The power of the heart, not the mind.
That was the currency here.
And armed with that knowledge, and the desire that accompanied it, Donovan felt a renewed sense of hope.
Just as Gunderson had said in that train yard as he lay in Donovan’s arms …
This wasn’t over yet.
HANDS STRETCHED TOWARD the sky, Gunderson stared up at the wormhole, waiting for it to take him. Another loud thunderclap and the now familiar jolt to the chest told him his wish was about to be granted.
“Come on, goddammit!”
The swirling black maw widened in response, wind kicking up around him, and he felt its power take hold. His feet lifted off the ground and he began to rise.
“Yes!” It was finally happening. The moment he’d been waiting for ever since that cop had put a bullet in him. “Take me,” he shouted. “Take me!”
But then, from out of nowhere, a voice said, “I don’t think so, Alex”—
—and Donovan appeared directly below him, wrapping his arms around his legs.
What the fuck?
Gunderson kicked, trying to shake him off, but the bastard had a lock on him so tight, he could barely move. One look into Donovan’s eyes and Gunderson realized that something had changed.
Donovan knew. He understood.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was not part of the program.
Feeling himself being pulled back toward the ground, Gunderson fought desperately against it, trying to break Donovan’s grip. But Donovan was a bulldog, would not let go, and a moment later they hit the earth, a tangle of arms and legs.
Pain shot through Gunderson as rocks dug into his flesh, scraped his bones—a sensation he wasn’t accustomed to.
They rolled to the edge of the precipice. Then, all at once, Donovan was straddling him, hands around his neck, an intense, unstoppable fury in his eyes.
“No more puzzles, Alex. Tell me where she is!”
Gunderson brought his arms up, trying to break Donovan’s grip, but was powerless against his rage. The earth beneath them began to rumble and crack, steam hissing up from newly formed fissures.
“Tell me, goddammit! Now!”
“Fuck you!” Gunderson croaked, and the ground shifted, another fissure opening up directly beneath him, the earth crumbling away on either side.
Electric tentacles reached up and wrapped around him, pulling at him. Donovan jumped back, narrowly avoiding the widening fissure. There was another loud thunderclap, and above, the swirling wormhole sucked at Donovan, his hair whipping wildly in the wind.
“Where is she, Alex? Tell me!”
But Gunderson ignored the command, watching in horror as the wormhole enveloped Donovan.
“No!” he shouted. “No!”
Then the wormhole swallowed Donovan whole and whisked him away.
And the agony Gunderson felt was so deep that he was almost certain it would last an eternity.
JUST WHEN SHE thought they’d lost the fight, that the epinephrine had been a bust, Jack’s body bucked wildly beneath the paddles and his eyes flew open as he gulped a bucketful of air. Feeling a rush of sweet relief, Rachel burst into tears and threw her arms around him.
“Oh, my God,” she said. “Oh, my God.”
She glanced at Wong, who was now leaning against the wall, his body slack, face full of shock, looking like a man who was seriously considering a career change.
“The hospital,” Jack croaked. “Take me to the hospital.”
“We’ve already called,” Rachel told him, hugging him close. “The ambulance is on its way.”
“No,” Jack said. “That isn’t what I mean.”
“What, then?”
“The convalescent hospital. Saint Margaret’s.”
“What?” Rachel said. “Why?”
Jack looked at her, a look she knew all too well. A look that meant she wasn’t going to like what he was about to say.
“Sara’s window,” he told her. “I have to find Sara’s window.”
Part Four
LIGHT
53
THEY GOT THERE in less than half an hour.
After making it abundantly clear to Donovan that this was against her better judgment, that he needed to go to the hospital—now—Rachel brought her car around and used her considerable driving skills to get them there in record time.
No doubt about it. He was gonna have to marry this woman.
Despite the ordeal he’d just been through, Donovan felt surprisingly good, thanks in part to sheer willpower, an abundance of hope, and the adrenaline Wong had pumped into his veins.
There were only a few scattered cars in Saint Margaret’s parking lot. They took the elevator to the second floor, and when the doors opened, Donovan was relieved to see that Nurse Baker had not returned. Instead, a lone nineteen-year-old was manning the nurses’ station.
“Sara Gunderson,” he said. “What room?”
The nurse looked at him as if he were something she’d scraped off the bottom of her shoe. “I’m sorry. Are you family?”
Donovan frowned and flashed his credentials. “Just take us to the goddamn room.”
Looking flustered, the nurse came out from behind the counter. “Follow me,” she muttered, and headed down a hallway.
A moment later she led them through a doorway into a small, dank room, a single bed against the wall, surrounded by a collection of medical equipment, including a ventilator.
The woman on the bed did not even remotely resemble Sara Gunderson. She looked like ninety pounds of nothing. A sickly old woman on the brink of death.
But it was Sara all right. Eyes closed, chest rising and falling to the wheezy beat of the ventilator.
Donovan looked around, surprised not by what he saw—but what he didn’t see. His stomach lurched.
“The window,” he said. “Where’s the window?”
The nurse studied him, clearly confused by the question. “She … doesn’t have one. This is a converted storeroom.”
“How long has she been in here?”
“Sir, if—”
“How long?”
The nurse flinched. “Ever since she was admitted. Why?”
Donovan glanced at Rachel, feeling the ground beneath him roll. Overcome by a sudden, intense despair, he found a chair and sat, the nurse eyeing him with a mix of distrust and concern.
“Are you okay, sir?”
“Get out,” he spat.
“Sir, I’m not sure what you’re—”
“Out,” he repeated. “Get out.”
Looking frightened now, the nurse turned and scurried out the door. Donovan felt Rachel looking at him and held a hand up.
“Don’t say it,” he told her. “Just let me think.”
He lowered his head and stared at the floor, studying the pattern in the linoleum. Everything he’d been through and this was where it ended?
No. There was something here he wasn’t seeing. There had to be.
The puzzle. Concentrate on the puzzle.
One word. Ten letters.
All you had to do was look out Sara’s window.
Cursing himself for being so bad at these things, he glanced up at Sara, watching her chest rise and fall. “Come on,” he said. “Help me with this.”
What had Gunderson meant? If there was no window in the room, what other kinds of windows were there? Sara’s eyes? The window to her soul?
No. Too literary for Gunderson.
Ten simple letters. What could they …
And then it hit him.
Rising, he crossed to the bed and searched the nightstand next to it, but it was littered with medical paraphernalia, nothing else.
“Come on, goddammit.”
“Jack,” Rachel said. “What’s wrong? What are you looking for?”
And then he found it, partially hidden by one of the machines, taped to the wall directly above Sara’s head.
Ten letters.
Photograph.
>
A Polaroid photo he’d seen at least a half dozen times: Alexander Gunderson smiling for the camera, standing in front of the Lake Point Lighthouse.
“What is it?” Rachel asked.
Donovan ripped the photo from the wall. “Sara’s window.”
54
HOLD ON, JESSIE.
He’s coming to get you.
…Jessie?
SHE STRUGGLED TO open her eyes and peered into the darkness she’d grown so accustomed to.
Was that the angel’s voice she’d heard?
Had she finally come back?
The angel had left her a while ago, promising to return, but Jessie didn’t hold out much hope. She was too tired, too weak to believe anymore.
She couldn’t stay awake for more than a few seconds at a time. The cold and hunger and thirst that had consumed her those first few hours—or was it days?—had been replaced by numbness, and the places on her skin that had been rubbed raw by the duct tape no longer hurt.
The sound of the rain was long gone, leaving nothing to connect her to the real world but the hiss of air filling her nostrils.
Then that, too, had finally gone.
Every so often, that hiss had trickled to a stop, only to kick into gear again, pumping fresh new air.
But this last time, nothing …
Only silence.
And as that silence stretched out longer and longer, she began to realize that all that was left to her was the air in this box. Air that was thick with feces and urine and stale body odor.
Air that smelled like death.
Shaking her head from side to side, she had managed to dislodge the mask just enough to allow her to breathe. But each breath she took seemed harder than the one before it, and she knew it was only a matter of time before she’d be unable to fill her lungs.
Like the angel, Jessie Glass-Half-Full had abandoned her. And the funny thing was, she didn’t have enough energy to care.
She thought of her father, frantically searching for her. Thought of Mr. Ponytail’s wicked smile and Matt Weber’s championship rear end and her mother and Roger doing it in their hotel room in the Caymans—and it all seemed so distant to her. So silly.
So many things in her life seemed pointless now that she was about to take her last breath.
Had any of it even mattered?
She wanted to believe it had. Wanted to believe that she’d brought some happiness to the lives of those who had made her happy. Wanted to believe that she and her father would finally have patched things up …
But what she wanted and what she could have seemed to be two very different things.
And, in the end, maybe what she really wanted was simply to let go.
Her chest felt so tight. No matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t get enough air and she knew that she would soon be leaving this darkness.
Don’t resist, she told herself. You have to let go now.
Say goodbye, Jessie.
Your time has come.
55
THEY CONVERGED ON the place like a small army, a cluster of federal and CPD vehicles, Rachel’s Celica in the lead. Not far behind was an ambulance, its siren cutting mournfully through the afternoon air.
A popular tourist attraction, the Lake Point Lighthouse had recently been closed for renovation, a project that had been stalled by a dispute with the contractor. Except for the ambulance and the converging cars, the place was deserted.
Donovan was out of the Celica and running before it came to a complete stop.
He raced across a wide lawn to the entrance of a small building shaded by trees, the lighthouse towering above it. There was a padlock on the door.
“I need some cutters here!”
A moment later Sidney Waxman appeared carrying a bulldog bolt cutter. He sliced through the lock and Donovan flung the door open, stepping inside.
The building was rectangular, holding a small gift shop, the lighthouse museum, and the keeper’s quarters. At the back of the room, a short passageway led to the tower, sunlight streaming in from above, filtering across a wrought-iron staircase that spiraled upward toward the lantern room.
As Sidney, Cleveland, and several of the others filed in behind him and fanned out to search the place, Donovan headed toward that pool of sunlight, remembering what Gunderson had said about Sara:
Give her a lakefront view and you’d lose her for half the day.
What better view, Donovan thought, than the one upstairs?
Moving to the staircase, he took the steps two at a time, winding his way upward. Still plagued by an overextended body, he was out of breath by the time he reached the lantern room.
The view was magnificent, large windows looking out over the water and at the wide green expanse of the lighthouse grounds.
Donovan scanned the landscape, looking for disruptions in the surface, but to his frustration, the lawn was pristine and perfectly maintained. No signs of a premature burial.
But Jessie was out there somewhere. He was sure of it. She had to be.
His eyes swept over the grounds again, taking it slower this time as he mentally walked a grid, covering it centimeter by centimeter.
Then he saw it, a good distance away, near a stretch of grass that sloped downward toward the lake, half-hidden by a tight grouping of trees:
A large aluminum storage shed.
And leaning against its door were two twenty-pound bags of all-purpose fertilizer.
Donovan flung the door open with such ferocity, he nearly ripped it off its hinges. The shed was the size of a small garage and shrouded in darkness, the light from the doorway doing little to illuminate it inside.
Finding a pull cord near the entrance, he yanked it, and a string of bare bulbs came to life. Gardening tools of various shapes and sizes lined the walls, a rusted lawn tractor parked at the rear. There was no floor in the structure, only dirt, and a mound of fertilizer was piled near the center, its acrid smell assaulting Donovan’s nostrils.
This is it, he thought, his heart pounding furiously.
Grabbing a nearby shovel, he attacked the mound and dug in deep, tossing aside heaps of fertilizer. Soon, his entire crew had joined him, Sidney and Al grabbing shovels as Darcy, Franky, and Rachel got to their knees, scraping dirt and fertilizer away with their bare hands.
No one said a word, the only sound the hollow scrape of the shovels. Time seemed to have temporarily been suspended as they all concentrated on their task.
Within minutes, the mound was gone, leaving only the soft dirt floor. Donovan, Sidney, and Al sank their shovels into it, digging deeper and deeper until, finally, Donovan’s shovel hit something solid.
“This is it!” he shouted, voice choked with emotion. “It’s her!”
And then he was digging harder and more furiously than ever before, scraping dirt away from the crude wooden lid of the coffin.
As it came into view, he flung his shovel aside and scrambled into the hole, grabbing the lip of the lid and yanking at it, trying desperately to pry it open. Several of the others joined in, uttering a collective grunt as they pulled at it.
The goddamned thing wouldn’t budge.
“It’s nailed shut,” Cleveland said, grabbing his shovel and ramming it into the crevice between the lid and the body of the coffin. Jamming his heel against the blade, he shoved it in deeper, then levered the handle, forcing the blade upward.
The lid splintered, breaking into several pieces, and through the cracks, Donovan could see a pair of hands inside—Jessie’s hands—bound together with duct tape.
“Come on!” he shouted. “Get it open! Get it open!”
Cleveland’s shovel slammed into the wood again, widening the cracks as Sidney and the others pulled away chucks of it and finally managed to pry what was left of the lid open.
Donovan stared down at Jessie, her eyes closed, skin bone white. She wasn’t moving. Wasn’t breathing.
Oh, Jesus God. No. No …
Ripping her oxyg
en mask away, he grabbed her by the shoulders and lifted her out of the box. She was cold and limp in his hands. Climbing out of the hole, he laid her down on the floor of the shed, felt for a pulse with shaky fingers.
Nothing. Not even a hint of heartbeat.
Strangling a cry of anguish, he slammed his fists on her chest, then yanked her mouth open and covered it with his, blowing air into her lungs.
She didn’t respond.
“Come on, goddammit, breathe!”
He pounded her chest again, administered mouth-to-mouth, but it did no good.
She was gone.
Suddenly a paramedic squatted next him, a portable defibrillator in hand. Shoving Donovan aside, he jabbed a needle into Jessie’s arm, as a second paramedic appeared out of nowhere and strapped a fresh new oxygen mask over her face.
The first paramedic flicked a switch on the defibrillator, shouted, “Clear!” and pressed the paddles against Jessie’s chest.
Her body bucked beneath them, flopping lifelessly, as Donovan watched, his heart in his throat.
“Please,” he whispered. “Please wake up.”
But Jessie remained motionless, no sign of life.
The paramedic shouted, “Clear!” a second time and brought the paddles down, her body again bucking beneath them.
A single moment seemed to stretch into eternity, then suddenly her eyelids fluttered and she stiffened, abruptly coming awake, staring up into Donovan’s eyes as she sucked in precious life.
Everyone around them began cheering and clapping, and in that moment, Donovan felt what seemed like a lifetime of pain leak away.
He’d found her and she was alive.
“Thank you, God,” he said. “Thank you …”
And as tears began to gather in her eyes, he pulled her into his arms and hugged her close, feeling as if he’d never let her go.
56
THE FALLOUT FROM the hunt for Jessica Lynne Donovan wasn’t pretty.
After forensic tests revealed that the blood on the carpet in Luther’s room at the Wayfarer Inn was indeed Bobby Nemo’s, the Fredrickville sheriff launched a search for an unknown assailant.
Kiss Her Goodbye (A Thriller) Page 26