The Reconstructionist Read Free Page A

OK.’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘It has to be better than selling TVs.’
    ‘Forensic engineering,’ she said. ‘He examines car accidents, to see how they happened.’ She inclined her head forward as if they might be overheard. By whom? By Christopher, was all he could think. ‘Or maybe the preferred term is accident reconstruction,’ she said. ‘They hire out to insurance companies and attorneys. I don’t know. I should have a better sense of it, but it’s pretty dark. I don’t really like hearing about it.’
    She changed the subject, and they talked of a few people they had known in Coil. Where his mother had kept track of people, Ellis was able to give news, and he could even make Heather laugh. But then she looked at her watch. ‘Well, hey,’ she said, ‘it’s good to see you.’
    His heart fisted. ‘Let me –’ Everything gyred. ‘Let me give you something,’ he said. He groped into the backpack he carried, and his hand came on pens, books, a calculator, and then a computer mouse pad that he had bought some weeks earlier, here, at the gift shop. A stupid thing, he thought, but he held it forward.
    She turned it over and back again. It showed a detail from an oil painting – a grey mouse on rough floorboards, looking upward, a red ribbon around his neck. Ellis couldn’t tell what she thought of it and feared she would try to press it back. ‘For mouse-on-mouse action,’ he said. ‘Or, I guess, for the best-laid pads of mice and men.’
    She rolled it between her hands. ‘You could talk to my husband,’ she said, ‘if you’re serious about looking for a job.’
    ‘Yes. Yes.’
    ‘Maybe it’s OK if you can get past the ugliness. He’s mentioned that he might take on someone to help with his caseload. I don’t know if he’s serious, but it won’t hurt to ask.’ On a slip of paper she wrote a phone number. At the top she wrote ‘Boggs’. She said, ‘Everyone, except for me, calls him Boggs.’

2.
    A LARGE AQUA-BLUE SUV lay in the corner of the parking lot, terribly mutilated – windows broken out, front and rear lamps gone, bumper covers hanging, grille missing, wheels settled on flat tyres, doors twisted out of door frames, hood bent like a potato chip.
    But otherwise, the place looked like an ordinary suburban office building, with ordinary cars clustered in the parking spaces nearest the front door. Ellis had arrived early. He sat in his car, looking at his résumé. It seemed a document built from scant and shabby materials.
    ‘
He is in the old labyrinth
,’ said a deep voice. ‘
It is the story of his gambling in another guise
.’
    A shining green Volkswagen convertible had come into the parking lot, top down though the weather was cool. ‘
He gambles because God does not speak. He gambles to make God speak
.’ It took Ellis a second to connect the voice to the convertible and its stereo. ‘
But to make God speak in the turn of a card is blasphemy. Only when God is silent does God
–’ A large, bearded man in a dark blue overcoat stood out of the Volkswagen and stalked toward the office door . His sand-coloured hair held itself out from his head like frayed hemp rope, and he carried a bright orange bag stuffed to overflowing with papers and binders. Ellis felt pretty sure it was the same man he had seen in Heather’s driveway.
    A few minutes later, as Ellis stared again at his résumé, he was startled by a knock on his window. The man from the Volkswagen peered down. ‘Ellis Barstow?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘You’re early. I’m Boggs.’ He appeared to be in his middle thirties, with crow’s feet beginning at the corners of vivid blue eyes. Ellis stood out of his car, and Boggs shook his hand and grinned. If he recognised Ellis or his car from the drive-by half a year ago, he offered no sign of it. He only tilted his head. ‘Come on.’
    He led Ellis to the battered aqua-blue SUV and nodded at it. ‘What do you suppose happened?’
    ‘Hit by an