Roddy Thorleifson, author

Chapter 1

July 1, 2024, 7:20 p.m.

            Jean looked up at the structure. It rose from the hot Arizona desert like a minimalist artwork – a plain grey cube. Only it was huge. It was as tall as a 30-story building and four times as wide. And it clung to the side of a strange rock formation – a mound of ancient grey-brown granite with an almost vertical face.

            All was bathed in the warm orange glow of the setting sun. It might have held a surreal beauty had it not been for the sounds that came from inside. Jean could imagine a hive of giant insects who were trying to kill each other with the brute force of their buzzing. The Sonora desert, on a calm night, in 96-degree heat, would often have a dreamlike feel to it. But this monumental edifice, with its preternatural roar, had conjured up a nightmare.

            “Weird,” she whispered after she squinted long enough to see that the whole thing was covered with tarps, each pulled tightly in place to conceal the secrets within.

            “Jean!” shouted her father, as he came out of a trailer. It was the sort of drab office trailer that could be found on any large construction site. Mike Fraser was a civil engineer and this was his daughter’s first day of her first summer job out of high school. He usually did not show emotion, so she was struck by his furrowed brow and pursed lips.

            “What’s wrong?” she shouted back.

            “Don’t go in there,” he said, motioning to the trailer while looking one way and the other. “There’s a… your… someone has… passed away.”

            “Somebody’s died?”

            “Ah… yes,” he said, while wringing his hands. “I think so. Well… I know. I’m certain. And… it’s your cousin.”

            “Brad?” she asked, while thinking back to the last time she had seen him. It had been at their aunt’s funeral.

            “Yes. He’s… and he’s gone… stiff. Rigor mortis,” Mike said, as if talking to himself. “And his eyes are open and there’s blood on his head that’s gone dry. So… he’s dead. For sure. Don’t go in. I’ve got to…”

            “I’ve seen a dead body before!” shouted Jean, defensively. “A car hit some guy. Just a couple of months ago. Close to school.”

            “Really? Oh… well.”

            “It didn’t bother me!”

            “Well… that’s good!” he said, while tapping a number into his phone. “Sarah?” he yelled as he turned away, a finger stuck in his other ear. It was his boss, Sarah Post, the managing partner of the engineering firm that had hired him a few months before. He had been selected for his experience in the blasting of rock for highway and railroad construction.

            “It’s Brad!” Mike yelled in the phone. “He’s passed away. Yeah, dead. Dead! And it looks like it’s some sort of an injury to his head. Well… maybe. Yeah. Blood. And a… big lump. A big lump! No, I haven’t… Yeah. I will… Yeah. And them too. Okay. See you then. Okay. Bye.”

            He was tapping in another number as Jean walked away. She could not resist. She felt like she was in a horror movie and she was the beautiful female being drawn by some unseen force, through a dark door. She had to look at the corpse. She had to see the blood.

            She went up the two steps to the open door of the trailer and looked in. It was almost elegant. There was a large desk made of black lacquered hardwood. The windows had grey curtains and the floor had a rug with a pattern in black and grey. Several wooden chairs indicated it was used for meetings. Counters held large monitors, showing black and white screen-saver images of spectacular feats of modern engineering. At the far end, she could see the soles of construction boots and sand-colored pants.

            She moved slowly towards the body. Brad’s blue eyes gazed lifelessly up at the ceiling. He had bled a lot from a tear in his scalp, and a dark puddle stained the carpet. Closer, she could tell he had been hit several times. Maybe while he sat in a chair. And she could see that his scull had been pushed in.

            “Somebody meant business,” she said to herself. Pulling her eyes from the ugliness, she looked around. On the floor by the wall lay a geologist’s hammer. It had an orange and black plastic handle and a grey steel head – square on one end and a long spike on the other. It was the blunt end that had blood on it. It was obviously the murder weapon.
            “Wow,” she whispered to herself as she took a step back. But then she heard a vehicle grinding to a stop on gravel. “Oh no!” she told herself, and she rushed to the window. It was a white pickup truck and a woman was getting out. She wore a sandy-brown short-sleeved blouse and grey slacks. “It must be Sarah Post,” she told herself. “And this must be her office.” She cursed herself for having come inside. “My first day on the job and I’ve already screwed up.”

            There was a backdoor to the trailer behind the desk. She crept over to make her escape. But she then stopped, realizing she was about to leave fingerprints at a crime scene. She pulled a piece of tissue paper from the back pocket of her beige pants, draped it over the door handle, carefully took hold to open the door, and stepped outside.

            Behind was a narrow space between the trailer and a temporary fence. Greasewood bushes were covered with construction dust. The dry heat of the evening had killed the last breeze and she felt dizzy and slightly nauseated. She walked carefully to the end of the trailer and peeked around.

            “So what idiot did it?” Sarah shouted as she waved an arm in exasperation. Jean could barely hear her over the construction noise.

            “No idea,” replied Mike, whose hand was to his forehead.

            “Damn… darn it,” muttered Sarah as she paced back and forth. “This could ruin everything! What a time! Was it locked?”

            “I… yes, it was. I had to use my key.”

            “What was he doing in there?”

            “Looking something up? Wanting some privacy for a meeting? Who knows? Lots of reasons. Could have snuck a girl in there. There’s plenty on the site.”

            “Jeez, Mike! Be serious! This could get the media out here. Poking around. Asking questions. And what a time! Everything’s so close! Within days! Well… weeks, anyways.”

            “And the research?” he asked. The noise from the structure had stopped and he no longer needed to shout.

            “Yeah, it keeps coming. People are starting to talk. Everything’s going great.”

            “But we wouldn’t want the best stuff to come out all at once, though. Would we?”

            “Can’t control that. What’s important we can control. After the unveiling, then the protests, then the court orders. Spread out. Protests will be great. Wonderful. So long as the thing is finished. One protest at a time. Give them more to report on. More news on more days. The kind of advertising money can’t buy. Once it’s finished and unveiled, then they can slap on all the injunctions they want. I hope they go berserk.”

            “All free publicity.”

            “But this… mess,” said Sarah as she waved her hand at the trailer. “What a time for this to… hit the fan.”

            “I guess it’ll help if they get a suspect arrested quick. Wouldn’t you think?”

            “But who?”

            “A worker?” shrugged Mike. “A loonie? A robbery gone wrong? Hopefully his wallet’s gone. And a credit card gone, too. Maybe a thief will try using it. Start a trail the cops can follow.”

            “Did he have a lover?”

            “Well… there was talk. But… I don’t know any names. Not for sure.”

            “You think he was gay?” whispered Sarah. “He sort of seemed like it.”

            “Don’t know. Had a wife and a kid.”

            “Doesn’t prove anything.”

            The two then turned towards the building site and Jean could not hear any more. Close to the tall structure was a stand of saguaro cactuses guarded from construction vehicles by steel fences. Beyond was a long low series of unfinished buildings, none higher than three stories. The workers wore bright yellow hardhats and vests. One truck was leaving while another arrived. Jean took the opportunity to walk up behind her father and Sarah. She was hoping they would think she had been close by all along. When Sarah turned again, she noticed her.

            “You must be Jean!” she said with a forced smile, and she stepped forward and held out her hand. “Good to meet you, at last. Headed into engineering, I hear?”
            “I hope so,” said Jean with a polite smile.

            “Oh, you’ll do great. Any daughter of Mike’s, hey? Any cousin of…” and she hesitated and glanced at Mike.

            “She knows,” he said, with a funeral director’s voice.

            “Tragic,” said Sarah, and she reverently shook her head. “Must be an awful shock.”

            “I hardly knew him,” said Jean with a shrug. “But… yes… still a shock.”

Chapter 2

July 1, 7:35 p.m.

            “I’ve got to get some things out of there,” said Sarah as she looked ominously at the trailer. “Before they declare it a crime scene and seal it off.” But she remained still, obviously reluctant to go inside.

            “I’ll help you,” said Mike as he led the way. Jean followed but stayed outside. She could see he was deliberately blocking Sarah’s view of the body. Her hands were shaking as she threw things into a cardboard box.

            Jean then remembered her laptop. When they had first arrived at the worksite, they had gone to where Mike had his desk, in the next trailer over. The police might seal it too. Her laptop was on her father’s desk with her textbooks and notes. He had said she would need something to do, to allow her to look busy. The engineers would be run off their feet for the next little while and would not be able to pay her much attention. She had to have her things, otherwise she would go for days with nothing useful to do.

            Jean’s father had been encouraging her to get as far ahead as possible in mathematics. It was what defeated most would-be engineers. He had said she would need to finish second-year math before she could make practical use of first-year. But he had warned that, like most people, she could likely not do mathematical work for more than four or five hours a day without starting to lose her mental capacity. The rest of the time, Jean would just have to try to look busy while observing and listening.

            The trailer was as plain as its neighbor – white and covered with dust. Cheap slider windows were shaded by ugly aluminum awnings. A truck drove past, raising more dust. She went inside and walked slowly down the aisle. The sun was setting in the western sky, casting long rays across the quiet room. Desks and tables were cluttered with papers and equipment. A counter was covered with printers, scanners and monitors. Shelves above held boxes and loose-leaf binders. She picked up her laptop and books, and started back.

            But then she got curious and decided to look around. One desk had a fancy high-backed, black leather chair with arm rests. She sat down to try it out and looked at the messy desktop. “A sign of genius,” she thought. She put her things down, pulled her tissue out of her pocket, and opened the drawer.

            Inside was an 8 ½ x 11 color photograph. At first, it looked like Mount Rushmore, only different. But then she froze. It was her dad and Sarah, coming through the door. Sarah was still grumbling. The high-backed chair could swivel so Jean spun herself around and slumped down to hide, the photo still in her hand.

            “You got a cardboard box?” asked Sarah. “Grab everything. You never know.”

            “Jacob’s here,” said Mike, who had heard the arrival of a vehicle. He was looking out the window. Parking was diagonal in front of the trailers. The engineers all brought their own vehicles, even though the bunks were only a half-mile away. Workers spent their nights in big trailers assembled into small hotels. They were called bunks, even though there were no bunkbeds. Each of the engineers had a very small studio apartment. Sarah had found research that showed that if you gave an engineer a desk, a micro-bathroom and a micro-kitchenette, he would average an additional 7.4 hours of work per week.

            “I’ll tell him,” said Sarah and she went back outside. Jean spun the chair around, got up and showed the photo to her father.

            “Dad?” she asked in an accusing tone. Mike looked startled to find his daughter there. “Is this place going to be called Mount Rushmore II?” She held up the photo that showed an artist’s rendering of a cliff carved with the faces of Andrew Jackson, Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.

            “Yes… well…” he sighed, as he took the photo from her. He set his cardboard box on his desk and sat down. “That was going to be a surprise in a few days, or maybe a few weeks, when it’ll be finished. And that’s what we’re building. Our firm. That’s our part of the development.”

            “Wow.”

            “Wow is right. Now, this is all very top-secret. The unveiling will be soon, if all goes well. Media event. Big news. Can’t keep this a secret forever. It’ll make news around the world. But it won’t be called Mount Rushmore II. Not officially. It’ll be called Mount Hohokam, in honor of the Indians… Indigenous people who lived here. Not now. The ones who left behind a kind of pottery that was unique to them, up until around 1450.”

            “Wow,” said Jean, whose eyes were back on the photo.

            “We godda get out of here before the cops show up,” said Mike. He tossed the photo into his box and stood up. “Where’d you find this?”

            “Top drawer. There,” she said, pointing.

He pulled out a Kleenex, went to the desk, and dug around each drawer. “Lemme show you something… in a minute,” he said as he went to his desk and started throwing things into the box. “Grab your stuff,” he said, as he picked up his and Sarah’s boxes. “We’ll take things we need, to keep the work going. The job can’t stop. Stuff from her office. And mine from here. In case they decide to call this trailer ‘evidence.’ If they ‘declare it a crime scene’ and ‘seal it off.’ So that means we might be committing a crime called ‘tampering with evidence.’ It’s serious. Really serious. So that means you can’t tell anybody. My even telling you not to tell anybody is a crime. So the cops can’t find out. Not ever! Okay?”

            “Yes! Okay! Do you think I’m an idiot?”

            “Well… sometimes you have to state the obvious, just to be safe.”

            He led her to the far end of the trailer, out its backdoor and behind an eight-sided gazebo that looked like it might be a lunchroom. Next to it was a windowless tailer. Mike looked around, unlocked the door, and they went inside.

            On the walls were large computer-generated illustrations of the sculpture. Different lighting conditions and various angles showed what it would look like in any weather and any time of day. At the far end was a three-foot-high by nine-foot-wide sculpture made of grey clay. It was the artist’s model. Trump was on the right-hand end, slightly higher than Reagan, and gazing towards the distant horizon as if envisioning the triumphant future of a great nation.

            “Wow,” said Jean.

            “On the finished thing the faces will be 70 feet tall. Ten feet taller than on Mount Rushmore. It’s only the statues on Easter Island that have a bigger face carved out of solid rock.”

            “Oh.”

            “It’ll be a ratio of 35 to one. It’ll be accurate down to a quarter of an inch, if all goes well.”

            “Cool.”

            “And we all, absolutely, have to keep this completely and totally secret. Not one word to anybody. Except me. And not to me either, because we might be overheard. The other summer student, Jenny. She doesn’t know about it. She thinks it’ll be a bunch of yuccas. That’s a kind of desert plant.”

            “I know what a yucca is!”

            “Good. Now, Sarah cannot find out that you’ve found out. It’s just the engineers who are supposed to know. Them and the artist. And the top management at Cactex. That’s the developer. They hired us to do the sculpture. The unveiling is going to be in a couple of weeks. Or four, or six. Who knows? Until then, we’ll still be saying it’ll be a sculpture of a bunch of yuccas. Can you keep quiet?”

            “Of course!” she hissed, as if offended.

            “Good. Not a word to your mom?”

            “No!”

            “Good. Now let’s get out of here before the cops show up.”

Chapter 3

July 1, 7:50 p.m.

            The sun had set, leaving low orange clouds behind distant mountains. The sky was a deepening blue and, though it was still only dusk, the site was brightly lit up by lights on short posts. It had been cold in the trailers, and the sauna-like heat outside felt good. They had just finished stashing their things in Mike’s truck when a black and white police car pulled in. Sarah had been waiting and waived it down. A young patrolman got out and stepped into the bright lights on the trailers. He straightened his shoulders and put on the tan-grey cowboy hat that was part of his uniform. He took off his sunglasses, and put them in his shirt pocket. The sight of him sent a shiver up Jean’s spine.

            He offered Sarah and Mike a solemn greeting and introduced himself as “Patrol Officer Hank Brown.” Another shiver. After a brief exchange, he followed them to the trailer.

            Jean was left alone. The loud buzzing inside the tall structure had restarted. Jacob, the other engineer, must have gone inside to box his things. The workday was about to start and a large bus drove past, stirring up dust. A load of construction workers was alerted to the presence of a young woman, well-illuminated and in a tight t-shirt. A line of wide eyes ran down the length of the windows.

            Jean turned away to blink the dust out of her eyes. She walked up to Sarah’s trailer. They had closed the door, so she went around to the back, thinking she might not have pushed the backdoor until it clicked. “Good,” she whispered. It was still open half an inch. She could just barely overhear their conversation. The young cop asked a question, followed by a pause, as if he was taking down notes. Next, he was taking photos, not with a cellphone but with a very small camera. Then came more questions. “He must want to be a detective,” she thought, as the questioning continued.

            The buzzing had stopped again and she could hear the sound of another car stopping abruptly and pulling in. This time Jean peeked under the trailer. She could see white pants and running shoes.

            “Oh good. Come in, dear,” said Sarah, interrupting the cop. She introduced the site nurse.

            “Patrol Officer Hank Brown, ma’am. The body is right here.”

            “Well…” said the woman, after a short silence. “He’s definitely dead.”

            There was another silence and then her voice again, on a phone, reporting that it was not an emergency. She said more, all medical jargon. There was another silence and then the cop continued with his questions. Another car arrived, and another, almost right away. Jean could see more white running shoes. The paramedics. And then men’s leather shoes with black dress pants.

            Back at the partly-opened door, Jean could hear the young cop. He sounded like he was giving his report. Then an older man, likely a detective, thanked him in a dismissive tone and asked him to stand outside and guard the perimeter. Jean could imagine the look on the young man’s face, and she wondered how he must feel to receive this sort of treatment in front of women.

            The backdoor was suddenly pulled shut with a slam that made Jean jump. She had stepped away and felt she had probably not been seen. “I godda get away,” she told herself. A peek around the trailer assured her that no one was close. She casually sauntered out to the parked vehicles, hoping to appear bored. A look to the side alerted her to what at first appeared to be a male model in designer hiking clothes, striking a dramatic pose, as if for a camera. A second glance revealed a suspicious look on his face. “Or is it a guilty look?” she wondered.

            “You must be Jean, Mike’s daughter,” the man then with a kind smile as he came forward with his hand out. “He said you’d be here. I’m Jacob Grift. One of the engineers with Post Grift and Associates. Only I’m not that Grift. That’s my dad.”

            “Nice to meet you. You heard about my cousin, Brad?” she blurted out, and then felt embarrassed for saying it as if it was good news.

            “I did. A real shocker. And so young. My head’s spinning.”

            “It usually is. I mean! Mine too. And it usually... But... And… and you should have seen the look on Dad’s face.”

            “Poor guy,” said Jacob as he shook his head. “How often does a person come across a dead body?”

            “I did! I mean… just a few weeks ago, I did. This guy had been hit by a car. It wasn’t me!” This was even worse, and she was ready to crawl under one of the trucks.

            “Whoa. That’s rough,” he said, shaking his head. “Two dead bodies in just a few weeks. Wow. You may as well be a cop.”

            “May as well,” she said, with a faint smile. He did not seem judgmental. They stood there in silence, at a loss for words. Another bus passed by. More stares. “I need a baggy shirt,” she said with a smile.

            “Start of the workday,” he said looking at the next bus that approached. “Not so hot. They say it’s going down to a cool 86. Down from 104 today.”

            “How do they stand it?”

            “Most are from Mexico, I think. Great workers. Cooler there, though. Last year’s hottest in Phoenix was 119. Three degrees short of the record. ’90. Longest stretch of plus 110, though. Climate change. Where you from?”

            “Well… I was born in Glendale. California.”

            “Same here. The whole firm’s from there. When they’re not somewhere else.”

            “We moved around, too. Mining towns.”

            “Of course. Should have guessed. Your dad’s teaching us a lot. Knows his rock. How to blast it. Jean, let me introduce you to Jenny Wren. Another summer student here. Engineering. Northridge.”

            Jean turned to see a pretty young woman getting out of a small car that looked even smaller next to the three large pickups. She carried books and a laptop, and wore a pale-yellow short-sleeved blouse and long beige pants. Her steel-toed safety shoes looked like running shoes. She was not much older than Jean. They both had long blonde hair pulled back into a low bun to fit under a hardhat.

            “Hello Jean,” said Jenny with a bright smile. “You’re gonna be my roomie. Unless you refuse. It’s either that or bunking with your dad. My Auntie Sarah says that’s your two options. I’m in a double, so if I don’t get you, who knows who I’ll get?”

            “Well… ah,” said Jean, who had not been told about this.

            “Not sure? Well, I’m claiming you then. And my name actually is Jennifer Wren. My parents had a sense of humor. Republican hippies.”

            “It’s a lovely name. I’m going to go to Northridge too. We’ll probably be seeing each other.”

            “She’s gonna follow you into civil,” said Jacob to Jenny. “Just like she followed me,” he said to Jean.

            “I swear I didn’t know he’d been there,” joked Jenny.

            “Jenny,” said Jacob, in a subdued and respectful voice. “Have you heard about Brad?”

            “What did he say now?” laughed Jenny.

            “He’s… passed away.”

            “What?”

            “He’s dead.”

            “Dead?” she asked, after a pause.

            “Dead.”

            “Well…”

            “My dad says he was hit on the head,” explained Jean. “He said he wouldn’t have suffered.”

            “Hit?” said Jenny softly. “How?”

            “It was… it happened in there,” said Jean, pointing to the trailer.

            “Sarah’s? How?”

            “I guess somebody hit him. With a…” but Jean stopped, remembering she was not supposed to know about the hammer. “Dad said he was hit on the head with something.”

            “He was murdered?” whispered Jenny.

            “The detectives are in there now.”
            “Holy… my goodness,” said Jenny, who was going pale.

            “I didn’t know him well,” explained Jean. “I mean… he was my cousin but I only saw him at weddings and funerals.”

            “Just as well. You wouldn’t have liked him,” joked Jacob. “Well… I mean…”

            “Jacob Grift!” scolded Jenny. “Seven years bad luck for speaking ill of the dead.”

            “What was he like?” asked Jean. “To work with?”

            “Ah… well…brilliant,” said Jacob. “Very… competent.”

            “Really knew his stuff,” said Jenny. “A real details man.”

            “A loss to the profession,” said Jacob with a nod. “Had a lot to offer. Yes, at this time we should focus our thoughts on all the things we loved and cherished in our dear friend Brad.”

            “Oh! Jacob!” laughed Jenny. “That’s awful! You’re such a pig sometimes!” She playfully kicked him in the shin.

            “Oh! Oh!” he whimpered. “Look at that! She kicked me! My spleen! My spleen!”

            “Oh, be quiet,” said Jenny with a smile as she looked away.

            “Well, that’s…” said Jean, but she stopped to wonder why nothing was being offered other than professional credentials and this foolery. “Do they all sleep through the day?” she then asked, after another bus passed by, eyes even wider.

            “Workday is eight p.m. through ‘til six a.m.,” said Jacob. “Ten hours, six days a week. Two hours of overtime every day – guaranteed. And time-and-a-half, all day Saturday. Sometimes Sunday too. And that’s what they want. Nothing else to do here. Save it up, take it home and hand it over to the wife. Nothing to do in the bunks, other than TV and video games. Same with us. May as well be a long week. 80-hour weeks, lately, for us. Double-checking and triple-checking. Sweating over details. Brad caught a couple of doozies. A few. He was as much of a computer guy as an engineer. Great combination. There could have been problems. Easier to avoid than to redo. A lot easier.”

            “Well… that’s good,” said Jean.

            “Yes,” sighed Jacob. “Well… I ought to take another look through the trailer. Make sure I’ve got everything out. Hold onto your stuff, Jen. They might seal off the trailer for evidence.”

            “You sure you’re okay?” Jenny asked Jean as they watched Jacob walk away.

            “Oh, I’m fine. He was a stranger to me. I mean… it’s a shock. And a shame. And…”

            “Let’s see what this dude’s got to say,” said Jenny. She had been ignoring Jean and looking at the young cop. He was leaning on the handrail, the arm of his sunglasses in his mouth, and looking as if in deep thought.

            “How much can you tell us?” asked Jenny with a cordial smile.
            “Not much. It’s an investigation in progress,” said the man, whose eyes widened as he looked her up and down. “I can tell you that my name is Patrol Officer Hank Brown.”

            “So, Hank Brown?” asked Jenny with a smile, “Bradly Price was murdered with a blunt instrument?”

            “I… can’t comment on an investigation in progress,” he apologized.

            “An awful thing to happen,” she then said. The smile had gone but there was little sincerity in her voice.

            “Awful shame.”

            “How long have you been a cop?” asked Jenny casually after a nervous pause.

            “Three years, this coming November. If I count in time in the academy.”

            “So… what’s it like? What do you do most of the time?”

            “Well, the cameras have taken over most of the traffic work, so… a lot of the time you’re a government clerk. And a lot of the time you’re a poorly trained psychiatric social worker. And often you’re a bit of a tax collector, imposing taxes called fines. And sometimes you’re actually lucky enough to catch a crook. But right now, I’ve been pretending to look at my cellphone while waiting and watching and hoping somebody gives me a guilty look.”

            “Really?”

            “Sometimes they actually do return to the scene of the crime.”

            “Cool. I didn’t reveal anything, I hope,” joked Jenny.
            “A cop rarely goes wrong by underestimating the intelligence of a criminal,” he said as he kept glancing back and forth. “Sometimes you’ll be getting out of your car and some guy will give you the guiltiest look you could ever imagine. And then he just turns and runs. You run him down… him or her. And first he denies everything. But then he obliges you by confessing to a crime. It can be as easy as that.”

            “That’s almost sad.”

            “It’s beyond sad,” said Hank as he shook his head. “But I can tell you some good news if you’re thinking of a career in policing. It is not as dangerous a job as people like to believe.”

            “Really?” asked Jenny.

            “You always hear about the cops who get killed. But there’s almost 700,000 of us in this country. So the odds are pretty good.”

            “How do you get to be a detective?” asked Jean.

            “Oh, that’s easy. After you’ve been a regular cop for a few years, you just write an exam. The only hard part is the exam. You’ve got to beat out the competition.”

            “A lot of bookwork?”

            “Oh, yes yes yes. And now-a-days they’d really like you to have a strong command of Spanish. So I’ve been spending a lot of days talking to a computer. Just yesterday, I walked in the room and my laptop said, ‘You again?’”

            “What a way for a computer to act,” joked Jenny.

            “I’ve asked for straight nights. More time for studying. Are you thinking of going for cop?”

            “I’ve always thought I’d look so good in the uniform,” said Jenny with a laugh.

            “Well, I think that might be what draws a lot of boys in. That, and a chance to order people around. And to walk around town wearing a cowboy hat and carrying a pistol. Maybe get to shoot somebody.”

            “Oh goodness,” gasped Jenny, “you didn’t shoot an innocent man, did you?”

            “No, no, no. Got shot myself once.”

            “Oh, no!”

            “You were innocent?” joked Jean.

            “Oh yeah,” he laughed. “I can even show you the scar,” he said as he pulled his shirt up to show a small ragged scar, just above his belt.

            “Oh, gross!” said Jenny.

            “The exit wound is worse,” he said as he turned and pulled his shirt up further.

            “Oh grosser!”

            “They actually look like what you’d expect, don’t they?” he said as he tucked it back in.

            “I’d never thought about it,” said Jenny as she shook her head.

            “I’d tried to tase him when I should have shot him. I’m what cops informally refer to as ‘stupid.’”

            “You’re great for PR though.”

            “Oh yeah. Good for the stats. Improves the ‘us versus them’ ratio. And he was even blonde. Good-looking too.”

            “Did you get his number?” asked Jean.

            “Don’t make him laugh,” joked Jenny. “It’ll hurt.”

            “It didn’t even hurt when I got hit. Felt really creepy, though. Sure hurt the next day. I got to lay around and study on full pay for six weeks. Worked out great.”

            “We should remember that for final exams,” joked Jean.

            “She’s just out on a day pass,” Jenny whispered to Hank.

            “Great attitude if you want to go for cop,” said Hank to Jean. “Black humor is a defense mechanism.”

            “You mean, I was just doing it to be nice?” asked Jean.

            “Sure do.”

            “What else is good about being a cop?” asked Jenny.

            “Fast cars. And the siren, of course. Instant adrenaline machine. And there’s a chance to be a bit of a hero every once in a while. And that almost makes up for all the times you have to clean puke out of the back seat of a car.”

            “Oh, gross!”

            “Fortunately, we’ve high-tech robotic equipment for that,” he joked.

            “Oh, good thing,” laughed Jenny.

            “Now, if either of you have any questions about a career in law enforcement and you’d like some insider information, you can just give me a call. Anytime except for daytime, ‘cause that’s when I’m asleep. There’s a lot that the websites won’t tell you.” He pulled out a small case, slid off a pair of ordinary-looking business cards and offered them to each.

            While they had talked, the trailer with the model statue of Mount Hohokam had been hauled away. Jacob had been waving his hands to give directions while Jean’s father had slowly pulled in. It was hooked up and they left. The construction noise muffled the sound. She and Jenny had effectively held the attention of Officer Hank. “Does that,” Jean wondered, “make me an accessory to a crime? Again?”

Chapter 4

July 1, 10:00 p.m.

            In the darkness, a boxy ambulance was slowly pulling away with no siren or flashing lights. “A sad end to a young life,” Jean thought.

            Fortunately, the detectives had not sealed off the engineer’s trailer. She had tried studying but was too restless to gain much from it. Brad’s desk was protected with yellow police tape. Jenny was at another desk, busy on a laptop. The air conditioning was excessive, so Jean had gone outside to warm up.

            Two detectives were standing by a car talking. Hank was winding yellow tape around wooden pegs to block access to Sarah’s trailer. “Protect it from the likes of me,” Jean told herself as she stood there, slouched with her arms crossed. She looked up at the tower. It was a black mass against a black sky, except for slivers of light that peeked out from between the tarps. The buzzing was noisier than ever.

            “Have you seen inside?” shouted Jacob from behind her. He had his professional smile again.

            “No,” she yelled back. “What are they doing in there?”
            “Drilling holes for explosives. For blasting rock. The explosive is good old-fashioned dynamite. More expensive than ANFO but better for small boreholes. And these terribly important boreholes are drilled by horribly noisy devices called ‘drifters.’ Funny name, huh? From a German word that means ‘pusher.’ It’s an automated hammer and chisel. As it turns it delivers a very rapid series of strikes. Fifty per second. Michelangelo on speed. Turns solid granite into a fine powder. Up close it’s as loud as a rock concert. And sometimes you’re hearing four at the same time. Wanna tour?”

            “Sure.”

            “You’ve got your ID tag and your steel-toe shoes. All you need now is a hard hat, glasses, a high-viz vest, earmuffs and gloves.”

            “All that for a tour?”

            “All that for insurance. You miss one item and you’ve let an insurance company off the hook. Can’t be that nice to an insurance company. Construction keeps a lot of lawyers busy.”

            “I’ll bet.”

            “Why did the engineer cross the road?” asked Jacob, with a grin. “To talk to his lawyer. One thing nice about lawyers and lawsuits. Once a suit is launched, then everybody can stand back and say ‘I’m afraid I can’t comment on a matter that’s before the courts.’ And there it’ll stay, for a year or three, or five. Finally, the lawyers will come to some out-of-court settlement. But by then it’s old news. The loved-ones have moved through the four stages of grief, right up to their final acceptance. Everybody can go their way in peace. And go out for some retail therapy.”

            “Well… that’s good,” said Jean as they went back inside to suit up. He wore a white hard hat, for a manager or a professional. Hers was green, for a new worker.

            “I’ve got one,” Jean yelled, once they were on their way to the structure. “How many civil engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Two. One to screw in the bulb and the other to blame the architects.”

            “Yes, that’s a good one.”

            “Dad told me it.”

            “An old one. Oldie but goodie. Here’s one. This engineer told a joke. Nobody had heard it before. So they phoned in to see if he actually had a license.”

            “That’s good,” she said after a small chuckle.

            “Here’s another. What’s the difference between an engineer and a con-artist? A con-artist knows when he’s lying.”

            “That’s good too,” she said, with a nod of approval. At the door, Jean exchanged pleasantries in Spanish with the pretty guard who scanned their ID badges. She wore an attractive dark blue uniform with an elaborate arm patch. Her pantlegs had vertical yellow stripes that went with her yellow hard hat.

            Inside was a slow-moving elevator that gave Jean a view of the whole construction site. It was brightly lit with hundreds of lights. All were hooded so they did not shine in her eyes. The drills stopped and they were able to take off their muffs and talk.

            “What’s an ostrich?” asked Jean. “A peacock designed by an engineer.”

            “Yeah,” said Jacob, as he smiled. “A little kid asked an engineer what one plus one is. The engineer said likely two, but we’d better make it three just to be safe.”

            Jean laughed. But it seemed strange. Halfway through the joke, Jacob had sounded like he was no longer joking. Then she said, “An introverted engineer looks at his shoes when he talks to a girl. An extroverted engineer looks at her shoes.”

            “That was me in high school,” said Jacob with an apologetic smile.

            Inside, the structure was a mass of steel bars, all painted yellow. It was the kind of scaffolding Jean had often seen on the outside of a building under construction, but here there were many layers sandwiched together.

            “See all these diagonal pieces of rebar? They’re welded to the scaffolding to make it all one very strong solid unit. But the scaffolding is rented. So when we’re finished, we’ll have to cut them all off with angle grinders. We’ll smooth them down and spray paint them, and just hope the rental place will take them all back without demanding compensation.”

            The drills started again, so Jacob could only wave and point. By the rock face, Jean could see horizontal drills set up on telescoping platforms. As a hole was drilled, powdered rock would spill down a hundred feet. When finished, the platform would back itself up, move sideways, and then move in again to drill another. Each hole was about an inch wide and eight inches from the next one. They watched until all the drills, one by one, went silent and their platforms pulled themselves back, close in to the structure. Suddenly a 240-foot-wide elevator – the whole width of the structure – slowly lowered itself by eight inches.

            “Impressive, isn’t it?” said Jacob as this was happening. “The computers do all the measuring. They’re drilling smaller holes than you would in a mine. Larger number of holes, too. More precise blasting. Fewer surprises. The worker on each platform is just there to watch, and to press a red button if something seems off. Then the engineer, there in the booth,” he said pointing. “That’s my dad, Cyrus Grift. Senior partner. He’ll come out to take a look.”

            “An engineer?” asked Jean. She squinted to get a look at Cyrus who was hidden in a shadow.

            “Has to understand what’s going on. Very complex. Very expensive. The workers on the platforms are all women. Cactex wants a good mix. Women in non-traditional roles. Good for PR. Women might not be great for heavy lifting but they can score high on tests for attention and concentration. Natural worriers, maybe.”
            “We have to be,” joked Jean.

            “The drills,” he said pointing, “can move back and forth, up and down, and in and out. Like a giant 3-D printer. They’re monitored with lydar. That’s sort of like radar, only it uses lasers instead of radio waves. That’s what they’re using on self-driving cars. The computer knows exactly where the drill bit is, and it’ll stop the drill when it gets to precisely four inches short of the objective. Give or take an eighth of an inch. No errors. At least, none so far. Once the holes are all drilled, it’ll be time for the first round of blasting. All watched by cameras. The blasting is controlled by the computer. Not one person withing a half a mile. Further than what’s needed. No stone’s gonna to fly that far.”

            “How do the cameras survive?”

            “Trapdoor. Steel. Flips shut. And once the blasting has it taken back, they’ll switch over to diamond saws to cut a series of horizontal and vertical cuts. Down to a quarter of an inch from the objective. They’ll end up with rectangular pieces of stone, an inch thick, sticking out. They can be hammered off and collected in pails, to be crated and kept to sell as souvenirs. Each piece mounted on a little pedestal. With a certificate of authenticity. Enough for a hundred years.”

            “Where’s the gift shop?” joked Jean.

            “Finally, it’s all smoothed down with small pneumatic chisels. Erasing the cut marks. Carving in the details. They’re heavy, and the vibration makes it worse. Muscle men for that job. That team is off with the artist now. She’s teaching them how to not make mistakes. You should see the arms on her. Gorgeous though. I actually would like to meet her in a dark alley. But before that starts, there’ll be smaller saws that can go into the crevices. And once the scaffolding is down, the artist will give it a long look and decide on any finishing touches. She’ll give instructions from below to a couple of guys on top of a 195-foot articulated boom lift. That’s as tall as a 20-story building, and it’ll stand on a ten-story platform. On rails, so it can move. It’s like those things you see house painters using, only really, really big. Biggest in the world.”

            “I want that job,” said Jean with a smile.

            “And when the scaffolding is down, then comes the unveiling. It’ll be a yucca in flower, in the style of Georgia O’Keeffe. She’s an artist. One of the great ones. It’ll be impressive.”

            “We learned about her in art class. But why a yucca?”

            “Desert flora” he said with a shrug. “Georgia O’Keeffe liked them. She’s the expert.”

            “But it could have been anything, couldn’t it? It could have been… a giant Jesus and his disciples. Or dinosaurs. Or it could have been… another Mount Rushmore!” said Jean with her hands clasped over her heart.
            “Could have been,” said Jacob as he shrugged and looked the other way.

            “And they could put Trump up there. And Reagan! That’d bring in the Republicans. And they’re big spenders.”

            “Not all of them.”

            “And… who else?” wondered Jean. “Who’s another Republican?”

            “Lincoln.”

            “He’s been done.”

            “Okay… Eisenhower?” suggested Jacob, sounding as if he wasn’t really interested.

            “Maybe. Whoever. But wouldn’t that be a great idea?” she teased, trying to see if she could pry it out of him.

            “It’d be controversial.”

            “But that’s what you’d want, isn’t it? It’d be free publicity. Think of it. The kind of advertising that money can’t buy. Everybody in the world would hear about this place.”

            “They sure would.”

            “Would it be too late to change it?”

            “I think… probably, yes,” said Jacob, while looking away. “Oh, I godda get this,” he said as he took his phone out of his pocket. He looked at a text and squeezed the button to turn it off. “Godda go. Sarah needs me. It’s all ‘hurry up and wait’ on a construction site.”

            “Can I stay and watch?”

            “Sure, you can. Your ID says engineer’s assistant. That gives you the run of the place. The whole site. Except the men’s toilets. Make the poor boys shriek. Careful you don’t fall off.”

            “I won’t,” she replied as he rushed off.

            She turned back to watch as each drill started up again. It was exciting to be in the presence of so huge a machine. And to be present while history was in the making. And in strictest secrecy too. She had watched videos on the blasting of rock. After having seen the model sculpture in the trailer, she could picture what she might see after the blasting but before the cutting and chiseling. If all tarps and scaffolding were removed, it would be rough and the faces unrecognizable. But it would definitely not look like it was going to be a yucca. She tried to imagine what sort of a shroud would be draped over it before the scaffolding was dismantled. Probably a light, shiny synthetic fabric, sewn into one huge sheet, and then tied tightly from dozens of anchors to keep it from flapping in the wind and tearing itself apart.

            And when it finally fell, the crowd of dignitaries, guests and journalists would be expecting a yucca. First there’d be a collective gasp. Then they would all remain still, in silence, as if in shock. There might be a distant hiss from the highway or the call of a desert bird. A few would laugh at a joke played on the Democrats. Then a chorus of excited speculation would begin to grow. Finally, the cheering and chanting.

Chapter 5

July 2, 12:00 midnight.

            “What are you working on?” Jean asked Jenny when the two of them went out to the gazebo next door to the engineer’s trailer. They both needed to warm up. It was a plain pre-fab structure built out of tubular bars, with water-repellent white fabric stretched over the roof. The walls were dusty nylon screens, and Jean could see streaks from when it had been vacuumed. Inside were three round tables and grey plastic chairs. Above, planks lay on top of steel bars with cardboard boxes in storage. Front and back screen doors had signs in English and Spanish that said it was for the exclusive use of Post Grift and Associates. It was ugly, hot, dusty and noisy, but at least they could talk without being overheard.

            “Auntie Sarah told me to read this book on environmental assessment,” Jenny replied in a dreary voice, as she dropped her books and laptop on a table. The noise from the structure had stopped so they did not have to shout. “I’ve got to keep her happy. She’s told me that if I work hard, she’ll make me an offer. Leading to partner. It’s mine to lose.”

            “Wow, that’s great.”

            “I think she might be grooming me for ‘new business development.’ That’s what they call ‘sales.’ But I’ll still have to be an engineer. As part of her team, I’ll likely earn twice what I’d ever earn if I went out on my own. Maybe three times. These days, a lot of engineering work is being done over the internet by people in India or the Philippines. Want a cappuccino or an espresso?”

            “I’d love a cappuccino.”

            “She’s got a really nice machine here. I told her the old one was undermining employee morale. She told me to buy a new one for her. The price made her eyes pop but everybody loves the coffee. And everybody has to make their own. No women serving men.” She showed Jean how it worked and how to do foam art. Jean tried to do a heart, but it wasn’t as nice as Jenny’s.

            “Environmental assessment sounds interesting,” said Jean.

            “It must be something. I suffer from environmental guilt every time I fail to be fascinated by it.”

            “Helps to build character,” joked Jean as they sat down.

            “I honestly do suffer! How can you not when you’re going into a career like engineering? Every day of your life you’ll be out there, poisoning babies.”

            “You don’t actually poison babies, do you?” joked Jean, as she put her hands to her mouth and gave her best expression of horror.

            “Of course not! Don’t make me feel worse! I feel bad enough about not feeling bad enough about poor stupid dead Brad.”

            “Don’t worry. I’ve more cousins.”

            “Don’t say that!” pleaded Jenny. “You’ll get seven years bad luck.”

            “I remember the first time I broke a mirror,” whispered Jean. “I was worried sick. I’m just lucky I didn’t come down with mono or some other post-viral thing right away afterwards. Because I would have totally believed that that was why I was so miserable. And then I would’ve died of guilt.”

            “You know,” said Jenny, her voice lowered, “you can actually die of guilt. My mom was telling me about how you can die of anything so long as you’re on the brink of death anyways. Fear, especially, though. You heard of Fukushima? The nuclear meltdown in Japan, ten years ago? The government there evacuated 300,000 people, but they’re saying about 2000 died. But none from radiation. Actually, it’s somewhere between zero and 245 who died of radiation. Everybody who gets cancer puts in a claim. But most of the rest. Or all the rest. They figure they just died from stress. Just from the evacuation.”

(Where’d I get these numbers? To factcheck this and several dozen other alarming statements of fact, google “links to endnotes roddythorleifson.com”)

            “They were just dropping dead?”

            “People with really weak hearts, I guess. Mainly really old. Mom told me that all but 200 who died were over 65.”

            “Wow,” whispered Jean. “It sounds like the Trail of Tears.”

            “Only with air conditioning and shock absorbers. I suppose they still had to do the evacuation, because they didn’t know how bad the meltdown would be. But it turned out the meltdown wasn’t too bad at all. Just really expensive. But it must be a heartbreaker for the poor guy who called for the evacuation.”

            “Yeah. I’ve always heard you can definitely die of fear.”

            “I wonder if they’ve got rules that say ‘no horror movies’ for assisted living places?”

            “Poor things,” Jean laughed, as she shook her head. “Death by B-movie.”

            “Were you scared during covid?”

            “For the sake of the old folks I was. A bit. Not for me. I haven’t run a fever since I was a little kid. I’m invincible.”

            “Me too,” shrugged Jenny. “I did get a fever a couple of years ago. May have been covid. I’m a real suck when I get sick.”

            “Because your mother trained you to be one.”

            “Yeah. Good old Mom.”

            “I lucked out on moms too,” said Jean with a smile. “She spoiled me rotten.”

            “I’ve a friend who was so incredibly scared, back during covid. I felt sorry for her so I lent her a book called… lemme think… Virtual Terror: 21st Century Cyber Warfare. It worked! After reading that she was so scared of identity theft and internet fraud. She couldn’t even think of covid anymore.”

            “That’s… I mean… that’s….”

            “It’s so nice to have somebody normal I can talk to,” said Jenny with a warm smile. “I’ve been going stir-crazy here.”

            “But there’s that other girl.”

            “She’s Euglena,” said Jenny, as she made a face. “And she’s always with Jacob. She’s my cousin. I’ve always hated her.”

            “Oh?”

            “When we were kids, I used to tell people she was divorced.”

            “When she was a kid?”

            “Nobody believed me.”

            “She’s an engineer, right?” asked Jean.

            “Just got her license. She’s only 25. She went to a really expensive school and started university when she was barely 17. Straight A’s. Brilliant mind. You wouldn’t guess it, would you?”

            “Why not?”

            “Blonde beauty. A real clothes-horse, too. Even on the site. Her t-shirts cost 90 bucks. And you should see her bras. All white and lacey. I bet none of them cost less than $200. As if she needs it with a set of… with a bosom like hers.”

            “I noticed.”

            “And with a brain too. She must have got in line twice.”

            “You’re pretty too, hon,” said Jean with a compassionate hand on Jenny’s arm.

            “Yeah, I know,” groaned Jenny. “But I don’t just envy her. I truly despise her. So… what did you think of Officer Hank?”

            “He seems… very nice,” said Jean with a shrug. “Like a cop in a B-movie. A nice-guy hero sort of cop.”

            “Yeah,” said Jenny in a tone of deep sincerity.

            “He seemed to like you,” said Jean, as she leaned towards her with a teasing smile. “I don’t think he even knew I was there.”

            “Oh, I’m sure… he wasn’t…”

            “You could phone him,” said Jean softly as she leaned even closer.

            “Oh, I couldn’t… I wouldn’t…”

            “You got his card,” Jean insisted. “You could ask something about what it takes to get to be a cop. You could ask about the health plan. And retirement benefits.”

            “Oh, that… he wouldn’t…”

            “He won’t phone you! He’ll be too chicken. They’re all scared silly about being accused of harassment.”

            “How was Jacob’s tour?” said Jenny abruptly to change the topic.

            “Very good. Very informative. Very charming.”

            “They’re dating. Euglena and Jacob. Really serious. Since they were hired on. Love at first sight. A few months ago, only. She’s pressuring him to propose. She’s jealous of me, so she has to keep me away from him.”

            “Oh?”

            “I guess because I keep flirting with him. She’s jealous of you too. I saw her watching the two of you when he was getting you into the safety gear. You may as well have had your hand up his shirt.”

            “Don’t say that!” laughed Jean.

            “She’s a model.”

            “I don’t doubt it.”

            “I’m wondering if she killed Brad,” whispered Jenny. “And I’ve wondered about him and Brad. They might be bi. They used to go jogging together. When it wasn’t so hot yet.”

            “That doesn’t say anything.”

            “But they both had a gay way of running.”

            “Oh,” said Jean, as if it was definitive proof.

            “And she’s mean enough, too. She used to beat up boys on the playground. She’s more man than most men. And she was in Sarah’s trailer right around the time he was killed. At the end of the day. 6:00 a.m. We were all in and out of there, one at a time, just before it happened. Or during, for the one who did it. Everybody but your dad. He’d left early to get some sleep before going to get you at the airport. But any one of us could have done it because we don’t know who was in first and who was last.”

            “Oh God! It wasn’t you, was it?” gasped Jean, now pretending to be scared.

            “No! But if it was, I’d be lying about it anyways.”

            “I suppose you would.”

            “If it’s one of us, it’s likely be Jacob.”

            “Why?”

            “Male. They’re ten times more likely to be convicted of a homicide. And they’re way worse when they’re in their twenties.”

            “They’re just awful, aren’t they?” joked Jean.

            “Or it could be Cyrus, his dad. Auntie Sarah told me that Cyrus used to have dreams of elected office. Republican. The whole firm’s Republican. Your dad wouldn’t have been hired if your family hadn’t been Republican. But Cyrus gave up on his hopes. He didn’t look good on TV. Or on radio either. So now he’s trying to groom Jacob for politics.”

            “He does have the smile.”

            “That’ll get him halfway. How ‘bout me?” asked Jenny with a smile, as she straightened up and opened her eyes wide. “Do I look like I’d make a good president?”

            “You want to run for president?”

            “Don’t tell anybody I said so. I don’t know why I told you. I haven’t told anybody in years.”

            “I’ll keep quiet,” said Jean, and she reminded herself to keep quiet about the 70-foot statues of Republican presidents.

            “What you’re supposed to do is join a party and go to young people’s events. You act presidential until your friends notice and try to talk you into running for something. You keep saying ‘Awe shucks.’ And then finally you reluctantly agree when they tell you the party needs you.”

            “How long have you wanted to be president?”

            “Since I was five,” said Jenny with a nostalgic smile. “I had the biggest girl-crush ever on Sarah Palin. My grandma kept printing pictures of her and giving them to me to tape on my wall. I wrecked the paint job. I had a video of her delivering a speech. Mom says I used to play it over and over. I didn’t understand anything she said. I’d just look at her.”

            “I guess I was… only three when she got famous. But I had a picture of her, too. For years I thought she was famous for being the most beautiful woman in the world.”

            “She would have definitely got the little girl vote.”

            “Yeah,” sighed Jean.

            “I had a really big poster of her. Up until I had to make room for Justin Bieber.”

            “Poor Sarah. Like ‘Puff the Magic Dragon.’”

            “And I figure that, once I’m a professional engineer and a partner in a firm, I’ll be encouraged. They’re desperate for women who’ve got some kind of credentials. And engineer is perfect because nobody can call you dumb. Evil maybe, but not dumb. And I look great on video. I’ve been practicing for years.”

            “You’re certainly pretty enough,” said Jean. “And you’re tall enough.”

            “But I’m not a giraffe, like Euglena. You don’t want to tower over sensitive men. I think Sarah just brought her in to irritate Cyrus. He might be a ‘senior partner’ but she’s the big boss. Nothing happens without her okay.”

            “I sort of guessed that.”

            “And I’m going to memorize all the big supreme court decisions. And I’ll have a couple of snappy one-lines to go with each. I’ll never be caught like poor Sarah Palin was. She got destroyed by the Democrat media. When somebody asked her what Supreme Court decision she disagreed with, other than Roe v Wade. And she drew a blank.”

            “Yeah, our teacher told us about that.”

            “I’m working on it already. And since everybody thinks the Republicans do nothing for the environment, I’ve got myself good and ready. I can tell them about how it was Eisenhower who signed the Air Pollution Control Act. Or about Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency by an Executive Order. Or Ford who signed the Hazardous Materials Transportation Act. Or Reagan who signed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Or like H.W. when he signed the Oil Pollution Act. Or like Dubya when he signed the Energy Policy Act. Or like Trump when he signed the Great America Outdoors Act.”

            “Wow. Is all that true?”

            “It actually is! They’re a bunch of closet tree-huggers. And I can deliver a short speech on any one of the bills.”

            “Cool.”

            “I’m a sponge. Just like my Mom. The easiest way to memorize things is to sing them to a melody. Celtic folk songs are perfect, so you’ll be thanking your mother for boring you to sleep with them. But it can’t sound like it’s been memorized. You’ve got to deliver it just right. It’s just like with comedy, you’ve godda get the timing right. And it works best if you deliver each one fast, then pause, to let your opponent go ‘Well… ah…’ in between each one.”

            “You’re a killer.”

            “I am! I made a guy cry once, just by slapping him around with facts. His girlfriend dumped him the next day. She said it’d ‘been a long time coming,’ but I think it was just for allowing a female to humiliate him on the environment.”

            “In, like, a debating team event?”

            “No, just at a party. He was getting snotty about Trump, so I went on a search and destroy mission.”

            “Wow, you’re scary.”

            “Yeah, but in a nice sort of way.”

            “You’ll have to have a couple of kids,” warned Jean. “I don’t think one’s enough. You’ll look like you were reluctant. I figure Hillary would have won if she’d had herself another.”

            “Trump has five.”

            “That must have hurt.”

            “And I guess I’ll need a good husband too. Won’t I?”

            “That’s the hardest part,” joked Jean.

            “What do you think of Hank?”

            “He’s got the face. And you could save money on a bodyguard.”

            “Just think,” said Jenny as she gazed upwards. “If he leapt in front of an assassin to save me and the kids, and he died a hero’s death. I could cry all the way to the White House.”

            “Isn’t it seven years bad luck for speaking ill of the future dead too?”

            “Probably. And I think it’s 25 to life for a uniformed cop. Fairy godmothers are tough.”

Chapter 6

July 2, 6:15 a.m.

            “I took your advice,” said Jenny to a droopy-eyed Jean. They were holding trays in the line-up for supper. The cafeteria, that was called the ‘kitchen,’ was utilitarian ugly. On each side of long tables were rows of chairs with yellow plastic seats. “I phoned him up, and I’m just back from an all-night restaurant at a gas station, just outside of Tucson. How’s that for fast work?”

            “Is that where you’d gone to? Dad just said you had to go somewhere. Was he in his uniform?”

            “He was still on duty.”

            “Oh cool. Did he let you turn on the siren?”

            “We weren’t in the cruiser!” said Jenny as their turn came. At the table they were joined by the engineers from the firm.

            “You won’t be here long before you’re phoning your mom to send you stuff,” said Jenny, as Jean’s dad helped them carry her bags from his pickup. “And then she’ll likely want to drive it out to you.”

            “She says she never wants to see another camp again,” said Jean, after her father had said goodnight. “And definitely not a six-hour drive. Five though, the way she drives.” The room was small, with single beds against the walls. The bathroom was cramped, the air-conditioner was noisy and instead of curtains there were black-out sliders.

            “Me and Hank talked a long time,” said Jenny. “First about policing and then about things we liked to do. And then about where we grew up. Sort of an intensive background check.”

            “And he wanted to hear as much about you as you did about him?”

            “I think even more. Lots of ‘ah-huhs’ and ‘ah-hums.’ I think they were to keep me talking.”

            “He’s been studying interrogation tactics,” said Jean with a smile.

            “With those eyes, he didn’t need tactics.”

            “Whatever he did was working?”

            “He got plenty out of me. We’ve both been martial arts nuts. He’s got a black belt in judo. He teaches kids. He says judo’s perfect for being a cop, because you learn how to get a drunk on the ground without injuring him. Not badly anyways. He says you have to be really careful with the old guys.”

            “Do you have a black belt?” asked Jean.

            “Naw, that’s a big step. That’s just for if you want to be an instructor. I didn’t want to take too much time away from homework. I’ve got a vicious roundhouse kick, though. That’s from karate. I did that for years, too. That’s where you spin around and kick him in the guts with your heel. It’s the hardest blow a human can land, and a woman’s leg is as strong as a man’s.”

            “Well… when it carries as much.”

            “My brother had a big punching bag, and I used to practice my kick every day. I could really thump it. Mom said she could hear me in the kitchen. I had my brothers scared of me.”

            “A desirable trait in a brother.”

            “But then there was this guy in school,” said Jenny in suddenly quiet voice. As if she had to keep it secret. “A real, complete, absolute jerk. This one day, he kept bugging me, and I… sort of… lost it. I gave him one just to shut him up. And… well…they sort of had to… remove his spleen.”

            “What!”

            “It kind of ruptured itself,” said Jenny with a shrug.

            “Shut up!”

            “I was only fourteen!”

            “Still!” said Jean, while shaking her head.

            “I was up to 5’9” by grade seven. A real ape. That’s as tall as I am now. But he was still bigger and taller than me.”

“Wow!”

“His parents couldn’t see the humor in it,” said Jenny, with a half-smile.

            “I wouldn’t think so.”
            “My parents had to take me to a psychologist.”

            “Whoa!”

            “It,” said Jenny, slowly, “took a lot of crying to convince him I was remorseful.”

            “Were you?”

            “No! Somebody had to set an example! They were getting out of hand!”

“You’re dangerous.”

“I was so used to kicking the bag,” Jenny pleaded. “Every time I’d walk past it, I’d spin around and drive my heel into it. I just did it by force of habit.”

            “Are you sure you’re a girl?”

            “Well!” said Jenny, almost in a sob. “If only I’d just kept to judo, then I’d have only put him in a really painful armlock, and held him in it until I’d made him cry. Karate is dangerous.”

            “Not for normal people.”

            “Jean! You’re going to give me a complex.”

            “I think you might have one already.”

            “I figured I may as well tell you about it, since somebody else would have told you, anyways. You remember Jacob mentioned it?”

            “I wondered about that.”

            “I’ll never hear the end of it! It’ll follow me until the day I die!”

            “The Democrats will make attack ads about it,” said Jean with a grin. “You didn’t tell Hank about it, did you?”

            “No. I don’t want to scare him. Not yet, anyways.”

            “Maybe you ought to be a cop.”

            “You want me carrying a gun?” joked Jenny.

            “Well… maybe not. Did he ask about Brad?”

            “He mentioned him. He was wondering about you, since he was your cousin. He wanted to know if you two were friends.”

            “He’s ten years older than me. I hardly knew him.”

            “That’s obviously not what the detectives have been told,” said Jenny ominously.

            “What?”

            “You were seen there at 5:00 a.m..”
            “Who said that?” gasped Jean.

            “Sounds like they’re ready to make an arrest.”

            “That’s crazy! That’s stupid! Who would tell them…”

            “Wait, no,” said Jenny, as she held up her hand. “No, actually he didn’t mention you.”

            “What? You…”

            “He did, but just to ask if the death had thrown a scare into either of us. Did it?”

            “I went in to look at him,” confessed Jean, after a pause. “When Dad was phoning the cops, I snuck into the trailer for a peek. At his… wounds.”

            “Are you sure you’re a girl?”

            “And then, when Sarah came, I went out the backdoor.”

            “Wouldn’t going in there be illegal?”

            “I don’t know,” shrugged Jean. “I don’t think so. I didn’t touch anything. But I don’t want Dad or Sarah to know I was in there. But what if I’m questioned? What if I deny it to the cops? Then that’ll be a false statement, won’t it? I think that’s a crime.”

            “Maybe. Probably. Definitely probably. You are in trouble now, girl,” joked Jenny. “It’ll be the state pen for you this time.”

            “But I don’t think anybody saw me! Nobody was there. Except for Dad and Sarah. And they didn’t act like they’d seen me snooping around.”

            “Then you’re okay, likely. Unless somebody else saw you coming out.”

            “I was behind the trailer, listening to them. I didn’t tell them that either. Actually, Jacob might have seen me.”

            “He won’t talk. He likes pretty girls. So what’d you see? When you’d gone in for a look?”

            “Bashed-in head. Dry blood. Puddle of blood on a nice carpet. Blood on a hammer.”

            “A hammer?”

            “A geologist’s hammer. But only bloody on the blunt, square end.”

            “Gross! Well… seeing all that ought to have thrown some kind of a scare into you. If you’re normal. That and knowing there’s a murderer on the loose.”

            “Yeah,” said Jean, as if it had not occurred to her.

            “But neither of us were begging to be killed the way Brad was.”

            “Be careful now,” warned Jean. “Seven years bad luck.”

            “And likely it was a psycho,” said Jenny with a gleam in her eyes. “Maybe that guy who’s been following you ever since you got here.”

            “Maybe you’re the psycho.”

            “Oh, we can’t call people a psycho. Not in front of Sarah. Did your dad tell you about her no objectional language policy?” asked Jenny. “Your contract has it in it. There’re fines. It’ll go to a charity for poor people. Small consolation. And it includes ‘Oh God’ unless you’re actually praying. It’s taking the name of the Lord in vain.”

            “Oh jeez!”

            “And that’s on the list too,” said Jenny, as she wagged her finger. “But you can say ‘gosh!’ even though it’s short for ‘Deliver me Lord from the land of Goshen.’”

            “What?”

            “Goshen was the place in Egypt where the Israelites were living before Moses led them out.”

            “Oh? That’s why old black… elderly African-American people say ‘Land-a-Goshen, child!’ My parents watch old movies. I always wondered about that. But how am I supposed to know what not to say?”

 “Jacob’s the only one of us who’s a natural. We think he’s a closet liberal.”

“I actually read the whole contract and…”

            “You read the whole thing?” interrupted Jenny. “And you actually understood it?”

            “I didn’t say I understood it. I just skimmed through it.”

            “the dirty sheet wasn’t with it?”

            “The what?” asked Jean.

            “The list of prohibited words and phrases.”

            “No.”

            “It’s just first and last letters, plus asterixis,” said Jenny. “Sarah didn’t want to have them written right out, in case it got out and was used against her. Most are pretty obvious. But there’s one that nobody understands. What is k***d?”

            “I don’t know. Did you google it? Just type in ‘begins with k and ends with d,’ and ‘five letters.’”

            “I did, but there’s nothing.”

            “Must be a typo. Why don’t you ask her?”

            “Everybody’s afraid to. She’s a tyrant. She’s an old Euglena. And she’s been worse, lately.”

            “She seemed really angry when she got here,” said Jean with a grimace.

            “My mom says she was born angry. They’re sisters. Mom says I’m her favorite niece. But Euglena’s mom thinks she’s her favorite.”

            “Why would she correct herself and say ‘Indigenous’ instead of ‘Indian.’ I thought ‘Native Indian’ was PC.”

            “The United Nations decided to use it for any group who’ve inhabited a region up until the colonialist oppressors arrived from Europe and took power and elbowed them aside. And I think they godda be poor too.”

            “What does it mean?”

            “It means ‘born in.’”

            “So it means exactly the same as ‘native’?”

            “Yeah,” said Jenny with a sigh. “Some Indian… Indigenous people want you to just use the tribal names.”

            “Like Cherokee?” asked Jean.

            “Yeah, but they can’t always agree on what the tribal name ought to be. Like Mohawk. That’s an Algonquin word that means ‘Man Eater.’ Or Apache. That’s a Zuni word that means ‘enemy.’”

            “What does Cherokee mean?” asked Jean.

            “Just a sec,” said Jenny, as she flipped open her laptop and tapped in a search. “It means ‘people who speak another language.’”

            “Would it bother you to be called a ‘Honky?’”

            “Not if it’s well-intended. And really, it always is. But it’s easy to be tough when you’re as privileged as me. I wonder if it means something? Just a sec,” said Jenny as she tapped in another. “Honky is possibly from a West African language and it means ‘red-eared person.’”

            “Oh, perfect!” laughed Jean. “Just like ‘redneck.’”

            “Did you know that Democrats think that’s offensive?”

            “What?”

            “Redneck.”

            “Redneck? Doesn’t it just mean white southern farmer?”

            “That’s what I thought,” shrugged Jenny. “Do you resent being called Blondie?”

            “I’ve been called that lots of times. To bother me it’d have to be intended as an insult. But I’m sure it never was.”

            “Cyrus is so funny. He told Auntie Sarah that she should add ‘jerk’ to the list, because he finds it offensive. He says he’d prefer to be called a ‘hunk.’”

            “Funny guy!” chuckled Jean. “Is he a hunk?”

            “No. Jacob takes after his mom. She’s taller than Cyrus when they’re in bare feet, so he has to wear cowboy boots with ‘height increase insoles.’ Jacob told me. It gives him another two and a half inches.”

            “Wow. I should get them. Then I’d be able to call you ‘Shorty.’ Where is Cyrus? I saw him in the glass box once, up on the machine. And that’s all.”

            “He’s been working out of his bunk. I think the murder has him freaked. Who knows? He is a bit odd.”

Chapter 7

July 2, 6:45 a.m.

            “What’s that thing?” asked Jean. While trying to decide what to watch, Jenny had taken out a small rubber ball and started squeezing it.

            “It’s an exercise ball. You use it to make your fingers stronger.”

            “What for?”

            “It’s supposed to make it faster to learn to play the guitar. Or the violin. I haven’t decided which yet. There’s research that says that if you learn how to play a musical instrument, your IQ will go up seven points.”

            “It will not!” groaned Jean.

            “Mom says it was a good source.”

            “Wow. I wonder if my bongos count?”

            “Only for guys,” joked Jenny.

“What are all the pools here for? I saw them from the tower. “Is this place gonna be a health spa?”

            “Oh yeah. The whole deal. Hot pools full of natural salts, along with all the other natural minerals. Like arsenic and uranium and mercury and lead. It’s all down there. And who knows? In small doses some of them might actually be beneficial. A pinch of arsenic is very probably beneficial.”

“Oh, go on!”

            Look at iodine. It’s really deadly. Actually, everything in a large enough a dose is a poison. There isn’t a natural hot spring here, but this isn’t far from where there are. There’s El Dorado out west, and Verde up north. And there’s others. Here they had to drill but eventually they hit warm saltwater. They have to pump it out and add salt and warm it up ‘till it’s just right, but it ought to be just as healthy.”

            “People will come here to float in a pool of hot saltwater?”

            “Not just that,” sighed Jenny. “There’ll be clinics here with all sorts of healthy stuff. Naturopathy, tai chi, massage, homeopathy, qigong, acupuncture, electromagnetic, guided imagery, chiropractic, reiki, yoga, herbal, osteopathic.”

            “Wow, all that?”

“Since covid, alternative medicine’s been doing well. I know about all those things because my mom and my grandma have tried them all out. They were alternative before alternative was cool.”

            “But aren’t they’re Republicans?” asked Jean.

            “It doesn’t seem to have helped. And she’s dragged me out for most of them. And there’ll be exercise classes and therapeutic dance classes. And there’ll be lectures on nutrition and there’ll be gyms. A few of them. No lineups at the machines. There’ll even be therapeutic art classes and therapeutic music. Drums and cymbals, probably. Played gently, to soothe the spirit and renew your vitality.”

            “That’s a lot of stuff.”

            “And it’ll all work, so long as it’s combined with a healthy diet and vigorous daily exercise.”

            “When I first got here,” said Jean quietly, “and Sarah was in a panic about Brad getting killed, she was talking about medical research studies. Is that to prove it all…”

            “That’s about covid,” interrupted Jenny. “ Back when covid started, they were gonna secretly fund research that would show that the overreaction to covid killed more people than covid did.”

            “What?”

            “Cactex, the developer. The guys in charge. They were going to hire researchers. Sort of hire them. Help fund them. But when they looked into it, they realized they didn’t have to. They found a lot of people had gone ahead already. There’s a lot who thought the lockdowns were nuts. They’d just been silenced. Threatened with the loss of their license, or their research money. You need a lot. Cactex still gave out a lot. It was already in the budget. And it’s tax deductible. Usually.”

            “Why would Cactex want to be giving money for that sort of thing?”

            “Remember how the Democrats were always accusing Trump of doing nothing to stop covid? Or not doing enough. Or promoting the wrong thing. And how they thought it was so horrible when he admitted that he’d played down the risk of death from covid, at first, to prevent panic?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Well, there’s a lot of medical types who think that he was right, and that organized panic led to more deaths than just the disease alone would have. Death from stress. Or assisted by stress. Like with the Fukushima evacuation. So if you want to make Trump look good, you have to make the lockdown look bad.”

            “But Cactex just needs to make Trump look good because of the statues?”

            “Oh yeah. If you’re putting up a 70-foot Donald-face…” Jenny stopped, and they looked nervously at each other.

            “I thought you weren’t supposed to know,” said Jean.

            “You weren’t supposed to know either.”

            “How’d you find out?”

            “I… I heard Sarah talking to Cyrus. And to your dad too. How’d you find out?”

            “I found a photo of the finished thing in Brad’s desk.”

            “You were going through his desk!” gasped Jenny.

            “Well… you were eavesdropping!”

            “That’s not as bad!”

            “Well… I guess we’ll both have to lie about this,” said Jean as she got up to go behind a screen to change into her pajamas.

            “Anyways,” continued Jenny, after a pause, “the research might be really convincing. They just need good models.”

            “Models?”

            “Computer models. A model is just when you stick something into a computer so you can get something out. If you put two plus two into computer language, and you run the program, and it tells you it’s four, then you’ve got a model. Albeit a simple one. You’re just using a computer to save time with all the numbers. Say you’re looking at 75-year-old women who delayed breast cancer checkups because of the lockdown. “Lemme look,” said Jenny as she typed. “Mom says that, before covid, if you made it to age 75, you’ve had a 50/50 chance of hanging in there for another 11 years. One who’s had a really healthy lifestyle might die, let’s say, about five years sooner, on average, because of the delay. Another woman, who’s spent a rewarding life eating cupcakes – a 75-year-old in the body of a 90-year-old. If she caught covid and died, she’s likely lost a year. If that.”

            “Yeah, but she’s still dead!”

            “Of course, and I feel badly for her and for her near and dear. And for the cupcake factory. But if the researcher looks at years of life lost, rather than just looking at confirmed covid deaths, then the one’s situation would equal five of the others’s. It’s five years of life lost, as compared to one. And that isn’t even starting on ‘quality of life.’ The healthy one’s losing five years of spoiling her grandchildren. As opposed to the fat one getting another year of watching basic cable.”

            “Wow,” said Jean, after a pause.

“And there’s lots of other angles you can look at it, to call down the lockdown and everything else. There’s the civil liberties thing.”

 “And this is all to justify putting up a 70-foot statue of Donald Trump’s face?”

            “For Cactex it is. But the researchers don’t know anything about Mount Hohokam. They’re just wondering about the best kinds of health care tactics. The best measures for the government for when the next pandemic comes along.”

            “And breast cancer matters that much?”

            “It’s not just breast cancer. It’s every other kind of cancer, too. And there’re likely dozens of killer conditions with names a block long whose treatment had been jeopardized by people being too scared to go in for checkups. Or to go into emergency. What about all the people who were scared when they had chest pains and they wondered if it was a heart attack? Or a weak arm and they wondered if it was a stroke? Hadn’t they been deliberately worked up into a fit of crazed suicidal terror?”

            “So… what do they do when they’re finished all the research?”

            “I don’t know. It’s likely just gonna end up with Democrat and Republican scientists railing against each other. Like Mom and Grandpa. But the Democrat geeks actually really were lying when they estimated the years of life lost from covid.”

            “What?”

“Once you really old, nobody knows what you really died from. If you can be killed by a pinprick, you weren’t killed by a pinprick.”

            “Isn’t there an autopsy?”

            “Mom says that, even before covid, only one in 20 deaths were ever checked out by an autopsy. And it’d have to be even fewer during covid because at first the labs were all really busy doing covid tests. And sending in stuff to a lab is a big part of an autopsy.”

            “But how does this make Trump look like some sort of great president who ought to be on a new Mount Rushmore?”

            “It’s one of several reasons. But it’s the clincher. It’s why he lost the election. He was being vilified because he wanted to play down the threat of covid to prevent panic. And he said that the WHO’s guestimate was way too high.”

            “Who is the WHO anyways?”

            “World Health Organization. It’s part of the United Nations. And too, Trump didn’t want to create a recession that’d hurt poor people way more than rich people. And not just here but all around the world. But as soon as he said he didn’t want a severe lockdown, the Democrats got all excited and decided they wanted to follow the glorious lead of Xi Jinping and have a can’t-be-too-careful lockdown.”

            “But that’s what the WHO wanted and they got all the big experts. A whole lot of experts.”

            “And with the blessing of the WHO, all kinds of high-ranking public health people all around the world started wanting to go for the hot new commie-cure-all. And then they started pushing for more fear, because then there’d be more people scared into social distancing and mask-wearing. It was a ‘war effort.’ Everybody had to pitch in, to scare the bad boys into going along with the rules. And they figured that, that way, more people would survive until the vaccines were out.”

            “Which is true!” insisted Jean.

            “Yes, it’s true. At least for the old folks. And I know it is because I’ve a grandpa who told me so about a gazillion times. I spent the whole lockdown at my parent’s house and he was living there, too. So I got to hear the Democrat party line every day of the week.”

            “Maybe it’s lucky you did.”

            “Dad made them promise to stop accusing each other of being a Nazi or a Commie. He said Mom could call Grandpa a Covidarian, and he could call her an Antilockdownist.”

            “What?”

            “A Covidarian believes the fight against covid justifies a denial of personal freedoms, and a Antilockdownist believes in placing civil liberties above a preemptive strike against a possible pandemic. And Dad said he used -arian and -ist because they’re often tacked onto religions. It’s to help remind them that it was never a question of science or of politics, but really it was a question of faith. And he said they could talk about a Covidarian heresy or a Antilockdownist heresy.”

            “That sounds like fun.”

            “So from then on, I had to listen Mom and Grandpa railing away at each other about Covidarianism and Antilockdownism.”

            “And they live in the same house?”

            “Oh, they love each other.”

            “Loving somebody doesn’t stop you from wanting to kill’em. Ask any woman who lives in a trailer park. But… but why does Cactex still care about covid?”

            “I know they can’t go back and do things differently but what about the next pandemic? Should they play it down or play it up?”

            “Hopefully there won’t be another pandemic for a really long time.”

            “Mom says there’s a mini-pandemic every year, and they call it ‘flu season.’ The death rate drops to a low in midsummer and then climbs up about fifteen percent and peaks every midwinter. January, 2018 was a bad one. It peaked at 18 percent higher than the summer low. And at the start of flu season, in the fall, the epidemiologists never know how bad it’s gonna be. So the Covidarians are gonna say, ‘better cancel Christmas, just to be safe.’ And then the news editors will yell ‘Bingo!’ because they just won the ad revenue jackpot.”

            “Oh, come on! You just want to believe this because…”

            “My mom kept emailing me stuff about covid. She didn’t want me scared silly by all the hype. And by a grandpa who kept on showing me pictures of some sweet young thing who’d been full of life and then got covid and dropped dead. I’d show them to Mom and she’d say that they’d never tell you whether the death of a young person who seemed healthy represented one in a hundred deaths, or one in 100,000.”

            “They were battling each other all through covid?”

            “Every day! And ever since! It’d never end! I did extra studying just to avoid them. Got straight A’s though. And I’ve been straight A’s ever since. So I can’t complain.

            “You owe covid a great big thank-you.”

            “Mom says they’ll never know how many died from covid, because a confirmed covid death just meant you had covid written down on your death certificate for the “immediate cause.” But what if you were already on your deathbed? It’s not like if the ‘immediate cause’ is ‘squashed under a grand piano.’”

“I guess.”

“What kind of music do you get if you drop a grand piano down a mine shaft?”

“What?”

“A-flat minor.”

            “Awe c’mon, Jen. I’m trying to be serious.”

            “A lot of old people die from several causes at the same time. Especially really old people. Most of the time it was just a toss-up as to whether it was covid or… whatever. There’s a difference between dying from something and having your death bumped up by something.”

            “But they were alive, then they caught covid, and then they were dead!”

            “If I’m walking to the clinic to get my covid vaccination and I’m run over by a truck, is it a covid death because it wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for covid?”

            “Oh, jeepers! Why do they have to do all this stupid research now? Covid’s over! Isn’t it?”

            “That’s Democrat talk. For two years we lost our freedom of speech, our freedom of movement and our freedom of assembly. For some people liberty never goes out of style.”

“Well…”

“Covid will be good and over when everybody come clean with the evidence. We went into WWI because the Germans sunk the Lusitania. A huge passenger ship full of Americans. They said it’s was a war crime because it was just passengers on it. The Germans said it was a legitimate target because it was carrying military supplies. We called them liars and went to war. In 2014 the truth came out. It had so many bullets and bombs aboard it’s a wonder it didn’t sink from the weight. It literally took a century for the truth to come out! Every last old veteran had to die before they could finally tell the truth!”

‘Wow.”

“Three years ago, 60 percent of people loved the lockdown. And it could happen again. And what if some epidemiologist finds some other bug that looks all hairy-scary? Do we start buying toilet paper again?”

            “Well...”

            “Mom says the research will keep on coming because brainiacs will want to know more about what strategy for fighting disease really works, and what strategy just wrecks my social life.”

            “Is that really it? Or is it just to make Trump look good because your Auntie Sarah is in charge of the 70-foot-Trump-face?”

            “Isn’t it a worthy cause to make Donald look good?”

            “Well…”

            “And it’s particularly important for us to understand how worthy a cause it is because we’re working for the firm where my auntie and your dad are partners.”

            “Dad’s not a partner.”

            “He will be soon. If the blasting goes well. And he’ll get a big pay raise too. I do a lot of listening around here. And don’t tell him. It’s supposed to be a surprise and I’m not supposed to know.”

Chapter 8

July 2, 8:00 p.m.

            “Jean!” called Sarah when she came out of the engineer’s trailer and squinted into the setting sun. “Come meet our newest employee.” Following her was a skinny boy with a brush cut. But when Jean got closer, she realized it was a pretty girl. “This is my daughter, Emily.”

            “Emily?” asked Jenny, as she came up behind.
            “Jenny? Is that you?” laughed Emily. “Your hair?”

            “And your hair? A brush cut?”

            “And you’re blonde!”

            “Last time we saw each other,” Jenny explained to Jean, “was in sociology class. I had brown hair and glasses, and she had long blonde hair.”

            “And now you can barely recognize each other?” laughed Jean.

            “I thought Professor Essor’s brush cut was so cool,” said Emily. “Didn’t you?”

            “Not enough to get one,” said Jenny with a smile.

            “Why blonde?” asked Emily.

            “For summer, I guess. But I always have to do something with it. It’s so dishwater blonde. I’ve had it dyed everything but green. I figured blonde went with summer clothes. Though not really, here. You can’t wear a pretty summer dress on a construction site. So it’s a bit pointless, since I’m here all the time, practically.”

            “Emily tells me she’s decided to go for engineering,” said Sarah proudly. “So she’s in the same boat as you, Jean. Having to get ahead in math. So that means more work for you, Jenny dear. You’ll be able to put ‘math tutor’ on your resume.”

            “That’ll be great,” smiled Jenny. “And they say that the best way to solidify what you’ve learned is by teaching it.”

            “That is so true,” said Sarah. “Now, listen. I was going to show her the site but I’m just so awfully busy right now. Mike, would you be a dear and give her the grand tour?”

            “My pleasure,” he said with a smile. He had just come out of the trailer.

            “And I’m afraid it’s going to be the three of you squeezed together at your little table,” she said to the students. “Until they take the tape off of Brad’s desk. Then it’ll be Jenny’s, I guess. So long as she doesn’t think it’s haunted. But if I hire another engineer it’ll go to him. Or her. But who knows when that’ll be? It might be yours for the summer. Now, I’ve got a call scheduled, so I’ll leave you to it,” she said to Mike. “Ask him anything,” she said over her shoulder as she went into the trailer.

            “The tour will have to wait for a couple of hours,” apologized Mike. “But don’t worry. Everything that’s worth seeing will be well lit up.”

            “She’s a liberal!” whispered Jenny to Jean. She had just pulled her away while Emily was asking Mike a question. “And… she’s a sociology major,” she said in a deeper voice, to indicate the issue of greater concern.

            “How bad?” asked Jean.

            “Bad! You should have heard her in class. That’s the only place I’d ever see her. We each had our own friends. Different high schools. She’s lives at her dad’s place. He and Sarah have been half-separated for years. Sarah’s always off somewhere on a job. He prefers to stay home.”

            “I can’t blame him.”

            “We’ve always thought he’s probably a liberal, too.”

            “I thought you were all Republican.”

            “We all are, officially,” said Jenny with an apologetic shrug. “But that’s like saying you’re Presbyterian. It doesn’t mean you pray. And I heard her dad say, ‘You never know what a consenting adult might do in the privacy of a polling booth.’”

            “Wait ‘till Emily finds out what consenting adults are doing on Mount Hohokam.”

            “Emily cannot find out! Even if she knew what this job means for her mother, I don’t know that she’d care.”

            “That’s awful!” whispered Jean.

            “You never know with liberals. Some would martyr themselves for the cause of… whatever the latest cause is.”

            “I guess.”

            “She’d always ask a question that’d set Professor Essor off on one of her rants. Essor was as flaming as a flaming liberal can get. And I had to lie to Emily too. To be sure of my A. If I’d confessed anything to her then she’d likely have ratted me out to Essor.”

            “You were claiming you were ultra-liberal just to get an A?” teased Jean. “You were living a lie? You were betraying your family heritage?”
            “Well! I wanted good grades.”

            “Is there anything you wouldn’t do for an A?”

            “Of course,” said Jenny, after a pause. “I’d like to think so, anyways. But Professor Essor was so horrible. Honestly, I used to call myself a feminist until I found out what it meant, some of the time. Now I’m afraid to. I’m afraid of what people might assume about what I think.”

            “That’s a shame.”

            “She’d never state it in so many words but Essor thinks that all the evil in the world can be ultimately blamed on men. ‘Privileged’ men. And she obviously thinks that men should be judged by a harsher standard because of wrongs committed by the worst of them, a hundred years ago. And she thinks that every woman is a victim. It’s like, everything any woman ever says or thinks or does comes out of the humiliation and degradation that all women have suffered at the hands of men. It’s like only a man – a white man – is in possession of a mind of his own. And he only ever uses it to victimize people.”

            “I had a teacher like that. He was a man too… sort of.”

            “Essor would never say it right out loud, but that’s what everything she said seemed to boil down to. It was insulting!”

            “Why didn’t you drop the course?”

            “I wanted the credit out of the way. And I wanted an A. I want to win scholarships that I don’t need, so I can brag about getting them. Image is everything.”
            “I suppose,” sighed Jean.

            “I told Essor whatever she wanted to hear. I had her completely fooled. I’m such a little suck-up. I figure professors are no better than anybody else. They’ll all mark you down if you’re blonde.”

            “You think so?”

            “I don’t know! I suppose Euglena never was. And Professor Essor had a grey brush cut. I hated it so much!”

            “Did she know you were in engineering?”

            “Oh, of course. I told her at least six times. I even told her about the spleen. I think that might have clinched me my A.”

            “My dad says just being a female in engineering automatically makes you a feminist, no matter how well you cook.”

            “We’ll never live it down.”

            “But… what if Emily finds a photograph? Like I did? Or hears people talking, like you did?”

            “We lie, obviously. If she finds a picture, we say that Auntie Sarah was asked to give an estimate on it, and that she’d refused the work for being too controversial. Look out, here she comes.”

            “Did you ever feel like, after getting something explained, you knew less?” joked Emily.

            “All the time,” said Jenny with a sympathetic smile. “We like to spend a lot of the time studying out here in this gazebo. It’s the company lunchroom.”

            “You can work in this heat and with all this this noise?” Emily asked with a smile. “It says it’s still 94 out here.”

            “But there’s the dust, though,” joked Jean, as if that made up for it.

            “I guess you don’t like saunas and rock concerts,” said Jenny.

            “Not at the same time!” laughed Emily.

            “I keep needing to warm up, too,” apologized Jean. “And wearing a sweater just isn’t the same.”

            “I can come inside if you’re stuck with something,” said Jenny. “Just phone me. Don’t be shy. You’re under orders from your mom to ask me. For anything at all. You just ring the bell, and I’ll come a-running.”

            “That’s so sweet. Jacob and Euglena have offered to help too. Everybody’s so nice here. This boss’s daughter thing is great. But for now, if you’ll forgive me, I think I need to head inside before I start to melt.”

            “Not that nice,” joked Jenny, once Emily was gone. “One of us is a murderer.”

            “Not necessarily. It could still be somebody who works for Cactex. Unless… unless you know for sure,” said Jean in an accusing tone.

            “If I did it, then I must be suppressing a traumatic memory. It’ll come out in a violent temper tantrum.”

            “You know… I’ve been thinking,” said Jean as they went into the gazebo. “You know the kind of research that Cactex is supporting?”

            “You mean their strategy for oppressing the working class?”

            “No, not that. What you told me about how the lockdown might have cost more years of life than it saved.”

            “Yeah, yeah. You are aware that, if you died of a heart attack and you tested positive for covid, there’s a good chance you went down as a confirmed covid death even if all you’ve had from covid was the sniffles.”

            “Really?”

            “And you’ve heard that the confirmed covid deaths are mainly, mainly, mainly the very, very, very old and the very, very, very feeble?”

            “Well… don’t their lives matter, matter, matter?”

            “Yes, of course they matter!” moaned Jenny. “But there’s a difference between ‘Grandma Moses in the home’ and ‘little Timmy down the well.’”

            “You don’t throw Grandma Moses down the well.”

            “Oh, that reminds me of a joke. Did you hear about the old lady who fell down the stairs? She said ‘I was going down anyways.’”

            “That’s awful!”

            “I heard it from an old lady in a home. It’s way funnier that way. I couldn’t stop giggling. It was embarrassing. Especially for Mom.”

            “Poor woman.”

            “And a glut of dead Baby Boomers is coming due. Just wait ten years and see what the death rate is.”

            “Maybe we should go for mortician,” joked Jean.

            “2 or 3 percent of the increase, recently, just reflects the expected increase that comes from the Boomers timing out. That’ll keep up ‘till the late thirties. Maybe forties if gluttony and substance abuse go out of style and all the Boomers start eating broccoli and pumping iron. Fat chance of that happening.”

            “But they say a million died of covid. Whether it’s directly or indirectly, it was still covid. And their lives still matter.”

            “Mom says that if human lives truly matter so much, then all the speed limits should be cut in half. Permanently. Because there’s a ton of evidence that says traffic deaths would be way down. And even if they cut them in half, we’ll still get to our destination. We’ll just have to leave earlier. That’ll be the new normal.”

            “Well…” started Jean.

            “And half of all traffic fatalities are people under 43.”

            “Well,” huffed Jean. “Then maybe they should cut the speed limits.”

            “And maybe they really ought to outlaw bicycles.”  

            “But there’s way more that were dying of covid!”

            “’Of it.’ ‘With it.’ And there’s no vaccine for bicycles. And bike victims are mostly young and healthy, and yearning to produce grandchildren.”

            “They could teach bicycle safety instead of contraception.”

            “Soft drinks!” said Jenny with a judgmental nod of her head. “They make you way more likely to get type II diabetes. And that’ll make you way more likely to die a few years sooner. So soft drinks are killers too. And peanut butter! They should all be outlawed.”

            “Oh, come on!”

            “And canoes. Think of all the tragic deaths.’”

            “But,” asked Jean as she pressed her hand to her forehead, “how can we question a million death certificates?”

            “And horribly dangerous sports, like football and hockey and basketball and wrestling and skateboarding. And pickle ball. Think of all the old folks who drop dead on a pickle ball court. They should have been watching TV.”

            “It’s a doctor that fills out a death certificate.”

            “Yeah, or the head nurse if it’s at a nursing home. But remember that, even before covid, only one in 20 deaths was ever checked out by an autopsy. Likely a lot of the time a ‘medical opinion’ was some Democrat doctor scribbling down ‘covid-19’ just so he could stick it to Donald.”

            “Wouldn’t the Republican doctors have been doing the exact opposite? And wouldn’t the two balance each other out?”

            “Do you really think that Republican doctors hate Democrats as much as Democrat doctors hate Donald Trump?”

            “Well… no. But… it still makes me feel guilty.”

            “Well, good for you, Jean Fraser. That means you’re a good person.”

            “Well, good for me.”

            “Mom says, if you’re not a liberal when you’re 20, then you haven’t got a heart. And if you’re still a liberal when you’re 40, then you haven’t got a brain.”

            “Your mom is starting to irritate me.”

Chapter 9

July 2, 11:00 p.m.

            “How was Dad’s tour?” Jean asked Emily when she sat down at their little table.

            “Way too hot!” she laughed. “But I guess I can’t blame him for that. He’s very patient with all my questions.”

            “He’s like that.”

            “That huge elevator is like something out of science fiction. My brain’s exhausted just from looking at things. I ran out of questions. I just couldn’t think anymore.”

            “How are you going to study math in this condition?” asked Jean.

            “I don’t know. But… I, at least, have to try engineering. It’s too tempting when your mom’s a managing partner in a firm that gets jobs like this. It’s such a contrast. Last summer I worked with inner-city kids in east L.A. and my boss was probably paid about one dollar more than me. And now I’m on a construction site in a desert.”

            “Yeah, it’s like you’re on a different planet,” said Jenny.

            “It is! And I wonder what we’ll be doing besides math? Your dad says they could be done in days, if all goes really well. But it’ll take months if it doesn’t.”

            “He says engineers are paid to expect things to go wrong,” said Jean as she opened her book.

            “He told me they’re hoping to get it done before any environmentalists try to slap an injunction on it. I hadn’t thought a statue of a yucca would be that important.”

            “He told me that the company’s lawyers – Cactex – can try to defend it by telling the judge about something called the Leshan Giant Buddha, in China. It’s a statue carved into a rock cliff, just like here. And he says it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site.”

            “Yeah,” shrugged Emily. “He told me about it too. But it was built 1200 years ago. It’s a bit more of an achievement for guys with hammers, chisels and loincloths. There’s got to be a different standard imposed on a technologically advanced society. But still, it ought to be hard to say no to a yucca.”

            “Environmentalists try stopping a lot of things,” said Jenny, “but they don’t always succeed.”

            “The governor here is Democrat, right?” asked Emily.

            “I think so” said Jenny, as she tapped on her laptop. “Yeah, she is. And it could be stalled in court by an injunction. And for a long time.”

            “I guess so,” signed Emily, with the confused expression of a non-lawyer staring into the abyss of legal process. “What about the Sphinx?”

            “It’s carved out of ‘living rock’ too,” said Jenny. “That means a rock that’s still where they found it, I guess. Bedrock. It’s about 3600 years old. Older than the pyramids. And there’s other things like it. Temples carved into rock. Hundreds of years old, some of them. But what’ll likely protect our… yucca, in court, is the statue of Crazy Horse, in the Black Hills.”

            “What’s that?” asked Jean.

            “He’s a famous Lakota chief. Gorgeous. The Che Guevara of Indigenous people. They’re building this humungous statue of him out of ‘living rock.’ It’s close to Mount Rushmore. It was started by the Chiefs of the Locota Tribe, but they hired one of the pros from Mount Rushmore to do it. They’ve got the face and a hand done, but there’s the rest of him plus half of a horse to go.”

            “Are they using modern tools?” asked Emily.

            “Oh, yeah. Drills and dynamite. Nothing like what we’ve got here, but still modern. It’d have been finished long ago, but they wouldn’t accept government money. Strange, isn’t it? They’ll take it for anything else. Almost.”

            “Well,” said Emily after thinking about it, “I suppose it’s only right to have one set of rules for the people with the nuclear bombs, and another set for Indigenous people with dynamite.”

            “Don’t tell her where we keep the nuclear bombs,” whispered Jean to Jenny.

            “You’ve heard about your mom’s list of forbidden words?” Jenny asked Emily.

            “It was me who compiled the list,” bragged Emily, as her eyes brightened. “And me who talked her into it. And she paid me a standard technical consultant’s base rate. Ninety bucks an hour. Though I guess that’s a bit generous, since that’s for a licensed engineer. But I did get an A in Intro Soc, so I’m sort of a trained technician of political correctness.”

            “Essor gave an A to a blonde?” asked Jenny.

            “A-minus, only. I deserved more. What’d you get?”

            “An A. Beat ya! Brunettes rule!”

            “So” said Jean to Emily in a menacing voice, “we can blame you when we get fined for saying ‘Oh God?’”

            “Well, it depends how you say it, dear,” said Emily in a motherly tone. “You might actually be praying. And you should thank me for the list. If you say forbidden words here, you might someday say them when the cameras are rolling.”

            “I suppose she’s right,” said Jean to Jenny. “Don’t you hate it when she’s right?”

            “But don’t worry,” said Emily. “I’ve refused to enforce it. She’ll have to hear you spewing filth, herself.”

            “I know!” said Jean. “She could hire you to start the process for getting World Heritage Status for here. You could do interviews.”

            “Ooo, I could!” said Emily. “How could UNESCO say no to a pretty girl with a brush cut? ‘Pretty woman’ I should say. ‘Handsome woman’ I should say. And even if we don’t get status, it’d be great for publicity when we’re unjustly turned down.”

            “You’re sounding like your mom,” teased Jenny.

            “Am I?” laughed Emily. “She’d be so proud.”

            “And isn’t it a shame they’re doing a yucca,” said Jean. “Just think of the free publicity they’d get if they put up another Mount Rushmore, only with Donald Trump and Ronald Raegan.”

            “Oh, don’t say it!” laughed Emily.

            “I’m sorry,” giggled Jean. “Sometimes I’m just awful.”

            “My mom would love it. She was so sad when he lost.”

            “But I have to wonder,” said Jean, “whether it’s a good plan for a place for alternative medicine.”

            “Oh, sure it is,” said Jenny. “Mom and her friends really go for that stuff. Especially since covid. I think what really matters is how tired you are or how much pain you’re in. That and how little your doctor can do about it. Republicans will try everything but marijuana. Or at least half of them. Mom says marijuana was ‘suppressed’ in the ‘20s when Protestants went nuts about it. Right around the Spanish flu. Coincidence, huh? And, of course, the news media cashed in. She says everybody’s a creature of fashion. Including engineers. The clothing designers are just more honest about it.”

            “Do you know about the investments that all the engineers had to make in the development?” Jenny asked Emily.

            “Oh, yeah. An extra-large payout if profits are high, and a total loss if profits are small. What a thing to do to a bunch of engineers. As if they don’t worry too much, as is. And what if the rock is all crumbly and they can’t do anything with it? Well… but that’s not likely, is it? Mom says that if it works out, we might end up spending our careers doing big statues in ‘living rock.”

            “It is incredibly hard to guess what we’re going to be doing,” said Jenny. “It’s scary. Things are changing fast. Have you heard of what people call ‘crowdsourcing’?”

            “Of course, I have!” huffed Emily. “What planet do you think I live on?”

            “Sorry.”

            “Explain it to me,” said Jean.

            “Well, it’s really not new,” said Jenny. “It’s just what they used to call ‘homeworking.’ Like when they used to give somebody a bag of wool, and she’d go home and spin thread and knit socks and bring them back to get paid.”

            “So you’re thinking,” said Jean, “that if this engineering thing doesn’t work out, we could knit socks?”

            “And,” continued Jenny, “forever they’ve been taking all kinds of factory work and making it homework. It’s controversial because it’s how you can get around the minimum wage laws.”

            “It’s outrageous then,” laughed Emily.

            “What’s different now is the internet. They’re taking office work and dividing it up into ‘micro-tasks,’ and getting it done by homeworkers that they contact online. It’s good for stuff like proofreading, and fact-checking, and freelance writing. And it’s good for finding people to deliver the stuff you buy online. Anything that doesn’t require a big machine or close supervision. And you can get stuff done by kids and disabled people for a dollar an hour.”

            “That’s awful!”

            “It’s awful if you’re the worker. It’s great when you’re shopping at the mall and you pick up a bargain.”

            “I want option number two,” joked Jean.

            “And,” continued Jenny, “if you’re a disabled person who can’t get a minimum wage job, then it can be a step up in the world. It’s paid experience. And how does your social worker know what you’re doing online?”

            “Unless you put it on your website,” said Jean.

            “But what’s really horrible is that it’s happening to classy careers, like accounting and computer programming. And worst of all, engineering.”

            “Oh God, no!” said Jean. “Oh! Oh! And that ought to be okay,” she said to Emily. “Because I actually was petitioning the Almighty.”

            “Remember Jacob said he’s mainly been double-checking? I bet that’s something that’d be easy to crowdsource to India. And too, all sorts of other jobs that are being done by engineers here. They do it in India for way cheaper. And the engineers there don’t suffer. They have lower costs because they’ve got lots of illiterate peasants who will do the things we have to pay minimum wage for, here.”

            “You’re right,” sighed Emily. “She can be incredibly depressing sometimes,” she then said to Jean.”

            “My mom says that crowdsourcing is hitting this country now like a tsunami. Here along with every other rich country. And it’s worse since covid. The lockdowns forced managers to get accustomed to having their people work at home. The bosses got used to supervising people over the internet. For a while, the number of Americans who were working from home went from about 20 percent to over 70. The bosses were getting a crash course in crowdsourcing. And now they’ve been wondering why they’re using high-price Americans when they can get victims of oppression on the cheap.”

            “They’re beckoning us with their desperation,” joked Jean.

            “Crowdsourcing,” continued Jenny, “is going to do to white-collar work what globalization did to factory work. The ‘rust belt’ is going to expand to cover the whole country – the whole first world. We’re gonna be giving away millions of jobs to the huddled masses. They just won’t have to come through Ellis Island.”

            “I’m liking the lockdowns less and less all the time,” said Jean.

            “It would have happened anyways. It’s just happening a lot faster.”

            “Couldn’t they just make it illegal?” asked Emily.

            “They could try,” replied Jenny, “but it’d just create new problems. And they didn’t stop the autoworkers’ jobs from sailing away. The politicians don’t care. And why should ordinary voters care either? There’s always going to be more bargain-hunting consumers than threatened workers.”

            “Wow,” said Emily after a silence.

             “Hey, I know something that’ll cheer you up,” said Jean. “Back in 1666, during the Great Plague in London. When the bubonic plague hit again. It’s hit again about every 25 years. They had a general rule. ‘Leave fast. Go far. Stay long.’ So, whenever the plague hit, the people with money would pack up and head off to the country. And they’d take along their higher-value servants. But the kitchen girls and the stable boys would just be turned out into the street. But there was no work in London so a lot of these out-of-work people had nowhere to go. They couldn’t go home because their parents were poor farm workers and the country people weren’t letting poor people walk out of London because they’d carry the disease with them. So at night, people would see them huddled together under bridges. They’d get malnutrition, which would undermine their immune system. Then they’d catch the plague from a flea that jumped off a rat. Or they’d catch whatever other bug that was going around. They’d get a fever and die of exposure.”

“How’d you know all this?” asked Jenny.

            “We had this history teacher who liked to torture us. Their corpse would be dragged out at night to get picked up by the ‘dead cart.’ So that leaves a question. Did they die from disease, from malnutrition, or from a crummy welfare safety net?”

            “Jeepers!” moaned Emily. “That the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard.”

            “Yeah,” said Jean. “But it makes crowdsourcing sound so good by comparison.”

Chapter 10

July 3, 1:00 a.m.

            “Are you all warmed up and cozy?” Euglena Graves shouted when she came into the gazebo. The drills were at full volume.

            “I love this heat,” Jean yelled back. “I just wish I had something tedious to do for a break from calculus.”

            “Where’s Jenny gone to?”

            “She’s actually working. Cyrus called and wanted her to find something on the internet.”

            “Don’t believe what she says about me,” said Euglena, after she had sat down. “She’s hated me since she was old enough to pee.”

            “That’s too bad.”

            “Don’t believe what I say about her either,” joked Euglena. “She might hate me for a reason.”

            “I’ll remember that. I hear you’ve been divorced since you were 12.”

            “Someday I actually will get divorced. That’ll fix her.”

            “All that, just to fix her?”

            “It’d be worth it,” said Euglena. The noise had gone down and she did not need to yell. “What’s the thought of a murder so close by doing to you? I find it makes it harder to concentrate.”

            “Where is Cyrus?” asked Jean. “Has the murder upset him?”

            “Maybe. It’s shaken me up good. Murderer at large. Colleague dead. Wife and child all alone, now.”

            “Yeah,” sighed Jean, shaking her head. She wished she could say something profound but could not think of anything. “Where are they?”

            “Back in Glendale. Nice house. Great pool. She said her parents need her there. He hadn’t been home in months. Too busy. Which, I guess, was true.”

            “So… what did people here think of Brad?”

            “He was a… he was… very… perceptive.”

            “That’s what Jenny said.”

            “He’s your cousin, right?”

            “Yeah, but I never saw him. Except at weddings and funerals. I’d always hear about his grades and his awards.”

            “That must have been a pain. He had many strengths and… a few weaknesses. He was able to solve problems. Big ones. He could foresee issues. Engineering issues, at least. And… well, he could be a bit dismissive of the person responsible for the error. That’s why I hated him. And, I guess, why everybody hated him. But… I think he meant well. On some level.”

            “Who do you suppose whacked him?”

            “I guess he was whacked, wasn’t he?” said Euglena after a pause. “They’re saying it was a blunt instrument.”

            “Yeah,” said Jean, as she thought back to the bloody square head of the hammer.

            “I’m reluctant to speak ill of the dead, but… I do feel some… understanding… for the killer. He… or she… might have been provoked.”

            “By a smart remark?”

            “But, of course, that’s no justification for murder.”

            “A severe beating, maybe,” joked Jean.

            “Perhaps an explanation, though. For an unintentional… or impulsive thing. Maybe he… or she… may have been… really irritated.”

            “Really, really irritated,” said Jean as a picture of her cousin came further into focus.

            “He could have made a major contribution to the profession,” said Euglena with a sigh.

            “If all goes well with the… yucca. Maybe he already has.”

            “Just think. If it works out well, we might end up doing ‘yuccas’ all over the place. But that means we’ll spend our lives living in trailers. Though, I guess we might all retire early.”

            “For a million bucks,” said Jean, “you can buy a Greyhound bus and have it converted into a luxury RV.”

            “That’d be nice.”

            “And that’s buying new. You could probably get a used one cheap from a former rock star. You’d just have to get the smell of puke out of it.”

            “You would.”

            “How old’s his kid?” asked Jean.

            “She’s still just two,” said Euglena with a sigh. “I saw her, back in Glendale. Just starting to walk. A dear little thing. Her mom went to my high school.”

            “It’s so sad.”

            “Well… maybe not so much. We figure she’ll likely now be able to marry the kid’s father.”

            “Oh.”

            “How was your tour of the structure? Jacob made it all make sense?”

            “It was very interesting. I’d never have imagined such a thing. Though it ought to have been obvious, once you see it. Just a really big 3-D printer. Only it’s a 3-D drill, saw and chisel.”

            “Very cutting edge,” joked Euglena. “We’re hoping this… incident won’t be the cause of delays.”

            “Yes.”

            “Delays won’t bring him back to life,” sighed Euglena. “They might kill Cyrus though. He’s a high-pressure guy.”

            “Is he?” said Jean.

            “Brad wouldn’t have wanted delays. Those were probably his last thoughts,” said Euglena, with deep sincerity.

            “Perhaps.”

            “Workaholic.”

            “That’s what Jenny said.”

            “Working against a deadline. They say that, for an engineer, it’s both the stick and the carrot. If you don’t thrive on stress, you’d be better off doing something else.”

            “Does your Auntie Sarah thrive on stress?”

            “Oh, definitely. She’s very good. She can be a little abrupt though. But… she’s been working pretty hard lately. All day, every day. She’ll miss Brad.”

            “Was he dear to her?” asked Jean, in a soft voice.

            “Oh, hell no! I mean… heck, no. He was just really good at his job. Exposed a few errors.”

            “That’s what Jenny was saying.”

            “A couple were Sarah’s.”

            “Oh.”
            “You never know when Jenny’s joking,” warned Euglena. “Deadpan humor. You don’t expect it from a girl. At least not a pretty blonde. Got to be careful you don’t let yourself get all insulted.”

            “She’s like you. A boy in a really good disguise,” joked Jean, and she immediately regretted it. But Euglena burst out laughing.

            “I think she might take that as a compliment. You hear about the spleen?”

            “Yeah,” smiled Jean. “That’s so… feminist.”

            “She is going for engineer. And aren’t we all half-boy? I think I try too hard to be girly, just to compensate.”

            “That’s a nice outfit.”

            “Pants and t-shirt?” she said with a weak smile. “Well, I should thank you. I try to work both sides of the street. Businessey and sensuality. Manly and swanky. Surly and girly.”

            “I guess I’m trying to do the same,” said Jean, looking down at her clothes. Today she wore a sandy brown shirt and long beige pants, but they were clearly not men’s clothing on a woman. The fabric was finer, the cut more feminine and the fit was perfect.

            “Let’s go walk around a bit,” said Euglena, getting up. “I’ve got nothing I have to do. I could point out a few things. Let’s go get our hard hats.”

            “Look over there,” she said, pointing, after they came back out with their gear. “Those cranes are lifting in the last of the modular units. They’re like Lego blocks, only they’re 8 ½ feet wide, 8 ½ high, and 53 long. As big a load as you can put on a flatbed semitrailer before you have to start worrying about permits and fees.”

            “Modular units? I’ve never heard of this before.”

            “Cheaper that way. They’re built in an air-conditioned factory. No sun, no wind, no rain. Built on an assembly line. They have windows, doors, plumbing and electrical, all installed. They get mudding and painting done here to give them normal-looking walls. The cheap rooms will all be the same size but different layouts. And a lot of them even have a finished bathroom. Just got to hope nobody uses one of them before they’re hooked up.”

            “It was Jenny!”

            “When the same person does the same task ten times a day, you’ll get way better quality. Way less waste. Fewer injuries. That saves on insurance. And lawyers. These things are bad news for the legal profession.”

            “Bad news for lawyers is good news for human beings,” joked Jean.

            “At every stop along the assembly line the module is clamped into place, to keep it from going crooked. They’ve got lasers to double check. And that means that, when they get here, they actually fit together.”

            “Cool.”

            “After the foundations and underground garages were all built, they started hauling the modules in. Hotels popped up like mushrooms. But not that far up. Nothing’s more than three floors. Tall buildings would spoil the old-Mexico look. Of course, that means the complex is really spread out. But they’ll have antique trains to get people around. They’ve found these Baldwin compressed-air locomotives. They’re like, 120 years old. Our nation’s heritage. And they’re really short so they could use them in mines. But there’s no smoke so they can use them inside without any second-hand smoke. The old guys will love them. Young geeks will love it too.”

            “I’ll love them!”
            “Well, you are a young geek, honey. In disguise with your nice clothes. And now that the modules are up, the stucco guys can go to work, giving it all a Spanish Mission look – round arches, red tile roofs, whitewash. Turquoise wall tiles, hand-made in Mexico. And they’ll have pens inside with miniature horses and miniature donkeys. Real, live ones. And they’ll have teenage kids walking around with big dogs that do tricks. And there’ll be lots of flowering trees and shrubs and plants in big pots. They’ll be bringing them in full-size. Twenty-feet tall, some of them. Very organic. Very beautiful. Very relaxing.”

            “Whoa! I’m definitely coming back. And my mom will pay for everything if I invite her along. ”

            When they had completed a walk around the half-finished buildings and pools, they ended up by a number of units set aside, close by their trailers.

            “And these are here temporarily,” explained Euglena. “The surveyors found a mistake. The architects have to redo the drawings to accommodate the error. It’s being built in a rush but you can’t do anything without a stamped blueprint. Lawyers.” They were walking around them when they heard Sarah’s voice. Jean was expecting Euglena to say something, but she remained silent. Then they heard a man.

            “I guess we’re all suspects. Not Mike or Jean, but you, me, Jacob, Euglena, Jenny. All had keys. All were in and out of there.”

            “All with a motive,” joked Sarah.

            “Still, he might have gone in with somebody else.”

            “And somebody might have left the door unlocked,” said Sarah, “The back door was open. He might have surprised a thief.”

            “They got all our fingerprints,” said the man, “but that’ll tell them nothing. All our prints are everywhere. Unless they have a murder weapon with a good set of prints from a sweaty hand.”

            “Maybe on the back door. I closed it without thinking, but…”

            “Could be Jenny that whacked him. Though she’d have likely used her foot. There’s been talk about her flirting with Brad.”

            “Jenny’s friendly with everybody.”

            “They were both away on the same weekends, a couple of Sundays,” said the man, as if it were a secret. “She said she’d a university friend in Tucson. And he said he was in Phoenix with ‘friends.’”

            “He probably found his friends on Arizona Avenue.”

            “Aw, c’mon. Maybe she fell for him, and he used her and tossed her aside. But… likely nothing, though. But Jacob and Euglena have both commented on it.”

            “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

            “Could be Euglena too. Big, strong girl. A bit of a temper. And he found a few mistakes of hers. Couple of doozies. Could have given her a lecture. Said too much.”

            “Well, I’d believe he’d say too much,” sighed Sarah.

            “There’ll be a lot of talk on the site. Fear of a killer. Fear of a ghost. It might not go away.”

            “I don’t think it’ll be a problem.”

            “Just think,” chuckled the man. “There might someday be stories of the haunted resort. There might be a movie about it. Might scare away just the sort of people Cactex is hoping to attract. People who will believe anything.”

            “A fast arrest would be nice.”

            “And a conviction. No wandering spirit, out to seek revenge.”

            “But who’d want to kill him?”

            “Who wouldn’t?”

            “I might be talking to the killer right now,” laughed Sarah.

            He burst out laughing and said, “You might be. Everybody knows I’m a dastardly scoundrel.”

            “Too late to grow a pencil-thin mustache,” laughed Sarah as they started back towards the trailer.

            “Did you hear that?” asked Euglena, after they were far enough away. “Cyrus says I’m a suspect. Wow. I’ve never been a murder suspect before.”

            “That was Cyrus?” asked Jean, who wished she had been able to get a better look at him.

            “It’s sort of exciting. It’s like I’m living in a movie.”

            “I’ve been thinking that too,” said Jean, and she put her hand on Euglena’s arm. “It’s all so unreal.”

             “But I didn’t think of myself in the role of the villain… villainess,” said Euglena with a smile. “Villainess. I like that. Madame X, woman of mystery. Who do you suppose they’d find to play me in the movie? While I’m rotting in prison.”

            “Nobody’s mourning Brad, are they?” asked Jean. “Did Sarah hate him?”

            “I don’t think she hated him.”

            “No hint of pent-up rage?” asked Jean. “Now and then?”

            “The poor woman has had a lot on her mind. She’d have the guts though. She could whack anybody. Her and Jenny both. They’re dangerous.”

Chapter 11

July 3, 8:20 a.m.

            “That’s Sarah’s alternative trailer,” said Mike to Jean. He’d come out to the gazebo for coffee. A truck was pushing it into the space where the trailer with the statue had been. Sarah was driving and Jacob was waving his arms.

            “Jenny’s still in there?” asked Jean. The detectives were using Cyrus’s office for questioning.

            “Yup,” sighed her dad. The sun was bright in the east and the sky was blue and promising another day of relentless heat. “Her old office is sealed for who knows how long, but she’s had a spare, ready to go. She was worried about enviro-terrorist bombers. Incited by ultra-left-wing speeches, no doubt. We… there were some who thought she was a bit paranoid, but now she’s looking brilliant.”

            “When you always expect the worst,” said Jean, “all your surprises will be happy ones.”

            “She has all the computers backed up, continuously. There’re duplicates of everything.”

            “Even the scale model statue of the yuccas?”

            “Don’t need it. Everything’s all in the computer. It was just there to make it seem more real. For good luck, I suppose. The job will continue without a pause. Neither murder nor mayhem can stop us. Not murder, at least. We’ve just been lucky with the detectives. They could have taped down everything. They’ve emptied out Brad’s desk and dusted it for prints. They just forgot the tape on it. You leave any prints?”

            “I used a tissue.”

            “And you’ve got an alibi because we hadn’t arrived back yet. You’re just a snoop.”

            “Sorry.”

            “Don’t worry. Sometimes it pays to be a snoop. Well. Bedtime soon,” he sighed as he looked at the trailer. “I’ll be next after you to be questioned. Grilled before a bright light.”

            “Don’t forget your sunglasses,” Jean said after him as he went inside. She wondered about him. It was hot, but his shirt had been soaked with sweat. “What does he have to sweat about?” she wondered.

            “They asked if I was upset,” said Jean to Jenny, later in their room. “And they asked how people were reacting. And they wanted to know whether anybody had any theories on who might have done it.” She and Jenny had gone first. Sarah had told the detectives that Jean might be especially tired, not being used to night being turned into day. Right after their questioning the two had gone back to the bunks.

            “They wanted me to remember every stupid detail of the whole stupid day,” complained Jenny. “I’d just been reading that stupid book, mostly. I’d been in Sarah’s trailer to find a file for Cyrus, and they’d wanted to know the exact time. It was somewhere around five, but how could I know, exactly? Nobody told me to keep an eye on the clock because there was gonna to be a murder. There was no body on the floor when I was there. I was pretty sure of that. I’d have to have stepped over it. That was about all I could tell them. They even wanted to know what I’d been told by Hank. I said he wouldn’t tell us nothing.”

            “I didn’t tell them I’d gone in for a peek,” said Jean. “I didn’t touch anything. I don’t think anybody saw me. There was nobody there but Dad and Sarah.”

            “And the murderer, who was standing behind you,” teased Jenny.

            “I tried to ignore him.”

            “But if somebody did see you, then the detectives will know you were lying. And they’ll never believe another word you say. And if everybody else checks out, then you’ll be the only one they have left to arrest.”

            “But I wasn’t here, yet.”

            “The murder of your own cousin. That’ll have the tabloids going. You’re gonna be famous.”

            “But I’d just got here,” said Jean with a smile. “And Dad said the blood had dried.”

            “Oh. Okay, you’re off the hook. Unless… your dad’s been lying to protect you.”

            “It’s way more likely that you’re the murderer. Everybody knows he was a jerk. He might have followed you in there and made an indecent proposal. And then you flipped out and grabbed a hammer.”

            “You’re right, they might think that,” said Jenny as she considered it. “And with his flirting, he’s been giving me plenty of motive.”

            “I’m just a snoop. You’re a martial arts nut with a troubled psychological history. And you’re a female engineering student who got an A from Professor Essor. They’ll paint you as a man-hating feminist who’s been trained to kill.”

            “Well, to fight, at least. And… I guess, to kill too. At karate class they’d always be reminding you about where you can’t aim a pretend punch or kick because if it landed by accident, you might kill somebody without meaning to. With karate you always stop short of landing the blow, and they award you the point if you could have got it in if you’d wanted to.”

            “Wait” said Jean, now serious. “You didn’t tell them he was killed by a hammer, did you? You’re not supposed to know that. You only know because I told you. Did Dad or Sarah mention a hammer?”

            “I don’t think so.”

            “Did you mention a hammer to the cops?”

            “I don’t think so” said Jenny, after wondering about it.

            “Good. If you did, and Dad and Sarah hadn’t noticed it, or they had but they say they’re sure they didn’t tell anybody. Then it wouldn’t look good.”

            “Wow. And I bet a murder conviction wouldn’t do much for my political career.”

            “Not in California, anyways,” joked Jean.

            “I’m always wondering if I’d make for a terrible president. Or whether I could be the worst president yet, and still get to be a great one, so long as I was the first woman.”

            “Surely there’ll be a female president before you’re old enough.”

            “And I haven’t a hope of making president before I’m 40.”

            “No matter how cute your dead cop husband was.”

            “There’ll be an election in ‘44,” said Jenny, as she thought. “I’ll be… 40! Perfect! And if there’s a war, and we get in and get out before the voters get bored with it, then I’ll be great, because the president will always get the credit for a good war. And if the world’s economy is booming and ours rises with the tide, then I’ll be great because the president always gets the credit for that too.”

            “So let’s hope for a war-boom combo,” joked Jean. “But what about Trump? Right up until covid, the economy was bouncing along. It was, wasn’t it?”

            “Two point something. Good for a ‘mature economy.’”

            “What’s a ‘mature economy,’” asked Jean.

            “It’s where you’ve done so well that you’ve run out of cheap labor. When there’s a shortage of anything, the price goes up. With labor, like everything else. And then your labor-intensive exports get priced out of the market.”

            “Oh.”

            “Trump would have been smelling like a rose if the WHO hadn’t come along with covid.”

            “Yeah. Darn covid.”

            “If only some kook had shot him,” sighed Jenny. “Just before the election. Just wounded him. Just got his liver. Reagan got shot, and he shot right up in the polls.”

            “But that was pure luck.”

            “If only some gorgeous blonde epidemiologist had got Trump all excited about covid just before it all got going. Then he’d have demanded a lockdown, and then the Democrats would have screamed ‘fascist takeover!’ Then the lockdown would have gone ahead but it would have been the Democrats fighting for liberty and the Republicans crying for Grandma in the home.”

            “You think Biden will be called a great president?” asked Jean.

            “Only if he’s shot during an economic upswing caused by a short war. He better act fast.”

            “Yeah. Getting shot is the tricky part. I guess he could eliminate the Secret Service and call it budgetary restraint.”

            “Mom says he’ll always be remembered for all he did to support the lockdown and the Taliban. And she says the president can’t really get his hands on the economy. Fiscal policy is up to Congress and monetary policy is for the Federal Reserve.”

            “What?”

            “And that,” said Jenny, “is why a future president needs at least one economics course. So he, or she, can pretend that he understands what words like those mean.”

            “And one course will do it?”

            “Maybe not. With each additional course the level of your confusion is raised to a higher plane. Mom says the world is ruled by economists, and that all the elected leaders can do is smile and nod their heads.”

            “And smile even more when it’s temporarily ruled by epidemiologists.”

            “Yeah. Mad scientists plotting to rule the world.”

            “Oh! I made up a joke,’ said Jean. “A kid asked an epidemiologist what one and one is. He said probably two, but let’s make it three just to be safe.”

            “Jean! You stole that one from the engineers! We don’t have so many jokes that we can afford to lend them out.”

            “Sorry. Here’s another one. Why’d the epidemiologist thank the mugger? Because he’d given him something new for his free-floating anxiety to fixate on.”

            “That’s good. So we godda think of what’s good about Trump,” said Jenny, slowly. “We’re going to be spending our whole careers defending the… ‘Hohokam Kid.’ We godda have material. What makes him great?”

            “He made America great again.”

            “That’s a slogan. We need specifics.”

            “He got taxes down,” said Jean, with a shrug.

            “Corporate, anyways. A smidge for the rich. But there’s not much glory in that. I wonder… maybe the drop in corporate taxes had a lot to do with the big drop in unemployment? Mom and Grandpa were always arguing about that.”

            “We could say he protected us from the environmentalists who were coming for our utes.”

            “Mom says that Obama tried really hard to do things to bring down greenhouse gasses, but most of what he tried was stalled in the courts by governors who thought he was exceeding his constitutional powers. Then, when Trump tried to take everything the other direction, he had the same problem. Everything stuck in the courts. So I’m wondering. Even if Trump had tried to push Xi Jinping’s can’t-be-too-careful lockdown, would it just have been fought to a standstill in the courts? The 10th Amendment gives quarantines and business closures to the states. Would Democrat governors have allowed him to set a precedent?”

            “Couldn’t he have just offered them money?”

            “He didn’t veto the two trillion relief bill. Either of them. And some say four trillion is a lot of bananas. Grandpa says the president has money to blow on emergencies. So Trump could have declared an emergency and gone through whatever he had left. He could have directly imposed a lockdown in national parks and federal territories like Puerto Rico. But compared to four trillion, it’d have been an extra drop.”

            “That’s all he could do?” asked Jean.

            “He’s got the power to go to war for 60 days before Congress can stop him. He could have invaded Sweden and closed the schools. Grandpa says the president’s biggest power is his ability to attract media attention. Trump could have used it to cheerlead lockdown compliance. But instead, he went for defiance.”

            “So the Democrats hated him for the wrong kind of wishful thinking?” asked Jean after thinking about it.

            “I guess. They always need something to fight over. For free advertising. But that’s not enough. We need hard evidence of greatness. And we need a whole long list. And it can’t just be what he might have done with enough support.”

            “Well, the Republicans who love him really love him a lot. Maybe he’s been a source of inspiration for the nation’s youth.”

            “How do you prove that?” sighed Jenny. “You can’t measure it with a ruler.”

            “Well… you know how the media kept giving us examples of a healthy young person who had suddenly got covid and died.”

            “But wouldn’t mention that it was one in a million.”

            “That few?”

            “Or one in a ten-thousand. Who knows? And how healthy is healthy?”

            “But anyways, it’d still worked for covid,” said Jean. “The media loved a sweet young thing dead from covid. All we need is a parade of young people, who are really successful, coming out saying they were inspired by Trump’s vision. Then we sell it like soap.”

            “Hey. I know who to start with. My old boyfriend. He’s going to be a big success of some kind. Likely. And he likes Trump. He’s smart, he’s ambitious, he’s tall, he’s gorgeous. And he’s a conservative Republican. And best of all, he’s black.”

            “Black?”

            “Good and black.”

            “Why’d you dump him?”

            “He dumped me. He met Miss Right. They’re engaged, already. You should see her. Not too smart but a real American beauty. Taller, thinner, blonder. He’s eight years older than me. He could be ready for ’32. ’36, anyways. He’s godda get elected to something first. That or get a hit TV series. And we godda get him out here for the unveiling.”

            “You think he’d come?”

            “He’d be nuts not to. Besides he owes me, for using me and tossing me aside.”

            “Awe. That’s so sad.”

            “Not really. I kinda fixed them up. But he doesn’t know that.”

Chapter 12

July 3, 8:00 p.m.

            “You gonna phone Hank again?” asked Jean as they carried their breakfast trays to the rack. They had sat with the other Post Grift people and listened to them fret about drills, lydar and programming.

            “Maybe,” said Jenny, “I don’t know. I was gonna wait for him to call. Don’t wanna look needy. Last time, we had the ‘career in policing’ stuff for an excuse. I don’t want to scare him off.”

            “But if you get too pushy, can’t he just threaten you with his gun?”

            “Oh, don’t say that! He’d probably just tase me.”

            “But your first date went really well, didn’t it? Just say you’ve more questions about a career. If he isn’t hot for you then he’ll say he’s busy fighting crime.”

            “Yeah.”

            “Does he know you’re going for engineer? Switching to cop would be a big decision. It’s only natural that you’d have questions.”

            “You’re right,” sighed Jenny, and she pulled out her phone. After a brief conversation, she hung up and said, “Same place. 5:00 a.m. Good thing both of us can take a ‘working lunch’ anytime at all. Unless there’s some pain-in-the-neck emergency.”    

            “How do you beat a donut shop to romance a cop?’

            “It’s a restaurant! Sort of. It does have donuts. Raised too. And glazed. I love the maple.”

            “Just load him up with sugar and he’ll fall in love with anything.”

            “He says the funniest things. ‘If you don’t like cops, then the next time you need help, call a thief.’”

            “That’s good. It’s old though.”

            “He can tell me all the old jokes he wants.”

            “After you and Hank are happily married, do you think you’ll ever come here for a vacation?”

            “We’ll have to stay at his parents, and they’re 19 miles from here. But that shouldn’t stop me. With all the alternative medicine here, I’d just have to say it’ll increase my fertility. And I’ll complain of pains or nausea to my mom, and then say it’s probably nothing. And then wait for her to decide that it’s serious. Both of us could complain. Then both our moms would make us come for therapy. And they’ll insist on paying because it was them who were worrying.”

            “She must really love you. To put up with you.”

            “She does,” said Jenny. “She’s always been happy wrapped round my finger. And besides, we’re loaded. My other grandpa owned a sweatshop. I never met him. Grandma says he was always at work. He was a tyrant. Everybody was scared of him. Then he dropped dead at 52 and left her a small fortune.”

            “Sounds like my grandpa. Only he was a doctor with a big clinic. A really classy sweatshop where he got to oppress young doctors.”

            “Mom says doctor’s all need a comeuppance. But she says that, really, a doctor’s patients train him to be high and mighty. They want to believe he possesses God-like powers to cure. So they’ll worship him like a god, just to reassure themselves. It goes to the poor guy’s head without him even knowing it.”

            “The ‘poor guy?’ Does that mean he’s a victim?” joked Jean.

            “I heard Sarah talking about how the guests who come here will get a follow-up courtesy call to see how they’re feeling. They’ve already been asked what brought them here, so if they’re worse you just blame whatever condition they had already. Unless it’s serious. Then you tell them to go into an ER, and you hope for the best. But if they mention any sort of improvement, they’ll get another call from another sweetie-pie. She’ll say they’re doing research. They actually will be doing research. It’d all be done by some PhD they’ve found somewhere.”

            “Where do you find a PhD?”

            “You look them up online. Just type in ‘where do I hire a PhD to do medical research.’ Do some study that’ll be written up nicely and sent off to a medical journal. That way they’re not lying about doing research. But the callers will be trained to ask them leading questions. Things that would help them realize their health problem had been somehow benefited by whatever happened here.”

            “To encourage them to come back?” asked Jean.

            “That and more. Let’s say some old guy decides that this place saved his life. He’ll be asked, nicely, if it’d be okay if news of his miraculous recovery was passed along to a medical journalist. A pair of hotties, boy and girl, will come and do an interview and take some nice photos. Then the story will get sold to a tabloid. And to local papers that do a lot of fluff pieces. You pay a big ‘publicist’ firm to do it all. They’ll hype it to heaven and sing praises to Mount Hohokam. They love that kind of thing. It’ll be really great publicity. And cheaper than regular advertising.”

            “Wouldn’t that be a bit unethical?”

            “I don’t know. I doubt it. Ethics are malleable. See, they won’t have lied. There’d been actual research being done. It might actually be good. The only thing would be their motivation. It’s for business first, and advancement of medical knowledge second. But… if that’s unethical, then isn’t most scientific research unethical? Look at Big Pharma. They’re always coming up with convincing sounding research for some new drug they’ve got a patent on. But the FDA has approved 19,000 drugs. Most are almost never prescribed because they were never much good in the first place. It’s a snake-oil racket.”

“Wow.”

“And how many professors are dreaming of the day their research might lead to a patent that’ll make them rich and famous.”

            “But what Cactex is doing isn’t dreaming,” said Jean. “It’s plotting.”

            “But aren’t I studying engineering to get me a high-paying career in the firm that my dearest Auntie Sarah runs? Is that not nepotism? Am I unethically going in for engineering for less than the most noble of reasons?”

            “In your case, yes.”

            “My grandpa says it’s okay to go for a high-paying career so long as you want to work for ‘change within the system.’”
            “How do you do that?” asked Jean.

            “I asked Mom. Before you’re a partner, there’d not be much you could do, other than date a visible minority. A hunk, ideally. That plus seethe with moral outrage at least once every time you go to a party. But once you’re a partner, you get to decide who gets hired.”

            “Oh, I already know a good one,” said Jean. “She’s an Asian female. We used to study together so we could cheat on the lockdown.”

            “Good for you!”

            “She just turned 18, and she’s cute as a button. And her parents are Republican.”

            “She’s qualified, already.”

            “Does rich, conservative, Asian still count as an oppressed minority?”

            “I don’t see why not,” shrugged Jenny.

            “She says her grandfather was an accountant for a Maharaja. He ‘borrowed’ money from him and got rich flipping real estate. Then he bought his way into America. A million bucks to build an apartment block in a slum got him an EB-5 visa.”

            “Cool! Huddled masses with moola. What’s she majoring in?”

            “Well… she hates math,” said Jean, like it was a medical disorder. “I helped her a lot.”

            “Oh well. It takes all kinds. Mom says the lockdown might have a spectacular silver lining. As soon as dastardly Donald said ‘we don’t shut down the economy for the flu,’ the wokies said ‘well, if he’s against it, then I’m for it!’ And from then on, all the harm to ‘children at risk,’ and the ‘emotionally challenged,’ and the ‘economically disadvantaged’ – it all became wokie harm. And they’re feeling guilty. Which they’re really good at. And it seems to be taking a bit of the wind out of their sails. And another thing. More and more, Big Pharma and their friends are looking like they imposed a reign of terror to help maximize profits from less than wonderful vaccines and antivirals. They might eventually face enough ‘oversight’ to make them focus on alleviating human suffering rather than cashing in on it.”

“Wow. Your mom makes them sound evil.”

“Speaking of evil, how’d your walk with Euglena go?”

            “She seems nice.”

            “She isn’t. After your tour with Jacob, she was fuming. Especially after I started worrying about it, too.”

            “Oh, honestly, Jenny.”

            “I can’t help it! I was born this way!”

            “You can’t blame Euglena. She’s a woman in love.”

            “She’s a woman from hell. All her grades have gone to her head. That and her modeling. And her family’s wealth. She’s too empowered.”

            “Oh, come now,” sighed Jean. “Can a woman ever be too empowered?”

            “If only she was willing to use her empowerment for goodness rather than evil. I’ve been watching her since I was a baby.”

            “What’d you do? Puke on her?”

            “I hope so” said Jenny, but then she stopped to think. “She needs a comeuppance,” she said slowly. “She needs to be brought down.”

            “Jenny. You’ve got a weird look on your face.”

            “Oh, sorry.”

            “Don’t worry. It was kind of cute.”

Chapter 13

July 3, 8:30 p.m.

            “I’ve thought of a practical joke that we could play on Euglena,” said Jenny. They had already gone to the gazebo to warm up. “We could design an official-looking form. Something that the detectives might have used. Like something they’d write notes on for an official investigation. And we could put something about how somebody was fingering her for murderer. Murderess. And then leave it where she’d find it.”

            “That’d be cruel,” said Jean, shaking her head.

            “It’s no worse than some of the things she’s done to me. Besides, I’m doing it for you. It’ll get her mind off of you and Jacob. She might try to sabotage you, in the eyes of Sarah, and destroy your career.”

            “She wouldn’t do that!”

            “She would!” insisted Jenny. “She’s done it before! She’s a viper!”

            “Maybe she was born that way.”

            “We could have ‘Eyes Only’ at the top of the form. Like on a CIA thing.”

            “What do you mean ‘we’?”

            “And it could have ‘Tucson Police Homicide Unit’ on it. We could find something on the internet. And photoshop out what’s there, and then print it off. And then… I could fake my printing by trying to fake somebody else’s printing.”

            “You’re evil!”

            “I’m empowered!” said Jenny with a grin as she typed a search on her laptop. “Oh look. Something like this,” and she showed her a filled-in form from a police investigation.

            “This is so wrong!” said Jean with a smirk.

            They went to the trailer to print it off, and then Jenny filled in the blank spaces. Under ‘notes,’ she printed, “#4 saw EG come from trailer with ‘guilty look.’ Time within window. #7 heard susp self-incr. #3 corrob. EG now prime sus.”

            “’Sus’ means suspect?” asked Jean as she read it. “And incr means incriminate. Corroborate… and EG stands for Euglena Graves?”

            “Good. If you can guess them, so can she. Where should we leave it?”

            “On the floor, under her desk. Where else?”

            “Go in front of me,” said Jenny, as she stood up. “If somebody comes in, ask them a stupid question.”

            “Can do!” said Jean as they walked slowly to the desk. Jenny slipped it under. They made it back to their table in time to be sitting, just as the door opened. It was only Sarah, who rushed past without seeming to notice them.
            “What’ll we do now?” asked Jean, after Sarah had found something and left.

            “Nothing. Study. Ask me for help with something.”

            “I’ve been thinking about all the research that Cactex is… giving money to. Is the world going to be better off knowing how many ‘years of life lost’ there might have been?”

            “Well, whether we want it or not, we’re gonna find out. Over the next few years one study after another’s going to be coming out. There’s sure to have been lots of scientists wondering about it all while they were doing nothing on a Saturday night.”

            “I suppose,” sighed Jean.

            “And we’re hoping Trump die-hards will keep thinking that if only the Democrats hadn’t used covid scare tactics to beat him, he would’ve had time enough to make America great again.”

            “Would he have?”

            “Unemployment in 2019 was the lowest in 50 years!”

            “What?”

            “You hadn’t heard that?”

            “I was just in grade 9. I had clothing to think of.”

            “If it’d hit that under Obama, we’d all have heard about it until we begged for mercy.”

            “Maybe.”

            “So we’re hoping that Trump lovers will keep on thinking that he could have done so so so much more to make America great again. But he was stopped by all the fake news about covid. And that’ll make this place a shrine for his devotees. And that’ll make Cactex money. And what’s good for Cactex is good for Post Grift and Associates. And that means my auntie and your daddy. What’s good for them is good for your career and, more importantly, for mine.”

            “But… I can’t help but think about how doing this kind of research doesn’t show much respect for all the thousands of healthcare workers who died of covid. If they prove that the fight against covid did more harm than good, then that’ll mean they died for a lost cause.”

            “Only to a Democrat.”

            “Yeah,” said Jean after a long sigh. “But wouldn’t the death rates have been up even higher if there’d been no masks and distancing?”

            “But everybody, including dastardly Donald, would have advised the very old and the very feeble to order in until there was a vaccine. But does that mean the government had to keep the young and the beautiful from going to parties, and finding that special guy, and starting to produce grandchildren?”

            “They kept saying the ICU doctors and nurses were having to work really long hours, and that they were really, really exhausted.”

            “I wonder if you can get a repetitive motion disorder from sticking tubes into old people?” asked Jenny. “Oh, listen to this. There’s a lawyer named Larry Macon who ran 239 full marathons in one year! And you should see him! He looks like a little old man in a Three Stooges show.”

            “I loved the Stooges!” confessed Jean.

            “You didn’t! I loved them too!”

            “And I was always embarrassed to admit it because none of the other girls liked them. I wonder… I wonder if it can predict who will end up in engineering?”

            “Maybe,” said Jenny with a shrug. “Maybe Stooges trivia should go into the GRE. Mom says the lockdown was just like Prohibition. She says it’s only ever been about one in ten people who will end up an alcoholic. Or a drug addict. But with Prohibition they bullied everybody who wanted a drink. And that’s why it failed. We aren’t a nation of pushovers.”

            “Well, maybe we should be.”

            “At first, I thought all the flap was worth the bother, for the sake of the old folks. But then I got sick of studying. And Zooming! And Mom wore me down with all her reliable sources. It took about a month.”

            “Do you ever go to fact-checking sites to see if you’re mother’s sources are right?”

            “No, I just assume she has. That’s what mothers are for. And you know what? Fact checkers have debunked the claim that the cup was half empty by pointing to recent observations that the cup was, in fact, half full.”

            “Well…”

            “But that’s not what’s important. Now that I’m going to be the pretty face of Post Grift, I need to start to really like the man who wanted to make American less chicken again.”

            “You sure that you’re going to be the pretty face?” asked Jean as she pulled back her shoulders and flashed a winning smile. “You’ve got competition now, honey.”
            “I knew you’d turn on me!”

            “But anyways, you think you’ll wear me down with reliable sources before the end of the summer? I might be a closet Covidarian.”
            “Easy-peasy. End of the week. And we should be happy about all the research. Without it nobody will ever know anything for sure. They still won’t but they’ll at least be less unsure. We’ll probably have to wait for the current generations of virologists to die of old age. Just like with generals after a war. California had a really strict lockdown, but by December cases shot right up. And Florida called off the lockdown and went full-Swedish-meatball, and at the end of the year their case rate wasn’t much more than California. And that’s the official rate which just might be influenced by justification tactics.”

“We’re a nation of believers.”

“Same deal with Japan and South Korea. They were poster boys for lockdowns and then, all of the sudden, their case rates went berserk. And look what happened to China after they finally came to their senses. They may as well of had lockdown-lite from the start and showed some pity on the bored and homebound masses yearning to breathe free.”

            “I heard Sweden ended up with the lowest death rate.”

“Yeah, they tied for the lowest all-cause mortality for OECD countries,” said Jenny as she shook her head. “But the WHO is still pushing for a treaty that’ll give them power to flick the lockdown switch any time they want. Imagine it? America’s liberty falling under the rule of some apparatchik in Geneva! Tedros Ghebreyesus, the guy in charge, used to belong to the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front. Back when it was Marxist-Leninist. And some say he still is. And there’s Democrats who want to hand power over to him! Do we want our freedoms to be come under the rule of a closet-Marxist? And to epidemiologists, who can seize power whenever they want to start lying by omission? Deciding how many people can be allowed to die before we all have to be put under house arrest? It isn’t a decision that should go to geeks who can’t dress themselves.

“Maybe after they got wives to dress them.”

“It’s not just a medical issue. It’s a philosophical issue. Everybody deserves a say. Do we really want the power to rob us of our social life to be handed over to nerds who’ve never had a social life?”

            “What does ‘lie by omission’ mean?” asked Jean, after a pause.

            “A guy is standing at a bus stop. A second guy comes up with a cute little dog. The first guy says ‘Does your dog bite? The second guy says ‘No.’ The first guy goes to pet the dog, and he bites him. He says, ‘I thought you said he didn’t bite!’ The second guy says ‘He’s not my dog.’”

            “Oh,” said Jean. “But somebody has to be the big expert. Even if they can’t dress themselves. Look at engineers.”

            “Yes, and we can all save more lives for ever and ever by permanently cutting all speed limits in half. And by outlawing bicycles and canoes. And soft drinks and desserts.”

            “Not desserts!”

            “And outlawing extreme sports. Almost any risky sport. Anything done by some jock who’ll happily kill himself doing something stupid.”

            “Himself or herself!”

            “Maybe the courts should recognize a constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness.”

            “Beat’s a right to privacy,” said Jean with a sigh.
            “And that’s why we’re going to have lots and lots of studies, whether we like it or not. To find out if the epidemiologists all happily went stupid in their effort to scare the bad boys into distancing themselves from the hot babes. My mom says the geeks are going to be going over the data for the rest of the decade – the rest of the century. Because every country and every state had its own individual lockdown. Each one had a different set of rules and a different mix of people. Each one was a big experiment. Experiments performed on uninformed human subjects.”

            “You make it sound creepy.”

            “They’ll all have been piling up tons of data. Mom says that, 500 years from now, there’ll still be historians doing their PhD on the 2020 lockdown craze.”

            “Really?” said Jean, after a pause.

            “And Grandpa actually agrees with Mom on that one. And since our own future success is tied to the firm of Post Grift and Associates, then we ought to be hoping that a whole lot of studies come out that’ll make dear old Donald look like the Prince of Prudence. Make him look like the poor guy who was forced out of office by the killjoys who stood up and said that one plus one better be three, just to be safe.”

            “Yeah,” sighed Jean. They sat in silence.

            “I wonder what they do at Emergency if somebody tests positive for covid, plus a squeezed-off windpipe from asthma, plus a panic attack, all at the same time? Like, how would you administer a puffer, an oxygen mask, and a paper bag at the same time?”

            “In rapid succession, maybe. What is a panic attack anyways?”

            “It’s when you get all excited and you start breathing too fast. But the attack is usually over in ten or twenty minutes, anyways. But some people will get one after another.”

            “Cool. Have you ever had one?”

            “Not even on a rollercoaster,” sighed Jenny, as if she felt she had missed out. “An anxiety attack can last for days. With a panic attack your body produces too much norepinephrine, and with an anxiety attack you’re wacked out on your cortisol. ‘High on life.’ I’ve been wondering just how many people who went to Emergency were having an anxiety attack on top of their covid. And whether laid-back types would just sit at home until they felt better and never get to be a confirmed case.”

            “I really wonder about people who say they’re ‘high on life.’”        

            “Yeah,” laughed Jenny. “The ones that brag about it. Is it just a lot of anxiety attacks in a victim of chronic happiness?”

            “Did you know that some people get the same effect from coffee that a normal person would only get from an illegal drug?”

            “Have you ever used an illegal drug?”

            “Only while robbing a bank,” joked Jean.

            “Don’t I know it, sister. It’s so embarrassing when you wake up with a headache and a bag full of new bills. Like, where do you put it where your mom can’t find it?”

            “You’ve really done this!” said Jean and she pretended to gasp with horror.

            “I wish. I’m such a priss. I fell among good company. Sometimes I get an urge to do something really stupid, just to prove I’ve got what it takes.”

            “Once when grandma was sitting us, we were refusing to do our homework. So she got mad and gave us a lecture on ‘stick-to-it-ive-ness.’ So me and my brother smeared ourselves with glue and came out covered with paper. She got really mad.”

            “I’d like to meet your grandma,” said Jenny. “Maybe I could drive her nuts, too.”

            “Oh! I thought of another Trump joke. Why did little Donald always go to school with skinny kids? He’d had them all convinced to invest their lunch money in real estate.”

Chapter 14

July 4, 4:00 a.m.

            After a long hour spent struggling with calculus, Jean saw her dad coming in with Euglena. Jacob gave her a quick smile and returned to his work. She looked tired and slowly sat down at her desk. When opening a drawer she noticed the paper on the floor. She picked it up, read it, and turned it upside down on her desk. The color drained from her face. After a glance to the side, she picked it up and read it again.

            After studying for what she felt was long enough to appear to be completely innocent, Jenny lazily asked Jean if she felt it was time to go out to warm up. With laptops and textbooks, they went past Euglena, carefully avoiding her eyes. Impulsively, both gave Jacob a nervous smile.

            “You can study that stuff too much,” advised Jacob, as he followed them out. Their smiles had looked like invitations. “Is Jenny a big help? Or just a big pain?”

            “She’s a huge help,” said Jean. “She’s taken two math courses and she aced them both.”

            “Just an A minus in one,” apologized Jenny.

            “Look, a falling star,” said Jacob, pointing. “That’s what’s great about working here. Even with all these oversized reading lights here, the stars are still bright. I’ve never paid so much attention to the night sky.”

            “I think you guys all need more stargazing,” said Jean. “You all look like you’ve been working way too hard.”

            “We have been!” apologized Jacob as he followed them into the gazebo. “And worrying too much. It’s all the double-checking. I may as well be a copy editor. But we’re coming up to the big moment. The first layer of blasting – the first series. It’ll tell us what kind of rock we’re really dealing with. If there are no surprises in the first round, then likely there’ll be none in the second. Sawing and chiseling won’t break off any big chunks. And then that’ll be it. Victory is in our sights. When the blasting’s done, we can all exhale.”

            “What do you mean ‘the first series?’” asked Jean.

            “Just that you don’t want to blast it all at the same time,” he said as he stood in line at the espresso machine. “You start on one side of a section and move across. One row at a time. It can be in rapid succession, though. You just want the rock thinner on one side, so the pressure of the blast takes out the rock where you want it to come out, and leaves the other side firm.”

            “That makes sense,” said Jean.

            Jacob went on to explain the mechanics of blasting as if he were an expert. They were all starting to make stupid jokes about explosives when Jean noticed Euglena. Jacob saw Jean’s expression and turned to look. With one last chuckle, he got up to ask Euglena what she was thinking about.

            “She’s completely fooled,” whispered Jenny, when they were outside. “Did you see her face? She’s losing her mind.”

            “Isn’t this a bit extreme?” asked Jean as she shook her head.

            “I did it for you! Otherwise, she’d be focused on you and the threat you pose. You should be thanking me. I’ve probably saved your career.”

            “Oh, I’m sure.”

            “She’s worried sick! Literally! The blasting and the murder, and her ‘special guy with the roving eye.’”

            “Where do you get all these old-fashioned sayings?”

            “From spending a year locked in a house with my mother and grandfather. I don’t think I’ll ever recover from it.”

            “I wonder if I’ve been doing it too?” Jean asked herself. “I haven’t said ‘Hubba-hubba,’ have I.”

            “I’m wondering about Euglena. She’ll go in the can, and you can hear her inside, barfing her guts out. And then she’ll come out staring at the floor and smelling like a mint lozenge.”

            “Barfing? You suppose maybe she’s pregnant?”      

            “Oh… jeepers,” said Jenny as her face went serious. “I didn’t even think of that.”

            “Does she look like she’s gained a bit of weight?”

            “She does. Is that a sign?”

            “Sometimes. Is she moody?”

            “She’s always that. But she’s worse now.”

            “Is she stuffy?”

            “She is!”

            “Is she peeing more often?”

            “I don’t watch her than close!”

            “Well…”

            “She must be pregnant!” said Jenny as she held her hand to her forehead in despair. “It all fits. It’s so obvious! She may as well have a ‘Baby of Board’ t-shirt. Oh, poor Jacob.”

            “What do you mean ‘poor Jacob?’ How about poor Euglena?”

            “Yeah, her too.”

            “Wasn’t she on the pill?” asked Jean.

            “Her mother talked her into this Christian summer school thing, and they got her all excited and she took the pledge. But then she took off her ‘purity ring’ for fear of scaring him off.”

            “And she didn’t go back on the pill?”

            “I guess not,” moaned Jenny. “I think she was counting on the strength of her convictions.”

            “Wow! That’s like asking my brother to use common sense.”

            “I hope our note doesn’t give her a miscarriage.”

            “Our note! It’s your note!”

            “You put me up to it!” insisted Jenny, as she held both hands to her face. “Oh… mercy, I feel so guilty, now.”

            “This is poetic justice, then.”

            “I don’t deserve this.”

            “Oh honestly, Jenny. What your deserving is…” Jean started. “Speaking of deserving. Why is Hoover going on the cliff?”

            “Who? Oh, Hoover. I think it’s because they’ve got to have another one-term president who was unfairly vilified by lying Democrats.”

            “But I thought he was the worst president ever?”

            “No,” sighed Jenny. “Mom says he was likely the smartest president of them all. He was a mining engineer. An explosives guy. Like your dad.”

            “Ooo, I like him already!”

            “And he was really successful in business. And he wrote a best-seller called ‘American Individualism.’ And he built a big reputation when he was put in charge of food relief in Europe, after World War I. The Europeans sang his praises. He didn’t use it to get rich off graft and kickbacks. They couldn’t quite understand that. Europeans are a bit dense. And during the Harding and Coolidge administrations he was Secretary of Commerce, but people called him ‘Secretary of Everything.’ The brains of the operation. And then the poor guy went and got elected president at just the absolute wrongest time ever. Just when the Depression was sneaking up on everybody.”

            “I thought he caused the Depression.”

            “That’s just what Democrat historians say. But that’s most historians.”

            “What did cause the Depression, then?” asked Jean.

            “The Elation.”

            “What’s that?”

            “I don’t know. Mom says that. She said there was a binge of easy credit for stuff like washing machines and houses. And buying stocks in a company was one form of easy credit because when you buy stocks in a new issue, you’re basically loaning money to the company. Mom says that a lot of Roosevelt’s New Deal was started by Hoover. He was an ‘activist,’ which is kind of the same as being a liberal.”

            “Oh, I thought of a joke. Franklin Roosevelt’s therapist told him that he was suffering from an irrational fear of fear itself.”

            “That’s cute. But the Democrat historians give Roosevelt the credit for everything. But it doesn’t matter anyways because it didn’t end the Depression. The unemployment rate was as high in 1939 as it was in ‘31. It was the War Effort that saved the country from the Depression. They finally spent their way out of it. People got elated again.”

            “It must come in handy to have a mom that knows everything.”

            “She does!” said Jenny with bright eyes, “Sometimes, when I had to write an essay, I’d just ask her a question and type really fast.”

            “Wow. Lucky.”

            “She’s what you call a ‘sponge.’”

            “Because she soaks up everything?” asked Jean. “That reminds me. I heard Sarah say that there’ll likely be angry Indian… Indigenous groups going to court and saying that Mount Hohokam is a sacred ground for them. Is that right?”

            “She hopes they do. There’s likely to be an angry Democrat Indigenous leader who can persuade some group to claim they’ve an interest that can give them ‘standing’ in court. Then they can crowdfund to hire lawyers. Which should be easy. Some legal eagle who wants to jumpstart his… her political career. And it’ll likely end up with a settlement that’ll give them… something. But it’ll still be cheap advertising for Cactex. Everybody will win except for the Indigenous people. Archeologists say the descendants of the Hohokam people are the Pima and Tohono O'odham tribes. They’ve got a big reserve close by. Big casino in Phoenix. There’ll be a shuttle from here.”

            “Have they tried anything legal yet?” asked Jean.

            “No. But Cactex has been hiring their people and donating to community projects. Maybe they’ll hire lawyers for them. And so far, they think it’s just gonna be a big yucca. But there’d have to be a few of them that have opinions about dear old Donald.”

            “Oh! Listen! I thought of another one. Why was little Donald always so boring on Halloween? He always went as the scariest thing he could think of. A liberal policy analyst.”

            “That’s good. Oh, jeepers,” said Jenny, squinting at her laptop. “It’s 5:00. I godda go see Hank. Before he falls for the waitress… the server.”

Chapter 15

July 4, 7:00 a.m.

            “How’d it go?” asked Jean when Jenny got back to their room. Jean was just back from supper, and was resting her brain with a novel.

            “Great! We talked and talked and talked. Stupid things, mostly.”

            “That’s always best.”

            “He told me all about his dogs. Setters. He trains them.”

            “Maybe someday he’ll be training you.”

            “I can’t wait. Mom’s already taught me how to sit up and beg. And I took this weekend course called ‘Passive-Aggressive Manipulation.’”

            “Oh good,” laughed Jean. “Something practical.”

            “It was supposed to be to convince you not to do it, but it just gave me ideas.”

            “Like teaching home security to a thief?”

            “Yeah. Or teaching teenage boys about the danger of using illegal drugs. I think the only reason my brother got vaccinated for covid is because Mom was worried the new mRNA technology might be dangerous. And then he came home and pretended to go into convulsions. It was so funny! I had to hold onto her foot to stop her from calling 911. She can really squirm.”

            “Did you get vaccinated?” asked Jean.

            “Oh sure. I’ll try anything three times.”

            “I got them, too. At first. I told Mom I wanted to try heroin next.”

            “Oh, why didn’t I think of saying that! I’m so dense sometimes!”

            “You could say it to Hank.”

            “I could say it to his parents,” said Jenny, with the dreamy look she got whenever she thought of him. “Hank says he’d like to live somewhere else for a while. Another country maybe. Study Spanish or something.”

            “At Northridge,” said Jean, with a smile. “That’ll be another country for him, almost.”

            “If only I could get him fired somehow. But still able to travel. I got to read a book on law-enforcement ethics.”

            “I’m worried,” said Jean, after Jenny had gone through everything she and Hank had said.

            “About Euglena getting revenge?”

            “No. She’ll assume you did it on your own. I’m wondering whether being associated with the research will follow us.”

            “You mean follow us with preferred access to a partnership in a highly successful firm?”

            “But don’t you think a professional engineer has to have a reputation for… professionalism?”

            “Where’d you get a crazy idea like that?” joked Jenny as she put down her laptop and leaned back on her bed. “And anyways, the statues won’t have your name in the corner.”

            “The 70-foot-Donald won’t be the biggest problem.”

            “There’s an 80-footer somewhere?”

            “No! Both of us are going to be associated with bogus research. Won’t that be bad when you go into politics?”

            “It isn’t bogus, you ninny!”

            “Ninny? Isn’t that on the list?”

            “No. It’s short for ‘Innocence.’ It was one of the Puritan names, like ‘Patience,’ and ‘Prudence.’”

            “Oh, I love those old names.”

            “There was this guy in the English Parliament whose first name was Praise-God. My brother’s just lucky he wasn’t named ‘Eat-Your-Vegetables.’”

            “Yeah,”

“But besides, Cactex didn’t hire people to do it. They just gave money to people doing it already. And they’re legitimate, reputable, honest PhDs who made their own decision.”

            “But they’re taking money from Cactex,” insisted Jean.

            “Everybody’s taking money from corporations these days. All researchers. Or most. A lot of them. The ones that can get it. Grandpa’s always grumbling about how it’s corrupting the universities.”

            “But that’s different.”

            “No, it’s not! Cactex is a respectable real estate developer who never imagined what a stink the Democrats would make about a tiny little 70-foot-Donald-face.”

            “Except that they’re hoping for a big stink.”

            “The easy-on-Donald research might get more and more convincing. And it could easily end up being the consensus view.”

            “The what?”

            “When you’re in a meeting,” explained Jenny, “and you ‘come to a consensus,’ that means everybody has agreed on something. When most of the experts, all over the world, have accepted that some theory is pretty close to reality, then that’s the ‘consensus view’ of the ‘specialists.’ And the anti-lockdown researchers have had an advantage in the ratings just because it’s all so controversial. A researcher will still have to cite an article, even if he’s condemning it.”

            “What ‘ratings?’” asked Jean. “Who rates them?”

            “A research paper gets ‘marked’ when it goes before ‘the referees.’ That’s a detailed examination by highly qualified people who act as jurors for a scientific journal. But after that, it will keep on being evaluated, because they’ll be counting how many times it’s been cited in another journal article.”

            “Oh?” said Jean, in a tone that sounded like she understood nothing.

            “If you go to university for four years, and you stick to the same major and get good grades, you’ll be able to do a big research project with the help of a professor. You’ll do a smaller one for your Master’s and then a bigger one for your PhD.”

            “What does PhD stand for?”

            “Lemme look,” said Jenny as she tapped a question into her laptop. “It means ‘philosophiae doctor,’ in Latin. ‘Philo’ means ‘fond of.’ ‘Sophia’ means ‘wisdom’ and ‘doctor’ means ‘teacher.’ So it’s like a license to be a teacher who teaches people how to be fond of wisdom.”

            “It’ll never work,” joked Jean.

            “So you spend years on a research project, and you write it up in a book-length ‘thesis’ and you get awarded with an announcement on their website that says you’ve received a PhD from an accredited university. Accredited means good. What you’ll probably do then is boil down your thesis into a short article, for a special sort of magazine. Once it’s published, anybody in the world who’s interested can read about it. Before you even started your research you read a whole pile of this sort of article. You read until you’re ready to die from reading. Because you don’t want to ‘reinvent the wheel.’”

            “I hate it when that happens.”

            “Only it won’t usually be called an article. It’ll be called a paper or a publication. And the magazine it goes in won’t be called a magazine. It’ll be called a ‘journal.’”

            “They like to go under a lot of aliases,” joked Jean.

            “So if, for example, you’re an expert on skin diseases of dogs, then the journal might be called the ‘International Journal of Canine Dermatology.’ That means ‘worldwide magazine for wondering about dog skin.’ Only it’s in all Latin. People with PhDs like to say things in a dead language to prove how ‘deadly serious’ they are.”

            “Not ‘deadly boring?’”

            “Half of what you’ll do in university is to learn how to say something in a convoluted and obscure sort of way. It’s called a ‘scholarly tone.’ Mom says it’s to generate an ‘illusion of depth’.”

            “Oh.”

            “It’s how to sound like you know a lot, even if you’re still confused.”

            “I could make use of that.”

            “In your paper you might say, ‘every year you’ll usually see more… ‘Skippy’s itch,’ right up until mid-June, and then you’ll see less of it, and the dogs will stop scratching.”

            “My brother’s always scratching.”

            “But then you might wonder if other dog skin experts will doubt whether that’s true. So to reassure them, you’ll put in a ‘footnote,’ telling them what article you got that juicy piece of information from. When you put in a footnote that tells about an article, you’re ‘citing the publication.’ The footnote is the little number that takes you down to where you’ve got the name and the author and the date of the paper. You’re saying ‘And I know that’s probably true because this guy said so in this article, and he must be really smart because he’s got a big fat write-up in this heavy-duty journal.’”

            “They’ll know I mean business,” said Jean as she banged her fist on the table.

            “If you get your PhD , and your paper gets published in a journal, you’ll hope a bunch of experts ‘footnote it.’ That’s the same as saying they have ‘cited your study.’ It’s a little pat on the back for you. It means he, or she, thinks your research is good enough for him to want to use for backup.”

            “That nice of him… or her. If only he wore a dress, we could tell.”

            “Actually, it won’t be just ‘your’ paper when it’s your first one. The professor in charge of helping you with your research will send the paper in for you, and his… or her, name will go ahead of yours.”

            “His, or her, name goes first?” asked Jean.

            “Right.”

            “Even if I, or me, did all the work?”

            “Right. Well, you never did all the work,” sighed Jenny. “He at least has read it several times, and each time he’s written comments in the margin.”

            “Polite ones, I hope.”

            “So he’s sent your paper into the big-time journal, and you’ve got your fingers crossed. The editor sends it off to the jurors. The team of jurors are big experts who are qualified to judge your research because they’ve spent their careers on dog skin.”
            “And if they say it’s good,” said Jean. “I crack open the champagne.”

            “Yes. And after you’ve had a couple of papers published, maybe you’ll be asked to serve as a juror. By then, people will be starting to call you an expert.”

            “I’ll just go to my head.”

            “A lot of jurors are university professors. My mom was a juror. Or they might work for some outfit that calls itself an ‘institute’ or a ‘foundation.’ That’s what you get your PhD degree for, usually. So you can get a job in research and be called an ‘expert.’”

            “And maybe then my dog will start to listen to me.”

            “But how do you know which is the best journal to send it to? Well, luckily for you, there are companies out there who take all the journals in the whole world. The ones in university libraries. And they copy down all the footnotes in all the papers, and pump them into a computer. Then the computer counts all the times your paper was footnoted in another paper, written by another expert. They count all your pats-on-the-back. That gives you a score for how much of an international expert you are. It’s like your final marks in grade 12.”

            “The pressure’s on!” joked Jean.

            “Now, the footnote counters will then count up all the times that all of the papers published in the same journal have been footnoted in another paper in another journal. And that produces a grade for the journal. There’s an outfit in Philadelphia called Clarivate that’s been doing this for decades. And another one called Scopus. The highest rated scientific journal in the world is called Nature, and it’s based out of London. Number two is The New England Journal of Medicine. The number one journal for engineering is the Annual Review of Control, Robotics and Autonomous Systems. It's up in Silicon Valley. If you can get a paper published in one of them, then you’ll be dancing and skipping.”
            “Because I’ve got ‘Skippy’s disease!’” joked Jean.

            “No. It’s because you’ve made it to the top of the charts. You’re a scientist with a chart-topping hit single. And you’ll be dancing because you know that it’ll count for promotions and pay raises. And it’ll make you the envy of all your colleagues – your fellow experts. And, if you want, you’ll be able to get yourself a job teaching in a big university.”

            “And then I’ll be a babe-magnet.”

            “Sadly, no,” sighed Jenny. “But if the research that Cactex is giving money to makes it into one of those the top medical journals, it’ll be a ridiculously good day for us, and for 70-foot-Donald, and for all the Antilockdownists.”

            “You think they got a chance?”

            “What do I know? I’m a third-year student who got a summer job from her aunt. But even if nobody publishes them, they’ll be released to the public on some website. And 70-foot-Donald-lovers can then say that they’d been blacklisted by the liberal-university-establishment. But that’ll likely be even better, because then it’ll be a conspiracy theory.”

            “Now you’ve got me interested!”

            “But the news will still get out. And it’ll be stacked on top of all the other articles. And it’ll make for news stories in the media and on websites and Youtube videos. And all the Antilockdownism will help drum up business for the Mount Hohokam. Controversy sells.”

            “And then,” said Jean, “there’ll be big profits, and my dad will get his investment back with a big return. And then he’ll be promoted to partner and get a big pay raise. And then someday I’ll be a partner in the firm of Post, Grift, Fraser and Associates.”

            “And I will, too. And then I’ll be able to buy my gorgeous husband a fast car. He’ll want it to impress the other house-husbands when he picks up our kids at soccer practice. So we godda hope that the papers get published somewhere. And that they generate lots of controversy.”

            “Here’s to hoping,” sighed Jean. “Oh. I thought of another. How do you get even with an epidemiologist? You say ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ And then you just leave him to think about it for a while.”

Chapter 16

July 4, 8:00 p.m.

            “He’s pretty happy for a guy who just got his girlfriend pregnant,” said Jenny. They were on their way out to the gazebo and had met Jacob coming in to work.

            “Do you think she’s told him?” asked Jean.

            “I suppose she might not have.”

            “Maybe she’s not pregnant.”

            “Maybe. Professor Essor had a lot to say about men who don’t accept responsibility for their unplanned pregnancies. She didn’t have any new solutions, though. She just wanted to make the boys in the class wallow in guilt by association.”

            “Did it work?”

            “Oh yeah. Think of who signs up for a sociology class. Liberals like to carry a heavy burden of shame. Did you know that men are three-and-a-half times more likely than women to commit suicide?”

            “They should have used a condom,” joked Jean.

            “Suicide’s almost as bad in Canada, so it isn’t because there’s just more guns lying around saying ‘Pick me! Pick me!’” And did you know that lots of men go to jail for not paying maintenance for their… unintended offspring. Mr. D said that makes it a debtor’s prison.”

            “Who’s Mr. D?” asked Jean.

            “He’s a guy in Essor’s class who wanted to get a D. He must have. Otherwise he wouldn’t have kept on trying to prove her wrong.”

            “Did he get one?”

            “How would I know?”

            “You could phone him.”

            “No. He’s a geek. He’d fall in love with me, and when I refused to go out with him, it’d break his heart, and then he’d commit suicide. You can’t be too careful with geeks. They’re lousy dressers but that doesn’t mean they deserve to die.”

            “Yeah,” sighed Jean. “I know this guy. He committed suicide, and in his suicide note he wrote ‘she knows she’s to blame.’ But he didn’t give a name. Well, half the girls who knew him were dying of guilt. Then, after three weeks, he showed up back at school. He’d faked his dad’s voice when he called people.”

            “What happened to him?”

            “Everybody hated him. But that just meant he had more spare time to study. And now he’s at Caltech on a scholarship.”

            “And Mr. D said, if a divorced guy has to take any job he can get, and he has to work like a slave, just to pay his alimony and maintenance, to avoid prison, then it’s just like being a sharecropper. And people say that’s a form of slavery. Same with paying fines. If you’re forced to work two jobs to avoid jail for non-payment, then it’s a thinly-disguised form of slavery.”

            “But they don’t auction them off in New Orleans and whip them for looking their master in the eye.”

            “Essor calls it ‘wage slavery’ when the capitalist system forces the working people to either accept whatever work they can get, or starve under a bridge.”

            “That’s not really slavery either.”

            “Forced labor is forced labor. Mr. D says that, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck.”

            “The man knows his ducks,” said Jean while Jenny was tapping something into her computer. “Little baby ducklings are so cute.”

            “Listen to this. Mr. D said that 97 percent of forestry workers – lumberjacks – are men. And they’re five times more likely than cops to die on the job. And it’s even worse for fishermen – fishery workers.”

            “Really?”

            “And he quoted the source. They’re government numbers. And he said that farmers and construction workers are twice as likely to die.”

            “But isn’t it just because they can’t resist showing off to impress each other?”

            “The cool ones, maybe. He said that, after Professor Essor started going on and on about women averaging 20 percent less pay than men. He asked why she wasn’t making any mention of danger pay that goes to ‘persons’ who are willing do dangerous work. He said you can’t compare fairness of pay without placing a dollar value on a man’s life. And a young one usually.”

            “With lots of muscle.”

            “And he said fishery workers are almost 90 percent men and they’re almost eleven times more likely to die than a cop.”

            “Well… but how many guys are in dangerous work?”

            “Mr. D said that overall, for all jobs, for the whole country, men are still 11 times more likely than women to die on the job. Or because of their job.”

            “Maybe they’re just eleven times stupider,” joked Jean.

            “Well… yes. But more so in the presence of a hottie. She turns their brains off.”

            “I’ve noticed that. I wonder what the stats are for male workers in strip clubs?”

            “Yeah. The bouncer keeps missing and punching the wrong guy,” joked Jenny.

            “Do a lot of guys die on the job?”

“For all jobs and for the whole country?” said Jenny as she tapped on her computer, “it’s about 5000 a year.”

            “Well, way over a million died from covid.”

            “With covid.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“And we’re not talking about people dying of old age plus covid over a two-year pandemic. This is 5000 every year, year after year. And Mr. D said… half of all on-the-job deaths are people under age 38.”

            “Wow.”

            “The young and the ripped.”

            “And I’ll bet a lot have a wife and little kids,” sighed Jean.

            “And even if he doesn’t, then his death means there’s a girl who will never find a husband.”

            “That’s the saddest of all.”

            “Unless she drops her standards. Mom said that, in the Spanish flu, half who died were under 28.”

            “Wow!”

            “Even at the peak of covid, you or I were more likely to die in a car crash than we were to die of covid. Mom said that, for me to be scared of dying of covid, I’d have to be dumb enough to buy a lottery ticket.”

            “Are you sure she’s a girl?”

            “Well, she is an engineering professor. How much of a girl could she be? She said the risk of dying in a car crash is like one in 8,000 per year for the average person. But I figure it’d be worse for a Republican, because we’re way more likely to be out driving something.”

            “Really?” asked Jean.

            “Wouldn’t you think so?”

            “Yeah, I guess so. But we’re in way bigger cars, so that’s safer.”

            “Way more utes and pickups. But they’re way more likely to roll,” said Jenny as she wagged her finger. “Especially when you think you’re invincible. Mom used to lend me her pickup. As soon as I was 16. She was nuts.”

            “You mean like usual mother nuts?”

            “A 2004 Ram SRT-10 pickup. That bad boy had a 505 cubic inch Viper. 500 horsepower.”

             “How fast could it go?”

            “The speedometer went to 150 miles an hour, and I buried it. I’m lucky I didn’t bury myself. And the six kids I had with me.”

            “That’s awful!” laughed Jean. “How could you be so stupid?”

            “I was only sixteen.”

            “And she kept letting you have it?”

            “No. Word got back. So she bought me that sad little thing I have now. Just to be mean.”

            “What are you talking about?” asked Euglena, as she came into the gazebo and sat down with them.

            “Death and stupidity,” said Jenny.

            “Oh, good. Men,” joked Euglena, as she unwrapped a sandwich. It was an egg salad that she had picked up at the kitchen. “Excess mortality, I suppose?”

            “This and that,” said Jenny. “But nothing I haven’t told you about, already.”

            “Yeah. You and your mom. They’ve had me so worried,” said Euglena to Jean. “that the epidemiologists were going to start demanding lockdowns every flu season. I’d have had to sell my snowboard.”

            “Oh, listen,” said Jean. “I’ve got another joke. Why do epidemiologists stink at poker? Because whenever they’re dealt a good hand, they alert the other players to the risk.”

            “That’s so good,” said Euglena, after she and Jenny burst out laughing.

            “And I found out why there’s two x’s in vaxxed but only one in waxed. It turns out epidemiologists are paid by the x.”

            “Jenny’s mom said that the wokies were thinking than, once everybody had been educated on lockdown rules, the health czars could start demanding one lockdown after another. The WHO could declare climate change a ‘global health emergency of international concern’ and order all the utes impounded. And they would go on doing it again and again until we’d achieved a perfect world.”

“Oh-boy!” joked Jean.

“But… we’ll all die of old age before that comes.”

            “I don’t think it’s PC to say ‘died of old age,’” scolded Jenny. “You have to say you died of something specific.”

            “They’ll keep on doing it until we’ve all died of something specific,” joked Euglena.

            “But really,” asked Jean, “how could anybody ever plan a winter vacation if they could shut down the country at a moment’s notice? Just because some hyper-geek in a lab shouted ‘eureka!’”

            “I keep thinking of those poor volcanologists in Italy,” said Euglena. “You hear about them?” she asked Jean after giving the sandwich a reluctant look. “It happened about ten or fifteen years ago. When you two were still is diapers. There was an earthquake in Italy, in a place called L‘Aquila. A bunch of scientists were thrown in jail for failing to warn of an earthquake after they’d detected vibrations with their instruments. They were seismologists and volcanologists. It was so stupid. What were the people supposed to do? Camp out in a field for a month? Just in case? Well, eventually a higher court reversed the verdict. But really, that’s a small comfort. They’d still been put in jail. And they probably still had to pay a fortune on lawyers. And scientists are such a bunch of neurotics. They probably have PTSD from being locked in a glorified bathroom with a bunch of lowlife creeps.”

            “That would be so awful,” said Jenny as she shook her head.

            “So all through covid,” said Euglena, “the poor epidemiologists were probably living in fear of jail.”

            “Oh,” said Jean, “I just thought up another one. Why did the judge sentence the epidemiologist to five minutes in prison for stealing a million bucks worth of lab equipment? Because he knew it would be sufficient to send a message.”

            “That’s clever,” said Euglena. “You actually just thought that up just now?” She then took a bite and made a face as she swallowed.

            “I got another one,” said Jean. “Why couldn’t the epidemiologist change his flat tire? His road-side emergency kit didn’t have any hand sanitizer.”

            “That’s good,” said Euglena. “Maybe someday you’ll be the first engineer to make it onto the comedy club circuit.”

            “Do engineers ever go to jail for mistakes that kill people?” asked Jean.

            “No,” said Euglena with a reassuring look. “You’d practically have to shoot somebody. Or poison him.”

            “And it’s got to be a real poison poison,” said Jenny. “A workplace risk of long-term exposure would never be enough.”

            “For an engineer to be convicted of manslaughter,” said Euglena, “there’d have to be hard evidence for outright, calculated, premeditated murder. There’d have to be clear intent to cause a death with a full understanding of all the legal issues.”

            “An engineer would have to be crazy enough to confess,” joked Jenny. “So now that there’s more female engineers, there’ll likely be convictions. All the sincere apologies.”

            “But we don’t have to worry. Judges love blondes,” said Euglena. “Oh my! I’m… I’m feeling restless. I think I’ll go for a little walk,” she said as she got up and rushed away.

            “Poor thing,” said Jenny. “She gonna barf again.”

            “I guess here you’d have to call it evening sickness.”

            “You know, she’s right about the poor scientists. Mom says they’re all germophobes. And they’d see jail as worse than a death sentence.”

            “Poor little fellas,” said Jean.

            “I know of people who went insane from covid. Back in Glendale. I know a family who had a whole room full of canned food and toilet paper and everything. They were going to hold out for a year, inside their house, waiting for a vaccine. But after a few weeks they got bored and they gave it all to a food bank in east L.A.”

            “Ah-ha!” joked Jean. “Now we know who was profiting from the lockdown. It’s the foodbanks!”

            “Oh, listen! Psychiatrists were talking about a new disorder. Mom found an article. They call it Post Covid Stress Disorder. And it isn’t just the people who almost died. It’s the people who lost loved ones. And restaurant people who went broke. And nurses who were forced to take extra shifts till they dropped. And mothers cooped up with snaky children. For some people it was really serious. They were flat-out insane.”

            “Oh, I believe that,” said Jean. “I knew a few.”

            “And Mom was telling me about this guy she knows who caused an accident once, and he tried to console the poor guy that he’d just run down. After, while he was laying there dying. Well, he’s never driven since.”

            “I thought of a joke. There’s an emotional disorder that only affects epidemiologists. It’s called temporarily-closed-international-borderline-personality-disorder.”      

            “Mom figures there were people who were so traumatized, they still haven’t come out of lockdown mode. And they never will.”

            “There’s a 12-step program that was developed by an epidemiologist. He told his girlfriend to walk 12 steps behind him in case she’s infectious.”

            “They’re grandparents who’ve been cooped up for four years. They’ll likely stay inside ‘till they die, in terror of new variants. For their grandchildren, who only see them on Live View, it’ll be like they’re not real.”

            “They’ll be a glorified interactive app,” said Jean.

“Who’s going to suffer the greatest harm from artificial intelligence?” joked Jenny. “It’ll be the poor guy whose sex doll is linked in with a phone sex service. So he’ll think she’s turning into a real girl. Like Pinocchio, only with a hot bod.”

            The drills had stopped, just as the last of Jenny’s words were spoken too loudly. Some men walking past heard her and burst out laughing.

Chapter 17

July 4, 11:00 p.m.

            “I warned Dad about Emily being ultraliberal,” said Jean to Jenny. They were going for a walk around the site. They had tried to persuade Emily to come but she said she’d “die out there.”

            “He’s gonna tell Sarah?”

            “Yeah. That she might be dangerous. You think it’ll break Sarah’s heart?”

            “No. She’s either angry or happy. And often both at the same time. She’ll think it’s just a phase.”

            “He’ll say that I’d just mentioned it in passing and that I’d been told by you. But he won’t tell her that I know about 70-foot-Donald.”

            “That’s good,” sighed Jenny.

            “You sound sad.”

            “Well! Now that Euglena’s likely pregnant, I’m feeling guilty for being mean to her.”

            “There might be hope for you, yet,” joked Jean.

            “As if all my environmental guilt from reading that stupid book wasn’t enough.”

            “Maybe your mom could take you to one of those insensitivity workshops.”

            “It just isn’t right what that jerk’s done to her.”

            “Yes, I guess I…” started Jean.

            “And… now I feel a need to do something mean to Jacob, on her behalf.”

            “I know who to call if I ever need a judge, jury and executioner,” joked Jean.

            “He’s deathly scared of snakes,” said Jenny, while still thinking. “He said so to your dad. That’s why he figures he has to have the gun.”

            “He’s got a gun? I thought he was a closet liberal?”

            “They’re good at making exceptions. Like all the mommies with utes and the grannies with monster houses. It’s in his desk. It’s the cutest little thing,” said Jenny with a warm smile. “He got it for when he and Brad used to go jogging. In case he’d ever have to defend himself against an aggressive rattler. He even has a jogging holster.”

            “You’re serious?”

            “So it doesn’t bounce around.”

            “Oh, of course. Does Hank have one?” asked Jean.

            “I never asked. Probably. He’ll get his dad’s gun collection, someday. There’s 278 of them, he thinks. They go back eight generations. Six of them in Arizona. Hank figures he’s part In… Indigenous. Judging by the old photos. I can’t wait to see them. I want to fire every one of them at least once. I’ll let him spread it out over a few visits though. The old guy even had a World War I machine gun, but his wife made him get rid of it. Because it’s illegal, or something. It’s at a gun club, now, if you want to try it out.”

            “That’d be cool.”

            “It’s German, though, so you’ll have to imagine you’re shooting our guys.”

            “I could pretend I’m shooting the British upper-class.”

            “Oh, you could! I should tell Professor Essor about it.”

            “Maybe she’d make the trip out.”

            “Brad had a fake rattler,” said Jenny, as her eyes lit up. “It’s likely still up on the shelf in its box.”

            “And you want to use it on Jacob?”

            “My brother had a fake rattler. Until our mom took it and hid it somewhere. She said he can get it back when he’s 65.”

            “That might be too soon,” joked Jean.

            “He scared me with it so many times, I got used to it.”

            “What are brothers for?”

            “I’d keep on waking up with it in bed with me.”

            “And you never killed him?”

            “Brad’s is a really nice one,” said Jenny with a smile. “Really expensive. It even rattles. It’s got a wind-up thing with a trigger that goes off when you throw it on the floor. And its head will rear up. It’s an awful thing.”

            “Stuff like that should be illegal. They could give somebody a heart attack.”

            “His heart’s good. You know what we could do?” Jenny whispered with an evil gleam in her eye. “We could set a snare. Like a lasso. In the gazebo. My brother did this to one of his friends. A few times. He’d never learn.”

            “Who? The friend or your brother.”

            “We could throw a rope over the bars at the ceiling. There’s a nylon rope in the engineer’s trailer. It’ll slide really good on the bars so we won’t need a pulley. And it’ll take his weight, easy.”

            “Won’t this be dangerous?”

            “We’d be there to save him. We could tie it to a bunch of those water jugs and put them up onto one of the planks. Enough jugs to take his weight. He’s skinny. 170, max. No, wait. We wouldn’t need that much. I could jump on for more weight. I’m 140. You wouldn’t guess it, would you? I sink like a stone. Even with my floaters. I’d be ready to pull them off. And then I’d hop on when I knew we’d got him hooked.”

            “And what do we do until he comes out? Hide for hours and hours?”

            “I know when he’ll be out. He has to set an alarm so he doesn’t forget to take a break. Isn’t that pathetic? Without it he’ll work until he’s over-tired and gets a headache. Then he’s useless until the medication kicks in. We’ll know exactly when he’s coming out.”

            “I don’t know about this,” said Jean.

            “We could turn off the lights, and when he goes to turn them on, he’ll be standing right in the lasso.”

            “And what if he isn’t standing in the lasso?”

            “He’ll hear a thud in the dark. We’ll sneak out the back door while he’s flicking the switch. And if he does catch us, we’ll all have a good laugh. But if the lasso catches him, he’ll be flipped upside-down and hanging there. And you can have the rattler ready with a string on it. Ready to give it a bit of a tug, to set off the rattler. And then to pull it away afterwards. So we can take it when we make our getaway out the back door.”

            “Oh, I don’t…”

            “I’ve seen it work! Even the victim thought it was brilliant. After he calmed down. And there’s a flashlight in the trailer that can focus down, like a spotlight. You could point it at the snake. We could twist the rope a bunch of times so that he’ll spin once he’s dangling. He’ll see it when he’s upside-down and spinning around. He’ll see it going past. It’ll work!”

            “Oh Jen. This is so cruel.”

            “It depends on how you define the word ‘cruel.’ Besides, it’ll serves him right for getting a poor girl pregnant.”

            “Poor? She’s a professional engineer with wealthy parents.”

            “Well… let’s do it anyways. And he’ll think that Brad did it, at first. He’ll be confused. For two seconds he won’t remember that he’s dead. And then he’ll remember, while spinning upside-down over a rattler.”

            “This is too much,” groaned Jean.

            “He’ll think the surveyors did it! They’re a bunch of jerks. And then you’ll turn off the flashlight and pull on the string to get the snake. I’ll cut the rope to let him fall.”

            “On his head!”

            “I’ll hold back and let him down easy. So he doesn’t land too hard. That way he won’t break his neck.”

            “Jenny, this…”

            “And then he’ll be left there in the dark. His head will be spinning. And he’ll think the snake is still there.”

            “Oh Jen. This is demented.”

            “Engineers do stupid things like this all the time. Auntie Sarah was telling me about some of the stunts she’s been part of. If we get in trouble, I’ll tell her it’s her fault for giving me ideas.”

            “But…”

            “You’ll be in on this sort of thing too if you go through for engineer. And… and if you’ve got this on your conscience, then you’ll be less likely to get all high-and-mighty when you’re the victim of a semi-cruel practical joke. It’ll prepare you emotionally.”

            “You think so?”

            “Sure. I took Intro Psych. We could do it right now. He’ll be out here in an hour. In… in 26 minutes,” she said, looking at her phone. “The jugs are right here. They weigh… ah… about 40 pounds each. There’ll be some friction, but three of them plus my weight will do it, easy.”

            “Oh, Jen…”

            “We have to! He’s so full of himself. It’ll do him good. It’ll help teach him humility. It’ll make him grow as a person.”

            “Is it him that needs to grow as a person?”

            “And he’d never guess it was us. He’ll think it was the surveyors. He’ll be looking over his shoulder. It’ll start a feud.”

            Everything was in place. At the last moment, they thought to unscrew the lightbulbs so he would hesitate in front of the switch. In the darkness, they crouched down and waited.

            A truck drove past. The drills on the tower stopped. They heard the elevator start to move. The door of the engineer’s trailer opened and then closed. Jacob came out, looking up at the starry sky. He walked over, stepped inside, reached up and flicked the switch. No lights. He tried again.

            Jenny yanked the rope.

The jugs fell.

            Everything worked.

The lasso went all the way up one leg to his crotch. He let out a yelp, stepped back, and fell, trying to land in a sitting position. Jenny threw her weight on the rope. It slipped back along his leg and pulled tight at his ankle. Jacob was upside down, hanging and spinning.

            The flashlight went on and the snake was brightly lit – its head up and its rattler going. Jacob circled round and round, seeing the snake’s open mouth with each pass.

            His shrieking was so loud it was heard across the site. Jean flicked off the flashlight and pulled on the string to retrieve the snake. Jenny let the rope slide back slowly to allow Jacob to land gently. But he was writhing in terror – still shrieking.

            Jenny cut the rope with the utility knife. Jacob jumped up and ran into the darkness, crashing into tables and chairs. He finally found the door. Outside, he stopped and looked one way and the other. He managed to remain still, except for shaking.

            Jean and Jenny had crept out and were to the back door of the engineer’s trailer. They could see underneath the trailer, and hear Mike and then Sarah outside. After he got the rope off his foot, Jacob asked them, “where that came from?”

            Jenny and Jean found the trailer empty except for Emily. She was at the front door looking out, crouched down in fear.

            “Whoever he was, he sure can yodel?” joked Jacob in a deep voice, his chin pulled in and his shoulders squared.

            “Where’d it come from?” asked Mike.

            “Was it a woman or a man?” asked Jenny from the front door of the engineer’s trailer. She had taken Emily by the arm and was leading her out.

            “It sounded like it was right here,” said Jean, who had hold of Jenny’s other arm. She realized the three of them must look adorable.

            “It did,” agreed Sarah, with judgment in her voice. By now there were at least 20 people outside. “Alright, who’s responsible?” she demanded in an effort to sound more authoritative than scared. No one answered.

            Others were coming. The crowd was unnaturally quiet, suggesting that some were trying to force back childhood fears of the restless spirits that walk the night.

            “Some people,” laughed Mike. He put his hand on Jean’s shoulder and said “Let’s go back inside.” Gallantly, he shepherded the three students into the trailer.

            Inside, Emily calmly returned to work at her desk. Jean and Jenny joined her.

            “That was really weird,” said Jenny as she opened her book to continue reading.

Chapter 18

July 5, 3:00 a.m.

            “You think anybody’s guessed anything?” Jean asked Jenny. They had been trying to study quietly for what seemed like a very long time, and had finally gone out for a walk.

            “Did anybody give you a dirty look?” asked Jenny.

            “I’ve been keeping my eyes down. But… somebody could have assumed something from that, too.”

            “Emily wasn’t saying anything.”

            “Just means she’s thinking.”

            “She thinks that I’m one of her kind of people,” said Jenny, “so she might cover for us.” As they walked through the site, each held a clipboard, as if they were inspecting something.

            “Actually, she might think I’m as liberal as she thinks you are.”

            “You aren’t, are you?” joked Jenny.

            “On the environment, I am. I guess. I’m not sure.”

            “Me neither. I’d be fine with a punitive carbon tax, so long as it just offsets other taxes. I care about children with asthma. Essor told us the government says air pollution costs us 6.5 billion a year. And it’s hard to put a price on human suffering in big cities in poor countries.”

            “They’ve got to tax something,” sighed Jean. “It may as well be Texas.”

            “I think the environment is an either/or. Conservative and conservationist almost means the same thing, don’t they? And there’s lots of Democrat old ladies who drive a big sport-ute so she has room for grandchildren. And she stays in the old family home so she has room for them to come to visit. She’s hardly an environmentalist. Except for her monthly donations to Greenpeace.”

            “So climate change can all be blamed on grandchildren.”

            “A lot of it.”

            “How extreme were you in front of Professor Essor?”

            “She might think I’m really severe.”

            “An ‘ultra’?” laughed Jean. “Wow. How does that make you feel? Kinda dirty all over?”

            “And now Euglena’s got me feeling guilty about flirting with Jacob in front of her,” said Jenny as she shook her head. “It’s taking all the fun out of everything.”

            “You mean you think you’ve grown as a person?” asked Jean.

            “Oh, I hope not! Does anybody ever grow into anything but boring? And besides, if I make her jealous without ever actually doing anything, then aren’t I teaching her to appreciate him more? And won’t that improve her behavior? And won’t her good behavior raise her in his eyes? And then she’ll go on and on being nice to him, just to keep him from me. And he’ll be nicer in return. I’m helping their love to grow.”

            “I’m afraid you might be a wonderful person.”

            “Just think,” said Jenny with her hand out. “I’ve empowered myself to go out and do good works. To use my beauty for goodness, rather than evil.”

            “It’s like you’re almost a saint.”

            “Almost? Do you doubt it? I’m Saint Jenny of Glendale.”

            “Go forth now, my child,” said Jean, with her arms up, “and bring relief to the hen-pecked.”

            “Bring me your girlfriends, all ye who despair of appreciation!”

            “Isn’t this wonderful? You must feel like a heavy weight of sin has been lifted off your weary shoulders,” said Jean as she took hold of her arm and drew her close.

            “But I have to wonder,” said Jenny, with a serious tone as they stood there, arm in arm. “I have to wonder whether Euglena faced greater competition from Brad. They both seemed a bit gay. And poor Jacob’s been seeming so sad since he died. Except when he’s flirting with us.”

            “But he and the rest of them have been working like imbeciles.”

            “Do imbeciles really work all that hard?” asked Jenny, after stopping to think.

            “What?”

            “Working like a mule? Working like a dog?”

            “A lot of dogs work hard,” said Jean. “Listening for doorbells. Holding down couches.”

            “We all owe so much to workaholics. They do so much more than the rest of us, and they pay so much in taxes.”

            “And they know it too. And it makes them all so smug.”

            “Tyrannical bosses, like our grandfathers. And obnoxious technoids, like Brad. But… I guess they’ve earned it, though. Haven’t they? It’s almost a shame that somebody beat Brad’s head in, before he could earn a pile and pay half of it in taxes, and send the rest to his darling wife in Glendale so she could raise… her children.”

            “It is a shame.”

            “I’ve read,” said Jenny, “that great people who accomplish great things are always really selfish people who arrogantly commandeer the time they need to do all their great works. They take advantage of the generosity of their family. And their friends, if they have any. They climb over bodies and step on heads in their ascent to glory. And then they make an attractive middle-aged corpse at a dry-eyed funeral.”

            “That’s so sad!”

            “Well, not that sad. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be dry-eyed. You know, you can get a spring-loaded tear-puffer and carry it in your purse.”

            “What?” asked Jean.

            “A theater major showed me one. Actors use it for instant tears. It’s got menthol in it. You just have turn away so your special guy doesn’t see it. And take a couple of steps further so he doesn’t detect the minty smell. And you sob loud enough to hide the click. And then you’ll be as tear-faced as any sissy-girl.”

            “Cool.”

            “But anyways. A week or so ago, I overheard Jacob and Brad in a ‘heated conversation.’ Whispering. Really heated. It sounded like a lover’s quarrel.”

            “That’s all you’ve got to go on?”

            “I guess,” said Jenny as she shrugged her shoulders. “Jacob told me about how his father is hoping that he’ll try go into politics. For the Republicans. He said his dad had always wanted to, but never got very far. He’d do volunteer stuff for the party and go to all their events.”

            “I wonder if all party workers start out with dreams of being the president?”

            “I’ve been wondering whether Jacob might be the killer.”

            “Well, I’m sure everybody’s wondered that,” shrugged Jean. “He’s young and male.”

            “Of course. A born suspect. Men are ten times more likely to be convicted of a homicide. And over half of convicted murderers did it in their twenties. Of course, over a third of murders aren’t solved, so maybe the old guys are just way sneakier.”

            “And Jacob was in the trailer. And everybody’s saying that Brad was an advanced jerk.”

            “And that they’d both been working way too hard,” said Jenny. “And maybe I’m not the only one who thought they were… involved. But maybe Brad had just caught a mistake of Jacob’s. A real doozie. And maybe he was blackmailing him, somehow. Emotional blackmail, maybe. Poor Jacob could have felt driven into a corner. Like when they had their big argument, only way worse. Hammer-swinging, head-smashing worse.”

            “Sounds like fun.”

            “And if it was Jacob, then he’d likely get all remorseful and go crying to Daddy. They’ll often be in his office and you’ll hear them… exchanging angry whispers.”

            “Well, at least if it’s him, then it’s not you,” joked Jean. “But why Jacob? Aren’t you a more likely suspect? You’re the one who’s had to convince a psychologist that you’re remorseful.”

            “You’re right. I’d forgotten. Maybe I am the prime suspect.”

            “And,” said Jean, with her finger raised, “maybe when the detectives questioned me, they got me really scared. And then I agreed to try to trick a confession out of you.”

            “You could be wearing a wire right now!” gasped Jenny, her hands to her mouth. “I should hold a gun to your head and tell you to strip!”

            “Right here? On a construction site?” laughed Jean.

            “We’d really draw a crowd. Wouldn’t we?”

            “Would we ever. We could pass around a hardhat for your legal defense fund.”

            “We could. We could do well. Really well. Maybe I should strip too.”

            “You were saying,” said Jean, after thinking for a moment, “that the research would get good ratings if it’s controversial, even if it’s not good research. Does that mean that anybody who’s willing to go controversial will get more money for his research? Without having to strip?”

            “I don’t know. I suppose. I’m sure stripping helps, too.”

            “The people that Cactex is funding. Are they maybe trying to show that the tough lockdowns did more harm than good, just to get money? From outfits like Cactex?”

            “If they’re smart, I guess,” said Jenny with a shrug. “You godda get money somewhere. But likely there’re lots of other researchers out there trying to milk rich Democrats. They’ll be trying to show that the lockdowns were a great idea. Like the ‘years of life’ people who presume that all the old folks of the same age bracket are equally healthy and equally likely to live out the same number of years, and equally likely to catch covid and die.”

            “And if the Democrat researchers don’t go out and get what they can get, then the Republican researchers will be better funded.”

            “Or maybe they’re all tailoring their research towards getting themselves plumb jobs with the department of health, or some hospital corporation. And once there, they pander to the medical-industrial complex, to get even better-paying jobs in the industry.”

            “Doesn’t anybody have pure intentions?” groaned Jean.

            “There must be somebody. And besides, scientists are humans. Only slightly less so because they’re nerds.”

            “Are they really all like Brad?”

            “No, but Mom says they’re bad enough. She says a lot of PhDs really hated the Big Bang Theory, because it perpetuated negative stereotypes. Albeit accurate ones.”

            “Somebody should make a cruel and totally unfair TV series about female engineers.”

            “Oh, that’d be so cool!” said Jenny with a bright smile.

            “Who’d they have for actors?’

            “They’d all be…”

            “Like you and me?” asked Jean.

            “I was thinking of Euglena. You don’t know Euglena! She’s Brad with hot bod.”

            “Why do you hate her so much?” asked Jean.

            “Because she’s evil. And I’ve always hated evil. It’s the goodness in me.”

            “But you’re the one that had to go to a psychologist and pretend to be remorseful.”

            “Oh yeah. I keep forgetting about that. I was kicked out of both karate and judo for that. For five years.”

            “Wow.”

            “I’m back in now.”

            “Oh, that’s good.”

            “It wasn’t easy. I had to come back crawling on my hands and knees.”

            “They must have liked that,” joked Jean.

            “In between, I switched over to gymnastics and ballet.”

            “Oh, I’ve taken those too! My mom loved it so much. Oh! I thought of another one. You know how they say that a pack of wolves can smell fear? The Covidarians got it out now as a cologne.”

            “That’s good,” laughed Jenny.

            “There was this epidemiologist who was a real control freak. And he started having reoccurring nightmares. Where he’d keep losing control of his hand puppets.”

            “They seem to like their power.”

            “This military dictator finally got tired of being bossed around by his epidemiologist. So he sentenced him to death. But when the guy was blindfolded and put in front of the firing squad, his last words were ‘Ready! Set! Fire!”

             “That’s good. Oh, that reminds me! I’m seeing Hank again. At the coffee shop. Not today, though. He’s busy with some stupid cop thing. So I can’t see him until tomorrow.”

Chapter 19

July 5, 5:40 a.m.

            Concerned that the students might be upset and feeling that he ought to do something to calm them, Mike brought a chair over to their table and sat down. With a smile he said “Whoever it was, he sure can scream. He could find work in Hollywood.”

            “You’re sure it’s a man?” asked Jenny.

            “Yeah, I’d say so” he said with a shrug. “Weird sense of humor.”

            “I hope that’s all,” said Jenny, who was crouched over and doing a very good job of looking scared. “It could have been the murderer signaling that he was about to act again.”

            “I wouldn’t think so” shrugged Mike. “There’s good news. The drill holes are almost all loaded and wired up. Tomorrow morning the siren will start to sound, and anybody left will head back to camp. Guards and all. The blasting curtain will be operated remotely. It’ll all be done by an encrypted radio transmission from Sarah’s room in the bunks. It won’t be much to watch. Unless you know exactly what to expect. The curtain will do its magic.”

            “What curtain?” asked Emily.

            “A thick one! It’s made from used tires, cut into strips and then sewn together with cables. Sideways, so it’s six inches thick. It weighs about 30 pounds per square foot, but that’s almost a ton-and-a-half for ten feet by ten. The whole thing is 15 tons. We had to add another 15 tons to the counterbalance on the other side of the structure to keep it stable. And we’ve got a spare curtain in case it’s torn to shreds.”

            “Is that likely?” asked Jean.

            “Not very. Each charge is fairly small. But there’s a lot of them.”

            “Will rock be shooting out the sides?” asked Jenny.

            “Enough. Lots of dust. But most will hit the curtain and bounce back. The holes are just eight inches apart, so each blast can be smaller than you’d have in a mine or a tunnel. Most will fall to the ground. Make a big pile. It’ll go towards the parking lots.”

            “And the computer does it all?” asked Jean.

            “Yup. With any luck. We’ll just sit back and watch. You guys are more than welcome to come watch with us. Though it really won’t be much to see. We’ll all be looking for what we don’t want to see. We’ll all have a finger ready on the ‘halt’ button, just in case. But if everything works, the whole thing will be done in a couple of hours. Strip by strip, top to bottom, left to right, one section at a time.”

            “Will it be noisy?”

            “We’ll hear it at the bunks. They’ll hear it out on the highway if anybody’s got their window down. But just a series of bangs. Thumpity-thump. Fast succession. Bit like a machine gun. Then the curtain will be drawn back and moved over to another section. Then it gets blasted. Or so we hope. Fingers crossed.”

            “So this is showtime,” said Jenny. “You guys must have butterflies in your stomachs.”

            “Yeah. First, all that screaming. And now this. It can drive a man to drink.”

            “So all you can do now is wait,” said Emily with a smile.

            “It’ll be a long night, followed by a long day. Not expecting to sleep.”

            “This is all so cool!” said Emily.

            “Hey,” Jenny said to Jean, “Tell him the jokes you made up.”

            “I’ve a new one. When the epidemiologist finally noticed the 900-pound gorilla in the corner, he recommended he stay there for two weeks in case he was infectious.” She went on to tell as many others as she could remember.

            “Pretty good,” said Mike, who could not stop giggling. “Well! It’s past six. Who’s hungry?”

            After a supper made less pleasant by nervous speculation about blasting, the students left for their rooms. They were crossing the road when Jenny noticed the two detectives who had questioned them. She waved and went over to ask how the investigation was going. But as she and Jean approached, they could see furrowed brows and expressions that seemed almost like embarrassment.

            “What’s wrong?” asked Jenny with a smile. “Is the case going nowhere?”

            “Jennifer Wren,” said the older of the two, “I… I’m afraid I have to place you under arrest.”

            “What? For what?”

            “It… it’s in regard to the death of Bradley Price.”

            “Brad? Why me?”

            He then pulled a card from his pocket and read her her rights. He had them memorized, and he looked to the ground as he read. “I spoke to your supervisor, Ms. Post, and she tells me she’ll get you a lawyer and arrange bail. That’ll all happen today. So there’ll likely… surely will be no need for a stay in jail.”

            “This is a mistake,” said Jenny, who was unable to stop her eyes from tearing up and her lip from trembling.

            “Jenny,” said Sarah, who had followed them from the kitchen, “don’t worry. Our law firm is the best there is. You’ll be out in no time. Someone will be there to meet you at the station. She said to wait for her before you answer any questions.”

            “It’s a mistake,” said Jenny, in a desperate effort not to sob.

            “Well…” said the detective, “sooner we get into town, the sooner you’ll be back here again.”

            “You hear about Jenny?” Jean asked her father as they watched the unmarked car drive away.

            “Sarah just told me. Bit of a surprise, isn’t it?”

            “It’s crazy. Nothing she’s said makes it sound like she’s guilty of anything. She thought he was a jerk, but so did everybody. She didn’t kill him.”

            “I wonder what they’ve got on her? She wasn’t the only one in Sarah’s trailer that day.”

            “It’s nuts.”

            “Well… I’ve heard that sometimes they’ll arrest the least unlikely suspect, based on whatever they have, just to put the real culprit at ease. Make him more likely to make a mistake. Say too much.”

            “Oh.”

            “You two want to sit in and watch the blasting? Keep your minds off poor Jenny. Starts at nine. Between blasting and all else, it might be a sleepless night.”

            “Okay,” said Jean as she looked at Emily.
            “I’m in,” said Emily.

            “We’ll all be at Sarah’s. Plenty of room there. You’re part of the team. And you’ll be welcome to come and go.”

            “We could be the cheerleaders,” said Emily.

            “I think Sarah would appreciate your enthusiasm. A good female-bonding opportunity. And it’d keep your minds off poor Jenny.”

            “Okay. We’ll join you,” said Jean, after a hesitation. She was wondering about Emily’s mention of ‘cheerleaders.’ It didn’t seem like something an ultra-liberal would say.

            Watching the blasting wasn’t what Jean expected. The process began on the far right, with the crucial face of Donald. On the monitor they could see the curtain. Then the steel door closed over the camera lens. In the distance they heard a series of bangs. The tension in the room rose as they stared at the blank screen. When the door opened, the camera only showed the grey of the dust. It was quickly blown away by large fans, and they could see the curtain was intact. It was drawn back, moved several feet over, and pushed back in. Again, the door closed over the camera, and again they heard the thunder.

            The curtain was drawn back and moved sideways, and they got another look at the results of the first series. The engineers turned their attention to a monitor that showed lines in brilliant greens, blues and reds.

            “Watch this,” said Sarah, looking back to the students. “I can flick the image back and forth from what was there, after the blast, from the lydar cameras, and then over to a computer simulation that shows what we’re hoping for.”

            What they saw made little sense to the students, but the engineers were thrilled. She flipped the image back and forth, from real to simulated. After the sixth series of blasts, the engineers were sighing with relief.

            “Don… it’s intact,” bragged Jacob. He got a dark look from Sarah. Jean guessed that he had almost said “Donald’s comb-over is intact.”
            “So far so good,” said Sarah. The show continued, methodically directed by the impersonal will of the computer. The sequence of events was repeated across the top of all the heads, one president at a time. What was left was not clear enough to betray any secrets. It could still be yuccas. The elevator was then lowered by several feet and the curtain moved back all the way to the right. Jean was reminded of her father’s old-fashioned ink-jet printer.

            The blasting continued. They heard no moans or groans. Each time, the lydar colors inspired comments like “nice” or “alright” or “good one.” They were like a group of high-stakes betters watching cards being laid down in a game that Jean did not understand.

            “We’re cheering for nothing,” joked Jacob, and the engineers all laughed.

            “Jenny’s been released,” said Sarah, as she held up her phone. Everybody looked at Jean and Emily with smiles, and then turned their attention back to the latest lydar image.

            Jean sent Jenny a text. “See you soon. Watching the blasting. Going good. You aren’t missing much.”

            Jenny texted back, “Great. See-ya.”

            Jean sighed. The blasting went on and on. She noticed that Emily’s eyelids were getting heavy.

            “You two don’t need to stay,” said Sarah. “All this lydar business is way more meaningful when you know what you’re looking for.”

            “Thanks,” said Jean as she got up.

            “I’ll come wake you,” said Sarah, “when we’re ready to crack open the champagne.”

Chapter 20

July 5, 2:00 p.m.

            “You’re back?” said Jean, when Jenny came through the door to their room, waking her up.

            “It wasn’t so bad. They tried to be nice. I was mainly just sitting by a desk, waiting. How’s the blasting going?”

            “Me and Emily were falling asleep. It’s all on lydar. It’s just a bunch of colored lines. They’re still geeking out on it now. I suppose we should go say hello and see if they’re happy,” said Jean as she got up to dress.

            “I was photographed and fingerprinted and stuff,” said Jenny as they went down the hallway. The walls were shiny exterior metal siding, because the ‘bunkhouse’ was assembled from two rows of trailers placed side by side, with a temporary hallway set up in between. “I came back in a cab. The lawyer said the cops would have been happy to give me a ride back, but only because they always hope the suspect will talk too much. Say things her lawyer would rather she didn’t.”

            “You feeling okay?”

            “I was so disgusted with myself. The whole time I kept tearing up and sniffling. Like a little wimp.”

            “They probably felt awful.”

            “Yeah. Poor guys. But will they think my crying is over the injustice of being wrongfully accused? Or my regret for having taken a human life.”

            “Oh, Jen. You look so sweet and innocent.”

            “Remember, I kicked that guy and took out his spleen.”

            “What does the spleen do anyways?”

            “It helps your immune system. But without it, your liver takes over. It doesn’t take your liver long and then you’re good to go.”

            “Do you think the cops know about it?” said Jean as she was about to knock on Emily’s door.

            “I don’t know. They didn’t mention it. But why’d they arrest me? They even asked me if I was having an affair with Brad. Where’d they get that from?”

            Once Emily was ready, they went to knock on Sarah’s door. She gave Jenny a hug and the others got up to offer their best wishes and to brag about the blasting. Jenny had to repeat her assurance that the detectives had been as gentle as they could be, under the circumstances.

            “You’re just in time for the tail end of it,” said Sarah, and she explained the colored lines again. She then assured the students that, if they were tired, they would miss very little by skipping out.

After the last blast Sarah walked with them to their rooms. After a glance each way, she gave each a pill and told them to sleep in late. It made Jean smile, because it was just like a mother handing out vitamin pills to little kids. Not at all like a guy in a trench coat selling killer drugs to pimple-faced high school kids.

            “Somebody must have told them something,” said Jenny after she had closed the door.

            “Who?”

            “Who would hate me enough? It’d have to be Euglena. Who else would?”

            “Did she look guilty just now?”

            “I avoided looking at her. Just in case she’s innocent, I don’t want her thinking I suspect her.”

            “Maybe she didn’t say anything . Remember, I heard Cyrus saying there’d been rumors about you and Brad.”

            “Oh, jeez, Jean! I’ve never laid a finger on him! I’d rather die!”

            “Dad says that maybe they just wanted to charge some random person to make the killer heave a sigh of relief and do some stupid talking.”

            “Maybe. But they can’t lay charges with nothing. I don’t think so anyways. I should have asked my lawyer.”

            “What’s she like?”

            “Good. Sort of like Sarah. Nice clothes. Conservative, but a nice cut. Great hair.”

            “That’s all you got to say about your lawyer?” laughed Jean. “Maybe you are a girl, after all.”

            “This pill is wild,” said Jenny a half-hour later, after they had watched a comedy that had put them in a giggling fit. The pill’s effect had come in waves, and they were teasing each other about their sleepy eyes.

            “I lied when I said it wasn’t so bad,” said Jenny. “It was incredibly scary. I kept wondering if they’d change their mind and put me in a jail cell with a bunch of psycho-lesbo-killer-whores.”

            “It’d sure scare me,” said Jean, and she sat down by Jenny and put her hand on her arm.

            “And the whole time I was there, sitting and waiting, I kept thinking about how undecided I was. You know, I don’t even know who I’m gonna vote for.”

            “Yeah… me neither. The ballot needs a box with ‘Yeah, whatever.’”
            “But I guess being undecided is good, in a way. It makes us one of the select few whose opinion matters most. Because almost every election campaign is aimed at trying to sway the last ten percent who is planning on voting but still hasn’t made a decision.”

            “Yeah, that’s right. I kind of like being one of a select few,” joked Jean. “Do you notice we’re surrounded by people who either love Trump or hate him? And neither of us can decide. What’s the matter with us?”

            “Mom says that, if you look at what he’s actually done, he’s really no more conservative than Dubya. He’s just way better at stirring up emotions.”

            “He makes me think of a coach doing a pep talk.”

            “When he doesn’t make you think of a professional wrestler. I think the ones who love him so much want a pro wrestler for president, and the haters want a funeral director.”

            “It was way more men who voted for him than women, right?”

            “I got it here,” said Jenny as she tapped on her laptop. “In ’20 Trump got 53 percent of men and 42 percent of women. And 61 percent of white men. No surprise. And 55 percent of white women. The popular vote was 51-47. What Mom calls the ‘official vote,” said Jenny with a smile. “But… holy smokes! Trump got 19 percent of black men and 9 percent of black women.”

             “That many?” said Jean, after a pause.

            “And he got 36 percent of Latino men and 30 of Latino women.

            “But everybody kept saying he’s a racist.”

            “It must drive the Professor Essors of the world nuts,” said Jenny with a sweet smile of satisfaction. “They’d wonder why any non-whi… person of color, would ever vote for a Trump. After all the Democrat trash talk in the media.”

            “Jobs, I guess,” said Jean with a shrug. “Lowest unemployment in 50 years. Before covid, at least.”

            “I guess.”

            “You can’t eat justice. That’s what Dad says.”

            “There must be a lot of black people who are just tired of all the woky anger.”

            “If they’re like whities that I know,” joked Jean, “they like anger 50 percent of the time, and hate it the other 50. Listen to this one. Imagine this is a news report. ‘The conscience of the Democratic Party died today, when he collapsed under the weight of collective guilt. In related news, the conscience of the Republican Party is reported to be having the time of his life.’”

            “That’s good,” chuckled Jenny. “But think. This means there must have been almost as much bickering over Trump in black homes as in white.”

            “We all got an equal opportunity to suffer through it,” laughed Jean as she got into her bed and pulled up the covers.

            “And that means one in five black men is going to be cheering when the curtain drops on 70-foot-Donald.”

            “He won’t cheer out loud, though,” said Jean with a smile. “His girlfriend might be listening.”

            “We just got to find a few black self-made multi-millionaire entrepreneurs who will come out and say that they owe their success to the inspiring words of Donald Trump. Then the Republican historians will be able to quote them to prove that he truly deserved to be a 70-footer.”

            “Do you think they’ll find many?” asked Jean.

            “If you can believe what some Democrats say, then his powers of persuasion are absolutely spectacular. Think of how he can incite a riot without even trying.”

            “Yeah. Have you told your old boyfriend about 70-foot-Donald? The black guy?”

            “I can’t tell him what I’m not supposed to know!”

            “Oh yeah.”

            “I’ll lure him to the unveiling with promises of Republicans looking for management material.”

            “Money talks.”

            “Mom says liberals were always accusing Trump of saying things he never actually said because what he actually did say was never good enough to get undecided people excited.”

            “I really envy people who can get excited that easy,” said Jean, after a pause. “Think of how thrilling their lives must be. They don’t even need drugs.”

            “And before that, the conservatives were always accusing Obama of saying things that he never said. Both sides are always thinking they can read minds.”

            “That’d be so cool,” sighed Jean. “I wish I could read minds.”

            “In a room full of engineering students?”

            “Oh... Well... So long as I could turn on the parent block.”

            “I guess if I ever want to be president, I’ll have to start by claiming I can read Democrat minds. And then I’ll tell people about the awful things they’re saying, even though they’re not actually saying them.”

            “Yeah,” sighed Jean. “And without doing that, you’ll just never get the kind of publicity that money can’t buy. But… why is it that you want to go into politics, when you can’t even decide who you want to vote for?”

            “Because… I’m committed to championing the cause of the undecided,” said Jenny as she pretended to pound her fist on a table. “I’m willing to stand up and read the latest polls before I say anything that I might regret. I’m willing to take a stand for what I believe in, and then let the economists make all the real decisions so I don’t do something really stupid.”

            “At last!” joked Jean, “it’s so good to finally hear someone who’s willing to come out and say that.”

            “So this is the deal. Neither of us are capable of being one of the sorts who can fall madly in love with either a Trump or a Biden. But at the same time, we’ve got a golden opportunity to get preferred access to a rising-star engineering firm that will forever be known for the 70-foot-Donald-face. We’ve got to start thinking like a criminal defense lawyer who says that every accused person deserves proper legal representation. We’ve got to line up the evidence, and then we’ve got to spend the rest of our careers giving 70-foot-Donald a proper defense. And besides, maybe his ‘play down covid to avoid panic’ approach will eventually be grudgingly accepted as the best way to run a good pandemic. But that’ll mean he was robbed of his win in ’20 by Democrat scare-mongering. And really, it won’t matter because in ten years a few black entrepreneurs will be crediting the enlightened teachings of Donald, partly because it’s true, and partly because it’s so much fun watching the liberals squirm.”

            “Now that you put it that way, I can get excited. Oh, I thought of another,” said Jean in a sleepy voice. “When did baby Trump enter his ‘terrible twos’? When he first realized he was paying too much.”

            “Ha.”

            “When did baby Trump throw tantrums? When his red bibs were all in the wash.”

            “Jean! I’m going to be having nightmares now.”

            “Oh, sorry.’

Chapter 21

July 5, 11:00 p.m.

            “I think the blasting has a few heads rattled,” said Mike with a smile, as he came into the engineer’s trailer. The three students had just arrived. “One of the foreme… the supervisors, for Cactex, is saying there’s a rumor going around about the screaming yesterday. Some of the guys are thinking we’ve been visited by a demonic spirit. And there’s a few of them who’ve called in sick. If only we could hand out valium.”

            “Cactex should bring in a priest and have a cleansing,” said Emily.

            “A what?”
            “I don’t know what they call it. But you just bring in a priest and get him to say a prayer.”

            “Oh, come on. You…” started Mike.

            “Na, na, na,” scolded Emily with her finger wagging. “You can’t belittle a person’s sincere religious faith. Especially not you, because you’re so privileged. It won’t cost much and it’ll get the men back.”

            “And maybe we’ll have an exorcism too?” joked Mike.

            “Actually, I think it will be an exorcism. I’m not sure. But they likely won’t call it that. Not in front of a nonbeliever.”

            “Yeah, but…” started Mike.

            “You shouldn’t try to impose your atheism on others. It’s un-American.”

            “Well…” said Mike with a patronizing smile, “you must be right then. I suppose it’ll be up to Cactex. But I don’t think much of…”

            “Good boy,” said Emily with her hand up. “You stand by your lack of faith.”

            “I can see this girl… woman, being my boss someday,” said Mike to Jean and Jenny. “And when I do, I wake up screaming.”

            “Don’t worry, Mike,” said Emily without looking up. “I’ll go easy on you.”

            “Do you girls… you women, want to head up to take a look at the mountain?” asked Mike. “Get a close look at the damage?”

            “Wasn’t that beautiful,” shouted Mike. They had just come from the rockface where they had seen the results. There was very little to look at. The newly-exposed granite had a slightly different color, and they could see the remaining bottom ends of the holes that had held the explosives. “What matters is that rock not missing from where it’s supposed to be.”

“What isn’t there was hard to notice,” said Jean.

            On three of the telescoping platforms the rock drills were at work again, drilling deeper for the final round of blasting. What was more interesting were the five platforms that now held saws. Some were moving back and forth, others up and down. The platform held the saw and a worker who stood and watched. It would move in and out, closer and further, to follow the computer’s precise command.

            Jean remembered the abrasive sawblade that her dad had shown them in the trailer. It was a metal disk, 16 inches across, and he had called it a diamond wheel. It did not have sharp claw-like teeth like on a table saw for cutting wood. Instead, it had a dull edge with large funny-shaped notches cut out of it. Up on the tower, in action, it was invisible under the blade guard. What was very visible was a small but continuous stream of dirty water that ran out of the cut and down the rockface. She had been told that the water kept the blade from heating up, from friction, and breaking. As well, the water carried away the fine particles. A  dry saw would have blown it out as dust. Long dirty streaks on the rock below were washed away by a worker with a hose, who was moving from saw to saw, spraying down the cliff.

            “The hotels are being designed to achieve a LEED Gold rating,” said Mike after they were coming back down. The noise had stopped and the giant elevator was in motion. “It stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. That means it will have a minimal impact on the surrounding environment, and will not add much CO2 to the atmosphere.”

            “Does it cost a lot?” asked Emily.

            “The cost of windmills and solar collectors are now so low it’ll actually save money. Cactex will call it GREED with LEED. They’ll back off, after the LEED people threaten them with a lawsuit, but not before they leak it to the media. It seems strange, though. Doesn’t it? To be going green, to save money? It’s hard to keep true to the conservative cause when the thermometers keep going liberal on us.”

            “What do you mean?” asked Jean.

            “The last few years, the average temperature of the world’s taken a bit of a jump. ’23 in particular. Bad news for coal, oil and gas. Trump has said it’ll go down, and that it’s just a fluctuation and I guess we should all be hoping he’s right.”

            “What do you mean ‘designed to achieve’ a LEED Gold rating?” asked Jenny.

            “What’s still pricy is energy storage. That’s the batteries they’d need to save the solar power until nighttime, or a cloudy day. And to put aside wind power for when it’s calm. So that’s why Cactex is just aiming to achieve the rating, and not planning on having it ready for opening day. They’re only needing to please Republicans, so the bar isn’t set too high. They’ll have some solar and wind ready, and some of the storage but they’ll still be a very thick extension cord buried under the road.”

            “Hiding their shame?” joked Emily.

            “This place is still pretty green. Most of the energy consumption here is for heating, air-conditioning and hot water, and not much of that will come from electricity. Or from carbon. Everything here has been designed with what they call ‘passive’ energy conservation. Lots of insulation, windows with three layers of glass, and with every crack sealed off for air leaks. The temperature here can get as low as 25 and high as 120, so they need it. It ain’t Hawaii. The big windows face north, and the rest are under broad eaves to shade them from the high summer sun but not the low winter sun. Passive design can cut air-conditioning and heating costs by 50 percent.”

            “That’s a small fortune, isn’t it?” asked Emily.

            “It sure is. And almost all the hot water heating here will be handled by special solar collectors on the roofs. They just heat water. In a three-story hotel you’ve got lots of roof. Heating and air-conditioning will be handled by a geothermal system that’ll cut costs by another 80 percent. Under the buildings and parking lots, and under the road coming in, there’s a mile of tubes that’ll have a fluid flowing through them. Just like in a refrigerator or an air-conditioner. The ground here at ten feet is steady at 79 degrees, summer and winter. With the help of heap pumps it’ll warm the place in the winter and cool it in the summer. Room temperature here will be 76.”
            “That’ll be cozy,” complained Emily.

            “Relaxes stiff old muscles. Part of the cure. The system will pay for itself in eight years.”

            “Cactex ain’t green. It’s just cheap,” joked Jean.

            “Greener and cheaper. Who’d have ever thought those two words would go together. They’re thinking of getting half of what little electricity they’ll still need from the sun and half from wind. Eventually. And the desert cooperates by being a bit windier at night. The windmills will be three times as tall as Don… as tall as a 20-story building. It’ll all be ready for cheaper energy storage. To try to go green on electricity right away, even with subsidies, the break-even time would likely be at least 12 years. Who knows? It’s just too tempting to stall on storage for a couple of years. Cactex is no different from all the ordinary people who get huffy when they find out their cousin’s electric bill is less than theirs. Everybody wants a bargain. Everybody’s waiting on the new technologies. Fighting pollution has never bought a lot of votes. And this is a democracy. The people want bargains. And the people are never wrong.”

            “Sounds like you don’t like people,” said Jean.

            “Well… you see… there’re some things that can get people really excited. Things like insects, snakes, dogs, darkness, confined spaces, heights, enemy attack, storms, and… oh, yeah. Plagues. How can I forget that one. Those are the things that can cause a severe neurotic phobia. And they’re all things that would have posed a danger for stone-age people. We’re hard-wired for those threats. People have a healthy, reasonable fear of electrical shock. But unless it’s coming from a bolt of lightning, they don’t go nuts about it. And stone-age people were never killed by air pollution. Indoor smoke, yes, but not invisible outdoor air pollution. It just can’t generate public hysteria. And sometimes the politicians need a bit of public hysteria before they can get a law passed. Job one is to get reelected.”

            “That’s unfortunate,” said Emily.

            “Darn democracy,” joked Mike. “But things are changing fast. There’re dozens of new technologies in the works for energy storage. It’s a new gold rush. And there’ll still be breakthroughs in solar collector design and windmill design. They’ll get more efficient. But it’s the combination of cheaper production plus cheaper storage that matters. The final price to the customer has got to go down. And it will go down. Startups keep announcing game-changing breakthroughs but what counts is the final cost to the customer. But the big boys are spending like crazy on R&D. What can be manufactured cheap will generate revenues in the billions. Along with internet billionaires, there’s going to be energy storage billionaires.”

            “So” asked Jenny, “there could be a huge breakthrough in the cost of renewables plus storage this year, and thousands of new factories could be built in the next five years?”

            “More likely this decade, and the next 20 years. But there’s no telling what, who or where. But we know for sure that, so far, the reductions in cost of wind, solar and storage have been way ahead of most predictions. The days of coal, oil and gas are numbered. With or without subsidies. And we can’t rely on personal self-sacrifice. Let’s face it. There’re two solutions. Technology… or abstinence. Good thing technology’s coming to the rescue, because not many are keen on abstinence. Not when they can see that others are still fat and happy. But soon, we’ll have solved air pollution and climate change, and then we’ll be happy forever.”

            “I can’t stop thinking about what you said,” sighed Jean as she foamed her milk. After they got back to the trailers, she and Jenny had taken their books to the gazebo. “About who they’d cast for a show about female engineers. Should it be hot young starlets, or homely women from the comedy club circuit who can really deliver a line?”

            “Yeah. It’d be a tough decision,” said Jenny as she stared at the less-than-perfect foam heart on her cappuccino. “Mom says that the more they do research on greenhouse gases, the less they find is coming from where we’ve been thinking it was coming from.”

            “Where’s it coming from?” asked Jean.

            “The experts keep reminding you that, ultimately, all consumption is personal. The big corporations are just middle-men. Middle-persons. What they do is all done for the comfort and convenience of the people. Some more than others. And a large chunk of that comfort and convenience is just from food.”

            “But food is what keeps us fat and happy.”

            “And if there isn’t enough shame in your life, you can find online carbon footprint calculators.”

            “Oh, boy.”

            “Mom says that, until cheap energy storage makes all the electrical utilities want to switch over to renewables, then any one person can’t do much. Except to voluntarily adopt the lifestyle of a really poor person.”

            “There’re some people willing to do that.”

            “There’s always has been. They’re called monks and nuns.”

            “Jeepers, Jenny. You can be so depressing sometimes.”

            “And Mom says it didn’t help the cause when Joe Biden bought a… just a minute,” said Jenny as she tapped. “A 4,800 square foot vacation home, for when he was bored with the 7,000 square foot house he was renting. And when Saint Al of Gore – that’s what Mom calls him when Grandpa’s in the room. When he bought a 10,000 square foot mansion.”

            “Well, aren’t big Republicans just as bad?”

            “They’ve even bigger houses, probably. But at least they aren’t hypocrites asking regular people to make sacrifices when they won’t.”

            “How big is a regular home?” asked Jean.

            “Lemme look. Mom sent me a link. Okay, this page says that, for ‘2009 builds,’ the U.S. has 829 square feet per person. They’re assuming an average family size, I guess. Australia 957, Canada 775, Germany 592, Japan and France tied at 462. Russia 236, China 215.”

            “How’d Australia manage to beat us out?”

            “Something to do with kangaroos, I’d imagine. And this is just for 2009. So that doesn’t even start on all the dear, old grandmothers clinging to their poorly-insulated family homes.”

            “You should see my grandma’s house.”

            “I don’t know about Russia and China. 2009 might have just been a big year for providing little apartments for poor people.”

            “Do they mention any developing countries?” asked Jean.

            “Not here. I’d imagine the number would be way smaller. But poor countries are mostly tropical and they can spend a lot of the time outside, so you’d be comparing apples to mangos.”

            “How big’s a trailer?”

            “A… classic house trailer,” said Jenny slowly as she looked, “is 12 by 60. That’d be… 720 square feet. But you’re usually sharing it with a husband, two grandchildren and three big dogs.”

            “How big is Donald Trump’s house?”

            “Mom found that… just so Grandpa couldn’t say that she hadn’t. He has six residences. His New York penthouse is 11,000. And his place in Palm Beach is… 62,500.”

            “It must take him forever to vacuum.”

            “But in his defense,” said Jenny, “and in Big Al and Big Joe’s defense, too. These big houses for big businessmen, and big politicians, and… and for big criminals. They’re all unofficial resort hotels. And both mom and grandpa agree on that one. You invite some client to stay for a couple of weeks. And you get paid when it’s time to do some buying and selling.”

            “Get paid?”

            “The say ‘invite me again,’ by buying for too much and selling for too little. It’s kind of legalized bribery. And Mom says the same goes for all the stately country homes in 18th century England.”

            “You mean Mr. Darcy’s house?” asked Jean, who was thinking about a character in Pride and Prejudice.

            “Yeah. Poor Elizabeth Bennet found out the hard way that she was going to be an overworked ‘hotelier.’”

            “I’ll have to steer clear of rich boys.”

            “So, to find out how much of a big mansion is truly used by the owner, you’d really have to do a detailed study. Mom says you’d have to put an electronic ankle bracelet on them and follow them for a few months and see which rooms they go into.”

            “I don’t think Donald will go for it.”

            “Likely not. Unless he has to wear it anyways. So big houses aren’t always what Professor Essor calls ‘monuments to their egos.’ They’re usually sound business investments.”

            “Okay,” said Jean, sowly. “Is that bad or good?”

            “I don’t know. It’s so confusing. Mom says that it’s really the amount that a family spends that tells you how much carbon they’re responsible for. It doesn’t matter a lot how you spend it. But she conceded going vegan can reduce the carbon that goes towards food by a lot.”

            “But how many fries can a person eat?”

            “But food only counts for 15 percent of an average person’s total carbon, anyways. To go beyond vegan, you’re back to voluntary poverty.”

            “I guess could trade in my Suburban for a Bolt,” said Jean as she sniffed and pretended to wipe a tear from her eye.

            “Mom says an electric car is a nice political statement, but it isn’t green if you charge it overnight with electricity that comes out of a coal plant. So what it all means is that poor people are the only truly green people.”

            “It must be a great consolation.”

            “Poor people really should get some kind of recognition for their contribution to fighting climate change.”

            “You’re right,” said Jean. “A green ribbon. But just think, maybe, someday, every mother will dream that her little boy will grow up to be poor.”

            “Hey. There’s a sin of gluttony. It’s one of the Seven Deadly Sins. What would be a general term for a sinful desire to enjoy more… material consumption, than you truly need to be happy? Material plus gluttony.”

            “Muttony?”

            “Of course,” said Jenny. “But a bit unfair to sheep, though.”

            “So have the Democrats really been doing any more than Republicans in the war on muttony?”

            “I haven’t heard that either of them is promising economic stagnation.”

“Delivering it, maybe,” joked Jean.

“But just think. All the development workers, off in Africa, have just been working towards larger carbon footprints for disadvantaged carbon emitters.’”

            “But don’t the poor deserve a little more carbon,” asked Jean. “Just as long as they don’t get the whole ‘American Dream.’”

            “I wonder how much more the rich actually consume than the middle-income types? They’ve bigger houses, obviously.”

            “But don’t they call it a ‘monster house’ because you’re sharing it with actual monsters?”

            “Does a rich person drive more?” asked Jenny as she thought, “or does he drive the same distance in a snazzier car? And does a rich man eat more, or just fancier? And if his fancy cloths all go to the Goodwill, eventually, doesn’t he get to pass along some of his footprint to the second owner? And the third?”

            “I get a lot of stuff second hand. It’s been pre-softened.”

            “There’s this plan to use huge balloons to dust the upper atmosphere with powdered calcium carbonate. Ground up limestone. It’s supposed float around for a few days and reflect the sun back out into outer space, instead of letting it warm the earth.”

            “They’re going to save the world with antacids?” joked Jean.

            “I guess so. It’ll be like a giant thermostat in the sky. Some Harvard people were going to test it out but too many environmentalists went berserk. They figure it’ll be used to protect the oil and gas companies. Oil and gas barons, everywhere. Arab sheikhs and Russian oligarchs and pension funds. And the best place to do it is likely over the equator, so it might cause more tornados in Africa. And once they try it out, from then on, every farmer who doesn’t get a bumper crop will hire a lawyer.”

            “But if it works, does it mean I can go back to buying lottery tickets?”

            “Maybe you can,” said Jenny, “but not me. I’m too pure of heart and noble of spirit. Besides, we’re loaded.”

            “You shouldn’t be aware of your purity! You’ll commit the sin of pride just thinking about it.”

            “But just think. Our greatest evil is our dogged refusal to work towards poverty as an ethical lifestyle choice. There you have it. Career development. The naked face of evil.”

            “Yeah,” said Jean, who was thinking. “Speaking of naked, why do you suppose the detectives were asking you about having an affair with Brad? What’d you tell them?”

            “I said ‘No!’ Like I’d just been asked if I ate raw worms. I might have overplayed it.”

            “They didn’t believe you?” asked Jean.

            “How would I know? They’re detectives. They’re trained to grunt.”

            “So they think you killed him because he refused to leave his wife and marry you?”

            “It’s so insulting!”

            “He wasn’t that bad!”

            “He’s never tried to romance you.”

            “He did you?” asked Jean.

            “In his nerdy way.”

            “Maybe he’s had affairs with other women.”

            “I don’t think it’s called an affair when you have to pay above her usual rate.”

            “He paid you in cash?”

            “Oh! Jean! That’s awful! I’m in a fragile condition!”

            “Sorry.”

            “If the prosecution plays up this adultery thing and the jury is full of jealous wives, I could still be convicted. To send a message to all hot little home-wreckers.”

            “You’ll have to dye your hair brown again and wear your glasses.”

            “I’ll definitely do that! And I’d wear a retro blouse. And a retro pink sweater, as if the inhumanity of it has chilled me to the bone.”

            “And you’d have to cry a lot.”

            “Oh, I can do that in a snap. I’ve practiced. It should be a registered weapon.” She sat up in the chair, slouched forward and crossed her arms at her stomach. At first, she just looked at the table. Then she started to jerk slightly, as if with involuntary stomach cramps. She held her hand to her mouth to pretend to hide the curl on her lip, and tears actually started to well up in her eyes. She was bringing a tissue to her nose when Sarah knocked and let herself in.

            “Oh, Jenny dear! Don’t worry, hon. I’ve talked to the lawyers. They say the police have nothing, and they’ll likely drop the charges real soon.”

            “You think so?” asked Jenny in a voice that almost made Jean tear up in sympathy.

            “Sure, I do. The cops have to look like they’re doing something. Just… just think about how well the blasting went. That’ll cheer you up.”

            “Yeah,” said Jenny. “That was so wonderful.”

            “You want another pill?”

            “No… but I’ll come to you if I need one.”

            “That’s the stuff. I got plenty of them. Well! Godda load up on espresso and get back to work. We’re into the closing stretch.”

Chapter 22

July 6, 7:00 a.m.

            “How’d it go?” asked Jean when she met Jenny in the hallway. Jean had just come from supper and Jenny was getting back from her third coffee date.

            “It was so great. We talked and talked. I had a cruller and a buster.”

            “If this keeps up, the two of you are going to look like a washer and a dryer.”

            “Actually, he might have missed a lot of what I was saying. He had his police radio on an earbud, so I was never sure if he was listening to me or to some ‘all-points bulletin.’”

            “He would have missed half you said anyways, just from looking in your eyes.”

            “I even told him about how I took out that guy’s spleen. He thought it was hilarious.”

            “Are you sure? He could have been laughing on the outside and cringing in fear on the inside.”

            “No. He’s a martial-arts nut too. And he’s a fast draw athlete!”

            “He’s an artist?” asked Jean, after a pause.
            “No. He’s like Billy the Kid. Did you ever watch old western movies with your dad? He’s just like one of those cowboy psychos. He can pull a gun out of a holster and hit a target, really, incredibly fast. He goes to competitions. He’s got ribbons and trophies. Just for the youth level. The champions are like, 50 years old.”

            “Oh, you’re lying!”

            “That’s what I said. But he showed me a competition on his phone. On the internet. It’s a real sport. It ought to be in the Olympics. He showed me a video of him at a competition.”

            “No way!”

            “And he can hit targets when shooting from the hip. And he can hit a moving target. The size of a melon.”

            “With a pistol? I thought that was a myth.”

            “He uses a Ruger Vaquero Single-Action 45.”

            “Okay,” said Jean, and she wondered if it meant any more to Jenny than it did to her.

            “His boss lets him carry it on the job. He showed it to me. Or at least he pointed to it with his eyes, in its holster. I looked under the table. It’s huge.”
            “You’re talking about the gun, I hope.”

            “He said I couldn’t fire it in the coffee shop,” joked Jenny. “Their ‘community relations’ thing.”

            “The community demands so much.”

            “He could easily have shot that guy. The blonde guy that shot him. Hank was so lucky. The guy only got his liver. If you don’t die, it’ll grow back.”

            “What?”

            “Your liver can grow back. You lose three quarters to surgery and get it all back. It’s like a tadpole.”

            “You’re lying!”

            “No, it will! Here, lemme show you,” said Jenny as she picked up her laptop.

            “Show me his liver? Gross!”

            “No not that!” she said as she located a video of a fast draw competition. They watched parts of three videos.

            “This is so… something,” said Jean.

            “I picked up a newspaper at the gas station. They tell about having made an arrest.”

            “Wow,” said Jean after she skimmed through it. “They make it sound like, now they’ve caught the culprit, the story’s over.”

            “I would have thought I’d be on the front page!” joked Jenny, shaking the newspaper.

            “You’re disappointed?”

            “Well… no! But… wouldn’t it have sounded like something out of a mystery novel? Young beauty accused of killing successful professional man. And they’re reporting it like it’s a… the schoolboard budget. How many girl-next-door murderers do they get?”

            “At least they didn’t call you a ‘murderess.’”

            “Lucky me,” grumbled Jenny. “I’ll have to tell Professor Essor.”

            “But you didn’t really want it on the front page, did you?”

            “Not with a mug shot like this. I look terrible. It barely looks like me.”

            “Do you wish it did?” asked Jean, who was growing concerned about Jenny’s mental condition.

            “Maybe it’s Cactex. Maybe the editors are hoping to keep them happy. Maybe Cactex has already been talking them up about a big advertising campaign. But… Mom says newspapers are pretty desperate these days. That just makes it all the more strange that they wouldn’t make this a front-page thing with stuff they could sell for big bucks to big media.”

            “I guess.”

            “Professor Essor says the media is a reflection of ourselves. It just tells the people what they want to hear.”

            “I’d have thought she’d have said that the media manipulates us.”

            “She says that too. Just not on the same day. But I thought the media would love a hot blonde as much as they love a hot pandemic. I’d have thought they figure I could sell advertising.”

            “Not with that mug shot, they couldn’t,” joked Jean. “What does Hank think about all this?”

            “Oh… I… guess we didn’t talk about it.”

            “Does he know?”

            “I… well. I guess he must,” said Jenny, with a stunned expression. “He said he took a day off, yesterday. Mom says the people got the pandemic coverage that they’d hoped for. It was the polls that drove the lockdowns, as much as the epidemiologists. And the polls were driving the news editors as much as they were driving the politicians.”

            “The people are never wrong,” said Jean, but she wondered why Jenny’s mind had jumped to this topic.

            “The voice of the people.”

            “Do you think Hank…”

            “Democracy in action,” interrupted Jenny. “My mom told me that what really got it all going came a few days after the WHO’s declaration, back in ’20.

“Covid?”

“In some study that came out of something called Imperial College of Medicine. What a name! It sounds like a song in a Gilbert and Sullivan musical.”
            “Oh, I love them! We did the Pirates of Penzance when I was in grade 11. I got a lousy part. I was so mad!”

            “It said that tens of millions might die.”

            “What?”

            “The big study. And that just protecting the old and the feeble would only cut deaths in half. It demanded we all go for Xi Jinping’s commie-style lockdown. Anybody who didn’t was a murderer. So everybody hopped on! Well… 60 percent, anyways.”

            “Yeah, but. Don’t you think that Hank would…”

            “Mom said the Imperial College of Medicine is to medicine what the Harvard Business School is to business.”

            “Because if Hank doesn’t know that…”

            “Imagine you’re the guy in charge of public health. All your training and your whole career has been preparing you for this event. At last, it’s your day in the sun.”

            “Yeah, but. Shouldn’t you be…”

            “Public health people are human beings. They wanna be heroes. They dream of taking charge. So they all yelled ‘Yahoo! Let’s get ‘em, boys!’”

            “That may be true, but don’t you think that you and Hank…”

            “So they said to the politicians ‘Either you call for a lockdown or we accuse you of murder!’”

            “Well, I doubt that those were their exact words.”

            “So what was Trump supposed to do? He’s no expert!”

            “Yeah,” said Jean, expecting to be interrupted if she said more.

            “The Democrats had themselves an issue they could ride all the way to the election. They had something they could milk like a cow.”

            “They did. But if Hank…”

            “But it didn’t end there. The news people. They had a story like nothing since 9/11. Their job is to deliver eyeballs to advertisements. It’s either that or give the story to the competition. So they hyped it to the hilt. They’d no choice. It’s either that or go broke and throw all their employees out into the street to starve.”

            “Yes, that’s true. But I think you really ought to tell…”

            “But it doesn’t stop there. Half the country went crazy and started buying toilet paper! It was nuts!”

            “I thought of a joke,” said Jean. “There was an epidemiologist named Karma. His mother was a hippy-demiologist.”

            “Mom says that, in 2020, death from all causes was holding steady, at not much more than usual, right through January and February. Then in late March it skyrocketed.”

            “Here’s another. How do you lock an epidemiologist in the bathroom? You put something sticky on the doorknob and he’ll be scared to touch it.”

            “To have so sudden a surge in deaths means that there had to be a sudden surge in contagion. Mom said that can’t happen.”

            “Why do epidemiologists know so much about physical distancing? Because they got so much practice when they were in high school.”

            “I suppose a surge in contagion could happen. But only if a month before was the kickoff of ‘International French Kiss Some Guy at the Airport Week.’”

            “Oh, gross!”

            “Imagine the ‘experts’ looking at that graph. Right when the WHO gave Big Media the green light! ‘Jeez Boss. What do we do now?’ And the editor says, ‘Let’s just stick to our story and hope nobody blabs.’”

            “That’s what I would have done,” joked Jean.

            “The epidemiologists had been all excited! Fighting the fight of their life! Democrats wanted to win so bad they could taste it. The media either had to sell advertising or starve!”

            “We have nothing to offer but fear itself!”

            “But it was too late. Trillions had been spent. Unemployment had doubled – tripled! The policy was too big to fail. They can’t now say ‘Whoopsie. Our bad. Sorry guys. Little blooper. Forgive and forget.’”

            “Why do epidemiologists stink at hide-and-seek? Because of their high-visibility vests.”

            “They bet their careers on tough lockdowns,” said Jenny, as if she had not heard her. “They claimed it was five times deadlier than influenza. Some said ten times. But they’ve got a major motive to play it up. It’s probably only twice as deadly.”

            “Why is it that epidemiologists refuse to go to heaven? Fear of heights.”

            “They could either resign in shame or say the vaccines saved us all in just the nick of time.”

            “Hey! They could make a movie about covid called ‘Invasion of the Irritating Neurotics.’”

            “And remember the toilet paper terror? Mom says there must have been people with really weak hearts who were literally scared to death. Just like after Fukushima.”

            “But maybe your mom just wanted to believe that because she’s in love with Donald.”

            “There you have it!” said Jenny, with her arm thrown up. “Thank you for illustrating my point. If you questioned the sacred lockdown, then you were immediately accused of having a crush on Donny-boy. The whole thing was 90 percent politics. Right from the first time Trump said ‘we don’t shut down the economy for the flu.’”

            “You know, I’ve got this image stuck in my head, of a doctor in an ICU, in a hazmat outfit, with a nurse holding a phone to his mouth. And he’s saying, “Honey. Listen! Buy toilet paper! Lots of it!’”

            “Professor Essor told us about a guy named Antonio Moniz. He won the 1949 Nobel Prise for Medicine. For the lobotomy! And he was a nice guy who just wanted to prevent suffering. After this, lobotomy was the hot new thing. All the cool surgeons were doing it. They figure there were about 50,000 of them done just in the US. One in every 3000 Americans! But it could have been more. Nobody really knows how many were done. They could do it in their office. They’d take a really expensive ice pick, slide it around your eyeball, ram it through where the bone is thin and then twist it around a few times.”

            “Gross!”

            “Back in the sixties, there was this doctor named William Sweet. And two other Harvard medical professors. They were advocating lobotomies to solve the problem with the agitators who kept inciting race riots. Lucky for Martin Luther King he didn’t go to Harvard to tell about his ‘dream’ because if he’d walked into the wrong building he might have walked out an idi… intellectually challenged person. And Dr. Sweet was an eminent physician who just wanted to alleviate suffering and pain.”

            “I guess that’s why they called him ‘sweet’,” joked Jean.

            “Mom figures 90 percent of the doctors who did lobotomies went to their graves insisting they did way more good than harm.”

            “That’s what I’d have done.”

            “And I guess that’s what all the studies will be for,” sighed Jenny. “Brilliant doctors are capable of being spectacularly wrong. And Mom says doctors aren’t too scared to talk, now. Some of them. She says we’ll all know more about what happened a year from now. And even more in two years. There must still be a lot of researchers waiting for the storm to blow over so they can open their mouths without having their tongues cut out.”

            “We’ll know it’s all over when the chief epidemiologist is replaced with the chief apologist,” said Jean, as she wondered whether she should go to Sarah and ask for another pill.

Chapter 23

July 6, 8:30 p.m.

            “Up close it still just looks like rock,” said Jenny to Jean when they stepped into the gazebo. The final round of blasting was finished and they had just come down from the tower. The site was less noisy than usual and there was a lovely sunset in the west.

            “It’s probably looking like people if you could see it from a distance.”

            “If anybody asks it’s… who’s a famous woman?”

            “Ah…”

“It’s nice to see them so happy though. Isn’t it? They’re all floating on a cloud.”

            “They’ll be more pleasant to listen to at the kitchen,” said Jean with a smile.

            “Smell better, too.”

            “Oh, look, It’s Hank,”

            “You left your wallet on the table,” he said with a warm smile as he came in the door. He was off duty and wore shorts, sandals and a Hawaiian shirt.”

            “Oh God… oh jeepers,” laughed Jenny.

            “They held onto it until I was back in. It’s my fault,” he explained to Jean. “I was still eating after she had to go. It was right there in front of me.”

            “Driving without her license then?” joked Jean. “You’ll have to give her a ticket.”

            “Can’t,” he said with an apologetic shrug. “Forgot my pad on the table. Next to my gun.”

            “Why don’t you stay for a coffee,” asked Jenny. “I can make you a cappuccino. We’ve really good coffee here. Sarah makes me buy it so I assume she wants the best.”

            “Sure,” he said as he sat down. Jean asked what time he started work. He said midnight, and started telling her about the usual nighttime routine.

            “Oh, my goodness!” said Euglena from the door. “I hope you’re not here for what I think you’re here for?”

            “What?” asked Hank.

            “Well… didn’t you hear? They’ve booked Jenny for the murder of Brad. They took her in yesterday. Wow! Consorting with an accused felon. Trouble deep. Here, come on with me. I’ll take you on a quick tour of the site. If anybody asks, you came here to see me.” She grabbed his arm and pulled him up. As they went out, he looked back at Jenny with an expression of betrayal.

            “Oh heck,” said Jenny, faintly, as she put down the cappuccino she had ready for him.

            “I hadn’t thought of that either,” said Jean.

            “No,” agreed Jenny with a stunned expression as she sat down. “I… never thought.”

            “It does make sense once it’s pointed out.”

            “Yes,” said Jean, after a long pause. Through the screen she could see the two of them coming back out of the trailer, her smiling and laughing. She had him in a vest, muffs and hard hat, and they started towards the tower.

            “How could I be so incredibly stupid?” said Jenny. She watched them until they disappeared through the big doors.

            “He’ll forgive you,” said Jean.

            “How could he?”

            “Well… I think Euglena was just trying to protect him.”

            “Yeah,” sighed Jenny as she sat back down. “He’ll think I’m a… thoughtless, uncaring, irresponsible… murderer.”

            “Well… at least… at least he doesn’t think you’re an unscrupulous, conniving, deceitful traitor.”

            “I amaze myself sometimes,” said Jenny as she shook her head. “I’m just not a very nice person.”

            “Well…” started Jean. She had intended to give her an example of when she had shown herself to be nice, but could not think of one.

            “You know,” said Jenny, slowly. “I used to try to tell the Covidarians about how unlikely it was that they’d get any more than a mild cold. I’d show them the statistics and tell them about the underlying conditions. And I’d tell them about the site I’d got it from to show it was a reliable source.”

            “That was something nice you did.”

            “It wasn’t. All I’d get for it was them getting mad at me. I finally gave up. It was like, anybody that was scared at the start of it was scared forever. And anybody who wasn’t scared then, would never be scared. Nobody ever needed statistics to make up their mind. The numbers didn’t matter. It was just the fear that mattered.”

            “Well…”

            “You know what it was like? It was like telling people who are scared of flying that they’ve a one in ten million chance of dying on a regular flight. It could be one in a billion and they’d still be scared.”

            “I got a joke. A survey of epidemiologists found that the only flights they feel secure taking are the ones that have been cancelled because of the lockdown.”

            “I was insulting them,” sighed Jenny. “ I was telling them how stupid they were, for being scared. They didn’t hear odds. They just heard ‘sissy girl’ and ‘scaredy pants’ and ‘lily liver.’”

            “Yeah, but...” Jean started, but again she could not think of anything to console her.

            “I just didn’t understand. I just couldn’t imagine what they were feeling.”

            “Yeah. I wasn’t…”

            “I looked it up, and I found out that it’s about one in 15 people who are too scared to fly. Either they don’t go or they need some kind of elephant tranquilizer. They’ve all heard, again and again, that it’s more dangerous to drive to the airport. It took months of insulting people about fear of covid before I realized I was just making them ashamed of themselves.”

            “Yeah. Poor dopes.”

            “But it’s way more than one in 15 who had a paralyzing, irrational fear of covid. It’s like… two in three who kept saying it was too early to take down the restrictions, even after two years. But… I guess a lot of them were old and sick, so they ought to have been scared.”

            “And not just when they look in a mirror,” joked Jean.

            “So maybe it was half of them who were really scared for the sake of the young and healthy people. One in three. One in 30. It’d all just depend on where you drew the line. Mom tried to find a poll on fear of covid that was just done on young people. But she couldn’t find one. Nobody’s done one.”

            “Young people never answer the phone,” joked Jean.

            “Even after I told the Covidarians that the risk for a healthy young person was like, one in 50,000.”

            “Well…” said Jean, “but with fear of flying, you don’t have the government telling you to wear your parachute for the whole flight, just in case you have to jump out the door at a mile up. And they don’t advise you to wear a life jacket and to carry your shark repellent in case you land in the middle of the ocean. You don’t have a deliberate campaign that’s geared to scaring people like my brother who’s too stupid to be scared by anything. But it can still scare the sissy-girls until they’re half-nuts.”

            “Yeah,” sighed Jenny.

            “It was like if they’d had the director of the FBI telling paranoiacs that they really are being watched by the CIA. Or the Surgeon General telling suicidal people that they really don’t have anything to live for. What could they expect?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Like my grandma used to say, ‘If you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind.’”

            “Oh, I loved that,” said Jenny as her eyes lit up. “My grandma used to say that one too. I loved it so much. It’d bring me an image of an old-fashioned windmill squeaking while it turned. And a loose windowpane rattling in its frame. And of a lonesome cowboy riding across the prairie, holding onto his hat while a tumbleweed goes past. It’s so beautiful.”

            “Yeah, it is.”

            “And I don’t even come from Kansas.”

            “If you did, you probably wouldn’t think it was beautiful. I bet when this place is open, everybody that comes will be flying in. And everybody from Arizona, when they go for a cure, will be going up to Canada to jump into an ice-cold lake.”

            “I wonder,” said Jenny, “if people who play a lot of poker were way less scared of covid. Because they’re used to estimating odds. And whether people who buy lottery tickets were really really scared of covid because they can’t comprehend the meaning of ‘one chance in a gazillion.’”

            “I’ve heard that statisticians hate it when they hear people use the word ‘gazillion.’”

            “I’ll have to remember that. I’ll use it when I need to torment a statistician.”

            “Pays to be prepared,” said Jean as she stopped to think. “I guess the people who are hard-wired for fear will always have enough evidence to justify their fear. Because no matter what the research says, the health czars from 2020 will never say ‘Forget what we said. We were nuts.’ And their insistence will be taken as proof that the evidence must exist.”

            “I guess if some czar did come out and admit he lied to protect Big Pharma, or the WHO, or Xi Jinping. He’d get hit with all the blame for all the people who lost their jobs, or went bankrupt, or overdosed on fentanyl. And he’ll be blamed for all the taxes that still have to be collected to pay for it all. And then what? He’s devoted his whole life to getting to be the big expert – the government health czar. Is he going to be happy going into early retirement? Gardening?”

            “How can anybody like gardening?” said Jean, after a pause to think about it.

            “Would he even be happy teaching courses at some state university? It’d be like a big-league coach losing his job and having to go coach high school.”

            “That’d be so awful.”

            “He’d be devastated. And who could blame him? So, he… or she, won’t ever admit he’s wrong. Not ever. He’ll keep on saying that, if it hadn’t been for the vaccines in the nick of time, the big wave of death would have hit, for sure. He’ll always be saying there’d have been tens of millions dead, just like the Pirates of Penz… the Imperial College of Medicine said. He’ll keep saying it until the day he dies.”

            “Hopefully not of covid,” joked Jean.

            “You know how they say there was an 18 percent increase in deaths from all causes in 2020?”

            “What did little Donald do when he received the honor of reading the ‘prayers of the day.’ He promised to make First Presbyterian great again.”

            “My grandpa will always figure that 17 out of the 18 had to be covid. And my mom will always say that it’s likely closer to one. And that almost all the rest died of… large portion sizes. And they’ll both be able to print off a stack of scientific articles that’ll justify their… opinions.”

            “But a million people still died of covid, indirectly.”

            “But Mom will say ‘how indirectly?’ Grandpa will say that they were indirectly murdered by ‘Donald the Terrible.’ When he wasn’t busy indirectly inciting riots.”

            “When Little Donald was in grade three, he learned to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He’d use it to incite food fights in the cafeteria.”

            “But you know what’s ironic,” said Jenny. “If there was a lot of people killed mainly by fear, then it’d have been mostly Democrats. Because they were the most scared. But then their deaths will be offset by the extra Republicans who died of covid, because they were less likely to try avoid catching it even though they weighed 400 pounds.”

            “Back during covid, why did epidemiologists only date compulsive liars? They’re the only ones willing to tell them they could understand the lockdown rules.”

            “Do you suppose,” asked Jenny, “that the Covidarians secretly admired and envied people like us? For being so brave?”

            “Probably. Did anybody ever choose to be scared silly? ‘Hey Mom, when I grow up, I want to be a scaredy-cat.’”

            “And what about scary rides?” asked Jenny. “And scary movies?”

            “But there you know for sure you’re not going to die.”

            “Not everybody. And what about show-offs?”

            “Yeah,” said Jean, “Everybody loves them, don’t they? And what’s car racing, or rodeo?” Or half of all sports? It’s just watching a bunch of dare devils showing off.”

            “Maybe they should make the dare devils double-mask.”

            “You know why it helped so much when the epidemiologist went out with three masks on top of each other? Because nobody could understand him when he started yelling, ‘Take them off! I can’t breathe!’”

Chapter 24

July 6, 9:30 p.m.

            “Did you see the look she gave me?” asked Jenny. She and Jean had just come out of the trailer. Euglena and Emily had been sitting together at her desk, and Euglena had looked up.

            “No, what sort of a look?” asked Jean.

            “If looks could kill, I’d be dead. I bet she and Jacob think they know who’s behind the practical jokes.”

            “Oh-oh.”

            “I guess we now know who talked to the cops.”

            “No, we don’t know,” said Jean in a mature voice.

            “We can’t go and apologize though. Can we?” said Jenny as she stared at her coffee.

“What do you mean, we?”

 “And Jacob might still be convinced that it was the surveyors. And Euglena might still think the fake police thing is real.”

            “Well, what can we do?”

            “It probably was Jacob who whacked Brad. We’ve all those reasons. And all those guilty looks.”

            “They can’t convict a guy just for looking guilty.”

            “Have you ever googled ‘wrongfully convicted,’ and gone to ‘images?’” asked Jenny.

            “They’re all scary-looking guys?”

            “A lot of them. But that sort of thing has its upside too. Lawyers say sweeties like us are virtually unconvictable.”

            “Unless you confess, just to be nice,” joked Jean.

            “Being found not guilty isn’t as good as getting the charges dropped.”

            “You said Jacob’s always talking to his dad in his office,” said Jean as she furrowed her brow. “If we could plant a bug in there, and we could listen in.”

            “You need a court order if you want voice recorded evidence to be admissible in a trial. I saw that on TV.”

            “But you wouldn’t need it just to make them want to drop the charges.”

            “Do you have a listening device?” asked Jenny, expecting the answer ‘no.’

            “We could buy one online.”

            “And get it in a month. Besides, Auntie Sarah’s so paranoid she probably has jamming devices. I saw that on TV.”

            “Well… what do we do?”

            “Watch more TV,” said Jenny, after a sigh.

            When they went back to the trailer to cool off, they found Emily at a computer terminal. “Jenny, could you help me? Cyrus asked me to do this.”

            “Oh, that jerk,” said Jenny as she looked. “Lemme do it. I know what he wants.”

            “Wow. That makes it easy,” said Emily to Jean.

            “I need your help,” said Jean after they sat down at the table to study. “It’s to get Jenny off the hook. I know she’s innocent and we’re sure that it’s probably Jacob who whacked Brad. There’s plenty of evidence, but it’s all ‘circumstantial.’ We’ve got to listen in on him and his dad when they get back from the tower.”

            “Cool,” said Emily with bright eyes. “I figured it was him as soon as Mom told me Brad was dead. Mom tells me everything. But she was ready to kill him too, so who knows? What can I do to help?”

            “Listen to them.”

            “I’ve been trying to,” sighed Emily. “No luck so far.”

            “Where are they now?”

            “They’re both up in the tower. They’re sawing like demons on Donald…” She froze. They stared at each other.

            “You know about Donald?” asked Jean.

            “You know about him?”

            “I found a photo. It was in Brad’s desk.”

            “You went through his desk!” gasped Emily.

            “Well… sort of.”

            “Bad girl! You know you can’t tell Jenny about Donald. She’s a rabid ultra-liberal nutcase. You should have heard her in Professor Essor’s class. She’s pathetic.”

            “No, she’s not!” whispered Jean, after a look back at Jenny. She seemed hard at work. “Well, she is. But not that way. She thinks you’re pathetic.”

            “Me! Why am I pathetic?”

            “It ought to be because you’re as big a phony as her. But it’s because she thinks you’re a liberal nutcase.”

            “What!”

            “But she means it as a compliment.”

            “Oh, okay.”

            “Jenny’s not a liberal. Not much of one. She just wanted an A.”

            “Oh… gosh,” whispered Emily. “That means she had me fooled.”

            “That’s what she does best.”
            “Wow. She’s good. Is she a conservative, then?”

            “I don’t know. Not really. More of a sociopath.”

            “And she thinks I’m what I was claiming to be?” asked Emily, sounding offended.

            “But that just means she thinks you’re good at what you do. And… jeepers, you do have a brush cut!”

            “Only to try to impress her. I need her to tutor me with math. I’m scared of flunking out and shaming the family. I’m desperate!”

            “So you were both faking it for Essor?” asked Jean.

            “I had to. I needed the grade.”

            “So you like Trump?”

            “I don’t know,” shrugged Emily. “He doesn’t stink. I sure liked the way he can make Essor suffer. I like the way he made a lot of people miserable. I wasn’t thrilled about him and climate change. But it hardly mattered. The U.S. was a greenhouse emissions good boy in spite of him. Sort of. It doesn’t take much to compare well to most countries. Nobody’s doing much of anything. Other than hunting for bargains.”

            “Wow. You sound just like Jenny.”

            “Well… I do have engineers for parents.”

            “Who you gonna vote for?” asked Jean.

            “Well, for sure Republican, probably. But just because I love my mommy.”

            “Oh, that’s sweet.”

            “Mom thought it was so hilarious when you and your dad ratted me out for being ultra-liberal.”

            “Is she mad at us?”

            “Oh, heck no!” laughed Emily. “She calls that loyalty. But she was so looking forward to seeing the look on Jenny’s face when she saw the unveiling of the Donald head. She was going to have it videoed.”

            “We were going to video you.”

            “Mom will have everybody videoed. I insisted. There’ll be ultra-high-def cameras from every angle. The whole thing was my idea.”

            “The videos?” asked Jean.

            “No, the statues.”

            “You’re lying!”

            “I had to nag her. She thought the yuccas were a great idea. I did such a good presentation before the Cactex people! I was magnificent! I was staring the old farts in the eyes and giving them snappy answers and cracking jokes. One of them tried to hire me away from Mom.”

            “That’s wonderful! This is so great!”

            “And videoing everything was my idea too. I’m still working on mom with that. If there’s an accident or anything. Always have a video. If we’re at fault, erase it. If we’re the victim, we’ve got the video. And if it’s somebody important, you can sell it to the media. I put a news video app on her phone. Mine too. You can upload a video in a second. Somebody robs you. You video him and upload it before he can grab your phone and run away.”

            “Wow, I never thought of that.”

            “But,” asked Emily, with a tragic look, “what’ll happen to poor Professor Essor once she finds out that she gave As to two girls who are part of the team that carved the giant Donald head.”

            “The poor woman.”

            “It’ll kill her. Hopefully, before she finds out, she’ll die of a new covid variant.”

            “I’ve got to tell this to Jenny!” said Jean. “She’ll be so relieved.”

            “No wait! How ‘bout I tell her that I know about Donald, and that I can get the key to where they keep the dynamite, and that I need her to help me plant a bomb where it’ll do the most damage. And then while we’re planting it, I make it look like I made a boo-boo and we’re both about to die!”

            “You’re too much like her! And we’ve more important things to do now.”

            After hugging and sharing stories about their lies to Professor Essor, Jean dragged Jenny and Emily back to the more pressing issue. “Wait right here,” said Emily, and she rushed off. Two minutes later, she was back with an electric drill and a half-inch bit.

            “Are they here?” asked Emily.

            “Nobody’s here,” said Jean. “Are you just going to drill a hole in the wall?”

            “Keep a lookout,” Emily whispered. She went behind Brad’s old desk to the wall behind Cyrus’s office. They heard the drill, and then watched her creep out the back door to return the drill to her mother’s office.
            “Done!” bragged Emily, when back. “And thank goodness I didn’t hit a wire and burn the place down. We’ll be able to hear through it, easy.”

            “Somebody might notice you on your hands and knees,” said Jenny.

            “That’s my best side,” bragged Emily. “Especially now with this hair. Besides, I could tell them I’m worshiping a graven image.”

            “Only Jacob would believe that,” said Jenny.

            “You know he’s a closet liberal.”

            “I think he’s in a few closets,” joked Jean.

            “One of us,” said Emily, as she thought, “could keep an eye out. And the other could be looking for something she dropped.”

            “But there’s too many people always coming and going!” insisted Jenny.

            “Not so much, lately,” said Jean. “They’re always up there admiring the rock.”

            “How long would we have to wait?” asked Jenny.

            “It’s Mike’s turn up in the tower now,” said Emily.

            “That means,” said Jean, “that if Jacob needs to talk, he and Cyrus will head straight for his office.”

            “What are the chances of that?” moaned Jenny.

            “You saw Jacob today,” said Jean. “He looks like he’s on the brink of a breakdown.”

            After ten minutes, Cyrus arrived. The students kept their eyes down. A gaunt and haggard Jacob followed. Both went into the office and the door slammed.

            “This is too easy,” whispered Jean with a mischievous smile. “Come on. You just stand there,” she said to Emily. “Strike a pose, like you’re walking down the hallway.”

            “Like a runway model,” joked Emily.

            “Yeah. I’ll make like I dropped… something. Something that could have rolled. I know! My exercise ball.”

            They went to their places. Jean got down and pressed her ear to the hole. Emily stood by the office door in mid-stride.

            Five minutes later, Jean got up, went to Emily, and pulled her away. “I can’t hear anything because…”

            “The door was open a crack,” whispered Emily with a naughty smile. “I’ve heard everything.”

            “And you left me there on the floor?”
            “I couldn’t stop. It was too good,” she said as she led her back to the table. “Jacob’s taken a photo of Mom and drawn some gross stuff on it. Cartoon bubbles with her saying filthy, disgusting things. And then he was dumb enough to autograph it. And Brad has… had the photo.”

            “Wow. That’s so….”

            “So juvenile!” whispered Emily. “That’s like a 12-year-old thing.”

            “You should have heard them when they were arguing,” said Jenny.

            “Quiet,” said Emily. Behind them, the office door had opened. The three students calmly sat at their table and stared at their books.

            “They’re gone,” said Emily, a minute later. “Let’s go.” She went to the open office door.

            “Where do you suppose they’d put it?” asked Jean.

            “It’s here on his desk,” whispered Emily. “What a pair of idiots.”

            “Oh, man,” said Jean when they were back by the table to examine it. “This is disgusting. You think Brad was blackmailing him?”

            “Maybe just tormenting him with veiled threats,” said Emily. “Just for the fun of it.”

            “Where do we hide it?”

            “Here,” said Jenny. She was about to put the photo on top of a high shelf when she noticed the scanner. She slid it in, tapped in a command, and waited.

            “Won’t it be set to keep a backup?” asked Emily.

            “Who cares if it does. Nobody looks at backups. Not unless they’ve spilt something on their laptop and wrecked it. They’re too busy to snoop through my stuff.”

            “Oh yeah,” said Emily as she watched her print off two glossy prints.

            “I’ll put a copy back on Cyrus’s desk,” said Emily and she turned to go. She looked back and forth and went inside just long enough to drop it where she had found the original.

            I’ll… put the other two… up here,” said Jenny, and she went to where loose-leaf binders sat on shelves. “Nobody ever looks at these things. They’re just decor. Let’s go to the gazebo before they come back.”

            “What a totally ridiculous streak of luck!” laughed Jean, once they were sitting down. “It’s like something out of a novel. We’ve easily got enough to get you cleared.”

            “No, we don’t,” said Jenny, as she thought about it. “We don’t have anything. Except evidence of a motive. And not much of that, either. All we have is a stupid drawing with a signature. We’ve proven he’s a jerk. Not a murderer. What we have doesn’t prove anything! This is hopeless!”

            “But we do have something!” insisted Emily. “Having a motive matters a lot. Especially when there’s no actual evidence. We should show the photo to the police. That’ll give them somebody else to wonder about. And… if it is Jacob that ratted you out, this’ll undermine his credibility. Mom said your lawyer figures they’ve got nothing. This could count for a lot. You need to take the photo in to her and she can show it to the detectives.”

            “Yeah,” sighed Jenny. “I guess I ought to.”

            “So” said Jean, leaning back in the chair. “Now what?”

            “I could take the photo in after supper,” said Jenny as she looked at the time.

            “You think Cyrus will notice that he’s only got a copy?” asked Emily. “He’ll suspect you. And that’d give them reason to wanna kill you.”

            “You think so?” asked Jenny.
            “It depends how nuts they are,” shrugged Emily. “We know for sure that probably one of them killed Brad.”

            “And that they’re both nuts,” said Jenny.

            “This is so cool,” whispered Emily. “Fearing death at any moment. It’s just like covid’s back.”

            “You’re enjoyed that?”

            “Well… sort of,” said Emily as she looked down. “I think for a lot of people the lockdown was the best days of their life. Think of the way some people were always trying to figure out how to correctly obey the distancing rules. They always looked like they were having fun. It was like a great big fantasy role-playing game.”

            “Forget about that!” ordered Jean. “Cyrus, and likely Jacob, too! They’ll be back soon! We have to be ready, in case Jacob needs to spill his guts.”

            Just then they saw Jacob and Cyrus coming in.

            “They gave us a real look,” said Jenny, who had glanced back.

            “Oh jeez… Jeepers,” scolded Emily. “You probably confessed your guilt with the look on your face.”

            “Sorry,” said Jenny. “What do we do now?”

            “Same as before,” said Jean as she held up the exercise ball. “I’ll listen in. Emily, you watch the door. If it opens, say ‘I think it went over there.’”

            They got into position. The door was closed and the saws were quiet. Jean pressed her head to the wall and shoved a finger in her other ear.

            “I heard plenty,” said Jean, after five minutes, as she dragged Emily back to the table. “They did it,” she said in a dramatic tone, after she made them wait three seconds to build up the tension. “One of them killed Brad. And they know we’re onto them. Cyrus is saying they might need another one ‘taken care of.’ That must mean you!” she said, pointing to Jenny.

            “They stated it clearly?” asked Emily.

            “I don’t know. I could hardly hear anything.”

            “Hardly hear anything!” groaned Jenny, “Maybe he wants to get somebody to take care of his elderly mother.”

            “They’re too angry for it to be that!” insisted Jean.

            “You’d be surprised,” said Emily.

            “Anyways,” said Jean, “Cyrus thinks they should do nothing. A second murder would be bad for their image.”

            “He said that?” asked Jenny.

            “He sort of implied it.”

            “Oh jeepers!” muttered Jenny. “We still got nothing.”

            “Unless we actually do have something!” insisted Jean.

            “So what do we do? Kill them before they kill us?” 

            “Wow,” said Emily. “Then we’d really be in trouble.”

Chapter 25

July 7, 2:15 a.m.

            “The rock is solid as a… as a rock!” declared Mike to Jean and Jenny, after he got back from the tower with Emily. “I’ve taken a close look at the entire face, and I can’t see a single fault. Every blast was as clean as… as you could hope for.”

            “This is all so cool!” said Emily.

            “We’ve going to have saws installed on all the platforms, and within a few hours they’ll all be sawing like the robotic demons that they are. The lydar and all the other technology, none of it’s let us down.”

            “That must be such a relief,” said Jean.

            “There’s no stopping us now. Who’s heading up for a look?” asked Mike. 

            “After few weeks the veil will be going up and the tower will start coming down,” said Mike after they were suited up and on their way. “And within a few days, we’ll have Don… the right-hand side finished.”

            “You can say Donald,” said Emily. “We all know. I told Mom that she and Cyrus are as leaky as sieves.”

            “Oh… well… that’s good,” said Mike.

            “And don’t fret. She’s glad she can talk to us all about it,” said Emily. “Where is she?”

            “Ah… in her office,” said Mike. “Drinking expresso and looking at lydar. I don’t think she’s slept four hours in the last 40.”

            “That’s not good,” said Emily, shaking her head.

            “Nothing we can do about it,” shrugged Mike. “There was so much that could have gone wrong. And nothing’s gone wrong.”

            When the students were back to their books at their table, Euglena and Jacob came in, walked past silently, and went into Cyrus’s office.

            “They’re in there. What do we do?” asked Jenny.

            “They must need some privacy,” said Emily. “We should respect that. Someday, at least. For now, let’s go see if we can hear anything through the hole.”

            Again, Emily watched the door while Jean pretended to look for her ball. She could not make out any of Jacob’s words, but Euglena was loud and clear. Once Jean knew what was happening, she got up, grabbed Emily’s arm and pulled her back to the table.

            “She’s telling him she’s pregnant,” whispered Jean, when they had their books open. “It sounds like he can’t have known until now. And he’s talking like he doesn’t believe it, and she’s crying.”

            “So what do we do?”

            They stiffened at the sound of the office door opening. They kept their eyes down. Jacob went out. Euglena went to her desk, tore papers and slammed drawers. Finally, she got up and went out.

            “Jacob must be going nuts,” said Jean.

            “She might have thought this would be a perfect time to hit him with it,” said Emily. “With the blasting all going so well, he must be as relieved as any of them. Or at least until just now he was. She knew he was ready to celebrate. She must have hoped that he’ll never be more likely to propose.”

            “That’s a big assumption,” said Jean.

            “But she can’t just sit and do nothing!” insisted Emily.
            “Yeah,” sighed Jean as they sat in silence. “You know,” Jean then said to Jenny. “You know how you said the researchers will be able to improve their odds of getting the results they want by the way they tailor their ‘assumptions.’ So our guys can...”

            “What guys?” asked Jenny.

            “Our… the researchers that Cactex is funding. The Antilockdownist heresy. What kind of assumptions are they making?”

            “What is a scientific assumption?” said Jenny, after a pause. “Well. Say you’ve got a new drug that’s helped improve some medical condition in your mice.”

            “On my cute little mice?” asked Emily.

            “You’ve tried different doses on them to see if any of the little darlings die. When it seems safe enough, you’ll want to try it out on humans.”

            “No monkeys?” asked Jean.

            “No way. Research monkeys are, like, 5000 bucks a pop.”

            “No way!”

            “And they stink at describing symptoms. You’ve got to be completely ready before they’ll give you permission to go out and find human test subjects. If you try doing human research without official permission, then you just might find yourself without a career. Or maybe in jail. You can ger permission from some ethics committee with some university, or foundation, or institute.”

            “Do they always want to throw scientists in jail?” asked Jean.

            “No, hardly ever. But it could sure affect your career. And you won’t want your guinea pigs to be women who might be pregnant, because you don’t want to harm an unborn child. Permanent injuries to mommies and babies will make people upset.”

            “It’s a motherhood issue,” explained Emily.

            “And you don’t want anybody under 18,” said Jenny. “They’re too cute. And you don’t want people older than about 45 because they have an irritating tendency to fall over dead. And you aren’t going to get many black guys because they’ve all heard of experiments done on poor black people. So you’ll finally be left with a bunch of guys who have a hard time holding down a job.”

            “That’s sad.”

            “Not that sad,” shrugged Jenny. “A bunch of reckless yahoos who’ll do anything for money. But – and this is a big but – a huge but…”

            “But not as big as yours,” joked Emily.

            “You’re doing research on a medicine that’s going to be for everybody. But your research is only being done on these losers. So you ‘assume’ that what works on them will work the same way on everybody. It won’t, but you’ll assume it because you’ve got no other choice. They’re the ones who are brave enough to swallow poison for money. And they’re the ones that the ethics committee allows you to use.”

            “And they’re way cheaper than monkeys,” said Emily.

            “But not as smart,” said Jenny.
            “But this isn’t good, is it?” asked Jean. “For the women and children and old people who’ll someday be prescribed the drug. You’re only getting the right dosage for bubbas.”

            “And,” said Jenny, “you have to wonder if half of them are binge-drinking, chain-smoking wackos.”

            “Hey,” said Jean, “that’s my brother you’re talking about.”

             “Back at the start of covid,” said Jenny, “when the death rate shot up for a few weeks. They figure that, in a large part, it was because old people were getting overdoses of antivirals.”

            “Wow.”

            “Mom says it that it’s been, for a long time, that people have been wondering whether giving the ‘recommended dosage’ to an old person is often way too much.”

            “Isn’t overdosing old people some sort of malpractice?” asked Jean.

             “Not if they’re following ‘best practice’ rules,” sighed Jenny. “That are based on the manufacture’s research. And it isn’t just that. Back at the start, they were using ventilators way too often, too. Until they realized it was killing people who might have lived. They’d slap an old geezer in a ventilator as soon as its last victim had been carted off to the morgue. Mom says Medicare was paying hospitals an extra $26,000 if they stuck somebody in a ventilator.”

            “My brother would have done it for fifty bucks,” joked Jean.

            “But still,” said Emely, “the doctors meant well. Didn’t they?”

            “Sure, they did,” said Jenny. “But so did Stalin. And remember all the people who died in the glorious Fukushima evacuation. And they figure it was just stress? When covid hit, people were likely dropping dead from stress as soon as they were wheeled in the ICU and they saw all those nurses in their hazmat suits.”

            “And nurses are scary enough as is,” joked Jean.

            “And likely,” said Emely, “most were dying 90 percent of old age, and 10 percent of whatever was enough to polish them off. So you can’t really fault the doctors.”

            “Old folks just aren’t team players,” said Jean.

            “Jean,” asked Emely, “are you sure you’re a girl?”

            “Sorry.”

            “But that’s not all!” said Jenny. “Right from the beginning to the end of every research project, you’ll be assuming this and assuming that. And then you start choosing your assumptions to doctor your results.”

            “Does that happen a lot?” asked Emely.

            “It hardly ever doesn’t. You do it without knowing you’re doing it. And you’ll be doing it soon enough, if you go for your master’s. You’ll call it ‘massaging your numbers.’ Like… for example, instead of saying that five is 50 percent of ten, you could say that ten is 100 percent more than five, because you want to make it sound like more.”

            “Wow. I’m pretty sneaky,” said Jean.

            “That’s a really simple example of how you can ‘dress up your figures.’”

            “And I can do it without spandex shapewear?” asked Jean.

            “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure,” said Jenny. “And once you’re working on your PhD, you’ll know a hundred tricks like that. Because you’ve been taught how to recognize them. So you won’t be fooled by them. But at the same time, you’ve learned how to fool others.”

            “This is all so wrong,” said Emely.

            “But you’ll be really cautious about how you use them. It’s like putting on make-up. You want just enough. But not so much that you look like a slut.”

            “But then the guys won’t notice me,” joked Jean.

            “The jurors of the journals spend most of their time wondering whether the assumptions are ‘reasonable.’ They’ll be phoning each other and saying ‘Wad-ja-think?’”

            “Do they really talk like that?” asked Jean.

            “Evaluating a study is really tricky. And they’ve all got their image to worry about.”

            “That’s why geeks so well dressed,” joked Jean.

            “If only. Mom says they’re all like… like the guys on Big Bang Theory.”

            “Wasn’t your mom a professor?” asked Emely.

            “I used to think she was just teaching engineering. But really, she’s been a judge at a dog show, and the dogs have been professors doing research on prototypes and informatics and mitigation.”

            “And blowing things up,” said Jean.

            “And too, it’s all the researchers at places called ‘institutes’ and ‘centers’ and ‘councils.’”

            “They’re all dogs, too?” asked Jean. “Is that what’s happening with the medical research that Sarah keeps fretting about?”

            “Mom says there’s one big reason why you have to make so many assumptions. It’s because you have to go with whatever evidence you’ve got. Like how much of some experimental drug your trash had to take before they were laying on the ground begging to be killed. And that’s not always the good data you wish you could get. How the daredevils do doesn’t always tell how well children and old people would do on the same poison.”

            “Oh.”

            “A guy was walking down the street at night. At a lamppost he saw another guy on his hands and knees. He asked if he lost something. The other guy said, ‘My keys.’ They both looked for a while, and then the first guy said ‘Are you sure you lost them here?’ The other guy said ‘No. I lost them over there,’ The first guy said, ’Well, why are we looking here!’ The other guy said ‘Because the light’s better.’”

            “So is all research fake news?” asked Emely.

            “I suppose,” said Jenny, “that if it’s accepted by the jurors for a journal that is associated with an accredited university, then it’s not fake, no matter how… misleading it turns out to be. Because the jurors are experts and they say that the assumptions didn’t seem unreasonable. So that means it’s not fake. Even after somebody else comes up with better evidence that leads to a very different conclusion.”

            “The road to hell is paved with reasonable assumptions,” said Jean.

            “What I need,” said Emily, with a sigh, “is a list of non-fake reasons why Donald deserves to be among the 70-foot class of presidents.”

            “Before covid,” said Jenny, “the markets were up and unemployment was way down. And the Taliban wasn’t in power in Afghanistan.”

             “And likely a whole generation of entrepreneurs,” said Jean. “have been inspired by his inspired leadership. They just might not know it yet.”

“And,” said Jenny, “we can always say he would have been great, if only the Democrats hadn’t hyped covid to steal the election. And they can’t prove it wasn’t hyped, so that means we can assume it was.”

            “And,” said Jean as she thought. “We know that a whole lot of old people died of stress after Fukushima. So stress from fear of covid would for sure be way worse because it lasted so long. And Donald tried to warn them of this but they wouldn’t listen.”

            “And,” said Jenny, “we know that people are doing studies that show that more ‘years of life’ were likely lost because of the lockdown or the vaccine. More than were lost from just getting sick with covid.”

            “And if every life truly matters,” said Jean, “then for the sake of logical consistency, the Democrats should be wanting to cut all the speed limits in half, and they’ll want to outlaw bicycles and canoes.”

            “And,” said Jenny, “since fewer than one in 20 deaths got an autopsy before covid. And way, way fewer than that in 2020. A doctor will often have a really hard time coming up with the real cause of death. So if the old fellow is covid positive his doctor shrugs his shoulders and scribbles ‘covid,’ on the death certificate.”

            “Less than one in twenty?” asked Emily.

            “The doctor, or nurse, who fills it out will usually guess at the cause of death based on the guy’s last few prescriptions. It’s the path of least resistance. Mom says that, when they put down pneumonia as an immediate cause, and covid as an underlying condition, the CDC would switch the two.”

            “So what would happen,” asked Emily, “if a Marxist doctor put down ‘complications related to capitalist oppression?’”

            “And could a Christian put ‘complications related to the wages of sin?’” joked Jean.

            “I guess when they’re stumped,” said Jenny, “they can always put down MACE – major adverse cardiovascular event. Because usually that just means that for some reason the heart stopped working. Everything’s cardiac in the end.”

            “I wonder if there’s causes of death that go in and out of style?” asked Jean.

            “Mom says there’s fads and fashions in everything. Including medicine. Medical school profs who go to other countries to study how they practice medicine there are always amazed about how care is so different. Everybody’s a ‘creature of fashion.’ The clothing designers are just more honest.”

            “Oh! Here’s another,” said Jean. “Xi Jinping was needing any justification at all, to get control of Hong Kong demonstrators who were going around demanding democracy and civil liberties. So he hopped onto covid and came up with the lockdown because he couldn’t come up with anything better.”

            “And,” said Jenny, “the public health czars must have always been dreaming of saving the world from a horrible plague. So they could hardly help but go bananas when their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity arrived, and they could show us what they got, and ride in with the cavalry, and save little Timmy down the well.”
            “And,” said Jean, “we know that Democrats, just like any political party, will say anything to get elected, so long as they can blame the stupid experts if it turns out to be a disaster.”

            “And,” said Jenny, “we know the news media has to sell advertising or go broke, so they’d have to capitalize on the hottest story since 9/11.”

            “And,” said Jean,  “Dad says that people are hard-wired to go neurotic over anything that can threaten a bunch of cavemen, and especially a plague.”

            “And,” said Jenny, “we know that, once you rob people of their fundamental freedoms and start spending money by the trillion, then you’ve got a policy that’s too big to fail.”

            “And we know,” said Jean, “that if any high-ranking health official was to admit that he was wrong on covid, that he’d be blamed by everybody for everything forever.”

            “Where’d you guys get all this stuff?” asked Emily.

            “Jenny’s mom. She’s an internet warrior.”

            “Could you write this all down so I could memorize it?”

            “I could do better than that,” said Jenny. “I could get my mom to write it all down. And she’ll quote highly reliable sources.”

            “Cool,” said Emily. “I wanna be a smart-aleck whenever some liberal mouths off about 70-foot-Donald. So I need solid, fact-based, red-hot one-liners.”

            “Good thing there’s so many factcheck sites on the internet, now,” said Jenny, “because it takes no time at all for Mom to prove or disprove anything.”

            “Oh, listen to this one,” said Jean. “If an Islamic priest were to ‘fact check’ the Apostle’s Creed, he’d find 16 statements of fact, 11 of which are inaccurate.”

            “Oh, you’re so brilliant,” laughed Emily as she squeezed Jean’s arm. “I’d never have guessed it by looking at you.”

            “Oh good! The last thing I’d ever want is look intelligent,” said Jean as she took hold of her hand.

 This is all so great!” said Emily. “Once your mom gets the list to me, I’ll be able to go the rest of my life with snappy comebacks.”

             “Oh! I thought of another,” said Jean. “When did the epidemiologist decide to devote his life to a career in public health? When the judge sentenced him to 60,000 hours of community service.”

Chapter 26

July 7, 5:00 a.m.

            “Hulloo,” said Hank as he came in the door. “That tower has a different sound to it every time I come.” He was in uniform with his duty belt and his cowboy hat in his hands. He found the engineer’s trailer empty, except for Jean and Jenny at the table, studying.

            “Oh… Oh…” said Jenny, who was taken by surprise. “It’s… it’s the pneumatic chisels you’re hearing now. Not just the saws. And it was the hammer drills at first. They’re the worst.”

            “Come over here!” ordered Jean in a loud whisper. “We’ve got something. We’ve got really good evidence of a motive for Jacob. For sure it’s probably him who whacked him.”

            “Oh?” said Hank. “But… maybe you should take that to the detectives. It’s really not my place to...”

            “And the look on Jacob’s face!” insisted Jean. “The day I first came here. He looked really… guilty as sin.”

            “And he’s been really weird,” said Jenny. “Ever since Brad got killed. Way worse than he usually is.”

            “Well…”

            “But you’re right,” said Jean. “Maybe you shouldn’t get involved.”

            “Yeah, well,” he then said, looking down. “I just thought I’d come for… but it’s nothing. I just thought I’d drop in and… say hello, I guess. I was just driving past. Nothing to do. I better get going.”

            “Officer Hank!” laughed Jacob from behind. He spoke in a sing-song voice, as if he’d had several drinks. “The Sheriff of Tucson,” he said as he got to his desk and fell into the high-backed chair he had taken from Brad’s desk. “Out after rustlers, are you?”

            “You did it!” snapped Jenny, and she jumped up and went to him.

            “Did what?” Jacob asked, his eyes wide.

            “You know what!”

            “I don’t…”

            “And it’s your fault that… It’s you who told them!”

            “Told them?” Jacob asked innocently. “Told them what?”

            “Come on, Jen,” said Hank softly, as he put his hand on her arm.

            “And you did that horrible drawing!” hissed Jenny, ignoring Hank.

            “Drawing? What drawing?” asked Jacob innocently. “What is it with this woman?” he then asked with a smile, looking at Hank, his hands up in wonderment.

            “You know what I mean!” yelled Jenny.

            “Hold on, now. I don’t think you…” Jacob started, his finger now pointed and his face determined. But then he saw a copy of the defaced photo of Sarah sitting on his desk. Jean had got it from the shelf and set it down while Jacob had his eyes on Jenny. He jumped up and stared at it while gasping for breath.

            “There!” said Jenny, pointing at the photo with a dramatic voice.

            “What? Where did… Who…”

            “Maybe you should just leave him alone,” whispered Hank. He was trying to be calm, but his words came out as pity.

            “I… you… I...” Jacob stammered, and he grabbed the photo and tore it in half.

            “That’s a copy, you fool!” hissed Jenny. “One of many copies. And that isn’t all that you’ve done! What about Euglena? Why don’t you admit what you’ve done to her!”
            “Now… now you look!” demanded Jacob, as he sat back down and tried desperately to appear brave.

            But then Jean threw Brad’s rubber rattlesnake into his lap. Jacob shrieked and jumped. The snake fell, but when it landed, it’s head bounced back up, making it look alive – the rattle rattling. Jacob kicked it, but he half-missed it and it only went two feet. Again, its head bounced up.”

            “Shoot it!” shrieked Jean. “Shoot it! Shoot it!”

            Jacob pulled open his desk, grabbed his pistol, flicked off the safety, aimed and fired twice at the snake. In the enclosed space the volume of its discharge was like an explosion.

            “Stop it!” roared Cyrus, who had heard the yelling outside. “Put that down, you stupid fool!”

            “I… No… You…” Jacob stammered. His deranged expression and hysterical voice told them that the burdens that had borne down so heavily were now too much for him to bear. Brad’s death, the blasting, the photograph, the pregnancy, and now the effects of a few drinks. They had joined together to drive him into a frenzy. “I’ve a right!” he yelled. “It’s mine! I’ll not… I… I…” he stammered, and then he stormed past his father and out the door, the pistol still in his hand.

            “Jacob! Stop!” demanded Hank, as he ran after him. Outside in the night, Jacob broke into a run. He then stopped, realizing he had gone past his truck. He turned, but Hank was behind him to block his way.

            “Put it down, Jacob,” Hank ordered, while carefully unsnapping the retention strap of his holster. He then pressed his palm against the butt of his pistol, ready for a lightning-fast draw.

            “You’ve no right!” snarled Jacob. Suddenly his pistol discharged again. He shrieked and jumped, but he still held the weapon.

            Hank hesitated, pulled his taser out of its holster, and fired directly at the center of Jacob’s chest.

            “Ah!” Jacob groaned as his body went rigid. He fell onto his knees. The two probes stuck into his chest. His mouth was open in astonishment and he teetered to one side, landing on an elbow. But he still had the gun in his hand.

            A small crowd was forming. With the roar of the saws and pneumatic chisels, no one realized that a weapon had been fired.

            “Put it down!” Hank demanded again. The effect of the taser was already wearing off and Jacob had pulled himself up on his knees.

            “Jacob, no!” begged Jenny. She had followed them out with Jean close behind. “No!” she shrieked when she saw Jacob raise the pistol. She threw her weight on him, knocking him over and she struggled to gain control of his arm.

            Jean grabbed hold of his other arm and wrenched it into a lock. She was reacting automatically after all her years of wrestling with brothers and fighting boys in judo class.

            “Careful!” yelled Hank, and he lunged forward to grab Jacob’s wrist and twist the pistol from his fingers.

            “Jacob!” sobbed Euglena. She crouched down to frantically pull out the two electrodes.

            “You’re wounded!” said Jenny as she raised herself up to look to Jacob’s leg. Blood had soaked his pantleg where he had been grazed by a bullet. 

            “A towel! A shirt! Apply pressure!” yelled Hank.

            “Yes,” sobbed Euglena, and she pulled off her designer top to reveal the loveliest lace embroidered bra that most people there had ever seen. She pressed the shirt against Jacob’s wounded leg. With her free hand round his neck, she sobbed, “Don’t die, my darling! Please don’t die!”

             “Listen to me, Jacob!” Hank ordered as he crouched down to take the shirt from Euglena and press it directly on the wound. He knew that Jenny and Jean had control of his arms. It was Hank’s intention to reassure him that the taser was not lethal. But instead, he said, “Jacob! This is your last chance to make your peace with the Lord. Jacob, was it you who killed Brad?”

            “Yes… yes!” Jacob sobbed, as he looked over to where his father stood. “Yes! It was me!” he said with the despair of a man who knew he was about to die “Forgive me, Lord!” he then said, as he looked upwards to heaven.

            “Stop it!” hissed Cyrus in a voice that shook with emotion. “He’s lying! It was me who killed him!”

            “No! Don’t believe him!” insisted Jacob.

            “It was me! I did it!” begged Cyrus. “I never meant to kill him! He just… he could drive a person nuts!”

            “Jacob!” demanded Jenny, and she took hold of Jacob’s ears to pull his head around. With her face so close that their noses almost touched, she said, “Jacob! Don’t you have something you need to say to Euglena?”

            “Oh! Oh! Lord! Dear Euglena!” he groaned as he reached his hand out to touch her cheek. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I love you! Please, Euglena! Will you marry me!”

            “Yes! Yes, of course I will!” she wailed, her mouth contorted into a dramatic expression of angelic sorrow, like a ballerina dying on a stage. “Please don’t die, my darling! Please don’t die!”

            “It’s okay, Jacob,” Hank then said, and with a blood-covered hand he took hold of Jacob’s chin to pull his face towards him. “I was wrong, Jacob. It’s superficial. You’ll be fine. You’ve just got to lay still and try to be calm.”

            His words, spoken with such authority, caused a wave of relief to wash over the crowd. More workers had been running from the site and they now formed a wall of spectators.

            Hank stood up and straightened his cowboy hat with bloody fingers. He realized that he still held Jacob’s gun. He flicked on the safety and tucked it into his belt, behind his back. “Okay, everybody,” he said with calm authority. “Show’s over.”

            “Well, well, well, Officer Hank,” Sarah then said quietly as she stepped up to him. She had her eyes on her cellphone and was busy tapping on the screen. “A gunfight on a dusty street in the desert of Arizona. There it is. Uploaded and on its way.”

            Everyone went silent, not immediately understanding what she was talking about. But the realization gradually came to them as she held up her phone. Sarah had videoed the whole event, and she had uploaded it with the news video app. An electronic chain reaction of video transfers had begun that would take this latest breaking news to every corner of the world.

            Someone was winding a tensor bandage around Jacob’s wounded leg. Jean and Jenny had backed away while clinging to each other.

            “Did you see that?” Jean whispered to Jenny. “She videoed it. And she uploaded it. The light. Her video light. It was on. It was on right from the start. She had her camera going, just as soon as we came out. She got the whole thing.”

            “Yeah. And Euglena. Did you see how close Sarah got to that… cleavage? And all that lace? She’s brilliant! They’re gonna be famous!”

            “And,” said Jenny, with a smile of disbelief. “That means Hank will be famous, too. And us! We’ll be famous!”

            “Yeah! She got us wrestling him down.”

            “She did!”

            “But it was you in first! You likely saved Hank’s life.”

            “Just think,” said Jenny, her eyes dazed and her voice shaking. “We’re gonna be the two girls who grabbed a gunman and muscled him down.”

            “They’ll be… they’ll be calling us ‘Amazon women.’ Democrats will poke fun at us. Isn’t that great!”

            “And just think,” Jenny whispered. “Donald’s face is going to be finished in...It’s almost finished now! They might not even wait for the rest of the presidents. They might take down some of the scaffolding to unveil him as soon as the story hits.”

            “And today, on the news everywhere, everyone will see us. And they’ll come interview us. I’ll tell they why we think he’s a closet liberal.”

            “Jeepers!” whispered Jenny. “Maybe Cactex… maybe they’ll give us free rooms, here at the resort, every year. In exchange for retelling the story, again and again.”

            “And, you know. Jacob and Cyrus likely won’t be convicted. They both confessed. They’re safe so long as they keep their mouths shut. It’s happened before. I saw it on TV. You can’t convict two people for the same murder.”

            “No, I guess not,” said Jenny after a moment to think. “And… and we’ll demand the really nice rooms.”

“And in exchange, we’ll show videos and photos. Sarah says she has tons,” said Jean, as she held Jenny’s arm. Worried that she might faint, she guided her down to sit cross-legged.

            “And for signing books. We godda hire somebody to help us write a book. Sarah will pay for it. A story of the building of Mount Hohokam.”

            “Of course! We godda act fast,” insisted Jean. “And it won’t be profiting from human suffering. It’s just a leg.”

            “This’ll make our careers,” said Jenny softly. “Won’t it? We’re gonna be rich.”

            “We will,” said Jean, whose head was swimming. “Just so long as we don’t catch a new covid variant and die.”