Odds Against Tomorrow Read Online Free PDF Page B

believe that another disaster is fast approaching.”
    “It’s late.”
    “Don’t take it the wrong way. All I mean to say is, you’re a natural.”
    The elevator chimed and Charnoble slinked inside. Just before the door closed, a weird lopsided smile crawled onto one side of his face. Then he was gone.
    Mitchell wondered what Charnoble meant by “the wrong way.” Did business zeal make Charnoble pray for atrocity?
    But half an hour later, as Mitchell sat in the backseat of the company sedan, the tinted windows muting the dawn, he wondered whether, in some hidden zone in his brain, he prayed for atrocity too. If you devoted your life to the contemplation of disaster, then wasn’t an incident-free existence an empty one? Put it this way: if you planned for disaster and none ever occurred, you were a fantasist. But if a disaster you predicted did come true, then your life had meaning. You weren’t just an expert. You were a prophet.
    It was at moments like this that Mitchell’s thoughts turned to Elsa Bruner.
    4.
    He hadn’t needed to open the envelope, which was heavily creased and smudged with dirt, to know that it contained a bomb, or at least superfine toxic dust. He had been expecting something of this sort; given the current national mood, it was only a matter of time until next-generation radicals began mailing bombs to the country’s largest corporations. But when Mitchell flipped over the soiled envelope—was the dirt, in fact, human feces? —he saw Elsa Bruner’s name. This barely diminished his anxiety. His forefinger trembled as he tried to slide it under the crease. It was as if his finger were connected to a stranger’s hand.
    His agitation multiplied with each sentence he read. The first peculiar thing he noticed about the letter, other than the fact that it was drafted in pencil, was its intimate, almost confessional tone. It was written in the voice of a lifelong friend who was resuming a conversation begun long ago. “Hi M.,” she had written.
    Elsa began the letter by explaining that after her “close call” on the day of the earthquake, she had been admitted to a hospital, where she was given a heavy dose of quinidine to combat her arrhythmia. If Mitchell hadn’t called the paramedics, she might have died. She apologized for her behavior that day—she hadn’t been thinking clearly. Her fainting episode, she explained, had been caused by a rare genetic disorder called the Brugada syndrome, which she didn’t describe beyond calling it “boring.”
    One might have expected the letter to end there. A thank-you note demanded no further elaboration. But elaborate she did. Elsa proceeded to update him on what had happened to her since that day. She explained that she had never returned to college and instead moved to a tiny village in Maine called Starling. Her boyfriend’s father owned property there: Camp Ticonderoga, a summer camp for boys on a horseshoe-shaped lake twenty miles northwest of Augusta. The camp had gone out of business several years earlier, and its log cabins had been yielding to the encroaching wilderness. The father had struggled to find a buyer, so he agreed to let his son and Elsa, along with several friends, convert the hundred-and-fifty-acre property into a working farm. It all seemed very convenient. Did Elsa know about the property before she started dating the boyfriend? She didn’t say.
    They arrived in late March, when a fragile crust of frost still covered the ground and sheer flakes of blue ice floated in the lake like tiny glaciers. In April, under Elsa’s direction, they tilled the baseball field and planted tomatoes, squash, and cucumbers; in the riflery range they concealed a square plot of marijuana by planting rows of sunflowers around its perimeter. They played volleyball, lit giant bonfires, and had dance parties in the old assembly hall. They paddled canoes out to the raft and jumped screaming into the frigid green water. They bunked in a farmhouse