by Dean Koontz
The girls were still sleeping when Jane returned to the room. She took advantage of the moment to lay out a change of clothes and be first in the bathroom. She showered quickly, for she was unable to hear anything other than the drumming of water on the walls and floor of the stall, so that her imagination alternately scripted the kidnapping of the children and then a sudden bloody assault on them.
23
* * *
Late Thursday morning in Chicago, at O’Hare International, Rebecca was waiting with Jolie at the baggage carousel when Twyla appeared among the in-streaming travelers. Tall and slim, wearing a sapphire-blue dress with pin tucks at the shoulders and a lightly ruffled placket, carrying a coat over one arm, she looked less like a nineteen-year-old college student than like a famous model of perhaps twenty-five, radiating experience and sophistication. Her smile, when it came as she noticed them, made her yet lovelier.
Gladdened by the sight of her older daughter and wanting to believe they would together navigate the current storm, Rebecca nevertheless scrutinized the people who followed in Twyla’s wake, alert for someone who seemed unduly interested in her. But she was not trained in crowd analytics, and in such situations as this, either everyone appeared suspicious or no one did.
Twyla hugged her mother, kissed her. “I’ve really missed you.”
But it was to Jolie that Twyla gave herself entirely. The two embraced, fell into excited conversation and laughter, commenting on each other’s hair and clothes, often with the affectionate sarcasm in which they had engaged since adolescence.
Rebecca had half forgotten how much alike the sisters were, not quite twins in appearance, each with her unique style, but alike in their enthusiasm and intelligence. With only the two-year difference in ages, they had always been as close as twins. Twyla’s passion was art—her talent so strong that she was on a two-thirds scholarship through her sophomore year, with a prospect of receiving full tuition thereafter—while Jolie lived for literature.
One arm around Jolie, Twyla turned to her mother. “You said drop everything, come now, nobody’s dying, but it’s important. Such mystery, such drama! I’m crazy to know. Tell me.”
“Not here, sweetie. Let’s get on the road first.”
“Does this have something to do with Ms. Gundersun, that insane horribleness at the hotel? When Daddy called last week about that, he wasn’t like himself at all, he was having the vapors, going on about Boston being half a world away, which it isn’t, it’s not even an eighth of a world away. Mother, I simply can’t go to school in Milwaukee or, God forbid, St. Cloud, if only because that’s not where I have a scholarship.”
“First things first. Which is your suitcase, dear?”
Twyla had arrived with one large bag exactly like Jolie’s; their parents had given both girls the same three-piece suite of luggage a few years earlier. After they snared the suitcase from the carousel, they were soon in Aunt Tandy’s Dodge, where Jolie ceded the shotgun position to Twyla and settled in the backseat.
Leaving the short-term parking lot, Rebecca remained wary, frequently consulting the rearview mirror. But if she were being tailed, those following her would have to be numerous and operating in a fleet, for the vehicles behind her kept changing. Of course if the car was electronically tagged, their pursuers wouldn’t have to maintain visual contact. Yes, but it wasn’t likely that Aunt Tandy’s phone was tapped, that anyone knew she’d brought a car to Rockford the previous night. Rebecca and Jolie would have been on the road from Rockford before the men watching the station wagon at the motor inn realized that the Buick had been abandoned. And when she had summoned Twyla to Chicago—rather than Milwaukee—she had used her disposable cell and had taken steps to ensure that anyone who might be monitoring the girl’s phone or even running eyes-on surveillance would be thwarted. Yet…the rearview mirror compelled her attention, and she knew that Twyla was aware of that.
When they unsnarled themselves from the airport tangle and were headed east on Interstate 90, Twyla said, “Home’s not this way. Why are we going into the city?”
“We’re not,” Rebecca said. “Only as far as I-94, then north.”
“To where?”
“To a place filled with good memories for your father and me. You’ll see.”
“Is Daddy waiting there?”
“No, dear. He’ll call us later and let us know the next step.”
“The next step? Where is he now?”
“He didn’t say. Maybe he will later.”
Twyla leaned left to glance past the headrest at her sister in the backseat. “I know it isn’t possible that our parents have been deep-cover spies all our lives and are now on the run. That’s a TV show, and life isn’t a TV show. You know what this is about?”
“What I know,” Jolie said, “is that we’re in deep doodoo, but I’m not clear whose doodoo it is or why we’ve got to wade through it. And neither is Mother. Daddy is playing this one close to the vest.”
“I’ve never seen Daddy wear a vest.”
“He sometimes wears a Kevlar one.”
24
* * *
With no pale shore in sight, the great green sea shimmered in the afternoon sun, grass for water, tides influenced not by the moon but by the soft breeze. Slender, buoyant harriers circled overhead, fishing for mice in the waves of grass. The vast timeless landscape and the quiet that lay on it gave Jane a sense of peace, though the mice probably did not share her mood.
After Leland and Nadine Sacket had bought the six-hundred-acre dude ranch, they rebuilt and expanded it into the first-class Sacket Home and School, where now 139 children resided. Of the opinion that children without parents deserved to grow up in a magical place to compensate for their loss, the Sackets kept the Western theme of the structures; the school resembled an idealized prairie town circa 1880. There were ponies and horses, so that every child might learn from riding instructors and be not only well educated but also well seasoned by the land and its traditions.
To prevent staff members from recognizing Jane, the Sackets drove one of the school’s buses to meet her and Luther at the ranch entrance, a mile from its buildings. A day earlier, Chase Longrin outlined for them the terms under which they needed to take these eight: The kids must not initially be included in school records and must be protected from discovery by visiting social workers; the eight were coached to tell other children that they were moving from an orphanage closing in Oklahoma; the truth of their past could not be revealed even to the Sackets until an indefinite future date. Leland and Nadine’s doubts were outweighed by their conviction that every child in need was sent to them by the spirit of the son they had lost to meningitis when he was three.
Harley Higgins and the other children of Iron Furnace had been with Jane and Luther less than two full days, but they were loath to be separated from them. She knelt to smooth their hair, kiss them, and tell them that Luther would either remain with them or soon return when he settled some business of his. She, too, would come back one day. Meanwhile, the good people of this special place would never become strangers to them, as had their own parents.
She hoped these promises wouldn’t prove false.
As Jane finished with the children, Luther led them to the bus, assuring them that he was their sheriff, always looking after them.
Harley hurried back to her and took her hand and squeezed it hard. He tried to say something and could not.
She kissed his brow and held him close and said, “I know. I know, sweetheart,” and took him by the hand to the bus.
25
* * *
In part because of the potential fire hazard, the hay barn, a long corrugated-metal building insulated against summer heat, stood at the end of an oiled secondary lane, on the ranch but more than a quarter of a mile from Sacket Home. At the end of harvest, a couple thousand bales would have been stored there, though the supply would now be half that.
In the Chrysler Voyager, Luther followed her Ford to the hay
barn, where they parked along the east wall in afternoon shadows. Two saddled horses were tied up to a railing there; they didn’t spook at the cars but regarded Jane and Luther with curiosity and nickered in greeting.
“Luther, I’d like a little time alone with my in-laws.”
“Of course. Take as long as you need.”
Inside, bales were stacked high all around, the air redolent of hay, heatless LED lamps pouring down a hard, almost blue light like a radiance in a dream of revelation, in which bits of dry chaff and dust motes floated in miniature galaxies.
Nick’s parents were waiting. Ancel, the father that Jane’s real father had not the clarity of soul to be. And Clare, the mother that Jane’s real mother would have been if she had not been murdered. She hadn’t seen them since Nick’s funeral. A flood of emotion surprised her: love, profound thankfulness that this good and strong-hearted pair were in her life, grief over the loss they shared, a piercing loneliness that rose from the knowledge that she would shortly be deprived of them again, and fear….
When they spoke and started toward her, she held up a hand to ask for a moment. She turned half away from them and got control of herself and fought back the tears and told herself that what she dreaded would not here come to pass, that her paranoia had for the moment gotten the better of her.
Turning to them again, she said, “Play Manchurian with me.”
“Play what?” Clare asked, and neither of them said all right.
26
* * *
Luther waited with the horses for fifteen minutes. When Jane opened the door and asked him into the hay barn, he saw that they had all been in tears, even the rancher, who looked as though he was carved from Texas oak and harder than bedrock.
Their regard for their daughter-in-law was so high that any friend of hers was a brother to them. Clare kissed Luther on the cheek and Ancel used both hands to shake one of the sheriff’s. They expressed such gratitude for what Luther had done that it seemed as though Jane must have told them that she’d had the smallest part in rescuing the children and that he had carried them and her out of Kentucky on his back.
If Ancel and Clare ever talked about themselves, Luther had no evidence of it that afternoon, as they seemed interested only in his wife and two daughters: what the Tillman women were like, where they were now, how he proposed to bring them to safety.
Going into the barn, he’d had only a vague idea of how he might bring his family together again in this world gone so dark in but a week. However, Leland and Nadine Sacket delivered an early picnic dinner and set it out on a red-and-white checkered oilcloth atop hay bales that served as a table, and by the time they reached dessert, the six of them had arrived at a plan.
27
* * *
The sky was decanting its last ninety minutes of light when Ancel and Clare rode out of Sacket Ranch, overland toward home, where they would not arrive until well after dark. The day was mild, but either the plains began to give up what little heat they had stored or some unknowable observer behind the apparent reality of land and light saw fit to color the moment mystic, because as they receded, a watery blue corona formed around them, into which they passed as if not only into the distance but also outside of time.
When Jane was moved to turn from the sight of her in-laws receding, Luther turned away as well. “So I guess…San Diego.”
“It’s a nice city. Go, Padres.”
“Otis Faucheur’s builder son?”
“Name’s Wilson Faucheur. I need to know about building codes.”
“But in San Francisco.”
“Otis said Wilson’s done some things there, too.”
“If you could wait a few days, then I could help you.”
“Can’t wait. Or won’t. Anyway, it’s best you bring your family safely here while you still can.”
“Once I do that, you’ll know how to find me.”
She looked at him and smiled and clapped him on the back. “If they decide to make you number two on America’s most-wanted list, you won’t be able to go out and about. Big and black as you are, you can’t just put on a blond wig, some makeup, and pass unnoticed.”
“Shave my head, grow a beard, go a little gangsta with my wardrobe.”
“Get your family, Luther. Maybe bald, bearded, and badass will be almost enough of a makeover if I need to call you down the road.”
She felt something crawling on her left hand and raised it from her side and saw a dewdrop-size ladybug born into the world too soon in the season, bearing its black-spotted orange shell from knuckle to knuckle.
Luther said, “So D. J. Michael’s apartment is on the ninth floor?”
“He financed the building. He owns it. He has the entire ninth floor to himself, four apartments’ worth of space folded into one. And the way I’ve been told, the eighth and tenth floors are part of his security system.”
“Way up in the middle of the air. How do you get there?”
“One way or the other.”
The ladybug reached the base knuckle of her index finger and continued its exploration around the side of her hand, through the purlicue between thumb and finger. She turned her palm up to follow the bug’s progress.
“What do you think you can get from him?” Luther asked.
“A video confession. The names of his co-conspirators.”
“Tall order. He has that crazy big-vision thing going on, king of the world now but going to make himself god of all.”
“I don’t expect him to be easy.”
“It’ll take time to break down a man like that, so sure of himself. Even if you get to him, you won’t have a lot of time.”
“I’ll have enough.”
The ladybug paused in the anatomical snuffbox of Jane’s hand, as though surveying the way ahead and considering the possibilities of her palm.
After a silence, Luther said, “You’re scaring me a little now.”
“I doubt that.”
“I mean, scared for you. You have what it takes, but you also need some luck. You’ve had a long run of luck in this. But nobody’s luck holds forever.”
The ladybug started to follow Jane’s heart line but then turned into the lifeline, making its way toward her wrist.
“Suppose you get to the ninth floor and then everything goes wrong.”
Abruptly the ladybug took wing, and watching it, Jane said, “Then I’ll fly.”
28
* * *
Under the circumstance, Jolie Tillman had not been expecting Thursday to be one of the premier days of her life. But when it turned very bad indeed, it did so in a way she could never have predicted.
Before checking into the hotel, their mother took them on a cruise through a couple Lake Forest residential neighborhoods of elegant mansions and massive old oak trees. She waxed on about the long walks that she and Daddy had taken on a faraway summer when the light was crystalline and the shadows velvet, when through the air soared dazzling phoenixes that burst into flame but were born anew in flight, when there were unicorns gamboling on lawns and when at night the falling stars proved to be sprays of diamonds that you could scoop up from the street by the fistful.
Or at least that’s how it sounded to Jolie, the tenor of the narrative if not its specifics.
Considering that a sinister man with a snake tattoo and his no doubt creepier companion had followed them to Rockford, that they were puttering around in Aunt Tandy’s Dodge, which still smelled of Uncle Calvin’s verbena cologne three years after his death, that Daddy had crossed swords with psychotic criminals who were somehow connected to the fiery deaths of forty-six people at the Veblen Hotel, and that the whole family was on the run from said criminals, Mother’s nostalgic recollections seemed not only inappropriate but downright weird.
From all this, Jolie made three assumptions. First, that her mother and father had been deeply in love from the start and wildly, totally hot for each other when they spent a week in Lake Forest back in the day. Second, th
at the hole in which the family now found itself was deeper and darker than Mother had yet let on. Third, that though her mother was brilliant when dealing with crises, this one pressed her toward the limit of her ability to cope, so she took refuge in nostalgia to remind herself that if there had been better days in the past, there might be better days in the future.
By design, explained Mom the tour guide, Lake Forest, Illinois, had few access points from surrounding communities. This was a realm of quiet wealth, beautiful mansions on multiacre estates, community forests maintained with admirable care, and polo in the summer.
The only hotel in all of Lake Forest was the Deerpath Inn, where Mother and Daddy stayed in that magical week when formations of flying doves formed the word LOVE in the sky and water turned to wine as you raised the glass to your lips. Built in 1929, the inn offered lovely public rooms and, supposedly, the most delicious food. The rooms were somewhat cramped and dated, Mother said, and too expensive for their limited budget of on-the-run cash. However, it was off-season, and rooms were available, and the hotel staff was superb, even legendary; and Daddy expected them to be there.
At 4:30 P.M., a bellman escorted them to two adjoining rooms, one for Jolie and Twyla, one for Mother. Daddy was going to call at five o’clock, after which they would go to dinner and pretend that all of them were as carefree as Mary Poppins.