The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson

of phone calls about you,” he said. “Thought for a while you’d robbed a bank.”
    The curtains were closed. It was the kind of house where not much light gets inside no matter what. Nor did the ancient floor lamp do much to dispel the gloom.
    He sat in his tired green easy chair, breathing shallowly, waiting for me to speak.
    “It was about a job,” I said. “They were doing a background check.”
    “Some job, if you got the FBI making house calls.”
    The undershirt exposed his skinny frame. He had been a big man once. Big and easily angered, not the kind of man you trifled with. Now his arms were skeletal, the flesh sagging. His barrel chest had shrunk back to the ribs, and his belt was at least five notches in, the loose end flapping against his high hip joints.
    I told him, “I’m going out of the country for a while.”
    “How long?”
    “Tell you the truth, I don’t know.”
    “Did the FBI tell you I was sick?”
    “I heard.”
    “Maybe I’m not as sick as they think. I don’t feel good, but—” He shrugged. “These doctors know fuck-all, but they charge like Moses. You want a cup of coffee?”
    “I can get it. I guess the coffee maker’s still where it was.”
    “You think I’m too fragile to make coffee?”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “I can still make coffee, for Christ’s sake.”
    “Don’t let me stop you.”
    He went to the kitchen. I got up to follow but stopped at the doorway when I saw him sneaking a big dollop of Jack Daniel’s into his own cup. His hands shook.
    I waited in the living room, looking at the bookshelves. Most of the books had been my mother’s. Her tastes had run to Nora Roberts,
The Bridges of Madison County
, and endless volumes of Tim LaHaye. My father contributed the ancient Tom Clancy novels and
Stranger Than Science
. I had owned a lot of books when I lived here—I was a straight-A student, probably because I dreaded leaving school and going home—but I had kept my mystery novels segregated on a shelf in my room, primly unwilling to let Conan Doyle or James Lee Burke mingle with the likes of V.C. Andrews and Catherine Coulter.
    My father came back with two mugs of coffee. He handed me the one with CORIOLIS SHIPPING, the name of his last employer, still faintly legible on the side. He had managed the Coriolis distribution network for twenty-three years and still collected a pension check every month. The coffee was both bitter and weak. “I don’t have any regular milk or cream,” he said. “I know you like it white. I used powdered milk.”
    “It’s fine,” I said.
    He settled back into his chair. There was a remote control on the coffee table in front of him, presumably for his video panel. He looked at it wistfully but didn’t reach for it. He said, “That must be some job you applied for, because those FBI people asked some peculiar questions.”
    “Like what?”
    “Well, there was I guess the usual, where you went to school and what kind of grades you got and where did you work and all that. But they wanted lots of details. Did you go out for sports, what did you do in your spare time, did you talk about politics or history much. Did you have lots of friends or did you keep to yourself. Who was your family doctor, did you have any unusual childhood diseases, did you ever see a shrink. A lot about Elaine, too. They knew she’d been sick. In that area, I mainly told them to fuck off. But they knew a lot already, obviously.”
    “They asked about Mom?”
    “Didn’t I just say that?”
    “What kind of questions?”
    “Her, you know, symptoms. When did they come on and how did she behave. How you took it. Things that aren’t anybody’s business but family, frankly. Christ, Scotty, they wanted into
everything
. They wanted to look at your old stuff that was in the garage. They took samples of the tap water, if you can believe that.”
    “You’re telling me they came to the house?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Did they take anything besides tap