The Caleb Collection Read online

  “Hold on. I’m almost finished.”

  “You’ll miss it! Get in here!”

  “Okay . . . okay.” Stewart threw the wrench back in the toolbox with a grunt. At least it was a Craftsman, which meant he could replace it at no charge. He grabbed an old T-shirt rag and walked through the kitchen wiping his hands.

  Barbara and Peter both had their eyes glued to the big Sony television in the living room. “What is it?”

  They didn’t respond, and he walked behind his son. Three facts settled in his mind at once—not necessarily critical facts, just the kind that police officers learn to mind. Fact one, they were watching NBC news with that Donna chick. Fact two, the Donna chick was at a meeting of some kind—a convention or a religious gathering—and she was definitely worked up. Fact three, both Peter and Barbara looked like they were watching news of a bomb’s detonation or the president’s assassination rather than coverage of a convention.

  It struck him only then that many of the people in the picture behind Donna were on the floor. “I know this looks unusual . . .” Donna was saying. “Well, it looks impossible actually, and to be honest, I might not believe it if I wasn’t here myself, but something very dramatic did indeed happen, ladies and gentlemen. And not just to the people you see behind me, but to me.” Her eyes glinted with eagerness. “We can’t necessarily explain what we’re seeing, but we can assure you that it is real. No tricks, no gimmicks, no wires. Just a little boy’s power. Let’s watch the footage again and let you experience for yourselves what we experienced.”

  The picture suddenly cut to a screen with white words “recorded earlier” flashing at the upper left.

  “Watch this, Stew,” Barbara said.

  “I’m watching.”

  He watched a little boy walk out onto the stage, stupefied, it seemed. Then he saw a teenage boy in a red wheelchair shoved onto the stage, and immediately Stewart’s heart began to thump. He glanced down at Peter. His son had pursed his lips in frustration or anger.

  The scene rolled on and then suddenly Stewart began to sweat because suddenly things were happening that had no business happening. When the boy took his first step, a buzz lit in Stewart’s ear, and he thought that Donna was wrong. What they were watching wasn’t real.

  When the child began to sing and the people slumped to the floor, he knew it was fake. It had to be. He very nearly leapt up to the box and snapped it off. But then the camera wavered and showed a shot of Donna lying on the concrete, and Stewart ground his teeth. A thousand conflicting emotions collided in his mind.

  They watched in stunned silence, the three of them, and then they watched the small child’s leg twist and straighten before the camera. The child couldn’t have been older than four. One look into his wide eyes and Stewart knew that this was real.

  The screen cut back to Donna, and she continued her rambling, but Stewart wasn’t hearing her. He was replaying that last scene in his mind, and he was thinking that the world had just changed. His heart was slamming in his chest, and sweat was snaking past his temples, and he knew that somehow nothing was ever going to be the same.

  Peter suddenly whirled around in his wheelchair and sped down the hall to his bedroom.

  17

  Day 12

  IDON’T CARE IF THE NETWORKS HAVE DUBBED HIM Boy Wonder! I don’t care if he flies around in a red cape; I want him out of the country!” Crandal sounded like a bulldog on the phone.

  “I know he’s a problem. And it’s not just the networks calling him Boy Wonder. The whole country’s talking about him. Immigration’s requesting clarification.”

  “Then give them clarification.”

  “We could do that. But not without accepting significant risks. The last thing we need is the media digging into this and going on some crusade to keep the boy in the country. You think we have problems now . . .”

  The phone went silent except for the sound of steady breathing.

  “How in the blazes does a punk kid go from being unknown one day to being a national buzzword the next, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you should look at the footage. It’s pretty . . . unusual.”

  “I’m sure it is. And what do you suggest we do?”

  “I suggest we go back to natural causes.”

  A pause.

  “That’ll take a week. At least.”

  “It’s safe. They’ll have no clue what happened to him.”

  “You sure you can pull it off?”

  “I’m positive. I’ve already set it in motion.”

  “Okay. But I want a plausible plan for immediate resolution in the event the kid starts saying things. And I want that kid trailed twenty-four/seven.”

  “It’s already done, sir.”

  Jim’s Fish House buzzed with a late-lunch crowd, just enough noise to mask their own conversation without obstructing it, Jason thought. A huge blue marlin glared down at the tables from its perch above the bar, as if daring him to take a bite. The marlin obviously had, and for his appetite he’d been rewarded with a hook through the lip. Somehow Jason doubted that was the display’s point. He wondered if the owner had actually caught the fish or simply bought it from the same catalog he’d bought the talking perch at the front door.

  He stared at his swordfish dish and tapped his fingers on the inch-thick varnish that covered the square table. Donna was due to join them for coffee in fifteen minutes.

  “Look at the bright side, Leiah. Four days ago we were losing sleep over whether he’d be snatched away and sent back to Ethiopia. We have to take this a step at a time. I mean, obviously things have gone nuts on us here, but we have to remember where this started.”

  “Sure. But isn’t it sorta like from the frying pan into the fire?”

  “Not necessarily. Nikolous may not be an angel, but trust me, neither are the good folks down at the NSA. I guarantee you that if we remove him from Nikolous through any kind of agency he gets sent back to Ethiopia. And that would be a mistake. At least for now we have some breathing room.”

  “We might, but meanwhile Caleb’s suffocating.”

  “He’s alive, isn’t he?”

  “We should at least file a report with the state.”

  “Human services? Take a month to get any response from them. No, getting an injunction was really our only short-term option, and now an injunction would harm Caleb more than help him.”

  She looked at him. The light was low and her eyes were blue and bright, despite her concern. Maybe because of it. Today a black choker hid the scars on her neck, and to the person who didn’t know better, she was looking very pretty. Not just her face but her whole . . . being. She had caught him looking at her white blouse once already, and he’d quickly sipped some iced tea to cover.

  He’d actually spent a good hour last night tossing and turning over this very matter. This issue of his awkward interest in her. The tossing resulted in a concerted attempt to persuade himself that it wasn’t more than interest. That she was clearly in some sort of a pot labeled Untouchable. Problem was, he was having more and more difficulty remembering exactly why having a bodysuit of scars put someone in the Untouchable pot.

  And at the moment, sitting across the table at Jim’s Fish House, with Leiah’s eyes boring into his own, Jason couldn’t see the scars. He couldn’t even imagine what they looked like. He just saw this stunning woman before him.

  She smiled softly and nodded. “You’re right. I’m just worried for him. The INS may have backed off, but if anything, Nikolous has tightened the noose.”

  She was right there. The Greek was going batso.

  “Well, for now at least, Nikolous isn’t the enemy,” Jason said.

  “Don’t you kid yourself. He’s as much an enemy as the devil himself. There’s no telling what they’re doing to Caleb behind closed doors.”

  “They’re doing nothing. They’re doing exactly what Dr. Caldwell insisted should be done with the boy. Nothing. If she’s right and Caleb loses his power due
to the world’s influence, Nikolous loses. If anything, that plays to our advantage.”

  “Having Caleb with us would play to our advantage. Not having him locked in some hole like a prize pigeon.”

  “Of course, but he’s not with us. We’ve been over this a hundred times. In the real world—the one in which his life is obviously being threatened, the one in which Nikolous does have custody of him—the fact that Nikolous doesn’t want him to change works to our advantage. And Caleb’s continued popularity also works to our advantage. Which, if you really think about it, means Nikolous is our ally, not our enemy. At least for the time being.”

  She drilled him with a sharp stare and turned away. Maybe he should’ve been less forceful. A week ago her reaction wouldn’t have bothered him; today it did.

  “But you’re right,” he said. “In some ways Nikolous is the enemy. Just not one we want to take on right now.”

  “He’s charging this time,” she said. “Twenty-five dollars a ticket.”

  “He’s charging? When did you hear that? Is that even legal?”

  “The radio this morning. Next Tuesday night at the Old Theater— twenty-five bucks a shot. Supposedly to be put in a fund for the boy’s care. The man makes me sick.”

  Jason whistled. “The place holds what, ten thousand? So he’s looking at two hundred fifty thousand dollars. The man’s no idiot.”

  “But he is the devil. He’s in this for whatever he can skim, and we both know it, Jason. We may need to go along with the man for now, but we have to stop him at some point. For all we know what he’s doing is illegal.”

  Jason wiped at the condensation on his tea glass. “He’s too smart to do something illegal unless he was sure he could get away with it.”

  “So let me ask you a question, Jason.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not trying to be insensitive, but just to put this in perspective, how much would you have paid for Stephen’s life?”

  It was as if someone had hit Jason’s head with a sledgehammer.

  “Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? A million?” she asked.

  He blinked and stared at her. He had a photo of Stephen taken on the day before he’d died. He was lying in bed with a green oxygen tube taped to his nose and he was smiling. He’d shriveled to twenty-five pounds on that hospital bed and he was smiling. Smiling, for goodness’ sake! How much would he have paid? Everything. Anything. And anything he could have stolen. He might have killed another man for his son’s life.

  “You see my point?” she asked softly.

  “Yes.” He cleared his throat. “But Nikolous wouldn’t really . . . do that.”

  “He will do that. And you’re right about one thing: as long as Caleb keeps performing, the Greek will do anything, and I mean anything, to keep him performing. And when he’s done with the boy, there’ll be nothing left.”

  “Maybe. And maybe you’re overreacting just a tad.”

  “Or maybe I’m not. Think about it, Jason.”

  He tried to, but his mind kept wandering back to that picture of Stephen’s smiling face. It was the one part of Caleb he disliked, the memories he brought back. The irony of it all. He ate a piece of cold swordfish and washed it down with a swig of tea.

  “Do you mind if I ask you another question?” Leiah asked.

  “Sure.”

  “What’s really happening here, Jason?”

  “What do you mean?” Jason fought to check his own frustration at her line of questioning.

  “It’s not every day you’re knocked from your feet by a boy twenty feet away.”

  “He’s psychic; that’s what’s happening.”

  “Yes, I know, he’s psychic. He’s a freak.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “No, but that’s what they’re all thinking. I know that because sometimes even I think it. But he’s still just a boy; no one knows that better than I do. He’s a simple boy with a heart as big as the sky. So then where does a simple, lovable boy really find the power to make crooked legs straight?”

  “You heard Dr. Caldwell. It’s not impossible.”

  “Yeah, I know. But somehow getting knocked from my feet didn’t feel like Dr. Caldwell’s explanation to me.”

  “So what did it feel like?”

  “Like something . . . someone went through me. Something that touched my emotions, not just my nerves.”

  He grinned. “We’re talking Casper here? Actually, I think the good doctor’s theory is slightly more plausible.”

  “I’m serious, Jason.”

  “I was there too, Leiah. Trust me. What we felt was definitely physical. It wasn’t a flock of ghosts conjured from the past, and it certainly wasn’t the invisible hand of God come down to knock us all from our feet. Please, get real.”

  She turned a shade of pink, and he knew that he’d hit on something.

  “You’re not serious, are you? You can’t actually believe this was spiritual?” In reality he’d had similar thoughts just last evening, but now those thoughts seemed distant and absurd. “I’ve seen what a band of Holy Ghosters can do, and believe me, in the end it all adds up to nada. Absolute zero.”

  She nodded and pursed her lips defiantly. “Well, we’re not exactly in tune with the fundamentals of mathematics here, in case you hadn’t noticed. Maybe your little run-in with the hallelujah folks at the Holy Ghost church didn’t add up to much, but neither is anything else right now. Nobody—and that includes your Dr. Caldwell—knows what’s going on here except Caleb. And Caleb isn’t rambling on about what a joy it is being a psychic.”

  “Caleb? What Caleb thinks he is and what he actually is are probably two very different things. You have to at least see that.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Exactly.”

  They locked stares and then each took a drink. Leiah sighed heavily and ran a gentle hand over her temple. “He says his power comes from God,” she said. “It may be that no one really knows who God is. Maybe the Buddhists have it wrong, maybe the Muslims have it wrong, maybe the Hindus have it wrong, maybe the Christians have it wrong, and maybe even the God-is-in-the-trees people have it wrong. Who knows? But Caleb seems to think this power comes from outside of him, and I’m not so sure that I disagree anymore. It sure felt like something from the outside to me. That’s all.”

  “Well then, you can join the local ‘It’s God’ group, ’cause believe me, they’ll be coming out of the woodwork. The lines are being drawn as we speak. All I can say is that if some higher power is responsible for all this, he’s sure got a sick sense of humor.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning any God who could do what Caleb does and yet chooses not to is no God at all. If God empowered any one of your religious groups, including Christians, we would see that power all the time, wouldn’t we? Supposedly Jesus walked the shores of Galilee healing the sick. He left promising his followers would do even greater things. But when you’re the one in need of a miracle, he’s conspicuously absent, isn’t he? That’s why I know Caleb’s power is specifically not from God.”

  “And this from who? A man who wants to fit God into a mathematical equation?”

  “No. This from a man who lost his son after spending weeks begging your God to heal him,” Jason said.

  Leiah stared at him directly for a moment. And then she sat back, softening. “I didn’t say he was my God,” she said.

  He had shed some light on the matter, he thought. What he said next came almost without his thinking. “You should know how that feels,” he said.

  She tensed, and he hoped she didn’t think he was referring to what he was. Unfortunately she did.

  “Really? And why’s that?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Because I know what it’s like to suffer, is that it?”

  She wielded an unreasonable tone that betrayed bitterness. He didn’t know what to say.

  “Because poor Leiah is covered from head to toe in nasty
scars? Because anyone confined to the gutter with the lepers should know how it feels? Does that about sum it up?”

  “No.”

  She leaned forward, and he saw a fire in her eyes that frightened him. “No? You don’t find my scars ugly, Jason? You don’t look at me and wonder how I can stand to take my clothes off at night? It doesn’t make your stomach turn?”

  Her lips held a slight quiver. It felt like a spike had been driven through Jason’s chest, and he was suddenly finding it hard to breathe. Heat washed down his spine, and he looked at his glass, immobilized.

  “Oh, so now you can’t even look at me, is that it!” She bit the words off, mocking. She slapped her hand on the table, palm down, and yanked on her sleeve.

  “Well, look! Look at me! Like it or not, this is me!”

  She had gone over some cliff in her mind, and Jason suddenly wanted to cry. He looked up at her arm because not to would have been like slapping her backhanded.

  She’d pulled her sleeve up to her elbow, and in the very first instant he didn’t recognize her arm as an arm, because it didn’t look like an arm. It looked like a root from an oak tree, gnarled and discolored and rough like bark. But he knew it was her arm because he’d come to know her surgically repaired hands, and one of them was stuck on the end. He blinked and caught his breath, and he knew that she had seen that. But he couldn’t help it. Nothing could have prepared him for the horror embedded in that strip of flesh she called her arm.

  Almost immediately another sentiment flooded his belly. The empathy rose through his chest, and suddenly his throat was aching badly. He wanted to scream. He wanted to fall on his forehead and blubber like a baby. He wanted to beg her forgiveness and tell her that it would be all right.

  But he could do nothing except stare at that arm and fight for breath.

  When he tore his eyes away from it and lifted his head, Leiah’s eyes were swimming in tears. Her face wrinkled in shame, and she slowly pulled her sleeve down.

  “I’m sorry, Leiah. I’m so sorry,” he whispered. The words sounded silly and, in their own way, mocking. She shook her head and lowered her head. The moment was impossibly awkward, the kind woven into nightmares.