Gwendy’s Final Task

She sends the email to the down-below and walks back and forth through her suite (which doesn’t take long), pulling restlessly at her ponytail. She can’t seem to sit still, not in her current state. She reaches out for Gareth Winston, like she did for the Chinese in their spoke, and finds him. He is on his computer. Writing an email. She can’t see it but she knows that’s what it is. There’s a word in his mind that she gets clear, although she doesn’t know what it means. The word is sombra.

Norris may not reply for an hour or more, she thinks, and Mom used to say a watched pot never boils.

She decides to walk (maybe even run) the outer rim—anything to burn off this wild and dangerous energy. She puts on shorts and a tee-shirt with CASTLE ROCK OLD HOME DAYS on the front, and is just lacing up her sneakers when her laptop chimes with incoming mail. She leaps across the room like Supergirl and settles in front of the screen. The message is brief, to the point, and totally Yankee.

Hey Gwendy,

Met Mitchell, talked to him, wouldn’t trust him as far as I could sling a piano. He couldn’t wait to get rid of me. Want me to take a trip to Derry and go at him a little harder? Happy to do it. By the way—any idea what got your Ryan haring off to Derry in the first place?

Norris

She wishes she could answer that question, but she can’t. Her best guess is that someone told Ryan they had dirt on Magowan, or dirt on her. Either might have gotten him to take a ride north. Did it make any difference? Of course not. No matter what the pretext, Ryan remains dead.

As for sending Norris up to Derry … no. Norris isn’t the man for that job. She believes the flash she had when she took Gareth’s hand was a true insight. She believes that she saw Gareth in one of the two old cars that were in Derry on the day Ryan died. She believes Ryan may have been killed in an effort to derail her Senatorial campaign. And she believes that her house was burned after certain men—perhaps driving perfectly maintained old cars—searched it for the button box, came up empty, and reached the logical conclusion: she has it with her in space. Sending Norris to Derry might only succeed in getting him killed.

Without the special chocolates lighting up her brain, she would have doubted this scenario. No, she thinks, I wouldn’t have been able to think of it in the first place, I would have been too addled. With that brain-booster onboard, however, she doesn’t doubt it. Not one tiny bit. She wonders if Gareth started agitating for a tourist run into space after she didn’t drop out of the race against Magowan. No, probably not until after she was elected and got on the Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee.

“Someone was really thinking ahead,” Gwendy mutters to herself. Her hands are clenching and unclenching. Each clench is hard enough to make her short nails dig into the soft meat of her palms. “Someone was really planning ahead.” Then, for no reason at all, she says, “Sombra sombra sombra.” She’ll hunt for it on the Net, but she has something else to do first, far more important.

She sits down and sends an email to Deputy CIA Director Charlotte Morgan.