Flynn's World

ONE "Da! Da! Wake up!" In his sleep, Boston Police Inspector Francis Xavier Flynn again was on the ground, a boy asleep against a warm brick wall. The other side of that wall, a city was burning. "Da! Wake up!" Cross-legged, his thirteen-year-old daughter, Jenny, sat on the rug beside his bed. Bathed in the light that came through the opened bedroom door, her curly blond hair gleamed; her brilliant blue eyes, as big as saucers, beamed at him. "Why are you waking me up in the middle of the night?" He felt for Elsbeth. She was not in the bed with him. "It's not the middle of the night, Da. It's only eight-fifteen." "Right. I came to bed at six o'clock, didn't I? Having had no sleep at all last night." He had spent Saturday, Saturday night until four-thirty Sunday afternoon discovering the whereabouts of a woman who had taken a car from outside a pharmacy. The car was not hers. In a safety seat in the back of the car was a sixteen-month-old girl. The baby was not hers, either. Flynn turned on his bedside lamp. He said to Jenny, "The question remains. Why is my bit of fluff awakening me in the middle of my night?" On the rug between her knees were a hammer, a screwdriver, a pair of pliers, a flashlight, a box of gauze, and a bottle of tincture of iodine. "Need you. Please get dressed and come with me." Without using her hands or arms, she stood up from where she had been sitting cross-legged. "As quick as you possibly ever can." "Where are we going?" he asked. "Cemetery." "But I'm not dead yet, I don't think." She picked up the odd collection of things from the floor. "Please hurry. I'll make you a cup of Red Zinger tea while you're getting dressed." * * * "Oof!" In the cemetery Flynn fell into a hole in the ground filled with dead leaves. "Oh, my God." He rolled over in the leaves and sat up. "For an instant there, I thought the grave had reached up and pulled me down. And before my fill of formaldehyde, too!" After climbing over the cemetery's stone wall Flynn had followed his daughter up a hill thick with dead leaves. In the fog the tombstones were not at all visible at a distance; when they did loom into view they appeared bigger than they were. There was full moonlight in the low fog. Jenny had rushed on ahead without using her flashlight. Holding his hand, Jenny had hurried him down the steps of their house and along the foggy Winthrop sidewalk. "What's all this about?" Flynn had asked. "Billy." "What's a Billy?" Part of Flynn's mind was still in the bed, asleep. "A billy's a goat. Or a nightstick." "Billy's my friend." "Oh, I see. Of the male variety?" "He's a boy." "How do we know Billy, although I'm not sure I do?" "He's been to the house." A goodly number of children wandered through Flynn's house, as he had five of his own. He could not swear to have studied them all. He doubted he had ever seen the faces of some--those who seemed to stand permanently facing the inside of the opened refrigerator. "Is Billy at school with you?" "He goes to public school." "Is he in trouble?" "He's in the cemetery." "Dead or alive is he?" "Discomfited," she said with dignity. "Then he must be alive." "Sometimes Billy and I meet in the cemetery. You know, to talk things over. Religion. Politics. Billy loves history." "Why on earth do you meet in the cemetery?" "It's quiet there." "I expect it is." "Sometimes we take the namMcdonald, Gregory is the author of 'Flynn's World', published 2004 under ISBN 9780375713583 and ISBN 0375713581.