“I don’t,” Celeste said.
Carter’s caprese salad arrived and after admiring it, he said, “You’re kidding, right? New Hampshire? 1961?” Working off her blank stare, he asked Marcus if he was similarly ill-informed.
“Please go on, Colonel.”
“Only if you call me Virgil. Okay, forget the Hills. So, years ago, I met a flyboy from Idaho who was doing a Pentagon tour of duty, and he told me about a buddy of his, a civilian, who was a truck driver, who was abducted one night, right out of his rig. He was transported up into a spaceship, a sausage-shaped affair, which was why the poor bastard, to the day he killed himself, was cruelly called Hot Dog. The aliens who did all manner of experiments on him over about a week’s time before returning him to Idaho—well, they were Grays. These are far and away the most common types of aliens abductees describe. You’ve got your Grays—they’ve got gray skin, large, elongated heads, big eyes, tend not to have ears, noses—they’re the classic Roswell-type of aliens. Then, you’ve got your Reptilians. They’re green, of course, with lizard or snake-type heads. Then, you’ve got your Nordics. They’re a heck of a lot taller than the Grays or Reptilians, usually with fair skin, blue eyes, blond hair—basically Swedes in space.”
Marcus muttered under his breath.
“Sorry, didn’t catch that,” Carter said.
“I said I can’t believe I’m listening to this.”
“Well, listen and learn, my friend. Shit, lost my train.” He took advantage of his memory lapse to pop a glob of cheese into his mouth. “Okay, got it back, so, let me fast-forward, ’cause I can see I’m in danger of losing you. After hearing about Hot Dog, I began compiling cases of abductions, at first as a kind of a hobby, and after a while I began doing some shoe-leather research, interviewing abductees and their friends and families. My employer took a dim view of such undertakings, so I waited till I hung up my spurs before starting U-AN with an online data dump of all my research. Currently, we are the biggest network of abduction documentation, bar none. Which brings us to Ruben Sanchez. Ruben Sanchez, a fellow who drives an Uber in Phoenix, dropped a post on U-AN a year ago. Now, after doing this long enough, I can separate the wheat from the chaff, and I could tell right off that he was a legitimate abductee.”
“How?” Celeste asked.
“Well, because all the assholes—excuse my French; shit, you are French; that’s pretty dumbass of me—they can’t help themselves from engaging in a-nod-and-a-wink BS, showing how clever and funny they are. Ruben was earnest and his account was pure, so I contacted him, then went to Phoenix to interview him in person. In a lot of ways, his abduction story had typical elements, but it was also unusual, because he was missing for a long time. Five months was one of the longest disappearances on record. At the time. Now we know it was small beer compared to the Andreason girls. So, his family filed a missing person’s report. The police had an active investigation ongoing. And then he shows up, five months later, walking along the very road he disappeared from with a helluva story. Anyway, with Ruben’s permission, I posted all his details and documentation and you can find it on my website with the date I posted it.”
“What about this woman named Helen?” Marcus asked.
“Well, Ruben is kept in this all-white room, and the Grays are doing all manner of experiments on him, when one day, he kicks one of the walls in frustration. And guess what? Someone thumps back at him. The two of them have a lot of time to kill, as one does in the stir, and before long, they work out the simplest form of code to communicate. It’s an alphabetic knuckle rap. A is one rap. C is three raps. N is fifteen raps, and so on. It’s not fast, but like I said, what else did they have to do?”
“He said her name was Helen? You sure?”
“That’s what he told me. Now, it took them some time to figure out how to use their code and to ask each other some basic questions, and shortly after they exchanged names, Ruben goes to sleep one night and wakes up on the highway. His five months is up.”
A large steak arrived and Carter asked for steak sauce. He grumbled when the waiter told him they had none, but he tucked a napkin into his shirt, sampled the meat, and declared that it was tasty enough, dry.
“Mr. Andreason’s daughter-in-law’s name is Elena, not Helen,” Marcus said.
“I’m aware of that. Ruben told me she said it was Helen.”
“Could he have made a mistake?” Celeste asked.
“An E is five taps, and H is eight,” Carter said. “Maybe he got it wrong, maybe she was using some variation of Elena.”
“Do you have his number?” Marcus asked. “Could I speak to him?”
“It’ll be a very long-distance call,” he answered. “Ruben passed away two months ago. When he came back, he had headaches and they found a tumor.”
“Oh, my God,” Celeste gasped.
“That what the girls have?” Carter asked. “Brain tumors?”
Marcus shut that down. “We’re not discussing their health. Did Ruben mention communicating with anyone else? In space?”
“Just Helen, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s close enough for government work. So, there I was, having a sandwich in my condo yesterday, minding my own business, when I saw the reports on Twitter coming out of Italy about the girls being abducted by Grays and returning the same age as when they were taken. Now, it’s entirely possible that Ruben didn’t age during his ordeal, but he was forty-seven and he was only gone for under half a year, so there was no way to tell. And it’s possible that other abductees didn’t age either, but their abductions were even shorter. Anyway, I could tell that this is, by far, the most important case
