everyone everyplace loved him. Not that often, but sometimes, the man would ask me to come with him on his morning walk. He always went the same route. After he was hit, I drove out to the spot with Niko. It was on a curve right by a three-foot-high stone wall. There was blood and hair on the wall where the man hit it, and he ended up well behind it.'
'A woman walking her dog noticed him, yes?'
'That's what we were told.' bo on.
'Got 'em!' he exclaimed, gesturing to the screen. 'Did you see that shot, lady? Two at once.'
It was hard at moments like this for Thea to believe that her brother might be among the most intelligent beings on the planet, but she had been told by her mother and the twins of testing done by the college he briefly attended, indicating that it was, by some measurements, the case.
'Dimitri, get to the point,' she insisted, an edge of exasperation in her voice.
With no introduction, Dimitri jumped to his feet, marched two screens over, and activated the computer that was there. Instantly an animation appeared showing the road and a stick-figure man walking beside it. The curve was there, and the stone wall, shown in nearly perfect proportions and three-dimensional perspective. Then, in slow motion, the figure became airborne, striking the wall with his head and then flipping over it.
'To knock him in this direction, the car would have to have been coming like this.'
Dimitri pressed a key and the stick figure returned to its original position. Then a green four-door automobile moved into the picture, coming from the right, and struck the figure, sending it tumbling once again, slamming against, then over, the stone wall. Thea saw the point immediately.
'Niko said there were no skid marks and no tire tracks in the dirt,' she said. 'The driver of the car would have had to hit Dad, then make a really sharp left in order to keep from going across that stretch of ground and hitting the wall himself.'
'Exactly. If he was drunk, he wouldn't have been able to do it. If he were sober, he would have had a hundred and twenty feet to see the man before he hit him.'
'Was it dark?'
'Not according to the police.'
'Have you shown anyone this?'
'I told Niko and Selene that I had made it, but they really didn't seem all that interested. The truth is, they're not all that interested in anything I do.'
Dimitri again immersed himself in killing demons. Thea knew he had retreated into the emotional safety of his video games, and for the moment, at least, he was announcing that all consideration of their father's near-fatal accident was over.
For Thea, however, that was not the case. She wandered out of the carriage house and back to Petros's Volvo, immersed in the possibility that the hit-and-run disaster might not have been an accident. It was chilling to think that someone could have purposely done such a thing to their father, but at the same time, her finely honed analytical sense was already at work probing the overriding question—why?
'Papa, what is that? The house is shaking. Papa, what's happening? Is this another earthquake?'
Nine-year-old Petros and his father, Konstantine, were in the living room of their modest house on a dusty hillside in the town of Lixouri, prefecture of Kefalonia—an island in the Ionian Sea west of mainland Greece. Konstantine Sperelakis was a teacher of Greek history and literature, and it was said of him that he knew what he knew. It was his absolute belief that Kefalonia, not Ithaca, was the birthplace of Odysseus, and he never passed up the chance to present the evidence to anyone who would listen.
There had been tremors and small earthquakes before— Konstantine had explained that Kefalonia lay on one of the great faults of the world—but something about these tremors was different. In spite of himself, because he knew his father's strict rules, Petros began to cry.
The year of the earthquake—the worst in many decades—was 1949. Sixty years later, lying helpless
'A woman walking her dog noticed him, yes?'
'That's what we were told.' bo on.
'Got 'em!' he exclaimed, gesturing to the screen. 'Did you see that shot, lady? Two at once.'
It was hard at moments like this for Thea to believe that her brother might be among the most intelligent beings on the planet, but she had been told by her mother and the twins of testing done by the college he briefly attended, indicating that it was, by some measurements, the case.
'Dimitri, get to the point,' she insisted, an edge of exasperation in her voice.
With no introduction, Dimitri jumped to his feet, marched two screens over, and activated the computer that was there. Instantly an animation appeared showing the road and a stick-figure man walking beside it. The curve was there, and the stone wall, shown in nearly perfect proportions and three-dimensional perspective. Then, in slow motion, the figure became airborne, striking the wall with his head and then flipping over it.
'To knock him in this direction, the car would have to have been coming like this.'
Dimitri pressed a key and the stick figure returned to its original position. Then a green four-door automobile moved into the picture, coming from the right, and struck the figure, sending it tumbling once again, slamming against, then over, the stone wall. Thea saw the point immediately.
'Niko said there were no skid marks and no tire tracks in the dirt,' she said. 'The driver of the car would have had to hit Dad, then make a really sharp left in order to keep from going across that stretch of ground and hitting the wall himself.'
'Exactly. If he was drunk, he wouldn't have been able to do it. If he were sober, he would have had a hundred and twenty feet to see the man before he hit him.'
'Was it dark?'
'Not according to the police.'
'Have you shown anyone this?'
'I told Niko and Selene that I had made it, but they really didn't seem all that interested. The truth is, they're not all that interested in anything I do.'
Dimitri again immersed himself in killing demons. Thea knew he had retreated into the emotional safety of his video games, and for the moment, at least, he was announcing that all consideration of their father's near-fatal accident was over.
For Thea, however, that was not the case. She wandered out of the carriage house and back to Petros's Volvo, immersed in the possibility that the hit-and-run disaster might not have been an accident. It was chilling to think that someone could have purposely done such a thing to their father, but at the same time, her finely honed analytical sense was already at work probing the overriding question—why?
'Papa, what is that? The house is shaking. Papa, what's happening? Is this another earthquake?'
Nine-year-old Petros and his father, Konstantine, were in the living room of their modest house on a dusty hillside in the town of Lixouri, prefecture of Kefalonia—an island in the Ionian Sea west of mainland Greece. Konstantine Sperelakis was a teacher of Greek history and literature, and it was said of him that he knew what he knew. It was his absolute belief that Kefalonia, not Ithaca, was the birthplace of Odysseus, and he never passed up the chance to present the evidence to anyone who would listen.
There had been tremors and small earthquakes before— Konstantine had explained that Kefalonia lay on one of the great faults of the world—but something about these tremors was different. In spite of himself, because he knew his father's strict rules, Petros began to cry.
The year of the earthquake—the worst in many decades—was 1949. Sixty years later, lying helpless
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