The Mask Keeper

Chapter One

Extracurricular

The rain had quit about twenty minutes earlier. The hallway smelled of wet concrete and floor wax, and the light coming off the tall windows was the color of an old nickel.

"Marsh."

Theo turned with the smile already up — the polite one, nothing behind it — and spent the second it bought him looking for something to hang a name on. Gray shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Lanyard. The ID card had been turned around so the photo faced the man's chest, which was the least useful place it could possibly have been.

"Hi," Theo said. "I'm on my way to the office. I've got a pass."

"I know. I signed it."

The man waited. His eyebrows came down, then leveled out again.

"Assistant Principal Whitlock," he said at last, and then, because the pause had gone on too long to leave alone: "I drove the van to the academic tournament in October."

"Right." Theo kept the smile where it was. "Sorry. It's the shirt. You don't usually wear gray."

"I don't usually wear gray."

"You look good. You look like you got some sun."

Whitlock studied him for a moment, not annoyed exactly, more like a man doing arithmetic he had done before and had not enjoyed the first time. "Do me one favor," he said. "Learn my face. I pull hall duty on your wing. One of these nights you're going to walk right past me and I'll have to write myself up for being in the building."

Theo laughed on time, at the right volume. He'd get right on that. He had a good memory. It just didn't take people.

"You're coming to my office," Whitlock said. "Save me the walk. It's in the annex."

The annex was on the far side of the practice field, and the shortest way there was out the side doors and across the wet grass. A kid in a gray gym shirt turned to watch Theo pass, the way kids did, then remembered the game and turned back. It happened most days. They were looking at his face, and he knew exactly what that was worth, which was nothing, because it had never once helped him pick anybody out of a crowd.

The office was small and had one window onto the parking lot, and by the time they got there the rain had started again, thin and steady, so that the lot looked like it was being viewed through dirty glass. There was a woman already in one of the two chairs. She stood when they came in.

Twenty-five, maybe. White blouse, dark skirt, no jacket. Her hair was pulled up into a high knot held with something he couldn't see, and she had a pen in her hand that she'd been rolling between her knuckles like a cigarette she wanted and couldn't have.

"Ms. Voss," Whitlock said. "Sorry to keep you. This is Theo Marsh."

"Theo." She didn't offer a hand. "I'm with Division Four-oh-four, Office of Unfiled Phenomena. I'm in the county on assignment. I came to the school because I need to ask you about your mother. Do you know where she is?"

"No," Theo said.

"All right. When did you last hear from her?"

"Two days ago." He got his phone out of his back pocket, opened it, and set it on the arm of the chair, face up, so she could see the thread: eleven messages going out to the right, nothing coming back. The last three got shorter as they went. He let her look for as long as it took him to feel stupid, and then he put it away. "She's out west. In the mountains. She goes where the songs haven't been written down yet and stays until she's got them, and there's no signal out there. It's not the first time."

"How long does she usually go?"

"Six weeks, sometimes eight." He heard himself and didn't like it. "It's been five."

Voss wrote something down. Whitlock, at the window, had turned to look at the parking lot as though it had become interesting.

"Who else is at home?" Voss said.

"My grandparents are dead. It's her and me."

"I'm sorry." She said it fast and she meant it, and then she kept going, the way people do when they've been at something too long to afford the pauses. "Nobody else? An aunt, a cousin, somebody who'd know where she went."

"We're not a big family."

Whitlock turned from the window. "You've tried the mother?"

"We've tried everything we have," Voss said. "That's how I ended up at a high school."

"All right." She clicked the pen twice. "Then let me ask it another way. How much of your mother's work do you know?"

Theo sat back. It was, finally, a question he could answer without guessing. "I've been cutting slips for her since I was three," he said. "The paper ones. By the time I could read I could cut and fold a hundred an hour and every one of them square. I know where everything in that house is. If it's a filing question, whatever you need, I can find it."

Voss looked at him a moment longer than the answer required. "Used to be," she said, half to herself, "sixteen was old enough to work an altar alone all night." Then she glanced at Whitlock and stopped, and set the pen down on the arm of her chair.

Whitlock turned around. "Ms. Voss. He's in eleventh grade. You said on the phone this wouldn't take much of his time."

"It won't take his evenings. Not most of them."

"How many days are we talking about?"

"Two days a week. Maybe three. It depends what we find."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have."

"Find what?" Theo said.

Voss glanced at Whitlock. Whitlock looked at the ceiling. Then she said, "There's a dig out past Route 402. The road widening cut into the side of a mound out there in September. The state has a permit on it now and a crew on the ground, and there are questions about what's in it that nobody on that crew is qualified to answer. My office is one of the consulting parties. So we're looking for someone who knows the old forms." She paused. "We call them practitioners. Regional tradition bearers."

"Like a consultant," Whitlock said, helpful, nodding. "For the folkloric angle."

"Something like that," Voss said.

Theo noticed how she said it, and said nothing.

"Now, look," Whitlock said. "I'm not going to stand in the way of this. We'll write it up as community service. There's a credit for it, and I'll excuse him early on the days you need him, and I'll email his teachers myself so nobody marks him down. It's a good thing for a kid from here to be asked to do." He said a kid from here the way a man says a line he has already decided will end up in a newsletter. "I'd just like to hear you say it isn't going to eat his year."

"It isn't going to eat his year."

"And you're sure you don't want to wait for his mother."

"I'd wait if waiting did anything," Voss said. "The work is already in the ground. It isn't going to sit there while we call her voicemail."

"I'm asking as his school."

"I know you are." She turned the pen over once. "Whether he can help us is what we're going to find out."

Whitlock was quiet for a second. "All right," he said. "Theo. Your call. If at any point it's too much, you come to me and I'll end it, and I don't care whose permit it is."

"Yes, sir," Theo said.

"All right." Whitlock clapped his hands once, and the meeting was over.

School let out at 2:45 and Voss was waiting in the lot in a dark sedan with the engine running and the heater on, and Theo got in because he had said he would.

The back seat held a cardboard box and a steel thermos and a rain shell folded into a square, and nothing else, which was somehow worse than a mess. She drove like the road had insulted her. Out of Marrow Hill the state route climbed, and the rain came back in sheets that made the wipers work for it, and the radio came on by itself.

"— and if you've been anywhere near a screen this month you've heard it," the host said, warm and pleased. "The eighteenth. A perigee full moon, folks, what they're calling a supermoon, and the weather service is saying clear skies. Now, the usual suspects will tell you to drive out to the lake, but I've got the folks at the visitors' bureau on the line and they're telling me the best viewing point in the state this year is right here in Redkiln County, just in time for Founders' Weekend —"

"Best viewing point," Theo said. "In a valley."

Voss didn't look away from the road. "Mm."

"A viewing point is a point you view from. We've got a ridge on both sides of us. You could put a wall across the sky and we'd hear about it on Thursday."

"The chamber of commerce wrote that," Voss said. "It'll be up. It's the moon."

Theo laughed, once, and then the host started on the parade route and the traffic and he stopped listening. The rain got heavier. The heater smelled faintly of dust.

Route 402 went from two lanes to a gravel shoulder, and then to a chain-link fence with green fabric zip-tied along it, so that from the road you could see nothing behind it but the tops of the trees and a hard white light coming down through the rain.

There was a patrol car parked on the gravel with its engine off and its windows fogged. There was a man beside it in a rain shell, with a gun on his hip and a clipboard tucked under the shell, and there were two people further down the fence line with a phone on a stick, who took one look at the sky and gave up and ran for their car without ever pointing the phone at anything that mattered. Fifty feet of green fence fabric, and they'd come out in the rain for it.

Voss pulled up, put the window down, and handed over a laminated card without being asked.

The man read it twice. Then he read Theo.

"He's with me," Voss said.

"Ma'am, that pass covers you. He's not on my sheet."

"Then put him on it. Call Mr. Quarles."

"I can't let a —"

"Call Mr. Quarles."

The man went back to the patrol car and used the radio, and the radio talked back, and then he came back with the clipboard and a face that had decided this wasn't his problem anymore. "I need to hear it from him."

Voss took her phone out, put it on speaker, and held it up under the roof of the car with the rain coming in on her wrist.

"Quarles."

"Mr. Quarles, it's Voss. I'm at the gate."

"Ah." An old man's voice, dry, unhurried, slightly too close to the phone. "You've brought someone."

"I've brought someone. He's seventeen."

A pause on the line, exactly long enough to be heard. "Well," Quarles said. "Let's not make him stand in the rain, then. This is Gerald Quarles. Ms. Voss is here at my request and the young man is with her. Pass them both through."

"Yes, sir," the man said, and stepped back, and lifted the barrier.

"You're good," he said to Voss, and then, to Theo, "You're good, kid."

Voss put the car in gear and rolled it through, and then, before she pulled away, she reached into the bag in the back seat, took out a metal pin about four inches long with a flat hammered head, and pushed it through the knot of her hair.

That was all. Her blouse was still a blouse. The car still smelled of dust and heat. But she drove the rest of the way up the track with the pin in her hair, and she didn't say anything at all.

"You're going to ask," she said finally.

"I wasn't."

"Good."

The track curved and the ground on the left had been scraped down to a color Theo had only ever seen on a riverbank after a flood. There were four trailers on it, one with a generator running outside, and a fifth one further off with the door lifting and dropping against the frame in the wind, once, twice, again, and the rain hammering on their metal roofs.