The Chronoliths Read Free Page A

judgment. Not this time—not unless my corpse washed up on the beach, and maybe not even then.
    The interrogation went like this.
    Three polite men arrived at the prison and apologized contritely for the conditions in which we were being held. They were in touch with the Thai government on our behalf “even as we speak,” and in the meantime, would we answer a few questions?
    For instance, our names and addresses and Stateside connections, and how long had we been in Thailand, and what were we doing here?
    (This must have been fun for Hitch. I simply told the truth: that I had been in Bangkok doing software development for a U.S.-based hotel chain and that I had stayed on for some eight months after my contract lapsed. I didn’t mention that I had planned to write a book about the rise and fall of expatriate beach culture in what the Thai travel guides are pleased to call the Land of Smiles—which had turned from a nonfiction work into a novel before it died aborning—or that I had exhausted my personal savings six weeks ago. I told them about Janice but neglected to mention that, without the money she had borrowed from her family, we would have been destitute. I told them about Kaitlin, too, but I didn’t know Kaitlin had nearly died a mere forty-eight hours earlier… and if the suits knew, they didn’t elect to share the information.)
    The rest of their questions were all about the Chumphon object: how we had heard about it, when we had first seen it, how close we had come, our “impressions” of it. A Thai prison guard looked on glumly as a U.S. medic took blood and urine samples for further analysis. Then the suits thanked us and promised to get us out of confinement ASAP.
    The following day three different polite gentlemen with a fresh set of credentials asked us the same questions and made the same promises.
    We were, at last, released. Some of the contents of our wallets were returned to us and we stepped out into the heat and stench of Bangkok somewhere on the wrong side of the Chao Phrya. Abandoned and penniless, we walked to the embassy and I badgered a functionary there into advancing us one-way bus fare to Chumphon and a couple of free phone calls.
    I tried to reach Janice at our rental shack. There was no answer. But it was dinnertime and I imagined she was out with Kait securing a meal. I tried to contact our landlord (a graying Brit named Bedford), but I talked to his voicemail instead. At which point a nice embassy staffer reminded us pointedly not to miss our bus.
    I reached the shack long after dark, still firmly convinced I’d find Janice and Kaitlin inside; that Janice would be angry until she heard what had happened; that there would follow a tearful reconciliation and maybe even some passion in the wake of it.
    In her hurry to reach the hospital Janice had left the door ajar. She had taken a suitcase for herself and Kaitlin and local thieves had taken the rest, what there was of it: the food in the refrigerator, my phone, the laptop.
    I ran up the road and woke my landlord, who admitted he had seen Janice lugging a suitcase past his window “the other day” and that Kaitlin had been ill, but in all the fuss about the monument the details had escaped him. He let me use his phone (I had become a phone beggar) and I reached Doctor Dexter, who filled me in on the details of Kaitlin’s infection and her trip to Bangkok.
    Bangkok. And I couldn’t call Bangkok from Colin’s phone; that was a toll call, he pointed out, and wasn’t I already behind on the rent?
    I hiked to the Phat Duc, Hitch’s alleged bait and tackle shop.
    Hitch had problems of his own—he still harbored faint hopes of tracking down the lost Daimler—but he told me I could crash in the Duc’s back room (on a bale of moist sinsemilla, I imagined) and use the shop’s phone all I wanted; we’d settle up later.
    It took me until dawn to establish that Janice and Kaitlin had already left the country.
    I don’t blame