Aha. Now they were getting somewhere. Zac shrugged. “You were just talking.”
Simon rubbed one hand over his face. “I thought about it a lot, the week after his death. I thought …”
“What, that you’re like him?”
“God forbid.” He passed his palm over his mouth. “I mean that, Zac. If there’s a God, I’d want Him to strike me dead before He let me become another Colm.”
“There is a God. And you’re—shoot, Simon, you’re worlds different from Colm. Can’t believe you need someone to tell you that.”
“We’ve all got darkness, man.”
“You’ve never deliberately brought harm to an innocent person. Never. I don’t care that you got some grim pleasure in tackling a guy to the concrete and kicking the gun out of his hand before he could shoot a bunch of mortals with it. I don’t care that part of you misses law enforcement and hasn’t found a rush to match it in all this time. None of that equals psychopath, Simon.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“He brought home souvenirs.”
Simon stared at Zac a second longer than was safe while traveling at eighty mph.
“Yeah,” Zac said. “Shot glasses, bought in souvenir shops from every place he made a kill. I found them in his apartment.”
“Where are they now?”
“Some landfill, I guess.”
Simon grimaced.
“If you try to talk to me about evidence—”
“No. We couldn’t have identified them from that alone.”
They were quiet a few minutes. Simon’s shoulders rose and fell a few times, long, cleansing breaths that seemed to settle him back into himself, to relieve the strain that had been building in him.
“You were actually worried about this,” Zac said.
“There are things you don’t know about me, Zac.”
“But a shelf of trophies from the places you’ve murdered mortals isn’t one of them.”
“No.”
“And you’ve never taken innocent life.”
“Well, the wars.”
“In the wars, we did our best. We tried to protect the innocent. When we failed, we mourned.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve never looked at a helpless civilian and lusted for that person’s life.”
“Never.”
“Well, there you go.”
Simon shot him a sidelong glance, shook his head, but his mouth twitched at the corners. Then he sobered. “So many things he said to me. Like they’re all echoing back at the same time.”
“Yep.”
“I’ve been wondering if any of it was true. His life in Fisher Lake, his blacksmith shop, his wife, and then Rose after her—what were those things to him? Cover? Toys?”
“I don’t know.” Zac gazed out the window at the patchy clouds. “We never will, I guess.”
A small voice rose inside him. Needing to know. Ready to know. He cleared his throat. “He told me once … a long time ago. I mean a long time, maybe the twenties.” He had to clear his throat again. A lump of tears rose in it, ancient tears that had been swallowed so many times they’d become petrified somewhere in his gut. Now they began to melt. “He told me you couldn’t stand me. But you did, for Moira. Since Moira wanted to keep me around.”
Simon was silent.
Crap. Okay. The last few weeks had made Zac hope, given Colm had turned out to be pathological …
“Buddy, I can’t believe you thought …”
The hope inside lifted its crushed head.
“I don’t stay in touch with people I can’t stand.” Simon’s voice had hardened. “I don’t share a table with them at Thanksgiving. I don’t answer phone calls from them in the dead of night. And I don’t go out climbing dunes all night looking for their pathetic accident-prone—”
“Yeah, okay.”
“You never challenged him on it.”
“No.” And that was on Zac. “I figured I managed to grow on you over the years, at least a little.”
Simon huffed. “Can’t believe this stuff’s been lurking all this time. He messed with both of us.”
“I think you messed with you, man.”
“No, I’m talking about— He told me you talked about going off with Moira someplace. Cutting ties. When I said you’d never talked that way around me, he said of course not, I was a cop, and you knew I’d track you down. I told Colm he was full of crap, and he never brought it up again. But I wondered about it for a few months, maybe a year. Until it didn’t happen.”
“Because I never said it.”
“He wanted us ill at ease with each other.”
“What are we, high school girls?”
“Well …” Simon’s mouth tipped up. “He succeeded, at least partly.”
“But why bother?”
“Maybe it was a game. Or maybe he found it easier to fool us separately.”
Zac propped his head in his hands as it throbbed afresh. “Right. Well. If you still need evidence you’re nothing like him, there’s some more.”
“Hmm. Yeah.”
“You know, I told David he was the one that kept us together. The glue of us. That we might drift apart forever without him.”
“Where’d you get an idiotic idea like that?”
“What I’m trying to tell you. It was something else Colm said, fairly often over the years. It was the place he saw himself.”
“Or wanted you to see him.”
“Or that.”
Quiet settled around them again, but it held a restfulness now. A shedding of old things. Simon checked his phone map, and Zac checked for a response from Rachel. Nothing.
“Anything else?” Zac said. “I mean, while we’re at it.”
Simon grunted. “Moira would be proud.”
“Fact.”
Someday soon, they would tell her about it.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Zac jolted awake hard enough to jostle his ribs. And his head. He winced and turned his eyes to the clock. He’d slept about forty minutes. Simon looked wide awake at the wheel, which seemed unfair.
He stretched his back, one hand pressed to support his ribs, and checked his phone again. Still no response from Rachel. He gazed out at the endless water on his side of the car, nothing between him and the sparkling expanse but a guardrail and the occasional dock. Then the road veered inland a few hundred feet, and here were rows of waterside houses, their backyards a Lake Michigan bay.
“We’re driving right up the side of the peninsula.”
“Yep,” Simon said.
Rachel had taken this road, maybe thinking she’d stay here a while before moving on. Maybe thinking she would never move on again.
At last Simon left the mostly empty two-lane highway and ended up on the main street of a town no bigger than Harbor Vale. He glanced down at his phone and said, “It’s right up here.”
Zac’s mouth dried as Simon pulled into a tiny lot, bordered by a split-rail fence. He checked his phone once more as they got out of the car. “Nothing.”
“Well, we’ll know in a minute.”
On one post of the covered porch hung a white sign painted with red letters: WELCOME! PLEASE ENTER HERE! They ascended the three stairs together. A screen door, old but kept in good repair, was unlocked and led into the home’s foyer. A round oak coffee table stood in the corner of the spiral staircase, adorned with a doily and bearing several manila envelopes. Simon picked up the top one of the pile.
“Williams.” He picked up a second one. “Armstrong.” A third. “Reddy.” He pushed the others around. “No Leon, no Noel.”
“Are those keys?”
“Looks like.”
“And they leave them here on the table, unattended?”
“Small-town trust.”
“Maybe we can find the proprietor and ask if she’s been here.”
“Mm, even small-town trust has its limits these days. And if they ask for our friend’s last name, we’re done.” Simon set the
envelopes down.
“Can I help you?” said a female voice from the far doorway.
She was somewhere in her seventies, hair dyed a light brown that allowed silver highlights to shine through. Smile lines bordered her eyes and mouth, and she wore a loose red sweater and jeans. Her hands were clasped in front of her, a welcoming pose.
“Would you be the owner?” Simon said.
“That’s right, young man. Do you have a reservation?” She looked from him to Zac with the first seeds of suspicion in the furrow of her brow.
“We don’t, but a friend does. Just wondering if she’s checked in yet—young lady with long gray hair.”
She blinked once. Yes, she’d seen Rachel. “I think you should call her on your cellular phone. Or send her a text message. Don’t tell me you don’t have a cellular phone.”
Simon didn’t hesitate. “I understand. I’m glad you have safety measures in place here. We’ll get hold of her. Thank you.”
Zac met her eyes long enough to nod his own thanks.
The woman said, “Wait just a minute. You.”
Zac tried not to look like a guy about whom a fan base was speculating. “Yes, ma’am?”
“You’re Zachary Wilson.”
Well, crap. “Yes, ma’am, that’s me.”
“I can’t believe it.” She stepped forward slowly. “You see, Rachel said that if a man named Zachary Wilson were to come here asking for her, I was to tell you. Only you.” She flicked a glance at Simon.
“I’ll wait outside if you’d prefer,” Simon said.
The woman straightened to her full height, which might have been five foot even. “I would.”
“No problem.” Simon strode out onto the porch and shut the door.
“Is that man trustworthy, Mr. Wilson?”
“Entirely.”
“Oh, all right then. Rachel showed me a picture of you yesterday, but when she left she said she hadn’t expected you to come and wasn’t the least disappointed.”
A knot rose in his throat. He swallowed hard. “Where was she headed?”
“You seem on the level to me.” She held out her hand, and he shook it. “Florence Olheiser.”
“Good to meet you.” Now talk already.
“She didn’t say where she was going, but she left a little after noon.”
“Thank you, Florence.”
Rachel had given him twenty-four hours, and he hadn’t come. Outside on the porch Simon stood in a corner, leaning against the side of the house, arms folded.
“She’s not here.” Zac didn’t pause in his rush down the steps. His heart pounded along with his feet. “She left almost three hours ago.”
Not until they both were back in the car did they stop to look at each other.
“Now what?” Simon said.
Zac pulled out his phone and checked his app. “Nothing.”
His fingers clenched around the phone as he returned not to his page but to hers. Maybe another clue lurked there, something they hadn’t noticed.
The B&B was no longer her most recent post. Two new ones showed above it. The first was text only and had gone up not long after he and Simon had set out for Leahy. He read it aloud. “‘After tonight this account will be permanently closed. I’m signing off with a final cavalcade of beauty. Stay tuned.’”
“Is that to you?”
“I think she’s given up on me. I think this is for herself.” Leaving a mark, unseen though it might be.
“What does she mean, cavalcade of beauty?”
No surprise the phrase would baffle Simon.
Rachel’s most recent post was a picture. Beauty put it mildly. The vantage point was a porch, white columns in the foreground striating the shot. Beyond them a fountain caught the midafternoon sunlight with diamond-like sparkles, and a faded green lawn stretched all the way to the lake. A few Adirondack chairs nestled in a half circle on a red stone patio just off the porch. Rachel’s eye had placed them poetically off-center.
“You have something?”
Zac held up a finger and ignored Simon’s huff as he read her caption. Almost didn’t stop here but glad I did! A historical fountain, who’d have thought? And the grounds are lovely as you can see.
“A historical fountain,” he said.
“A what now?”
“We have to find a historical fountain. That’s where she is.” Zac’s thumbs flew over his screen as he typed in a search. Leahy, Harbor Vale, Traverse City, historical fountain. There couldn’t be many of them.
The first resulting image showed the same building, facing the porch where Rachel had stood. The fountain was an artesian spring that had been flowing since the 1850s. The building had been erected in 1887. He brought up driving directions.
“She’s thirty miles north. It’s a straight shot up the lakeshore if we stay on the state highway.” By the time he finished speaking, Simon had put the car in drive and was heading for the road.
Zac refreshed his phone. A cavalcade, and the fountain an unplanned stop. Her itinerary was fluid at best. He refreshed again.
“Hey, knock it off.”
He looked up. “What?”
“Just be still. All your fidgeting’s making me jittery.”
He forced his knee to stop jumping and refreshed the app again.
“We’re doing the best we can, Zac. But if she keeps ahead of us and we can’t—”
“Shut up.”
“I need you to be prepared, man.”
“She said cavalcade. More than one. She’s not going to—to do anything there. We just have to get to her before she leaves.”
“And talk to her.”
The lazy cynicism in his voice made Zac want to deck him. “Yeah, talk to her. She thinks she’s got nothing but solitude and her camera, but she has us.”
Simon shut up. In the next forty minutes, Zac refreshed his phone app no less than eighty times. When they pulled into the gravel lot beside the weathered white bungalow, he was out of the car before Simon shut it off.
“Hey,” Simon said as he got out at the pace of David’s pet turtle. “You said she drives a gray SUV.”
“Yeah.”
“Then she’s not here.”
Zac scanned the lot. Not many vehicles, none of them Rachel’s. “I want to look around. Just in case.”
“Look for what?”
He didn’t know, so he ignored the question.
Green signs informed him he was on park property owned by the township of Valerian; the historical house and the fountain’s grounds were open to the public, but vandals would be prosecuted. An ordinance vehicle was parked at one end of the lot. Simon caught up to him, and together they strode around the building to the back porch. Zac mounted the steps and stood where she had stood, shifted his feet until the chairs and the fountain occupied the same spaces in front of his eyes that they did in Rachel’s picture.
He looked up and down the long porch. A couple sat at one end, feet on the steps, watching their kids run around the fountain. Zac walked out onto the lawn, all the way to the water. He paced one way then the other, gazed back at the house and the fountain and the parking lot. She wasn’t here.
If he could see the place through her eyes, find some clue to her in the beauty she had chosen to capture: a fountain of sun-wrought diamonds, a wide expanse to the lake and the sky. And porch pillars like prison bars, standing between her and all of it. Still a prisoner to her body.
She hadn’t taken the cure yet.
His pulse jumped with relief, but he steadied himself. Only theory. Maybe a complete misinterpretation of her art. He wouldn’t know until he reached her.
Simon had disappeared but now emerged around the side of the house. He shrugged. “Not much inside. A few roped-off displays. Nowhere to hide.”
Zac approached the couple, hoping this didn’t backfire and get the cops called on him. “Excuse me.”
They looked up. “Yes?” the woman said.
“This is going to sound weird, but
…” He brought up Rachel’s picture on his phone. “Am I in the right place?”
They both looked at the picture and nodded. “Taken from right here on the porch,” the guy said.
“That’s what I thought,” Zac said. “We’re following this online photo chase thing. Someone’s posting shots of landmarks, and we’re trying to catch up to him before he posts the next one, but we keep missing him, which is eventually going to cost me twenty bucks. Did you see anybody around here within the last, I don’t know, half hour?”
“We’ve been here about that long,” the woman said, eyes on her kids again, her interest in Zac waning. “No one else has come by, so your photographer must have left ahead of us.”
“Thanks.” He shrugged. “On to the next, I guess.”
He motioned Simon to follow, and they got back in the car.
“Him?” Simon said with a twist of his mouth.
“If I’d said her they might think I was a stalker.”
“And they’d be so far off the mark.”
Zac leaned back in the seat. The ache in his ribs was building again. His phone rang, and his pulse leaped, everything in him strained and straining, forgetting Rachel didn’t have his phone number. It was Tiana.
“Hey,” he said.
“Zac, are you watching her account?”
“Yeah. We’re at the fountain now, but she’s gone.” He cringed. Not that word.
“What about Fishtown?” Tiana said.
“Huh?”
“Her newest picture. It went up three minutes ago. She’s in Fishtown.”
“Fishtown,” he said to Simon. “Go.”
Simon fiddled with his own phone while Tiana said, “Okay, I’m mapping.”
“Us too,” Zac said.
“If you’re at Fountain Arbor right now, you’re about an hour behind her. When you get off with me, check out her path now that you have three stops. You’ll see she’s going to run out of state highway if she doesn’t deviate. There’ll just be public beach and Lake Michigan.”
“And how long will that take?”
“From Fishtown, maybe another hour.”
“Okay. Thank you, Tiana.”
Simon began to drive, and Zac hung up. This had to be it. Please, God, let this be it. He could keep her there if He wanted to. A flat tire if nothing else.
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