The interior of the main section of the house can pretty much be summed up as wide open and a shade of white or green, with a minimum of effort spent on decorative stuff.
As Sarah looked around my nearly bare room, her gaze settled on a huge black-and-white picture of some ancient faded swirls carved in stone. It is the one thing other than a flat-screen TV on my walls.
“Oh, I know that I think. That’s from Newgrange, in Ireland, right?” she asked.
Surprised despite myself, I answered, “Sure is. I took that photograph myself. Nobody alive today is certain what the three spirals mean, but it gets lit up every year on the Solstice when the sun strikes it. I figure it must have been important.”
“Are you Irish, Mr. Dru?”
“Whole family is,” I replied. “Most of us come from Ulster.”
“Was that where you were born?”
“I’m a naturalized American now. Look, Sarah, is there something I can do for you? You seem…How’s Frank? Is everything alright?”
Sarah sat on my old, Amish-built sofa and stared down at her hands. “You knew my Frank well, didn’t you?” she said.
I took a seat in the chair near the sofa, mainly to give myself time to think. I was getting into risky territory here. Frank and I met in a military unit euphemistically called “irregular” by the government. We did what other special forces couldn’t, and we did it with a mix of soldiers who weren’t all, technically speaking, human.
Seriously.
And Frank was one of the guys not quite human.
