The Grays

PART TWO The Three Thieves

They stole little Bridget
For seven years long;
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone.

—WILLIAM ALLINGHAM

“The Fairies”

THREE

DAN CAME INTO THE KITCHEN while Katelyn was washing spinach and nuzzled her neck. She moved her head back, enjoying him. In their case, not even thirteen years of marriage had been enough of a honeymoon, and she was very far from being used to this guy of hers.

They had met here at Bell, two days after he arrived. Bizarrely, it turned out that they’d both grown up in Madison, Wisconsin, just a few blocks from each other. He’d been crossing the campus in that aimless way he had, looking here and there, smiling even though there was no reason to smile. He was a strikingly handsome man, the last person you’d pick for a professor, let alone a specialist in physiological psychology. But that’s what he was, and he’d just snared a provisional professorship when they met. Now Bell had reached a point of no return with him. This was, at last, his tenure year, and in a few days, his career here—and their pleasantly settled life—would either continue or it would end.

“What’s Conner up to?” she asked. “Is he downstairs?”

“He’s in the living room.”

“Too bad, he’d hear us if we went upstairs.”

“Mmm.” He continued nuzzling.

Their son was more than a genius. A well-constructed, handsome tow-head, gentle of eye and so smart that he was a de facto freak. His IQ of 277 was, as far as anybody could determine, the highest presently on record.

Dan came up from nuzzling and said, “He’s in a funk.”

“Symptoms of said funk?”

“Staring miserably at the TV pretending not to stare miserably at the TV.”

“He’s eleven. Eleven has stuff.” She arched her back, drew his head over her shoulder, and kissed the side of his lips.

“He’s watching 2001.”

Which meant that it was a serious funk and he needed Mom. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”

“In the first place, I wanted some love.”

She went into the family room, stood for a moment looking at the back of her son’s head. On the ridiculously huge TV Dan had unveiled at Christmas, the apes were howling at the monolith.

She sat down beside him. “Can I interest you in—” She glanced at her watch, picked up the TV Guide. “A Mork and Mindy rerun? The McLaughlin Group?”

“Invasion of my space, Mom.”

“Point taken, backing off.” But she didn’t do that. She knew to stay right where she was.

“And just because I’m watching 2001 does not mean that I’m sad.”

What could she say to the misery in that voice? “Conner, a genius does not an actor make.”

“Mother, could you consider dropping that label? You say that all the time and it does not help.”

“That you’re not a good actor?”

“Okay, let’s do this. Would you care to come out on the deck with me?”

“On the deck? It’s twenty-six degrees.”

But he’d already gotten to his feet and slid open the door. He gestured to her, and she saw the anger in it. She went out with him.

The air was sharp with smoke, the western sky deep orange beyond the black skeletons of the winter trees. One would have thought that a winter silence would prevail, but instead she heard the shrill voices of preteen boys.

When she looked down toward the Warners’ house, she saw streaks of light racing around in the backyard.

“You’re not invited?”

He went back in the house, sat down, and jammed the button on the remote. The bone sailed into the sky, the “Blue Danube” started.

Paulie and Conner had been friends effectively from birth—Conner’s birth, that is. Paulie was a year and a half older.

“Conner, what happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Something happened.”

“Mom, I’ve asked for space.”

“Honey, look, you’ve got one place you can go. Here. Two people who are one hundred percent on your team, me and Dad. And I want to know why you aren’t at that party.” And why, moreover, was it unfolding outside where Conner could watch from a distance? That was real hard, that was.

Conner was ten months younger than the youngest child in his class at Bell Attached, the school that served the children of Bell College’s professional community. He was nowhere near puberty, in a class where half the boys were shaving at least occasionally.

“Conner, would it make you feel better if I told you that puberty turns boys into monsters?”

“Thank you for that little dose of sexism, Mother. Girls have trouble with puberty, too.”

“But boys really do.”

She could hardly believe that Maggie and Harley would allow Paulie to leave Conner out like this. “What’s really wrong?”

“All right. Fine.” He got up, crossed the room, and went downstairs.

She heard him shut the door to the basement that Dan had finished for him when he was five. It was boy heaven down there, with an X-Box and a TV/DVD combo and a hulking but powerful Dell computer, plus his dinosaur collection, all of them painted with the utmost realism, and his train set, HO-grade, which had lighted houses, streetlights lining the streets, and lighted trains. He would play trains in the dark down there by the hour, muttering to himself in the voices of a hundred train men and townsfolk, all of whom he had invented, all of whose lives evolved and changed over the years. Katelyn thought of the train set as a sort of ongoing novel, and that her boy was a word genius as much as he was a math genius.

The care he lavished on everything he modeled came from his ability to concentrate. Even when he’d been little, he hadn’t been clumsy. When he was eight, she’d discovered while cleaning up one day that the tiny human