Female Kalmuks? Gay, lesbian, and bisexual Papua New Guineans? Of course there’d be a question about them. Two questions, more likely.
Maybe history courses had been all about dead white males once upon a time. No, certainly they had. World history was supposed to be the antidote to that. From time to time, Bryce wondered if the cure wasn’t worse than the disease.
They were paying him not to wonder about such things. No, they were paying him to keep his big trap shut if he did wonder about them. And keep it shut he did—where the students and the people who were paying him could hear, anyhow.
Susan got an earful, though. When his cell phone had power, so did Colin Ferguson. The police lieutenant laughed his gruff laugh. “Didn’t you take Hypocrisy 101 in college?” he said. “Well, even if you didn’t, this is your postgraduate course.”
“Tell me about it!” Bryce exclaimed. “Is the whole world like this?”
“Pretty much.” Colin wasn’t laughing any more. Bryce remembered he’d been passed over for chief of the San Atanasio PD not least because he had the dangerous habit of saying what he thought. And I just stuck my foot in my face, Bryce thought unhappily. After a beat, Colin went on, “You get used to it after a while . . . most of the time, anyhow.”
“I guess.” Bryce wasn’t nearly sure he wanted to get used to it. He wondered if he had any choice. No, there were always choices. Socrates had made his. Sure, and look what it got him. Changing the subject looked like a good idea: “You ever hear anything from Rob and Vanessa?” He asked about his ex with no more than a momentary twinge.
“Well, Rob got shot,” Colin answered.
“Shot!” That was the last thing Bryce expected to hear. “Jesus! What happened?”
“I got a card from him a few days ago. He says somebody mistook him for a moose. He says he isn’t eating that much. He says there isn’t that much to eat where he’s at in Maine. And he says he’s healing up, which is the most important part.”
“Uh-huh.” Bryce nodded, not that Colin could see him. That sounded like Rob, all right. It also sounded quite a bit like Colin himself. His firstborn would have got pissed off had anyone told him so, though. Bryce tried again: “And Vanessa?”
“Still on the scavenger circuit. She doesn’t write much, and she’s not any place where she can power up her phone—or where she can get bars even if she does. I keep reminding myself she’s good at landing on her feet. You know about that.”
“Now that you mention it, yes.” Bryce tried to sound light, and feared he made a hash of it. On the way to one of those landings on her feet, Vanessa’d kicked him in the teeth. The Bulgarian judge gave her a 9.85 for technical ability when she did it, too, and 9.9 for artistic merit.
Well, what could you do? She’d walked out of his life four and a half years ago now. He couldn’t do a damn thing, that was what. What he ought to do was forget he’d ever known her and spend all his time thinking about Susan, who actually wanted to be with him. Much as he would have liked to, he’d long since discovered he couldn’t do that, either. Colin still had Louise on his mind, too, even if he wished he didn’t. No wonder they’d stayed friends. No, no wonder at all.
What Bryce could do now was grade papers. As a matter of fact, that was what he had to do. And so, as soon as he got off the phone with Colin, he went ahead and did it.
* * *
The late, not so great town of Fredonia, Kansas, wasn’t quite in the middle of nowhere. It was in the southeastern part of nowhere, or at least of Kansas. Since the supervolcano blew, Kansas and nowhere had become effectively synonymous.
As far as Vanessa Ferguson was concerned, Kansas and nowhere were synonymous long before the supervolcano blew. Since she’d escaped Camp Constitution to pick the bones of people who’d made the mistake of feeling otherwise, she kept quiet on that score.
Fredonia, Kansas, also wasn’t in the middle of a Marx Brothers movie. Vanessa made the mistake of mentioning it to the rest of the refugees from the refugee camp she worked with. They all looked at her as if she’d just sprouted an extra head, even—no, especially—when she started singing “Hail, Hail, Fredonia!”
“Vanessa, we already know you’re weird,” Merv Saunders told her with what sounded like exaggerated patience. “Do you have to go and advertise it?”
“Oh, give me a fucking break,” she snarled. He was close to twenty years older than she was. Shouldn’t that have been enough of a head start to give him some kind of clue about the Marx Brothers? Evidently not.