Authority(82)

“Which was?”

Grace smiled, triumphant. At knowing something he should have known? For some other reason?

“Ask your mother. Your mother had a hand in both things, I believe.”

* * *

“They had lost confidence in her anyway,” Grace said next, bitterness bleeding into her voice. “What did they care if she never came back? Maybe some of them at Central even thought it solved a problem.” Like Lowry.

But Control was still stuck on Jackie Miranda Severance, Severance for short, Grandpa always “Jack.” His mother had placed him in the Southern Reach, in the middle of it all. She had worked for the Southern Reach briefly, when he was a teenager, to be close to him, she had said. Now, as he questioned Grace, he was trying to make the dates synch up, to get a sense of who had been at the Southern Reach and who had not, who had left by then and who was still incoming. The director—no. Grace—no. Whitby—yes. Lowry—yes, no? Where had his mother gone when she left? Had she kept ties? Clearly she had, if he were to believe Grace. And did her sudden appearance to him with a job offer correspond to knowing she had some kind of emergency on her hands? Or was it part of a more intricate plan? It could make you weary, untangling the lines. At least Grandpa had been more straightforward. Oh, look. There’s a gun. What a surprise. I want you to learn how to use a gun. Make everything do more than one thing. Sometimes you had to take shortcuts after all. Wink wink. But his mother never gave you the wink. Why should she? She didn’t want to be your friend, and if she couldn’t convince you in some more subtle way, she’d find someone she could convince. He might never know how much other residue he’d already encountered from her passage through Southern Reach.

But the idea that the director might have reached out to others in the agency, and at Central, comforted Control. It made the director less an eccentric, less a “single-celled plot” as his mother put it, than someone genuinely trying to solve a problem.

“What happened on her trip across the border?” Control, pressing again.

“She never told me. She said it was for my own protection, in case the investigators subpoenaed me.” He made a note to return to that later.

“Nothing at all?”

“Not a single thing.”

“Did she give you any special instructions before she went on leave or after she came back?” From what Control could intuit from the files he’d read, Grace was more constrained by rules and regulations than the director, and the director might have felt slightly undermined by her assistant director’s adherence to them. Or perhaps that was the point: that Grace had kept her grounded. In which case, Grace would almost certainly have been in charge of operational details.

Grace hesitated, and Control didn’t know if that meant she was debating telling him more or was about to feed him a line of bullshit.

“Cynthia asked me to reopen an investigation into the so-called S&S Brigade, and to assign someone to report in more detail on the lighthouse.”

“And who did the research?”

“Whitby.” Whitby the loon. It figured.

“What happened to this research?” He couldn’t recall seeing this information in the files he had been given before he’d come to the Southern Reach.

“Cynthia held on to it, asked for a hard copy and for the electronic copies not to be entered into the record … Are you planning to go down the same rabbit holes?”

“So you thought it was a waste of time?”

“For us, not necessarily for Cynthia. It seemed irrelevant to me, but nothing we gathered would make much sense without knowing what was in the director’s mind. And we did not always know what was in the director’s mind.”

“Is there anything else you want to tell me?” Being bold now that Grace was finally opening up to him.

A sympathetic expression, guided or pushed his way. “Do you smoke?”

“Sometimes.” This past weekend. Banishing demons and voices.

“Then let’s go out to the courtyard and have a smoke.”

It sounded like a good idea. If he was completely honest with himself, it sounded like bliss.

* * *

They reconvened out at the edge of the courtyard, nearest the swamp. The short jaunt from room to open air had not been without revelation: He’d finally seen the janitor, a wizened little white guy with huge glasses who wore light green overalls and held a mop. He couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. Control resisted the urge to break ranks with Grace to tell him to switch cleaners.

Grace in the courtyard seemed even more relaxed than inside, despite the humidity and the annoying chorus of insect voices rising from the undergrowth. He was already sweating.