Free 999 by Al Sarrantonio Page A

belonged. If only they knew .
    Father kept to himself, hidden away most of the time in his private quarters on the third floor of the house. On even the hottest, most humid and oppressive midsummer days, Father continued to work; it was said by Mother that he worked never less than twelve hours a day; he would not relent until he was vindicated. We might catch a glimpse of him at a safe distance—tramping through the tall grass, for instance, one of us sometimes glanced up and saw the flash of white of Father’s customary shirt at a third-floor window; never did we wave, for Father might misinterpret such a gesture as frivolity, or worse yet, mockery. It was at dinner we saw him, when we saw him at all. When he might appear in our midst, seated at the head of the table before we were called into the dining room by Mother, smiling and hopeful as a convalescent. He ate slowly, with forced appetite, and spoke little, as if to conserve his voice; he didn’t like to hear us chatter, but he didn’t like us to be absolutely silent, either—“Like mourners.” (Though Father seemed tired, he was capable of his old, cutting sarcasm, and outbursts of temper, directed especially at Stephen, whose awkward attempts to appear cheerful were misread by Father as “impertinence.”) There were many evenings, however, when Father ate alone upstairs, his food prepared for him by a woman from Contracoeur, Mrs. Dulne, whom Mother had hired as a part-time cook and cleaning woman and whose nusband, Mr. Dulne, also helped out as a general handyman and groundskeeper. (The Dulnes were very nice, if reserved and somewhat wary people; old enough to be our grandparents.) It was Mother who carried these meals on an ornate, tarnished-silver tray upstairs to Father, fretting and anxious that he should eat to “keep up his strength.” For all of our lives, our very futures, depended upon Father’s “strength.”
    Occasionally, beginning in late June, visitors came to Cross Hill to see Father. Their long, dark, shiny cars seemed to appear out of nowhere, driving hesitantly up the rutted gravel lane. Perhaps these visitors were lawyers. Perhaps they were state investigators. On at least one disturbing occasion, they were a TV camera crew and a woman reporter; Mother barred the reporter from entering the house but was powerless to do much about the TV crew, who simply filmed her as she stood shrinking in the doorway crying angrily, “Go away! Haven’t you done enough! Leave us alone!” We were not allowed to speak with these strangers, and we were discouraged from observing them. We were discouraged even from recalling that we’d observed them. When one of Father’s invited visitors left the house late one afternoon, though he’d exchanged greetings with Stephen (who was working alongside Mr. Dulne in the tall grass beside the front walkway, clearing away brambles, bare-chested in the sun), it was Mother’s pretext that there hadn’t been anyone there at all; at least no one Stephen would have known. In fact, Stephen was sure he’d recognized his father’s visitor; he’d seen him at our house in the city several times; one of Stephen’s classmates at his old school was the man’s son; yet, to Stephen’s bewilderment, he couldn’t remember the man’s name. And when Stephen asked Mother about him, Mother professed ignorance: “Who? I didn’t notice. I was napping. This heat …” Stephen asked if Father would be presenting his case in court soon, and Mother said nervously, “Stephen, how would I know? I’m not allowed such information. But please don’t ask your father, dear. Promise!” As if any of us, particularly Stephen, required such a warning.
    So the days, and the nights, were tense and unpredictable. For the first time in our lives, we Matheson children hadn’t anything to “do"—no friends to see, no private lessons, no school, no TV, no VCR, no video games, no computers (except for Graeme’s increasingly faulty