whenever he caught Maddison doing something she wasn’t supposed to and thought she was adorable It drove Maddison nuts It’s so that you’d have to come home to yell at me Maddison offered when she’d finished the mouthful of cereal She was allowed to eat in her bedroom but she was not supposed to eat things that could spill and ruin upholstery in her room and cereal with milk was the worst culprit Uh huh Dr Kevin McRae said coming all the way into the room and holding a hand out Maddison passed him the bowl and he took a large spoonful then winced I put chocolate milk on them Maddison admitted admitted guiltily I can see that her dad gasped fanning at his mouth as if he’d eaten something hot Gaaah that’s sweet He cleared his throat and swallowed a couple of times Okay then now that I’ve given myself a sugar rush to take the edge off the adrenaline crash Maddison had opened her mouth to ask what he 8
meant by adrenaline crash when he added We need to talk Okay so her dad didn’t want his explanation of what happened at the Kingsolver’s house to turn into twenty questions Maddison was still teetering between worried and mad so all she said was You took my cereal so I can’t pretend to have my mouth full Her dad studied the bowl of soggy cereal for a second took another spoonful and then handed it back to Maddison Well I certainly didn’t do it for my health he said and then he softened a little bit and added Everyone’s fine Mads Your young man is going to have a magnificently bruised tailbone and his sister is frankly quite terrifying but nobody died He’s not my young man Maddison protested a half second before she realized this was exactly the right way to convince her father that Chris was and added and Chris and Carrie are cousins not siblings Well they certainly act like siblings her dad said And that’s not actually what I wanted to talk to 9
you about but I did need to reassure you that everyone was fine I think it would be better for you to call up Carrie and spend an hour or six letting her tell you what happened That is when she’s worked off the adrenaline enough to call What I actually need to do he said settling himself in Maddison’s desk chair and again sidestepping Maddison’s frantic demands for answers because why would Carrie need to work off the adrenaline Was everyone running on frenetic adrenaline right now except for Maddison who was going to be in a minute or two if she didn’t get some answers I need to tell you a little bit about my past Maddison’s dad said Maddison fumbled the cereal bowl directly into her trashcan Maddison hadn’t gotten into ghosts and aliens and Bigfoot because her dad was a historian That just 10
made for an easy excuse She’d gotten into the stuff at the age of eleven because her public library kept the books on the CIA and the history of intelligence agencies right next to the books on ghosts and ghosts were well ghosts were safe as strange as that sounded or at least safer than what Maddison had actually been worried about at that age Maddison had really been trying to determine if her dad had been in witness protection By the time she was eleven Maddison had known that her dad was hiding something from her Kevin McRae had a carefully concealed blank spot in his past one a lot of people didn’t ever seem to notice He would happily share family history and early childhood memories his wedding photo was proudly displayed on his desk and he was still in contact with his parents but nobody knew anything about Kevin McRae from age eighteen to twenty-two This was coincidentally the age during which he ought to have been getting his bachelor’s degree from college and that must have been what he was doing because he had then gotten a 11
