Chapter 33
At the Shady Pines Residential Home, a new wing was under construction. That worked to Rory’s benefit as he was easily able to blend in with the construction workers.
After two months of off-radar existence, he didn’t know if anyone was still looking for him. He didn’t know if anyone ever had been, in fact. It would be to Lincoln’s benefit to keep Rory’s involvement to himself. Beyond that, the man owed his life to Rory and he seemed to take that debt seriously.
But just to be safe, Rory had gone completely off the grid for the past two months. He’d stayed in Hawaii long enough to secure a forged passport, then flown to New York, where it was easy to get lost in the crowd. It was also easy to monitor the news from there.
The mysterious blackout in Kailua-Kona got minor coverage.
No cause was ever officially identified.
The financial papers reported on a major rift in the Kerr family, with Maureen Kerr attempting a coup on the company’s board of directors.
After days of suspense and drama, her move paid off.
Lincoln stepped down as the CEO, but not without extracting a price.
He took over sole ownership of an obscure alternative energy startup called Higher Ground Solutions.
Try as they might, none of the financial reporters were able to figure out why Lincoln was so interested in that particular company. But they did gleefully report on his demotion from powerful billionaire to a mere millionaire. Lincoln himself issued no statements and gave no interviews.
But Rory felt sure Lincoln had several cards up his sleeve and that the world would be hearing from him soon.
Had he and his security team managed to find the crystal?
Was that why Lincoln was still so focused on that company?
In all the articles and online forums he researched, he saw no mention of an energy magnifier like the crystal.
Did that mean they were back to square one with its development?
Or did it mean Lincoln had made a deal with the billionaire bunker crew which meant that no one would ever hear about that amazing technology? Was Rory literally the only outsider who knew of its existence?
If so, what responsibility did he have regarding it? Without the crystal itself, no one would listen to him even if he did break his NDA. He’d sound like a crackpot ranting about magic crystals, and he’d get into legal trouble if Lincoln chose to enforce the NDA.
For now, he was staying quiet. And invisible.
But he knew Ethan would be wondering why he hadn’t come to visit, and the one thing he couldn’t handle was hurting his brother’s feelings. So here he was, wearing carpenter’s overalls and a baseball cap, blending in as he slipped into the Shady Pines foyer.
“Has anyone else come to visit Ethan lately?” he asked Sally, who was monitoring the sign-in process. He knew all the staff here, and had a great relationship with most of them.
“Sure, he gets plenty of visitors. Popular guy.”
“Anyone unexpected or unfamiliar?”
“Other than Taylor Swift? Nah.” She sighed as she handed him the sign-in sheet. “Sorry, that was my wishful thinking talking. Just the usual, your family, a friend from the neighborhood, no one sketchy.”
That was a relief. His biggest fear was that someone would track down Ethan to get to him. Honestly, he needed to cool it with the paranoia.
He found Ethan in the midst of building a Lincoln log house, which gave him a private little laugh.
If only Mathilda was here to share it with him.
He loved those little moments of mutual appreciation of absurdity.
He missed them, and he missed her. Before Mathilda, he hadn’t realized how essentially alone he was.
Sure, he had plenty of people in his life, but no one else with that perfect kind of wavelength connection.
Ethan tore himself away from the project to give Rory a long, affectionate hug.
“Where were you?” he demanded. With his already thinning sandy hair and freckled nose, he resembled their father, whereas Rory had more of their mother’s Japanese looks.
“I’ve been in Hawaii. Want to see some pictures?”
“Yes!”
Luckily, he’d been able to download a backup of his phone from the cloud.
Even luckier still, apparently at some point he’d had enough of a cell connection that his phone had automatically uploaded.
He had no idea where his phone was now, but at least he had access to the photos he’d taken in the jungle.
He flipped through them with Ethan. As he showed his brother photos of the brilliant bird of paradise anthuriums, the enormous racks of green bananas dangling from between fringed leaves, the curled tail of a boar running away into the jungle, he braced himself for the one photo that showed Mathilda.
He’d pored over it too many times to count. He loved that photo. She’d been deep in conversation with Robert, and when she’d spotted Rory with his phone, she’d met his gaze and crossed her eyes and made a goofy expression. Adorably, of course, like everything she did.
As soon as Ethan saw the photo he burst out laughing. He rocked forward and back, slapping his knee with his hand, like an old man on a park bench laughing at a joke from the old days. “She’s so funny!”
“Yeah, she’s pretty funny.” He tried to flip to a photo of a gecko, but Ethan refused to let him.
“Is she your friend?” he asked.
“Sure. Yes, you could call her a friend. She rescued me. But then I saved her from…well, I rescued her too. It went back and forth like that for a while.”
“What’s her name?” Ethan kept staring at Mathilda’s goofy face.
“Mathilda.”
“Can she come visit me?”
“Oh…well, no, she lives in Hawaii. Or possibly England.” He’d scoured every British newspaper he could find for mention of a big society wedding in the Aberdeen family, but hadn’t seen a mention.
“She should visit,” he declared. Geography meant nothing to Ethan. “She’s nice. I’m going to make her a present.” With that, he abandoned the Hawaii slide show, shoved his Lincoln Log house to the side, and pulled out a sheet of drawing paper.
“Ethan, I…I don’t think she can visit. I don’t know where she is or how to reach her.”
Already busy with his favorite colored pencils, Ethan barely glanced at him. “But you can do anything.”
“Well…” Rory didn’t want to break his brother’s heart by saying that was ridiculous. Of course he couldn’t do anything. On the other hand, he could still hear Lincoln’s words of praise about his resourcefulness.
You can do better.
That thought struck him as he watched his brother draw his favorite subject, an airplane. It wasn’t enough to know there was a transformative piece of energy technology out there. He had to spread the word. But how could he do that with no physical evidence, and without breaking his NDA?
Be resourceful. Get creative.
He slid to the next photo on his phone. There it was, in his palm, the crystal glowing in the dimness of the tent at the Nahele Research Camp. There was something so compelling about it even in a photograph.
And then it hit him.
Why not set the power of crowdsourcing on the case?
Strip the metadata from the photo. Sneak some posts onto various social media sites, being careful to shield his own identity.
Pose the question. Can this object solve our energy issues?
Are billionaires hoarding this resource for themselves? #Revolution #BeAHero
He itched to get started. His brain was already sorting through the details of how to seed the mystery onto the internet.
Filled with determination, he smiled at his brother’s earnest artistic efforts.
If he had the ability to make the world better, he was going to do his damnedest to make it happen.
And if he could do that, surely he could find Mathilda.
Suddenly, all he could think about was her.
He wanted to see her in all her tangled-hair, muddy-booted, dedicated-science-nerd glory.
He wanted to feel her kiss again. He wanted to tumble her into bed, with or without a mosquito net.
He wanted to see her eyes shoot blue fire at him when he got under her skin.
He wanted to tell her he loved her. He wanted to take her into his arms when one of her panic attacks threatened.
He wanted to see her face light up with happiness.
And—maybe selfishly—he wanted that happiness to be thanks to him.
“I can try,” he told Ethan, “but there’s a chance that she’s married now.”
Ethan didn’t seem to understand the problem, so he left it there. Maybe it wasn’t an issue. Maybe she’d said no to all that money and social status and everything that went with being a marchioness. But if she had married Duncan, wouldn’t there have been some mention, somewhere, anywhere?
That was the tiny spark of hope that he kept holding onto.
Besides, even if she was married, maybe she wouldn’t mind if he showed up out of the blue with a friendly check-in. Yeah, like a wellness check. A friendly not-at-all desperate-with-longing wellness check.
There was only one way to find out for sure.
First step, figure out where she was. Step two…he’d make that up as he went.