The Multitude, стр. 37
Her mother fished in her purse, came out with a key, handed it over. “Stay as long as you like.”
Carla closed her hand around it. “Just for a couple nights, but I’m driving to Manhattan after that.”
A shadow crossed her mother’s face again. “Why so far?”
“A subway keeps calling my name. Elaine is big on facing down fears.”
“Elaine?”
“She’s my thera— She’s a friend of mine.”
“Manhattan isn’t safe. I’ve told you this before.”
“Yeah. Way too often.”
Her mother crossed her arms.
Time for a white lie. “Okay, I’ll just go to the cabin.”
“Promise?”
“Mother.”
“What?”
“When you visited, you know, other places, in your dreams, did you ever come back with anything?” The very act of asking such an incongruous question in a commonplace setting disoriented her. The couple across the aisle might have been deciding which movie to see, and the businessmen behind them could have been closing a deal. A baby’s fuss could be heard from the other side of the restaurant. She closed her eyes against the sensation of being out of body, as if looking down at the booth from the ceiling.
When she reopened them, her mother’s probing gaze stole into her soul again. She found refuge in her purse, pulled Brewster’s card out, and slid it across the table. “This makes him real, doesn’t it?” Her voice cracked.
Her mother handled the card as gently as a Communion host before handing it back. “You and I have a gift, Carla.”
“You need to tell me more about it.”
“The talisman you passed on? I woke up to find it in my hand one day.”
“What?”
“A girl gave it to me in a dream.”
Carla replayed the words in her head twice before she could trust she’d heard them. Her stomach tingled. If a coin could emerge from a dream, kick around in the waking world, and then disappear into an entirely different dream years later, her ideas about wormholes, time travel, and alternate realities had now become far more likely than any self-diagnosis of dementia. Yet, if she were sane, the whole universe must have gone crazy. “What’s happening to us?”
With a slow shake of the head, Carla’s mother said it all. Neither of them had any idea. “What’s wrong with having a little extra God in our lives?” she said.
Carla grimaced. Not everyone could share so cavalier an attitude. Barbarians were closing in with a net. A subway train was barreling too fast into a station. “Who was the girl?”
“We ran into her in a park when you were three. She was the typical blonde-haired, ponytailed girl you’d find on a thousand middle-school playgrounds. First she visited our waking lives and then she popped into my dream. Abbie or Addie…no… Gabby. Gabriella, I think. I never saw her again after that.”
CHAPTER 16
Nine hundred miles west in his Chicago office
Brewster frittered his time staring out the window, gazing at the paintings on his office wall, and halfheartedly flicking spider mites off his desk. He’d been in a fog since staggering into the building earlier that morning.
Somehow, the Virtus dream had settled into the area of memory reserved for actual events. Although only seven hours had passed from when he and Carla drifted off together to the point he awakened alone with her coin in his hand, the disorienting recollection of a two-day trek through scrubby desert had gotten lodged between those bookends.
This thing scared the hell out of him.
He reached into his wallet and examined the coin. Why not leave a damn note instead? Dear Brewster, catching a wormhole back to Syracuse. See you soon. Would he see her soon? The possibility he wouldn’t plunged through his stomach like a bad taco.
A ringing phone pulled him back to a world where people were expected to get some work done. He slipped the coin back into his billfold and tried answering with something resembling enthusiasm. “Brewster DeLay.”
“We’ve got problems.” Charlie Hanson’s whine grated through the receiver.
Brewster suppressed a groan. “What’s up?” He made a mental note to check caller ID next time he got the crazy impulse to answer his phone.
“Are you managing that place or what, Brewster? You people burned through one hundred thousand dollars cash last month. We’re almost out of dough up here.”
As the chief financial officer of Parker Investments—a sorry mess of a holding company that owned not only Crestview Finance but several other stumbling businesses—Charlie certainly had the authority to lodge a complaint. But the man had forfeited all right to straight answers by failing to attend a single strategy session. Ever since the recession began sucking the life out of Crestview, Charlie had avoided brainstorming meetings like the plague. He kept his hands clean by steering clear while Brewster struggled alone against an avalanche of loan defaults.
“Are you there, Brewster?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“You couldn’t have sounded more positive when we met with the bankers a week ago.”
“How did you want me come across? They’re scared enough.”
“Not only them.”
No kidding. Brewster took a deep breath. “It’s no big deal, Charlie. Most of our customers wait until month-end to make their payments, and the last two days of September happened to fall on a weekend. You’ll see a huge Monday deposit in our October numbers.”
“Can I count on a better month?”
“Uh-huh.” If he tried taking another deep breath, he might have choked on the lingering cloud of false optimism he’d just exhaled into the phone. Who knew what could be relied upon anymore? Try as he might, Brewster couldn’t account for, let alone predict, the company’s monthly cash flow with any degree of precision. Money came in from fees on new deals and from customer payments on old ones. It went out to cover payables, expenses, payroll, and amortization of Crestview’s whopping bank loan.
Amortization. Therein lay the problem. The bank pulled loan repayments out of the company’s accounts at the end of each month.