Six

"And?" Sapphire asked after Alex had paused again. She felt there were several missing parts to his story. He was rambling, not totally coherent.
"And that's all I can tell you," he said, holding up his hands. "The rest of what I know is pretty much nothing. Argus refused to go in. I offered to go in myself and pretend I was him, what the heck, I had come all that way and I was curious myself, but apparently they'd already tried it with somebody else, and she knew. She wouldn't be fooled. Phipps kept pressuring Argus, reminding him of previous discussions. It seemed he had promised or anyway made them believe that if they would let me come with him, then he would give in and go in the room. He'd changed his mind, he told them. He would never go in, he declared, and unless they used force it wouldn't happen. Phipps looked like he wasn't beyond doing that. I kind of expected him to just grab hold of Argus and throw him in there with her, but he didn't. He tensed up but then he relaxed and he said we could go. First he swore us to secrecy which as you know I've already broken, just now with you."
He gave her a questioning look and she reassured him.
"Don't worry," she told him, "no one will hear it from me."
"I believe you," he said, and he glanced down the road at the diner. It was time to move on. Sapphire sensed it as well and they started to walk back together.
"So when was all this?" she asked on the way.
"What is today? Wednesday? That was last Friday. I talked to him Monday. Nothing had changed. They're on him, though, continually. The feds are not taking no for an answer forever. Since Phipps didn't work they've brought in some others, trying to find the right combo I guess, someone who'll get through to Argus. Good luck with that is all I can say. Once he's made up his mind, that's about it."
'They'll get to his wife', Sapphire thought to herself, and realized that was what she should do. She asked Alex for Argus' address, which he gave her, and wished her good luck.
"You might as well try," Alex said. "He's the key to the thing, after all."
"And the girl," Sapphire added.
"And the girl," he agreed.
They stopped at their cars which were parked side by side. The silence was awkward but just for a moment.
"I'll be in touch" Sapphire said. "It's been good to see you," she added, since the first part came out too professional sounding.
"Anytime," Alex answered, "and likewise. It's funny to see you in person after all of these years. I mean, after seeing you on TV all this time. You're even more you than I thought."
"TV makes you look different," she commented.
"Right, that's what I meant," Alex said, though it wasn't. He meant she was not the same person at all, or rather, she was but wasn't his friend anymore. He was just someone who gave her an angle. After an awkward attempt at a hug, she got into her rental and took off down the road. Alex was not in a hurry. He went back into the diner, where Carmela had nothing to do and was sitting at the counter, cutting up lemons.
"All done with business?" she asked, looking up.
"I guess so," he said. He returned to the same table he'd been sitting at previously, and Carmela came over to join him, sitting where Sapphire had.
'You never told me you knew her," she said, placing her hand upon his.
"We were friends growing up," Alex said. "We were best friends, you know, for a while. She practically lived at my house."
"Everything changes," Carmela offered wisely and Alex chuckled and smiled.
"Everything and nothing," he said. He lifted her hand to his mouth, and he kissed it.

Sapphire had the gadget transcribe Alex's narrative and dispatched both the audio and text up to storage. She played it back as she drove, pausing and rewinding a few times at the parts that seemed most confusing. That the girl had climbed out of the pit. No one saw her go in. Where'd she come from? That her hair and her clothes were on fire but her skin was undamaged? Alex said nothing of medical reports but how would he know? He only had part of the story. Argus could tell her some more, but not much, she decided. She would need to get some more sources. And she wanted to get to the girl too, of course. Who did she know in the bureau? Who did she know who knew someone? Phipps and Hawkins were the names he had given her. She sent off a memo to Meyer to get her some intros somehow. Doctors and nurses, firemen and cops. Security guards. These were all possible venues of entrance. Peggy Kirkham as well, if not Argus. Would he even remember her? He would probably take her to be one more nuisance, another unwelcome poker and prier. She had to approach him somehow. She would have to have something to give him, but what?
As usual, her planning crowded out other thoughts, but suddenly it occurred to her that Alex had never once asked about her. 'Is it so obvious?' she thought, 'that I never settled down, got married, had kids? How would he know about that? Has he been looking me up online? There's precious little there besides all my stories. Maybe he assumes that I'm gay. The waitress in the diner back there sure did. Maybe the hair. Maybe it's nobody's business! Funny thing how no one these days seems to know there's a line between you and what's none of your business. Maybe that line doesn't exist anymore. Maybe everything is everyone's business.'
She recalled what Alex told her Argus had said, that the sinkhole, the girl, was nothing to him. He didn't want to get involved. At least there was one person left who had the idea. She remembered how quiet he was as a child. Half the time the two of them didn't know Argus was even there in the room. He hid under his blankets on the bottom bunk in the room that he shared with his brother, and rarely peeked out. He kept books under there, and toys. He would be building whole cities with Legos and such, she recalled. Once in a while she would ask him about them, but he'd try not to answer, he'd say "oh it's nothing." A private little guy, if there ever was one. The day she'd chased him down in the street, and pulled him away from, from what? From nothing it seemed to her now, but he'd kicked and he'd struggled but she was too strong, and afterwards he cried for what seemed like hours, the first and the last time she'd seen him like that.
Sapphire recalled a story she'd done, where she'd had to return to a village somewhere - Sri Lanka she thought, after a decade had passed. She had come to know everyone there the first time, when she'd stayed for a month, researching a band of mystical warriors who were said to be planning remote terrorist strikes with their minds. It was said they had caused some tsunamis by chanting nonstop for a week. She lived in the village with a family of nine, a father and eight children, all boys. The boys looked exactly the same to her then, except for their height which was consistent with each of their years. Going back, ten years later, the boys were all grown and were now all the same height as each other, as their father, yet she picked each one out by their name, missing none. She could tell by their smiles, by the tone of their voices, by a host of subtle traits. She prided herself on that skill but had to admit to herself now that she probably would never have picked Alex out of a crowd. He was more alien to her than any one of those remote village boys she had barely even known. Where had her whole childhood gone?
'You turn your back on a place', she thought, 'and the place turns its back on you too.'
She wondered what Spring Hill Lake would be like. Last time she was there she had barely paid attention - she was helping her father move out to his luxury retirement community. She had been in a hurry, wasn't paying attention. She remembered the airport and that's about all. She had taken a taxi to the old neighborhood where her father had remained all those years, but she hardly looked up, and when she got there she just got down to work, making calls and ordering workers around. It hadn't been fun to see her father becoming more and more helpless, a man who for all of her life had always been the one giving orders. She scarcely remembered her mother, just the father who worked his late hours and never had time for his kid.
'I would never have time for one either,' she said to herself, remembering her most well-worn reason for not having children.
'Whatever, I hated that place,' she considered as she was approaching the outskirts of town. She would stay by the airport, in that hotel, the one with the faded red carpeting. She had already made reservations and by the time she'd checked in and flopped down on the bed, it was time to call Qatar and Meyer.