Old Chaos (9781564747136) Read Online Free Page B

and half a dozen towels on the folding table. It took a while to mop up. By the time they’d dried a place on the floor, laid out the blanket, and stripped their victim naked, he was mumbling.
    He was a true redhead, Meg noted with interest. It seemed that Kayla was still in a clinical frame of mind, however, so intent on warming him up, she didn’t pause to admire his anatomy. Rob’s gray sweats were an inch short but fit him otherwise. He lay inert.
    Meg hauled his sopping clothes and the wet towels back to her tiny utility room. Then she changed her own wet clothes at the folding table. One of these days she would put the laundry away. She brought Kayla a set of sweats.
    Kayla still knelt by her patient. She was slipping a self-sealing bag full of crushed ice under his head.
    “Ice!” Meg offered the dry sweatsuit. It was pink.
    “Reduces the swelling.” Kayla took a look at the sweats and burst into laughter. “Yours? Way too short. I’m going home.” She jumped to her feet. “Back in fifteen minutes. If you have more towels, warm them in the oven and wrap him in them.”
    “What if he wakes up?” Meg wailed.
    “Talk to him. Find out who he is.”
    “His wallet fell out of his jeans.”
    “So what’s his name?”
    Meg flipped the scuffed leather wallet open. “Charles Morris O’Neill. Pullman address, Visa card, debit card, gas card. What’s he doing down here?” Pullman lay three hundred miles to the northeast, on the Idaho border. Its chief claim to fame was Washington State University, the science and engineering school. Maybe O’Neill was a professor. He was too old to be an undergraduate. Maybe he was—what was the current euphemism?—a returning student.
    When Kayla disappeared into outer darkness, Meg set the oven to two hundred degrees, lit it with a long match, and ran upstairs for more towels. She also found socks. She warmed everything and swaddled O’Neill, then sat by him on the floor. He still looked cold, but that might be the light of the Coleman lantern. Ice slapped the windows. She thought of her neighbors trapped in their chilling houses and of Rob out on the road.
    The man said something. Meg jerked from her reverie. “What is it, Charles, uh, Charlie?” Maybe he went by Chuck.
    “Head.”
    “Yes, you fell and hit your head. We think you have a concussion.”
    “Mmmm.” He drifted back into stupor.
    Meg sat still, willing Kayla to hurry. After what seemed ages, O’Neill stirred again and said something else.
    “What did you say?”
    “Cousin.”
    Meg stared.
    He was frowning. His eyelids fluttered and opened. His eyes were blue. “Looking for my cousin.”
    “So you shall but not now. You’ve hurt your head.”
    The brilliant eyes closed, but the frown didn’t ease. “Got to find him. They must’ve lost the report.”
    Meg digested that, or tried to. It didn’t make sense. “Where does he live? Your cousin.”
    “Right here.” He sounded aggrieved.
    She opened her mouth to say no he doesn’t, closed it. “Er, what’s his name?”
    But he had drifted off again.
    Meg was busy adding and subtracting. O’Neill. Neill. Rob was this man’s cousin. Charles O’Neill looked familiar, not because he resembled Rob, but because he looked like Rob’s father.
    Rob had shown her one of those studio portraits taken of soldiers before they go on active duty. Charles Neill, staff sergeant, killed in Vietnam in 1968, a long time ago. He’d had red hair. Rob took after his maternal grandfather, Robert Guthrie, who had raised him in Klalo. He talked of the Guthries often and with affection, but he rarely mentioned the other side of the family.
    “Nasty out there!” Kayla shouldered her way in the door carrying a load. She’d been gone half an hour by the kitchen clock, which was battery-operated.
    Meg relieved her of a laptop computer.
    “It’s his.” Kayla shifted her remaining burdens, a small carry-on bag and two grocery sacks. She had changed into wool slacks and