Change of Climate

Untitled Part 13

London was dimly aware of the fact that Quinlan kept driving, because she asked him to. But she curled into a ball on the passenger seat and stared blankly out the window, feeling numb. It was bad enough to walk in on one murdered parent. To put it mildly. It was beyond bad. It was the worst. You would not imagine something worse than that on your worst enemy. And now London had just realized that she had had a parent murdered twice.

Twice.

That was basically the maximum number of parents you could have murdered. Definitely, genetically speaking.

London pulled her knees up and pressed her forehead into the dark, dim space she created and tried to keep breathing.

Finally, she felt the car stop, and Quinlan's hand rested gently on her arm.

It was gentle but she jumped a mile nonetheless.

"Hey," he said, softly. "We've got to eat, right? And I think it would do us good to stop traveling for just a little while."

London gazed blearily at the little roadside diner they'd pulled up at. "Where are we?" she asked. They were the first words she'd spoken since they'd hung up with Quinlan's mother and she had said I don't want to talk. It had been a long while of silence, apparently. Her voice felt rusty from disuse. And she'd lost all sense of time.

"I have no idea," Quinlan admitted. "It might be Pennsylvania? I feel like we've been in Pennsylvania for a while now, but Pennsylvania might be bigger than I think it is."

London unfolded herself and then unpeeled herself from the seat and walked with Quinlan into the diner. All of her movements felt slow and choppy. She had not felt this way after finding her father. Her adrenaline had kicked into gear and she had run, moving so quickly there was no time to think. Apparently now her body wanted to do nothing but think, wanted to play Quinlan's mother's words endlessly over in her head, as if there was anything useful about doing that. Your mother was murdered, too.

Quinlan ordered them coffee and glanced over the menu.

"What'll you have?" he asked London.

London glanced at the menu without interest. She shrugged.

"A hamburger?" he suggested.

"Yeah. Fine." The whatever was implied.

She let Quinlan take care of ordering. She looked dully at the television above the serving bar. They were talking about the hurricane, showing its coordinates in the Atlantic, as it barreled toward the coast. She picked out Pennsylvania on the map. Far enough inland that they should be okay, she thought, although the hurricane was massive. It had been building ever since her father had died, but she hadn't been paying attention to it, for obvious reasons. She'd had no idea how big it had gotten.

Quinlan said, "London, I think maybe we should talk about it."

"Why?" she asked, keeping her eyes on the meteorologist on the television explaining the hurricane's predicted route, little red dots in the center of a spreading cone of probability. Her father should have become a weatherman on the news. He'd probably still be alive if he had been.

Who knew about her mother?

London took a deep breath and looked away from the television. "What good is it going to do to talk about? It was years ago."

Quinlan's hand settled over hers, and she realized she'd been nervously shredding the napkin on the table. "How old were you?" he asked.

London took another deep breath and looked down at their intertwined hands. "Seven," she said. "It was right before we moved to Cheltenham."

"Is that when you started to move around a lot?"

"No, actually," London realized. "We always moved around a lot. Cheltenham always stood out to me because it was the longest we'd ever spent in one place. I always thought my dad did that to try to...I mean, it was a sad time, obviously, and getting to be in one place, getting to make friends, getting to almost be a normal little girl for a little while...it helped."

"And you didn't know your mother was murdered?"

"My father said it was a car accident. It was..." London's breath stuttered, and she focused on regulating it again. "Icy roads. Bad conditions. She was a meteorologist killed by bad weather conditions. The irony is, you know, something," London finished, lamely, and waved her hand and tried to smile like it was a funny, funny joke.

The thing was: it had been a funny, funny joke. Not that her father had ever made light of it, but he was the one who used to make the comment about the irony. They felt her absence every hour of every day. The heavy burden of that had had to be alleviated somewhat, somehow. And her father had done that for her.

Apparently by never telling her she was murdered.

"So she was a meteorologist, too?"

"Yes. Why? Why would someone kill her? Is someone just going around killing all of us Lassiters?"

"Was she, like, a weatherperson on TV?"

"No, she was a professor like my dad. That was how they met." London blinked, realizing. "And she was researching climate change."

"She was researching it, too?"

"No, she was researching it first. She was the one who was researching it. My father didn't start researching it until after she died. Before he was researching...something with the tides or something, I don't know. But yes. I remember that. That's right. We have all of her papers, I used to go through them sometimes to feel close to her, and they were all climate-change-related. My father's weren't until after she died. Like he picked up her work and kept on with it." London looked at Quinlan with dawning realization. "It's something with that research, Quin. I'm more convinced than ever. It's got to be that research."

The waitress arrived with their food.

Quinlan waited until she left to say, grimly, "So all we have to do is figure out what twenty random numbers mean and why anyone would want to kill two meteorology professors. Should be easy, right?"