Silver Cross

by B. Kent Anderson

  She extended the small pouch to him. “Take it!” she shouted.

  “But, madam—”

  She shook it in his face. “Protect it with your life!” For one instant she thought she could see into his eyes, even in the darkness.

  “I will, my lady,” he said, so quiet she could barely hear him.

  She started to tell him how if they became separated, he was to see that the letter reached Richmond and President Davis. But the boat began to turn, capsizing as the wave receded and crashing back toward the sea.

  The water rushed over her head, and Rose felt the waves pulling her. The shouts of the men began to fade. For a moment she had a grip on the boat, feeling wood splintering under her fingernails as she clawed for a handhold. But she was being pulled down, the heavy fabric of her dress and the pouch around her neck dragging her beneath the waves.

  Her head broke the water one more time. Her hands raked the air. She could barely see Roberts, now three or four feet away. He was reaching toward her. But she could no longer fight the waves, and her dress pulled her under again.

  CHAPTER

  1

  Present Day

  The sign on the office door still read WHERE CASES GO TO DIE. It was a white piece of paper with the letters in black marker, held in place by tape. A new nameplate was above the sign: MEG TOLMAN, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, RESEARCH AND INVESTIGATIONS OFFICE. The office was at the end of a short hallway on the fourth floor of an unassuming office suite in an equally unassuming office building in downtown Washington. The woman behind the office’s desk wasn’t thinking about research or investigations. She was wondering if she could get away with doing a lecture about piano music of the Romantic period and not mention Franz Liszt.

  In the months since Meg Tolman had been named to run the day-to-day operations of RIO, she had learned that much of her job involved submitting reports to the offices of the attorney general and the secretaries of both Treasury and Homeland Security, the three departments that coadministered the agency. But she’d also learned why there had never been a person with the title of “director,” why a “deputy director” was in charge. The titular director of RIO was the president of the United States. Twice a month Tolman had a personal meeting with the president’s chief of staff. On two occasions she’d met with President Mendoza himself. In such an environment, it was easy to get distracted from her other world—that of part-time concert pianist.

  Still, Tolman had farmed out as much of the administrative function of her job as possible to others in the office, so that she could still do actual work. RIO took cases that were referred from other law enforcement agencies—often strange and unsolvable crimes—and reviewed them to determine whether it was appropriate for federal resources to be committed. In most instances the cases were returned to the referring department. Occasionally they weren’t. It was a strange and surreal existence, and Tolman needed her music to balance her life.

  She doodled in a notebook, thinking about the lecture she was supposed to give in the afternoon at Northern Virginia Community College. She would talk about Schumann and Brahms and Chopin and even the “twentieth-century Romantics” like her beloved Rachmaninov, but Liszt …

  “Liszt was a fucking show-off,” she muttered.

  She doodled a few music notes, a box, a cat, then put the notebook aside and turned to her computer to finish writing another report. She was plodding through an analysis of alleged federal civil rights abuses in a case from Ohio that had arisen from state police response to one of the recent waves of protests and general unrest sweeping the country. Protests on the left, protests on the right, she thought. No one’s satisfied and the cops are overmatched. What a mess—thinking about Liszt was easier. She looked up from the computer when her cell phone rang.

  “Hello, is this Meg Tolman?” said a male voice she didn’t recognize.

  “The one and only,” she said, still looking at the Ohio case but thinking about what a prima donna Liszt had been.

  “Ms. Tolman, this is Carl Troutman at New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, North Carolina. You are listed as the emergency contact for Dana Cable. There’s been an accident.”

  Tolman looked away from the computer. “What? Did you say Dana Cable?”

  “Yes. Her insurance company lists you as her emergency contact.”

  “You mean Dana Cable the cellist?”

  The man hesitated. “I don’t know if she’s a cellist, but her address is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and her insurance company—”

  “I haven’t seen Dana in a long time, probably six or seven years. There must be someone else.…”

  “You are Meg Tolman and you work in Washington, D.C.?”

  “Yes, of course, but—”

  “Then there’s no mistake.”

  “Where did you say you are? North Carolina?”

  “Yes. Wilmington.”

  “What’s Dana doing there? What kind of accident?”

  “I don’t know the answer to the first question. As to the second, from what we can tell she was out walking on the seawall below Kure Beach that separates the Cape Fear River from the Atlantic. It seems she had been drinking, and it was high tide. A wave knocked her over. She hit her head.”

  “That’s not right.”

  “Ms. Tolman—”

  “No, no, you don’t understand. That can’t be right.”

  “Ms. Tolman, your friend has been in a serious accident. She’s been in and out of consciousness and is in ICU. The nurses told me that she’s said your name several times. Will you be able to come?”

  “What?”

  “She’s asking for you, Ms. Tolman. You should come soon.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t mean to be indelicate, but if you want to see your friend while she’s still alive, you should be on your way here as soon as possible.”

  Tolman gripped the phone. Dana Cable. She had a vision of the two of them playing Beethoven’s Cello Sonata no. 2. It was Dana’s senior recital at the Curtis Institute, and she’d asked Tolman to accompany her. She remembered the way Dana’s long brown hair had fallen around her face as she bowed, lost in the music. Afterward they’d gone to a bar down the street, and while Tolman drank rum and Coke as Dana drank straight Coke, both of them confessed they never wanted to hear Beethoven’s Cello Sonata no. 2 again. Tolman remembered Dana mumbling about wishing they could see her “back home” now. She’d come from some little town in the Ozark Mountains, and she was fairly certain she’d owned the only cello in the entire county. Tolman blinked away the memory.

  “I’m on my way,” she said.

  CHAPTER

  2

  When she stepped off the plane in Wilmington, Tolman realized she’d come to the only possible place in America that was more humid than D.C. in August.

  Although she hated driving almost as much as she hated Franz Liszt, she rented a car. It was her experience that there was no decent public transportation between Washington and Atlanta. Following the rental’s GPS, she found herself on highways 74 and 76 within a few minutes of each other, made a wrong turn, crossed the Cape Fear River twice, and finally arrived at the sprawling New Hanover Regional Medical Center complex on Seventeenth Street.

  She dragged her purse and laptop bag out of the car and found the main hospital entrance. Her blouse was dotted with perspiration from the coastal humidity by the time she reached the door. She was glad her hair was still short—anything longer than her very short shag would have wilted like dying flowers.

  She asked for directions from a volunteer desk near the entrance, and in five minutes she found herself standing outside the ICU. “I’m here to see Dana Cable,” she told the nurse.

  The nurse picked up the phone, punched some buttons, spoke quietly. Tolman scanned the ICU waiting area: families congregating with fast-food wrappers in corners, an old woman crying while a middle-aged version of her held her hand and stared into space; a tired man with a salt-and-pep
per beard sat with three teenage boys, periodically speaking in low tones about when they would be able to go in and see “granddad.” Tolman turned away—there was tragedy everywhere. A former boss and mentor, a man who had betrayed Tolman and many others, had once said, “If you dig deep enough, you always come up with a fistful of tragedy.” He’d been right on that one.

  The nurse at the desk said, “Someone will be out to talk to you in a couple of minutes.”

  “What about this guy Troutman who called me? Who is he?”

  “He’s the unit clerk on the earlier shift,” the nurse said. “But someone else will be out to talk to you.”

  “Who, the doctor?”

  “If you’ll take a seat, someone will—”

  “I’ll take it from here,” said a voice in a deep Carolina drawl behind her.

  Tolman turned and looked up at a tall man in polo shirt and khakis. “Who are you?” she said. “Are you the doctor?”

  “Let’s go in,” the man said. He slapped a silver square button and the doors to the unit began to swing open. They were in a long hall. “She’s at the far end, in the trauma section.” He turned and looked down at Tolman as they walked. His legs were longer, and she had to trot to keep up. “I’m Larry Poe, New Hanover County Sheriff’s Department.”

  “Are you the investigating officer?”

  Poe didn’t break stride. “Now that’s interesting. Usually when I introduce myself in a situation like this, people say, ‘Sheriff’s department? Why is the sheriff’s department here? Don’t sheriff’s deputies wear uniforms?’ Things like that.”

  Tolman smiled. “I’m with the Research and Investigations Office in D.C. We’re part of the departments of Justice, Treasury, and Homeland Security.”

  “I see,” Poe said. “Three bosses. As much of a headache as it sounds?”

  Tolman decided she liked Larry Poe. “More than I ever thought possible.”

  “Never heard of your department before.”

  “You and a couple of hundred million other Americans. We fly under the radar.”

  “Like NSA? No Such Agency, that sort of thing?”

  “Hardly,” Tolman said. “We’re not that important. We look at cases that other departments think are worthless.”

  Poe stopped. “You’re making that up.”

  She sighed. “No one would make up a job like that.”

  The sheriff’s man started walking again. “Good point. The clerk tells me you’re listed as emergency contact for Dana Cable.”

  “Apparently so. I didn’t know it until the call came today.”

  “Haven’t seen her in a while, then?”

  “About seven years, since we graduated from the Curtis Institute.”

  “In Philadelphia.”

  “Right. She’s a cellist. I’m a pianist.”

  “Thought you were with the three-boss office in D.C.”

  “That’s my day job.”

  “Got it. Well, your friend went out for a late-night walk on the seawall, down at the tip of the Cape. Her blood alcohol level was nearly twice the legal limit.”

  “See, that’s what doesn’t make sense,” Tolman said. They reached the end of the carpeted hallway. Poe touched another square button and another pair of doors swung open.

  “She’s in room three,” he said, then stopped. Nurses in scrubs, and at least one doctor, were filing out of the room with the number three above it. One nurse drew the curtain across the opening. The doctor, a slim young African American man, pulled off his surgical cap and caught Poe’s eye. He came toward them.

  “Inspector,” he said, nodding at Poe. “She went into coma about an hour ago. She coded ten minutes ago. The brain trauma was too severe for her body to handle. Is there someone else we should call?”

  Poe nodded at Tolman.

  “Are you a family member?” the doctor asked.

  Tolman felt numb, her feelings on unsure footing. She hadn’t seen Dana Cable in seven years, and they’d only kept in contact sporadically … a handful of phone calls and e-mails. Nothing at all in the last six months or so. “An old friend,” she finally said.

  “Oh,” the doctor said.

  “I know she had two brothers,” Tolman said, “but I don’t know anything about them. I don’t even know where they live now. I think she said one is an accountant, and one was a college professor somewhere. I don’t know where.”

  “We’ll be ordering an autopsy,” Poe said.

  “Of course,” the doctor said, and looked at Tolman. “I’m sorry.” He moved away.

  “Do you need a few minutes?” Poe asked.

  “What?” Tolman said.

  Poe gestured toward the door of room three.

  It took Tolman a moment to get what he meant. “You mean go in there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No,” Tolman said. “I don’t want to see her dead.”

  Poe looked surprised. “You sure? There might not be a chance…”

  Seeing death, even violent death, didn’t scare Tolman. She’d even had a part in killing a man a few months ago, a man who was shooting at an unarmed civilian, and who had been part of a plot to overthrow the United States government. But seeing someone she knew—that was different. Her mother’s car had gone over an embankment and into the Potomac River when Tolman was sixteen. In the backseat, she survived. Her mother didn’t. At the hospital, her father—who had been called to the hospital from President Clinton’s Secret Service detail—wouldn’t let her see the body. “That’s not your mom anymore,” Ray Tolman had told her. “That’s just a container with a bunch of skin and bones and blood and muscle in it. That’s all it is now.”

  “No,” Tolman said. “I’d rather picture her playing the cello.”

  “Okay,” Poe said. “We’ll need a couple of days for the autopsy. Do you want to claim the body? You mentioned brothers. Maybe they—”

  “I don’t know. I guess if she listed me as her emergency contact, though I don’t know why she would, she must have wanted me to do something.”

  “We’ve searched her hotel room and released it. I have her belongings. There was a letter.”

  Tolman looked up at him. “What kind of letter?”

  “It said ‘In case of emergency’ on the envelope. It tells what to do in the event of her death.”

  Tolman felt her heart slow down. “How many people carry something like that around with them?”

  “Then you see why I’m here, and why this all looks a whole lot more complicated than someone getting drunk and going for a midnight stroll at high tide.”

  Tolman glanced at the closed curtain of room three. “She wasn’t drunk.”

  Poe spread his hands. “Yes, she was.”

  “No. Maybe her blood alcohol level said she was, but Dana didn’t drink.”

  “You hadn’t seen her in seven years. Maybe she started.”

  “Both of her parents were alcoholics. Her father wandered drunk out of a bar one night when Dana was little and ran out in the middle of the highway, where a truck hit him and killed him. Her mother died of cirrhosis of the liver when Dana was in college. She and her brothers all swore they would never touch alcohol as long as they lived.”

  “People break childhood pledges all the time.”

  Tolman looked up at the tall man again. “Bullshit, Inspector. You don’t believe that. You’re playing devil’s advocate with me. You know something’s not right here.”

  Poe ran a hand through his short, graying brown hair. “Hungry? Ever had East Carolina–style barbeque?”

  “No and no. I want to know why she was down here, and I want to know what happened to her.”

  “Did she know what you do for a living? Research and investigations, all that business?”

  Tolman met the man’s eyes. “Yes.”

  “Uh-huh. Let’s get something to eat, Ms. Tolman. Then I want to take you for a little ride down the coast. We have a lot of daylight left.”

  As they turned toward the unit
door, one of the nurses who had come out of Dana’s room caught up to them, trotting from the nurses’ station. “Excuse me,” she said, and her voice carried the same soft drawling cadence as Poe’s. “Is your name Meg? Were you a friend of hers?” She tilted her head toward the room.

  “I’m Meg,” Tolman said.

  “She was in and out of consciousness ever since she came up from the ER,” the nurse said. “She wasn’t very coherent. And with the brain injury…” She shrugged. “But when she was lucid, before she went into coma, she said your name several times. She even grabbed my arm one time when she said it. She kept saying, ‘Tell Meg, tell Meg.’ I asked her who Meg was and what we were supposed to tell. ‘Tell Meg,’ she kept saying. Then after Troutman reached you and you said you were coming, I told her you were on your way. But right before she went into coma, she said it again. ‘Tell Meg.’ Then she said, ‘The rose and the silver cross. Tell Meg, the rose and the silver cross.’” The nurse dipped her head. “Does that mean something to you?”

  “The rose and the silver cross.”

  “Tell Meg.”

  And she thought of her mother, the way she’d been screaming at her over the seat of the car when she’d lost control. And she thought of Dana Cable and the good times in Philadelphia, a lifetime ago. The way they’d gone out after recitals, with Dana as the perpetual designated driver. She hadn’t seen either of them dead, her mother or Dana, even though both of them had been talking to her—in very different ways—right before they died.

  “No,” Tolman said. “That doesn’t mean a damn thing to me.” She looked up at Poe. “Let’s take that ride down the coast, Inspector.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  Ann Gray watched Inspector Poe and the short blond woman emerge from the ICU. Gray blended into the throng of patients’ families and friends, sitting in a corner, a box of tissues on her lap, an old magazine open and unread beside her. Hospitals were easy places to conduct surveillance. Everyone looked out of place in a hospital.