Joyce was looking at her over the rim of her coffee cup, and nodded slowly as she lowered the cup from her mouth. “I think so, yeah. Why?”
“Well, the loa must have had its hooks in them, assuming that it worked the same way then that we’re seeing now.” Izzie chewed her lower lip, thoughtfully. “But they both lived for years after Jett pulled them out of there—maybe not happily or well, but they lived—and didn’t seem to show any of the symptoms of being Ridden in all that time.”
“Not based on the evidence that we’ve found so far, no,” Joyce answered, shaking her head.
“So . . . how did he manage that, exactly?” Izzie asked. “Is it possible to make someone, I don’t know, un-Ridden?”
Joyce raised her shoulders in a shrug.
“I don’t know.” Then she raised her cane and pointed toward the visitor’s entrance of the community living center. “Why don’t we go back to the source and ask him?”
The receptionist at the front desk saw them as they entered, and waved them over with her free hand while she held the handset of her desk phone to her ear with the other. Izzie and Joyce walked over and then waited while the receptionist wrapped up her phone call.
“You were here before to see Mr. Jett, right?” the receptionist said as she set the handset back in its cradle. “I’m guessing you’re back to see him again?”
When they nodded, she picked up a handwritten note from the desktop beside her elbow.
“He’s finished up his P.T.,” she read aloud from the note, “but he’s a little worn out so he’s resting up in his room. If you want to go up and talk with him there, though, I can print you out a couple of visitor badges. You’ll need them to get into the residential floors.”
“That would be great, thanks,” Izzie answered, trying not to sound too eager.
A few minutes later, adhesive badges stuck to their chests, Izzie and Joyce were escorted upstairs by an orderly. As he led them down a long hallway, Izzie felt that the smell of antiseptic and age was even stronger here than it had been in the waiting room, and as they passed open doors she caught glimpses of elderly residents—mostly men but a few women, too—sitting in chairs and staring out windows or just into the middle distance, awake but not exactly alert. Were they lost in their own memories of the past, or waiting for someone to visit, or just patiently idling away what time remained to them?
Finally, the orderly knocked on a partially opened door with a few raps of his knuckles, and said, “Mr. Jett, you decent?”
“If I am, it’d be the first time,” came a voice from inside. “Come on in, then.”
The orderly stepped aside and held the door open for Izzie and Joyce to walk through.
“Took you long enough,” Jett said as they entered. “Was starting to think you girls had got bored and gone on home.”
He was sitting in his wheelchair, parked over by the window. The room was outfitted with the same relatively featureless furniture that Izzie had seen in the other rooms they’d walked by, like the kind that she’d expect to find in college dorms or hospital patient’s room. Unlike the other rooms she’d glimpsed, though, Jett’s didn’t have much in the way of personal touches, no framed photos of family members or vases with flowers. The only thing that the old man seemed to have added to the bland anonymity of the room’s fixtures was a battered old wooden footlocker, the olive drab of its covering of paint scuffed and faded, sitting on the floor at the end of the bed. There was a narrow couch with thin cushions opposite the bed, and the old man pointed to it with a knobby-knuckled finger, indicating that they should sit.
“So where were we?” Jett said as they settled onto the couch.
“You were on your way up the hill to the Eschaton Center,” Joyce answered. “You said that your sixth sense . . . your knack . . . was telling you that you were walking into trouble, I think.”
“Was that all the knack was giving you?” Izzie added. “Just an intuition?”
“At first, yeah.” The old man folded his hands in his lap, his face lined by a deep frown. “But when I drove up there that morning and found a spot in the brush where I could park the car without being seen from the road, I got my first look at the Eschaton Center itself, and it felt . . . wrong. I couldn’t see anything exactly, either with my eyes or with the knack, but I knew something wasn’t right. It was like the whole place was radiating waves of dread. Anyway, I kept an eye on the place throughout the rest of the day and night, watching as folks came and went. Saw some Hollywood stars I’d seen in the movies showing up in limousines, rock stars with their entourages, other folks I recognized from TV . . . the kind of rich folks who I’d have expected to hang around that kind of place. But nobody like the street kids that I’d been following, and no sign of the four kids I’d been hired to find. There were maintenance and custodial employees who were bussed in mornings and taken back to the city at night, though, but they were picked up and dropped off around back at a service entrance instead of the big fancy front gates that the rich folks came in and out of. When a laundry truck came by to deliver laundered uniforms the next morning, I snuck up when the driver wasn’t looking and snagged a janitor’s uniform that would fit me well enough. And then when the workers
