of everything?”

  While Brenda served, I leaned back and studied her and Daniel. Something had happened between them since we were last together—the tenuous bond they established in Port Avalon was far stronger now. I could see it in the way her body curved toward him and in the way his eyes followed her as she served everyone else. Maybe he’d been afraid to fly this morning and she comforted him. Maybe he’d begun to see her as a surrogate mother. One thing I knew for sure—if the kid had managed to get inside her heart, he was the only one of us who had.

  And Daniel—in Port Avalon, he had been accompanied by an invisible friend . . . a rather large friend who didn’t care for the name Harvey. If Daniel’s imperceptible protector had come along on this trip, apparently he hadn’t joined us for dinner.

  Brenda was watching Tank inhale a plate of Kung Pao chicken when I caught her attention. “By the way, how’d you get Daniel out of the hospital?”

  She smirked. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Give us a try.”

  Brenda glanced around the table, then snorted. “Okay. So last time when I took Daniel back to the hospital, I had to explain why he was with me, right? So I told them that I was his aunt, and I was steamin’ mad that they’d let that other couple sign him out without providing any kind of identification. I showed them a newspaper article about the murders in Port Avalon, and I told ’em Daniel had been in the middle of all that. Well.” She smiled. “They were so terrified by my threats of a lawsuit that they never asked to see anything from me. I had them put me down as Daniel’s au
nt, and I told them that if they ever released him to anybody but me, I’d sue the lab coats right off their pimply backsides. You should have seen ’em scampering to take care of the boy after that.”

  “That hardly seems logical.” The professor smiled, but his eyes softened when he looked at the boy. “Surely his parents are listed in his file. I’m sure there are certain custody orders, medical releases—”

  “That’s the thing, Doc.” Brenda leaned toward us and lowered her voice to a rough whisper. “That hospital is like the end of the earth. One look around and you know that nobody is comin’ for any of those patients. I get the feelin’ that Norquist is the kind of place where they put people nobody ever wants to see again.”

  A low rumble came from deep in the professor’s throat.

  “So this time when I went to get him,” Brenda went on, “I sashayed right up to the desk and said I was Daniel’s aunt and I’d come to take him out for a few days. The girl looked at me like I had a hole in the head, but then she called over some Deputy Dog security guard. I recognized him—he’d been on duty the last time—and he said, ‘Oh, yeah, she’s his aunt. She’s cool.’ And then the girl says, ‘But I don’t have her on his approved visitor list,’ and the guard says, ‘Then you’d better get her on his approved list.’ So the next thing I know, I’m on some kind of list, and they’re bringing Daniel out to me. The girl is watching me, though, probably thinking that Daniel will freak out or something if he doesn’t know me, but he comes right over, slides his hand into mine, and off we go, just like Bonnie and Clyde.”

  The professor cleared his throat. “I’d choose another metaphorical paring, if I were you. Bonnie and Clyde didn’t end well.”

  Brenda’s eyes sparked with annoyance. She picked up her fork, and for an instant I worried that she might lean across the table and stab the professor with it.

  “Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket?” Tank smiled, easing the tension. “They had a happy ending.”

  “Indeed.” The professor nodded. “And the metaphor is more apt, considering the cricket served as the puppet’s conscience. In a way, you are serving as the boy’s window to the world.”

  Brenda lowered her fork and shot me a is he for real? look, and I shrugged. Being a professor, my boss often felt inclined to correct others, and Brenda didn’t like being corrected.

  Few people did.

  “So, Miss Andi.” Tank stopped shoveling food long enough to look over at me. “Why are we here?”

  I bit my lip, hoping I could explain what I felt in my gut. “It all started when I had a horrible dream about Abby losing her eyes. Scarcely an hour later, the dead fish washed up and something had destroyed all their eyes. That was bizarre enough, but within minutes, dead birds started falling out of the sky, also without eyes. Then I got a strong feeling that the two events were connected—and when the professor said he’d had a dream about Sridhar and he had no eyes, I knew I needed you all to help me. I know there’s a connection, but I can’t figure out what it is.”

  “So what are we supposed to do?” Brenda asked.

  “I have no idea.” I raked my hand through my hair and propped my elbow on the table. “But I did some preliminary research and discovered that mass animal deaths are occurring all over the planet, and not only with birds and fish. Cattle, sheep, elk, crabs, oysters, honeybees, seals, starfish, puffins—”

  “What’s a puffin?” Tank asked.

  “A kind of sea bird,” I answered. “Cute little things.”

  Tank shifted in his seat. “Those other animals—did they lose their eyeballs, too?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. They were just . . . dead.”

  “Yes, animals are dying.” The professor folded his hands. “But mass animal deaths have occurred throughout the centuries. Look at what happened to the dinosaurs.”

  I blinked. I hadn’t considered the dinosaurs, though I knew the cause for their extinction was hotly debated. Some scientists believed they died before the emergence of human beings when a meteor hit the earth; others believed the dinosaurs perished in an ancient flood. I didn’t want to get into a debate about dinosaurs over dinner—the professor would certainly prevail, and we’d be distracted from the work we were supposed to be doing.

  “Yes, the dinosaurs died,” I admitted, “but now all kinds of animals are dying.”

  “Like the buffalo?” Tank asked.

  I gave him a patient smile. “There’s no mystery about why the buffalo nearly died out,” I reminded him. “People killed them, and when they stopped, the buffalo herds came back. It’s the same reason elephants and gorillas are dying now. But we don’t understand why these other deaths are occurring.”

  “I’m sure there’s a good reason,” Brenda said, though she sounded anything but sure. “I’m no scientist, but don’t they blame these things on pollution, red tides, stuff like that?”

  “Sometimes they can find a reason for one situation,” I pointed out, “but so many? And there’s—something else.”

  I pressed my lips together, wondering if they’d laugh.

  Brenda made an impatient gesture. “What?”

  “A pattern,” I said. “The golden mean. I was looking at a map of animal deaths, and there were dozens of dots all over the map. So I zoomed in and naturally the dots spread out. That’s when I saw the curved spiral that looks like the inside of a sea shell—the golden mean. It occurs all over the place in nature, and it’s nature’s way of performing her work efficiently. Which means that if nature is killing the animals, she will efficiently meet her goals and we humans might be next.”

  “Whoa.” Brenda held up both hands. “Step it back. I’m not getting this.”

  “Let me help.” The professor leaned back in his chair and gave me a wry smile. “You know how Andi loves her patterns. But while the brain does tend to seek patterns in everything from clouds to breakfast toast, apophenia is not a true gift. We yearn for patterns because humans yearn for predictability.”

  “It is a real gift,” I insisted. “I don’t see the face of Jesus in mushrooms. I see . . . structures and schemes. And with all due respect, Professor, just because scientists debunk the idea of apophenia doesn’t make it any less real.”

  Brenda and Tank shifted their gazes from me to the professor and then back to me, probably debating which one of us they should believe. Daniel just kept eating.

  Brenda looked at Tank. “Maybe it doesn’t matter,” she said. “What matters is that next bit she mentioned—if she’s right about all the animals dying and we’re next, well, that’s freakin’ interesting.”

  Tank snorted. “Yeah. So—what is this mean thing?”

  “The golden mean,” I explained, “sometimes called the golden ratio. Philosophers consider it a definition of beauty; mathematicians call it phi. Fibonacci explained it as a series in which every number is the sum of the two numbers preceding it, like this: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 and so on. This series seems to be sort of a key for organisms in nature. For instance, consider flowers: the lily has three petals, buttercups have five, the chicory has twenty-one, the daisy has thirty-four, and so on. And seed heads, like sunflowers? In order to pack the seeds in so that no space is wasted and every seed receives an adequate amount of sunlight, nature needed to determine the perfect mathematical ratio for placing and positioning seeds. That ratio is 0.618034—the ratio of phi, the golden mean. That ratio results in the spiral you see in pinecones, sunflower seeds, sea shells, even hurricanes. Artists and photographers use it in composition; architects plan buildings around it. It’s perfection. Completion. It’s the way nature gets things done.”

  “It’s genius.” Tank grinned. “And only a Master Creator could have figured that stuff out.”

  Brenda stared at me, a hard line between her brows. Clearly, she thought I was nuts.

  “Let me show you.” I stood and grabbed my laptop from the kitchen counter, then pulled up an illustration of the golden mean.

  “Okay.”
Brenda nodded. “I may not understand all this, but it’s enough that you do. But what makes you think these animal deaths have anything to do with pinecones and hurricanes?”

  “Because of the pattern.” On my laptop, I opened the map of animal deaths. Zooming in as before, I focused on a cluster in the south, then ran my finger over it, connecting the dots in the arch and resultant swirl.

  I think even Tank was impressed.

  Brenda tilted her head. “Cool.”

  “Is it? The golden mean is Nature in no-nonsense mode. What if she is killing the animals?”

  “I wish you’d stop talking about Nature like it’s a person,” Tank mumbled. “Nature isn’t a person, it’s a creation. If someone is doin’ something, it has to be the Creator.”

  “What if the operative force is mankind?” the professor said. “What if people have unknowingly triggered something that might result in the loss of all life on the planet?”

  After a moment of heavy silence, Brenda laughed, Tank looked baffled, and the professor smirked. Even Daniel, who usually wore a blank look, seemed to have a small smile on his face. I guess that’s what happens when ants look up at the rain and talk about how they might make it stop.

  “We’re not scientists,” Brenda said, still snickering. “If what you’re saying is true, what are idiots like us supposed to do about it?”

  The professor stiffened. “I beg your pardon. You may not aspire to be an example of intelligent human life, but others—”

  “Here we go,” Brenda said, looking at me. “Just when I thought we were beginning to get along.”

  “Are we gonna be travelin’ everywhere, checking out dead animals?” Tank asked.

  I held up my hands, unable to handle all of them at once. “I don’t know what we do next. I only know I was supposed to invite you here because Sridhar might be trying to reach us. Can we just leave it at that for now? Do you think we can spend a couple of days here without insulting each other?”

  The others looked around the table, then Brenda’s mouth curved in a smile. “I always did want a Florida vacation. Spending a couple of days in this big ol’ beach house is all right by me.”