The Returned. Jason Mott

returns! Not long before the masters are back with us!”

      So he was famous now. Work he’d made nearly a hundred years ago, work that never sold for more than a few hundred francs, now went for millions. And then there were the fans.

      But all Jean wanted was Marissa.

      “You kept me alive,” he said, nuzzling his head into her lap like a cat. “You kept my work alive when no one else knew me.”

      “I’m your steward, then,” she said. With her wrist, she pushed loose strands of her hair from her face—hair that was a bit more gray and a bit more thin each day. “Is that what I am?”

      He looked up at her with calm, blue eyes—even in the grainy, black-and-white photos of him that she had studied for years, she had known they were this particular, beautiful blue. “I do not care about our ages,” he said. “I was only an average artist. I know now that my art was meant to lead me to you.”

      Then he kissed her.

      Five

      IT HAD BEGUN small, as most large things do, with just one government-issue Crown Victoria containing only one government man and a pair of too-young soldiers and a cell phone. But all it had taken was that one phone call and a few days of things being moved around and now Bellamy was entrenched in the school but there were no students, no classes, nothing but the ever-growing numbers of cars and trucks and men and women from the Bureau who had been setting up shop here for the past several days.

      The Bureau had developed a plan for Arcadia. The same isolation that had kept the town’s economy stifled for all the years of its existence was exactly what the Bureau was looking for. Sure, there were hotels and restaurants and facilities and resources in Whiteville that the Bureau could use for what they were planning, but there were also people. Close to fifteen thousand of them, not to mention the highway and all the various roads that they might have to secure sometime soon.

      No. Arcadia was as close to a nonexistent town as they could want, with only a handful of people, none of whom were anyone of note. Just farmers and millworkers, mechanics and laborers and machinists and various other denizens of hardscrabble existences. “No one anybody would miss.”

      At least, that was how the colonel had put it.

      Colonel Willis. The thought of him made Bellamy’s stomach tighten. He knew little about the colonel, and that made him uneasy. In an age of information, never trust a person who can’t be found on Google. But that was something Bellamy only had time to ponder in the late hours of the night back at the hotel before he nodded off. The day-to-day business of his duties, the interviews in particular, took his full attention.

      The schoolroom was small. It smelled of mildew, lead-based paint and time.

      “First of all,” Bellamy said, leaning back in his chair, his notepad resting on his thigh, “is there anything unusual that either of you would like to talk about?”

      “No,” Lucille said. “Nothing that I can think of.” Jacob nodded in agreement, most of his attention resting squarely on his lollipop. “But I figure,” Lucille continued, “you’ll be able to ask whatever questions you’re supposed to ask that’ll help me realize if there maybe was something strange going on. I imagine you’re quite the interrogator.”

      “A bit of a harsh word choice, I think.”

      “Maybe,” Lucille said. “I apologize.” She licked the pad of her thumb and wiped a candy smudge from Jacob’s face. She’d dressed him handsomely for his interview. New black dress pants. A bright new white, collared shirt. New shoes. Even new socks. And he was doing his part to keep everything clean, like the good boy that he was.

      “I just like words, is all,” Lucille said. “And, sometimes, they can come across a bit harsh, even if all you’re trying to do is add some variety.” Lucille finished cleaning Jacob’s face, then turned her attention on herself. She straightened her long, silver hair. She checked her pale hands for dirt and found none. She adjusted her dress, shifting her weight in her seat so that she could nudge her hemline farther down—which is not to say that the hem of her cream-colored dress had been high, gracious, no, but only to say that any respectable woman, Lucille felt, made it a point, when in mixed company, to show that she was going through all manner of effort to conduct herself with modesty and propriety.

      Propriety was yet another word not used nearly enough in conversation for Lucille.

      “Propriety,” she muttered. Then she straightened the collar of her dress.

      * * *

      “One of the things that people have been reporting,” Bellamy said, “is trouble sleeping.” He took the notepad from his thigh and placed it on the desk. He hadn’t expected that a schoolteacher in such a small town would have such a large desk, but such things made sense when you thought about them long enough.

      Bellamy sat forward and checked to be sure that the recorder was running. He scribbled in his notebook, waiting for Lucille to respond to his statement, but soon began to realize that no response would be coming without elaboration. He wrote eggs on his notepad to look busy.

      “It’s not that the Returned have trouble sleeping,” Bellamy began, once again trying to speak in a slow and non-Yankee tongue. “It’s just that they tend to sleep very little. They don’t complain of fatigue or exhaustion, but there have been accounts of some of them going for days without sleep, only to rest for a couple of hours and be completely unaffected.” He sat back, appreciating the quality of the wooden chair beneath him in the same way he had appreciated the quality of the desk. “But maybe we’re just grabbing at straws,” he said. “That’s the reason we’re having all these interviews, to try and see what’s an anomaly and what’s nothing at all. We want to know as much as we can about the Returned as we do about the non-Returned.”

      “So is your question about me or Jacob?” Lucille said, looking around the classroom.

      “Eventually, both of you. But, for now, just tell me about you, Mrs. Hargrave. Have you been having any trouble sleeping? Any disturbing dreams? Insomnia?”

      Lucille shifted in her seat. She glanced toward the window. Bright out today. Everything shiny and smelling of springtime, with the scent of a humid summer not far off. She sighed and rubbed her hands together. Then she folded them and placed them in her lap. But they weren’t content there, so she brushed her lap and placed an arm around her son, the type of thing a mother should do, she felt.

      “No,” she said, finally. “For fifty years I’ve been awake. Each and every night I’ve sat up, awake. Each and every day I walked around, awake. It was like I couldn’t do anything else but be awake. I was sick with being awake.” She smiled. “Now I sleep every night. Peacefully. Deeper and more soundly than I hardly imagined or hardly remembered was possible.”

      Lucille placed her hands in her lap again. This time they stayed. “Now I sleep the way a person is supposed to sleep,” she said. “I close my eyes, and then they open again all on their own and the sun is there. Which, I imagine, is the way it should be.”

      “And what about Harold? How is he sleeping?”

      “Just fine. Sleeps like the dead. Always has and probably always will.”

      Bellamy made notes on his notepad. Orange juice. Beef (steak, perhaps). Then he scratched out the bit about the steak and wrote ground beef. He turned to Jacob. “And how are you feeling about all this?”

      “Fine, sir. I’m fine.”

      “This is all pretty weird, isn’t it? All these questions, all these tests, all these people fussing about with you.”

      Jacob shrugged.

      “Anything you want to talk about?”

      Jacob shrugged again, his shoulders coming up almost to his ears, framing his small, soft face. He looked, briefly, like someone’s painting, something created from old oils and technique.