He opened the door on his side and made her slide across. He pulled her out, the strong fingers of his left hand tight around her bicep. He stood her up beside the Cadillac. She lowered her face against the glare, but he put his hand below her chin and lifted it, forcing her to face into the headlights. She heard a car door open and close beyond the lights. She heard a voice say, “Yes, it’s her. Please remove the tape from her mouth.”
“She might scream.”
“Everybody’s screaming.”
It was true. The air was pregnant with the shrieks of citizens and sirens. The man released her arm and ripped the tape away in one quick motion. Then he gripped her arm again. From behind the light she heard, “You don’t have to be afraid, Dr. Williams. I just need the answers to a few questions, and then we’ll let you go. Okay?”
She did not reply.
“Do you understand, or not?”
“Yes,” she said.
“There’s too much noise. I need you to speak up.”
“Yes!” she shouted.
“Very good. Now, the first question. How much do the Keeps know?”
“The Keeps?”
“Help her understand me, will you?”
The man twisted her arm behind her back and lifted. The pain was excruciating.
“How much do the Keeps know?”
“About Brazil?”
“Of course.”
“I haven’t told them anything.”
The pain in her arm was awful. She screamed just a little.
“Take it easy” came the voice, and the man relaxed the pressure. She heard the voice continue, “Whom have you told?”
“Nobody.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Why should I lie?”
“Help her think of a better reason.”
The man twisted her arm and raised it up again. She rose to her tiptoes, trying to reduce the excruciating pressure. She cried out again. She heard the voice behind the headlights say, “Whom have you told?”
“Nobody! I swear!”
“Let’s give her a breather.”
The man relaxed the upward pressure on her arm. She began to weep. “I’ve never told anyone. You have to believe me! It’s how I stayed hidden all this time. Why would I risk telling anyone?”
The voice behind the headlights remained silent for a time. Then she heard, “I believe her. We’re done here.”
After a few more seconds, the headlights shifted away from her as the other car began to roll. She watched the lights until the car had left the parking lot, then the young man pushed her forward, walking her across the pavement and into the surrounding darkness. Still temporarily blinded by the headlights, she did not see where he was taking her until he stopped behind another car, a different one, a Mercedes Benz. It was in terrible condition, dented and scraped all over, the safety glass of the rear window battered with a dozen blows at least. Then the driver was there with them. He bent over the lock on the trunk of the Mercedes for a few seconds, and the lid rose up.
“No key no problem,” said the smiling driver.
“Get in,” said the one who held her by the arm.
She had been passive all along, lulling them in preparation for this moment. With no warning whatsoever she twisted violently to her left. It worked. He lost his grip. She set out running toward the lights of the hospital, her bound hands swaying back and forth in front of her stomach, her bare feet slapping on the pavement as she called for help as loudly as she could. But her cries were lost among so many others, and the sirens, and the roar of the inferno, and she felt a massive weight crash into her back, one of them on her, and then she was down on the asphalt.
Looking up she saw smoke parting in the night sky above Dublin, saw the full moon up there beaming down, and the poor lost young men looking down at her beside it, and now that this was finally going to happen after all her years of dread she realized it was not as she imagined, not as she had always feared, and she wished she had not wasted so much time on faithless worries. But no, no, that was wrong. There was no reason for regrets, no condemnation now, for after all those years of dealing with her worries all alone she was in the here and now at last; she had given up her fears to God and sealed the bargain with a lawsuit.
“Don’t be so afraid,” she said, looking up at the young men and the full moon just behind them. “You don’t have to be.”
“What was that?” asked the driver. “What’d she say?”
And the young man who had ridden there beside her said, “Who cares?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
STEVE NOVAK DID NOT SLEEP for two days straight, then he lay down on the shiny vinyl floor in his office for a couple of hours and dreamed of pulling tuna through the transom gate of his cousin’s yacht. When he awoke he had a bad crick in his neck. He washed his face in the station’s public toilet room and went back out into the mayhem.
He discharged his weapon sixteen times before it was over, firing warning shots mostly, but returning fire twice. He hit his assailant both times. During calmer moments he worried they might die. He hoped to find the time to check on them at the hospital.
The total stillness of the fog-laden air that first day had been Dublin’s only blessing. It had allowed the city’s three fire trucks to contain the blaze somewhat until more trucks arrived from nearby Cambridge and Pennyton. In the end, with thirteen fire crews working they were able to limit the destruction to a five-block area. By the third day Steve still did not have a final count, although he thought maybe a hundred homes had been destroyed. It would have been much worse with the usual onshore breeze. Still, Steve did not feel grateful.
Colonel Peterson never did formally authorize the use of force or issue rules of engagement or whatever it was they called it when the National Guard gave soldiers permission to shoot civilians. But when looters started firing at his men, the soldiers defended themselves, and that got to be the way things were. For about twelve hours during the worst of things, it was pretty much shoot on sight without bothering to determine if the target was a hostile or a citizen protecting his own property. After the worst was over, Steve decided he would file a formal complaint about the colonel at some point, but the paperwork and lawyering about this mess would probably go on for years, so there was plenty of time for that. Besides, the media was all over it, and Steve figured they would have the colonel’s command at the very least. Probably have Steve’s job too, but that too was a worry for another time.
Four days into it, volunteers were still sifting through the smoldering ruins, searching for casualties. So far they were up to seven Dublin citizens dead of one thing or another. Smoke inhalation, gunshot wounds, heart attacks. Steve did not know any of the victims personally, but he knew people who did, and he understood the widespread desire for vengeance. A military truck with a loudspeaker had been weaving through the streets for the last forty-eight hours, warning people not to step outside their homes or businesses with weapons. Steve knew a few of the diehard Mainers would have no patience with that. He had seen a lot of homeless people doing their best to control the rioters, helping with evacuations, putting out small fires, but that wouldn’t matter either. A stranger took his life into his own hands walking through Steve’s town unless he wore a uniform or carried a news camera.
Driving through Dublin, Steve saw very few remaining homeless people anywhere, rioters or not. At last report nine of them had been shot dead by persons unknown, on top of the seven Dubliners who were dead from one thing or another. So that was sixteen dead so far. As crews dug through the ashes, he fully expected that number to increase.
Steve cruised past the lot where Just Right Liquor used to be. All three liquor stores at the edge of town had been targets, of course. Two got away with just broken windows, but Just Right had been burned to the ground, possibly by a few students from over at Bowditch who had joined the mayhem in sympathy with the protesters. They had pitched furniture through library and administrativ
e building windows, and used it to build a bonfire on the mall. Downtown, Henry’s Drug Store had been ransacked again, just like the prior winter. This time they tried to burn it too, but four National Guardsmen had run them off before the fire got out of hand. Most of the storefront glass downtown had been shattered, and although the Guardsmen had managed to keep looting to a minimum down there, a lot of stolen inventory still lay where the thieves had dropped it along Main Street. Even the town hall had suffered damage. Only Willa’s shelter and the Congregational church stood untouched.
Thinking of Willa reminded Steve of Hope’s husband or whatever the man was, and that reminded him of Hope’s Mercedes. He lifted his radio’s handset. “Dave, Dave.”
After a short pause he heard, “Ten four.”
“What’s your twenty?”
“Still over here at the hospital.”
That was what he thought. “While you’re over there, would ya get that Mercedes towed for me like we talked about?”
“You bet.”
Steve replaced the microphone in its cradle. He thought about those two words, ‘you bet.’ To his surprise, they made him feel a little weepy. In the last seventy-two hours, Dave had been unstoppable. Steve doubted the man had slept at all. He had been all over town, a calming influence wherever he went. Steve thought about his whole department, the way they had risen to this challenge, days without sleep, lives on the line, no hint of slowing down, every single one of them a hero or a heroine as far as he was concerned. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Normally he was not emotional. Probably it was the exhaustion setting in.
He got a little more sleep that night, and a full four hours straight the next. A couple of times he thought about finding Hope’s ex husband or whatever he was and grilling him about Willa’s whereabouts, but Steve had nineteen dead for certain now, and that many actual deaths to investigate left little time for looking into something that was just a possibility. Still, Willa was a very special person, and whether she was dead or not, something wasn’t right. He would get to Riley Keep.
Colonel Peterson had been replaced by a General John Sanders, who seemed to be a master of logistics. During the general’s first two days temporary trailers arrived and were set up in a field near Teal Pond for those who lost their homes and had no friends or family to put them up. They were delighted to move out of the high school gymnasium.
Another day went by before Steve Novak got the call about the car.
Things were a bit less hectic by then, yet after seven days the body count was up to twenty three, including so called natural causes brought about by stress. The news media had long ago descended on Dublin like flies on a swollen carcass. Steve had to detail a patrolman just to keep them off his back whenever he went outside the station. Everything he did was observed with telephoto lenses, which was why he appreciated the wall of corrugated steel around Nehemiah Shore’s junkyard.
After Steve drove in through the gate, Nehemiah’s sole employee pulled it shut behind him, and the reporters who had tailed him from the station were forced to wait on the gravel road, out of sight. Dave waved to Steve from over beside the Mercedes, which was parked along with a group of cars that looked relatively clean compared to the dozens of cannibalized wrecks Nehemiah had stacked haphazardly around the yard. Steve rolled to a stop near Dave and got out of his Explorer. “Just get here?” he asked.
“Ayuh.”
Nehemiah walked up, wiping filthy hands on filthy overalls. Steve said, “Thanks for callin’.”
“You bet. Uh huh. You bet.”
Steve cocked his head to consider the skinny man. He looked pretty much as usual—greasy hair, stringy beard, Adam’s apple busy as a squirrel in autumn. The sour smell of whiskey on his breath was hard to take, even in the open air. “When’d ya first notice it?” asked Steve.
“Ha’d to say. Ha’d to say. Yestidy, mebbe. Mebbe, ayuh.”
“All right, Nehemiah. Give us a little room to work here, will ya?”
The man started nodding, and did not seem capable of stopping. “Ayuh, ayuh. I’ll be ovah there.” He waved toward the corrugated metal shack that was his office and his home.
“That’s fine, Nehemiah. We’ll call ya if we need ya.”
Still nodding, the junkyard owner walked away. After a few steps he stopped and looked back. “Wasn’t me what noticed first. Not first. Was the dogs, ya know.” He kept nodding. “Dogs first, ayuh.”
Steve sighed as he walked up to the Mercedes. He knelt beside the rear bumper and examined it carefully. His heart sank at the sight of dried blood. He’d seen enough of the stuff the last few days to know what he was looking at. He stood. “Go ahead an’ pop the trunk, will ya?”
Dave walked around to the driver’s door.
“Use a pen or somethin’,” called Steve, thinking about fingerprints.
Dave grunted and pulled a pen from his shirt pocket. He leaned in through the open window and a second later the car’s rear lid rose up with a pneumatic hiss. The stench was nearly overwhelming. Steve stood looking down into the trunk as Dave came back to stand beside him. For some reason, out of all the tragedy Steve had seen over the last week, this hit him the hardest. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to sit down in the dirt and wail at the top of his lungs. But he was Dublin’s chief of police, the man responsible for standing between good citizens and things like this, so he just looked into the trunk, pretending to be strong.
After a minute, Dave said, “Well, that about cinches it.”
“Ayuh,” said Steve, thinking about that man, Riley Keep. “It surely does.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
RILEY SAT IN THE CORNER OF THE HOSPITAL ROOM, watching the rising and falling of Hope’s chest as the ventilator fed her lungs. Beside her bed, Bree and Dylan played a game of checkers. The two of them were very easy with each other, communicating almost without words as good friends often do. When Riley could no longer stand the sight of it he rose and went out to the hall.
“Hi ya, Riley,” said the uniformed policeman from his chair outside the door. He had been assigned to guard Hope’s room full time, since it seemed the riots had been started by a mob intent on harming her and Riley. The cop said, “How’s she doin’?”
Hope had been unconscious since that first day a week ago. The bullet had only grazed the side of her skull. Far worse damage had been done when she fell. Her hip was broken, and her head had apparently hit the kitchen floor very hard. The emergency room nurse’s quick diagnosis of a subdural hematoma and Hope’s subsequent surgery were initially a cause for hope, but as the days of her coma continued to add up, the doctors seemed more pessimistic. It was impossible to tell how permanent her brain injury might be until she regained consciousness.
Riley looked at the cop and shrugged. “She’s about the same. You want a soda pop or something?”
“Naw. I already gotta go pretty bad as it is, and my shift ain’t done for another thirty minutes.”
“Go on to the john. I’ll sit here for you.”
The cop smiled and shook his head. “Chief’d have my job.”
“Oh well,” said Riley. He walked to the end of the hall where he pressed the button for the elevator. When it arrived, a pair of nurses stepped out. Riley said, “Hi, Helen. Becky.”
Becky said, “Hi ya, Riley,” but Helen walked right past as if he were not standing there. Becky had explained her co-worker’s attitude to Riley a couple of days before. Helen had a son with a drinking problem.
Riley ignored her snub. “Any news people down there?”
Becky said, “Didn’t see any,” then followed Helen toward the nurses’ station.
Down in the lobby, Riley exited the elevator and glanced left and right to make sure the coast was clear before heading toward the cafeteria. Being at the hospital full time made him an easy target for reporters. He had eaten all his meals there since the day they admitted Hope, sleeping in the hospital every night, leaving the building only long enough to shower
and change clothes at Dylan’s house, which stood in a neighborhood that had not been burned and still had working plumbing and electricity.
Riley dropped a few coins in a vending machine and pressed a button. He worked his shoulders up and down as he waited for the soda to drop into the little hatch. The stones and bricks he had taken on his back for Hope had left a maze of bruises, and a doctor had put nine stitches in his scalp where something had laid it open. Also, he had not been able to keep up with his exercises, so after sleeping in a waiting room chair the night before, he felt stiff all over. Walking back toward the elevator, Riley opened the can and took a sip, hoping the caffeine would compensate for another nearly sleepless night.
Upstairs again, he turned the corner and saw Dylan and Bree standing out in the hallway along with Jerry the policeman, all three of them staring in through Hope’s door. Riley’s heart sank. Something was wrong. If it was just a matter of making room for the orderly to change Hope’s sheets, they’d be standing around talking to each other, not focused on her room that way. He hurried down the hall. Drawing close, he asked, “What is it?”
Bree turned to him, her face shining. “She’s awake!”
Riley had to lean against the wall to keep from falling.
At first they kept Hope on some kind of sedative to make the plastic tube that still stuck down her throat a little easier to take, but in spite of her sedation, she was clearly with them once again, blinking her eyes and making guttural noises in response to Bree’s and Dylan’s excited words. Riley didn’t say much. Mostly he stood back and watched.
Each time the nurses came to check on Hope, Bree pled with them to pull the ventilator tube out of her mother’s throat. Twelve hours after Hope emerged from her coma, they called the doctor in, and he agreed. Everyone had to leave her room. Ten minutes was all the time it took and the doctor and nurses were finished. They let Bree go in while Dylan and Riley stayed in the hall. They said Hope wanted it that way.
Sipping coffee from a paper cup, Riley watched Dylan closely as they waited for their turn to be with Hope. Dylan had been there almost since the start. He too had slept in chairs most nights. He too had taken most of his meals in the hospital cafeteria. And as the three of them had lingered day and night in Hope’s room, Dylan had often suggested that they pray. Watching Dylan now as he stood waiting outside Hope’s room with such obvious joy, Riley couldn’t stop the recurring memory of Hope’s words. He’s a good friend. Riley remembered asking if that was all Dylan was to her. He remembered that she had not answered. He wished he had not asked, because now the question felt like doubting something pure and true. Hope deserved a man like Dylan. Riley deserved nothing.
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