Riptide by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child Page B

emergency, there had been no time to think. Now, in the darkened operating
     theater, alone with his thoughts, it took all the self-control Hatch could muster to control the fit of shaking that threatened
     to overwhelm him.

9

    D oris Bowditch, licensed Realtor, strode briskly up the front steps of 5 Ocean Lane. The old boards of the porch groaned beneath
     the unaccustomed weight. As she bent forward to try the front door key, a vast assortment of silver bracelets cascaded down
     her forearm with a jingling that reminded Hatch of sleigh bells. There was a brief struggle with the key, then she turned the
     knob and threw the front door open with a little flourish.
    Hatch waited until she had stepped through the door, muumuu billowing out behind, then followed her into the cool, dark interior
     of the house. It hit him immediately, like a blow to the gut: the same smell of old pinewood, mothballs, and pipesmoke. Though
     he hadn’t inhaled that scent for twenty-five years, it was all he could do not to step back into the sunlight as the intense
     scent of childhood threatened to bypass all his defenses.
    “Well!” came Doris’s bright voice as she shut the door behind them. “It’s a beautiful old thing, isn’t it? I’ve always said,
     what a shame it was shut up for so long!” The woman swept into the center of the room in a swirl of pink. “What do you think?”
    “Fine,” said Hatch, taking a tentative step forward. The front parlor was just as he remembered it, the day his mother had
     finally given up and they’d left for Boston: the chintz easy chairs, the old canvas sofa, the print of the HMS
Leander
over the mantelpiece, the Herkeimer upright piano with the circular stool and braided rug.
    “The pump’s been primed,” Doris continued, oblivious. “The windows washed, electricity turned on, propane tank filled.” She
     ticked off the items on long red fingernails.
    “It looks very nice,” Hatch said distractedly. He moved to the old piano and ran his hand along the fallboard, remembering
     the wintry afternoons he had spent struggling over some Bach two-part invention. On the shelf beside the fireplace was an
     old Parcheesi set. Next to it lay a Monopoly board, its cover lost long ago, the pink and yellow and green rectangles of play
     money worn and creased from countless contests. On the shelf above lay several grimy packs of cards, held together by rubber
     bands. Hatch felt a fresh stab as he remembered playing poker with Johnny, using wooden matches as chips, and the vigorous
     arguments about which was higher, a full house or a straight. Everything was here, every painful reminder still in place;
     it was like a museum of memory.
    They had taken nothing but their clothes when they left. They were only supposed to stay away a month, at first. Then the
     month turned into a season, then a year, and soon the old house receded to a distant dream: shut up, unseen, unmentioned,
     but waiting nevertheless. Hatch wondered again why his mother had never sold the place, even after they’d fallen on hard times
     in Boston. And he wondered at his own, deeply buried, reasons for a similar reluctance, long after his mother’s death.
    He passed into the living room and stepped up to the bow window, letting his gaze fall on the infinite blue of the ocean,
     sparkling in the morning sun. Somewhere out on the horizon lay Ragged Island, at rest now after claiming its first casualty
     in a quarter century. In the wake of the accident, Neidelman had called a one-day halt to the operation. Hatch’s eyes dropped
     from the sea to the meadow in the foreground, a green mantle that fell away from the house toward the shoreline. He reminded
     himself that he didn’t have to do this. There were other places to stay that didn’t come with the added burden of memory.
     But those places wouldn’t be in Stormhaven; driving to the house that morning, he’d seen perhaps a dozen Thalassa employees
     clustered outside of