Free Watermind by M. M. Buckner Page B

slice. The two-liter bottle of Coke had warmed to room temperature, but she drank some anyway. She also flipped open her laptop and plugged into the motel’s dial-up Internet service.
    By the clear morning light, she knew she’d been wise not to invite Roman Sacony into her room. More than once since her father died, she’d awakened to find a stranger occupying her bed. Some brief acquaintance whose unwashed body invaded her sheets. Too many evenings, she had embraced a kind knight—only to find in the morning a troll with sour breath and chin stubble.
    Then came Max. Wrong background, wrong job, wrong style, completely unequivocally wrong. Max had remained a knight.
    Mist beaded her window and blurred her view of the parking lot. She drummed her fingers on the glass pane. The motel dial-up took an eon to connect. As soon as the browser opened, she Googled Roman Sacony. While the results trickled in, she showered, dressed in serious business clothes, and styled her hair for the first time in weeks. She was going to the airport to meet the science team.
    The tantalizing enigma of the ice revolved through her stream of consciousness. Roman wanted to know where the heat went, and so did she. Some unprecedented chemical reaction must have absorbed or converted or stored it somehow. And did that same reaction also produce the electromagnetic field? Maybe a downed powerline was trickling current through the water. But there were no power lines in Devil’s Swamp.
    She browsed her Google results, clicked on
Time
magazine, and read that Roman Sacony held a doctorate in material science from the
Universidad de Buenos Aires
. He hadn’t mentioned that. The article described how he’d expanded his family’s Argentinean business and established a beachhead in Miami. Under his command, Quimicron SA had swelled into a midsize conglomerate. Roman Sacony was multilingual, a pilot, a marathon runner, never married. He was forty-eight years old—exactly her father’s age on the day he died.
    She shut the laptop and chewed her fingernail. Something about Roman aggravated her. He was flying back to Miami this morning, and the fact that he would be hundreds of miles away gave her a sense of relief. She dug through the litter on her bed, found her cell phone and called Max.
    â€œCeegie, what happened? They don’ tell me where they took you.”
    Her conscience wrenched her. She should have called sooner. “I’m fine. Are you up? I’ll come over.” Max lived across the river in West Baton Rouge, a few miles away.
    â€œI’m workin’,” he said. “They got us stakin’ out the pond, watchin’ to see nobody fall in.”
    â€œYou’re working in the swamp?” Good, she thought. Max still had his job.
    â€œYeah, and it’s raining. Bunch of protestors met us at the gate this morning. They standing in the rain, waving signs, carrying on. Call us ‘bird killers.’ One
nomm
tried to sneak in.”
    â€œMax, is the pond . . . doing anything?”
    â€œJust old sump water. Kind of floury. We got backhoes filling in the little bayou that flows out the bottom. Gonna make sure
djab dile
stay put.”
    â€œWhat did you call it?”
    â€œ
Djab dile.
Devil milk. We gonna scoop it up, seal it in barrels. Did you hear about Manuel?”
    â€œYeah.” CJ’s attention wandered. Something Max had said triggered a vague alarm.
    â€œLord,
lamie,
every time I think about what mighta happened to you, I go crazy.”
    His plaintive baritone weighed on her. “Don’t worry about me. I have a new job.” She told him about the science team.
    â€œ
Sa grand.
That’s where you belong.” He sounded genuinely pleased.
    She cradled the cell phone between her ear and shoulder while she ran a motel shoe-mitt over her black high heels. “Do you know anything about Roman Sacony?”
    â€œMr. Sacony, he the head man.