“You should tell them, then, Mommy. Or Daddy should.”
Allison quickly changed the subject, wondering what her daughter would say if she knew that both Mommy and Daddy used to smoke. Back then, when they were in their early twenties and thirties, the habit was much more prevalent, even in New York. Back then, when they thought they were immortal . . .
Yeah. That notion changed pretty abruptly, didn’t it?
Struggling to keep her hold on a wriggly J.J., she looks at Mack, still focused on his BlackBerry. “I thought you were going to get the kids ready.”
Still thumb-typing intently, he says, “Girls. Go brush your teeth. Mommy’s out of the bathroom.”
“We’re jumping across the Mississippi River!”
“No, the Missouri River,” Hudson corrects her sister. “That’s what we’re going to cross when we get to Nebraska tonight, remember?”
“Yes! The Missouri River! One more jump!”
“One more,” Mack tells them, not looking up from his BlackBerry, “and then brush your teeth.”
“I’m named after a river!” Hudson announces, getting ready to jump. “Right, Daddy?”
“There’s a Hudson River. Right. But you were named after the street.”
“Is there a Missouri Street in Nebraska, Daddy?”
“Hmm?”
“Do most rivers have streets that are named after them, too?”
“I don’t know,” Mack murmurs.
“How many rivers are there in America, Daddy?”
“That’s a good question.”
“I know. I always ask good questions. Are you going to answer it?” Hudson bounces on the bed.
“Yes, just as soon as I finish this, I’ll look it up.”
“Have you seen the diaper bag?” Allison asks him, balancing J.J. on her hip as she rummages through the bags cluttering the floor by the door.
No answer. The girls are squealing, still jumping.
“Girls, go brush your teeth!”
“Two more jumps!”
“Hudson, now! Both of you!” she says so harshly that they scramble for the bathroom. “Mack!”
“I already brushed.”
“The diaper bag. Where is it?”
“Probably still in the car. Didn’t you bring it when we went to dinner last night?”
“Probably. Here, hold J.J. and keep him off the floor while I go out and look.”
“I’ll go look,” he offers, and before she can thank him, he adds, already halfway to the door, “I have to go outside to call the office anyway—the kids are way too loud in here.”
There are so many things wrong with that statement that she doesn’t know where to begin.
“Mack . . . you’re on vacation! Why would you do that?”
“There’s some stuff going on with one of the clients . . .”
Of course there is.
Allison clenches her jaw as Mack reaches for the doorknob, still talking.
“Kathy comes in at eight”—she’s his assistant—“and I need her to take care of a couple of things for me because as soon as—”
“It’s barely seven now,” Allison cuts in, no longer able to hold her tongue, “and you said you wanted to get on the road.”
“It’s eight in New York, and it’ll only take two minutes.”
It doesn’t, of course.
It takes twenty-five.
By the time he returns to the room with the diaper bag, J.J. stinks to high heaven, the girls are bickering, and Allison is at her wit’s end.
“Daddy! How many rivers are there? You never answered my good question!”
“Sorry about that,” Mack says mildly, handing the bag to Allison.
“About not answering her question, or about disappearing for half an hour?”
“Both.”
Determined not to argue about it, Allison wrestles J.J. onto the bed and unsnaps his pajamas. “It’s okay. I’ll just change him really fast and we’ll go.”
“Take your time. I have to wait for Kathy to call the agency and they don’t open until nine.”
“What?”
“She has to call them and call me back. If I call, I’ll get sucked in and you don’t want that to happen, do you?”
“What I want to happen,” she says evenly, “is for us to get on the road. I’ll drive the first leg so you can answer your phone and talk to Kathy when she calls back.”
“No, the cell signal is too sketchy when we’re out driving in the middle of nowhere.”
“Mack—”
“You’re the one who said it yourself!”
“Well, if you miss the call, you can get back to her when we stop for gas or breakfast. The kids are going to need to eat in—”
Mack’s BlackBerry rings, and she watches him check the screen.
“Is it Kathy?”
“No. The client. I’ll be right back.”
He steps out of the room again.
Shaking her head, Allison methodically changes J.J.’s diaper, telling herself not to be angry with Mack. He’s just trying to do his job, and it’s a demanding one. If she were in his shoes, supporting the family in a demanding job in this struggling economy, she’d be doing the same thing.
It’s just been such a long time since she was actually in his shoes; such a long time since she’s done much of anything other than take care of her family and negotiate a suburban lifestyle that suits her just fine—most of the time.
Only now does she realize that she’s starting to experience hints of the same sense of unfulfilled restlessness she was feeling last fall, before disaster struck. In its wake, she was so thankful to have emerged with her family intact that the little things, the day-to-day mundane aspects of motherhood and marriage, were more than enough.
Now, she looks at her life—at the woman she’s become—and she wonders if she’s simply chosen the path of least resistance.
Not marrying Mack, because she loves him with all her heart. The children, too, of course.
But she had let go of her career so easily—the fashion industry career she’d worked so hard to achieve. Maybe too easily, leaving it behind just as she had old friends and family and everything else that complicated matters along the way. Better to avoid conflict and tough decisions than to face them head-on, right?
The thought is so troubling that she pushes it away.
Tries, anyway.
What about Tammy? a nagging voice persists as she sets J.J. back on his feet and steps into the bathroom to wash her hands.
Why can’t you even put yourself out there enough to send an e-mail to say hello after all these years?
What are you so afraid of?
“Mommy?”
She looks up to see Hudson standing in the doorway.
“Are we leaving soon? I want to cross the Missouri River!”
“So do I,” Allison tells her, surprised to find that she means it. “We just have to wait for Daddy to finish his phone call, and I have to send a quick e-mail.”
Before Crispin vanished into the stormy shadows Saturday night as the sky opened in a violent downpour, LaJuanda had convinced him to give her the contact information for a more knowledgeable source named Jonas.
“First or last name?” she asked Crispin, who shrugged. Either he didn’t know, or he’d decided it was none of her business.
Unfortunately, the number she dialed wasn’t a home or cell phone.
“Office hours are Monday through Saturday from nine A.M. until six P.M.,” announced a locally accented voice, without bothering to indicate what kind of office it even was. “Please leave a message and someone will get back to you.”
Even if this Jonas person worked at the office in question, what could LaJuanda possibly have said into a voice mailbox?
You don’t know me, and I can’t tell you why I’m calling, but please call me back . . .
Or: I’m calling for information about a dead female bartender who happens to bear a resemblance to a missing woman
from Ohio . . .
No. No way. She wasn’t even sure it was a legitimate number. The voice on the outgoing message was female, and she’d gotten the impression that Jonas is a man.
When she went online and searched further for him, she found that Jonas is a popular last name on the island. There was no way to tell which one she wanted.
LaJuanda hung up without leaving a message, knowing she would have to wait to talk to Jonas in person.
Just as she’ll wait to approach the authorities, either here on the island or back in the States.
What would she tell them? That a mysterious man had stepped out of the shadows and momentarily mistaken a photograph of Molly Temple for Jane Deere?
Who supposedly died, LaJuanda reminds herself as she sips a cup of strong black coffee on the small balcony of her hotel room. The sun has been up for an hour, but it’s still too early to make phone calls.
Just as well. She needs to sharpen her senses before she gets down to business today, and that’s going to take more than one cup of coffee. She barely slept last night, nagged by a growing hunch that Jane Deere might have had something to do with Molly’s disappearance.
LaJuanda had plugged the name “Jane Deere” into various search engines, too, hoping to find a photograph or some information about her background.
But there was nothing at all, other than the woman’s name listed among the victims in published reports about the explosion at Jimmy’s Big Iguana.
That in itself is interesting.
In this day and age, just about everyone LaJuanda investigates has left some kind of electronic trail—unless they were trying to avoid it. You have to work pretty hard to do that, though, even on a tropical island. Some people even go the opposite route to throw off the authorities, going to great lengths to create a fake online presence.
Was Jane Deere deliberately flying under the radar? Is that why there’s no information about her on the Web, not even a photograph?
LaJuanda spent hours online studying pictures that had been snapped at Jimmy’s Big Iguana, both on the bar’s barebones Web site—which has yet to be updated to reflect the tragedy—and posted on Saint Antony travel forums by tourists.
It was slow going, though. Even the Internet here is on island time. The pictures loaded with painstaking slowness, and in the few shots she found that showed the bar in the background, the bartenders’ faces weren’t clearly visible.
Frustrated, LaJuanda can only take a stranger’s word for her resemblance to Molly Temple. No, not even that; he wasn’t willing to say much. All she has, really, is Crispin’s initial reaction to the photo of Molly. Crispin, who had refused to give her his own phone number or address.
When she did an Internet search for the name “Crispin” along with “Saint Antony,” she had far better luck than she had with “Jane Deere” or “Jonas.”
Crispin Bishop is a local dealer with a long history of drug arrests, and the online photos clearly depict the man LaJuanda met prowling the ruins of the bar.
A shady character, to be sure, but he hadn’t harmed her on Saturday night. She’s willing to take her chances with him. Hoping to run into him again, she revisited the spot yesterday morning, and again at around sunset. He wasn’t there.
She wandered around the pier and the streets, hoping to find someone she could ask about Crispin, and about Jane, again to no avail. Most of Saint Antony’s residents are devoutly Catholic, and everything grinds to a halt on Sundays. The harbor area becomes a ghost town, with all the tourist action confined to the beach resorts that rim the coast. Aside from a couple of skulking young men who were only interested in selling her drugs—and clammed up as soon as she mentioned the name of their fellow dealer Crispin—LaJuanda couldn’t find a soul, not even the child beggars.
Everything would have to wait until Monday, she realized then—and Monday is finally here. Keeping an eye on her watch, she pours herself a second cup of coffee and calls home. The kids are still sleeping, but Rene is on his way out the door to the courthouse.
She asks him about his case; he asks her about hers. As always, they give each other brief, barebones feedback, to protect each other as well as themselves. Rene, a criminal attorney defending a pedophile accused of murder, knows how she feels about his client. And the less Rene knows about what she’s doing down here, the better.
“What are the kids doing?”
“They’re both still asleep. Ricky doesn’t go to work until noon”—their son is a summer lifeguard at a day camp—“and Raquel is babysitting tonight. They miss you. So do I.”
She smiles. “I figured you were too busy to miss me.”
“I’m not. Are you?”
“No, unfortunately. I’m sitting here twiddling my thumbs until nine.” She wishes Rene luck in the courtroom before hanging up, then goes back to sipping coffee and watching the clock for another hour.
She forces herself to wait until ten after nine. Then she steps through the glass sliders into the room, not willing to risk being overheard, and at long last dials the number Crispin gave her.
A woman answers on the first ring. “Dockside Tours.”
She hesitates only slightly, hoping this is the right number. “I’m looking for Jonas.”
“One moment.” There’s a click, and after a few moments, a man comes on the line. “Yes?”
“Mr. Jonas, my name is LaJuanda Estrada and I’m here from Miami, looking for a friend.”
“Yes.”
“Crispin said you might be able to help me.”
“Yes,” he says once again, and she can tell by his tone that Crispin told him to expect her call.
“Can we meet and discuss this?”
“Later. I am doing shore excursions today. I will be busy until after the ships go out.”
She arranges to meet him at six o’clock at the Clucking Parrot, a local restaurant near the pier.
Between now and then, she decides, she’ll head into town and see if she can talk to the locals who work around the pier when the cruise ships are in port. With luck, someone will remember seeing Molly Temple or be able to tell her something more about the enigmatic—perhaps deliberately so—Jane Deere.
The hot Dakota wind stirs the tall prairie grasses, tickling Carrie’s bare legs as she walks the vast, flat acreage, looking for the well.
It’s around here someplace, she’s sure . . . but around here isn’t good enough.
She wants to see the exact site. Now. Needs to see it. Needs to make sure everything is as it should be, needs to prepare for tonight—and she doesn’t have much time.
She tried once before to find it, right before she moved to New York. But the section of land—her father’s land, officially listed as abandoned property after failing to sell years ago at a foreclosure auction—was blanketed in a foot of December snow that day and more was falling: an inch an hour, probably more. Bitter gusts enveloped Carrie in swirling white so that she couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead of her.
Shades of things to come: smoke and dust from fallen towers . . .
Funny how the pattern seems destined to repeat itself in her life.
Nine years ago this week, the surrounding prairie was changed forever in an eerie echo of what had happened in New York on September 11. Here, the destruction also—quite literally—dropped out of the clear blue sky on a warm summer Tuesday, when a record sixty-seven twisters touched down in this part of the state.
A little ways down Highway 14, an entire town, Manchester, was wiped off the map, never to be rebuilt.
Just like this farm . . . and good riddance to it.
No lives were lost here on the Great Plains on Tornado Tuesday, as the press called it, but all things relative, the physical toll seems as apocalyptic as what had happened in Manhattan.
When Carrie later read about it from her far-flung tropical island, her initial reaction—aside from a general sense of detachment—was to welcome the news as she had the fallen towers: yet another cosmic c
oincidence. It was almost as though some higher power were determined to help her erase every trace of her existence in both South Dakota and New York.
Then, with growing uneasiness, she remembered the level of destruction a powerful tornado could wreak out here on the Great Plains: flattening homes, uprooting trees, even disturbing the earth. An F4 or F5 storm like the one that had passed over this acreage was capable of scouring the ground a few feet deep, possibly unearthing . . .
But surely she’d have heard about it if that had happened.
How? It’s not as though anyone around here would have any idea whatever happened to her after she left. For all they know, she’s as dead as her parents are.
So, no, they wouldn’t come looking for her if something had been unearthed on the farm. The media would have jumped on it, though—wouldn’t they?
Just to be sure, she did a search on her laptop last night, plugging in every possible word and phrase she could think of. Plenty of hits concerning dinosaur bones that had been found in South Dakota—but nothing about human remains.
That was good news enough to allow Carrie to come out here today as planned. If she honestly believed anything had been found here, she’d never have dared to set foot on the property—or even in this part of the state—again now. She’d have convinced herself that it was best to leave well enough alone.
You never seem to do that though, do you? an inner voice scolds. You’re always compelled to go looking for trouble, aren’t you?
Not really. Not today. Today, she’s just making sure that trouble stays buried in the past where it belongs. As for yesterday . . .
She thinks of Imogene Peters. For someone who had been such a pushy big mouth on the plane just hours earlier, she had basically gone down without a fight.
Just like Mrs. Ogden had all those summers ago back in her fourth floor apartment on Hudson Street—the one Carrie and Mack would soon be able to rent, because its elderly tenant had fallen and hit her head . . .
With a little help, Carrie remembers with a smile.
But Mrs. Ogden had never known what hit her. Getting rid of her had been a basic necessity. Carrie had simply slipped into her apartment through a fire escape window on the first warm May night, given the old bat a hard shove, and watched her head hit the bathroom tile. It didn’t crack open, as she’d hoped—just hit hard, and when Carrie felt for a pulse a minute or two later, there was none.
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