She broke into a smile that could light up half of Manhattan. “I really appreciate this, Keith.”
“But you have to understand. These aren’t direct flights, okay? They go via Havana, Mexico City, Guatemala, Caracas. . . no telling.”
“That’s fine. Where in the States do these flights usually land?”
“Miami, Orlando, Atlanta, it varies.”
“Any of those would work.”
“But because this is the capital of ‘Mañana Land,’ Faye, these plans could fall through. That’s what happens at least fifty percent of the time.”
“It means we have a fifty-fifty chance of getting back to the States. That’s better than what I have on standby.”
“Let me grab my cell phone and we’ll get going.”
“We?”
We, us. “Hey, you’re going to plead your case. These military guys are always suckers for a beautiful woman’s sob story.”
“Should I change clothes?”
No. “Something a little more modest.”
“Less legs? Less boobs? A hat? Sunglasses? Be specific.”
“Less legs, less boobs, but be imaginative.”
She looked amused. “I’ll meet you in the parking lot in five minutes. Should I have my bag with me?”
“No. These flights usually leave at night. We’ll have plenty of time to get back here.”
She started out, her straw bag over her shoulder, then turned, came back to him, and cupped his face in her hands and kissed him. Not the kiss of an innocent, he thought, and definitely a kiss that promised to finish what had begun here. “Just give me some time,” she said softly. “See you in five minutes.”
When she met him in the parking lot exactly five minutes later, she looked like something off the pages of a fashion magazine. Seductive, but not crass, a gringa with class.
Chapter 14
Light the color of pus filtered through the cabin windows, a faithful reflection of Sheppard’s mood. Even two mugs of Goot’s Cuban café con leche didn’t do much to lift his spirits and it didn’t banish his fatigue. His eyes still felt as if they’d been scrubbed with gravel and put back sideways into the sockets.
Since Annie’s hysteria three or four hours ago, he and Goot had made little progress. They didn’t have any idea what they were looking for. They couldn’t name it, tag it, categorize it. Yet, last night, both of them had felt certain that they would recognize it, this quality, this critical element, when they saw it. Now he wasn’t at all sure.
“Shep?”
He glanced up as Annie sank down next to him on the living-room floor. “What is it, kiddo?”
“After I woke everyone up last night and went into Nadine’s room, something weird happened.”
Weird. Okay, that was business as usual for the Morales family, he thought. “Weird how?”
As she started explaining, Sheppard picked up a legal pad and scribbled notes. A house on a frozen river. Northern Georgia. Mira in a basement or cellar, strapped down to a bed. A woman named Rose. It didn’t seem like much information, but his years with the Morales family had taught him to pay attention to the smallest details, regardless of how insignificant they might look.
“Who was this Rose person?” he asked.
“I don’t know. But she said it was important to remember her name.”
“Goot, do we have anyone in these case files named Rose?”
He was already doing a search on the laptop. “A perp?”
Sheppard looked at Annie and she shook her head. “She wasn’t a bad person.”
“Anyone, Goot,” Sheppard said. “Family members, relatives, friends connected to any of the cases.”
“We haven’t finished compiling all the names yet,” Goot said. “But I’ll keep searching.”
Nadine brought breakfast plates over to the kitchen table and, as they all sat down, announced that she and Annie would like to read the barn after they ate. “We’d like to start here at the cabin and follow the path that Mira took.”
Eighty-two years old and she could sleep for a few hours and then function. Sheppard was forty years younger and felt like warmed shit on toast. The secret, he thought, had to be yoga and good genes. Nadine had practiced yoga for fifty years or more, long before it had become popular with baby boomers. She looked twenty years younger than she was, had a body so flexible that on a good day she could do a backflip that would send Olympic competitors in gymnastics back into training.
So right after breakfast, they all retreated to the outdoors. Kyle King had arrived by then and he had the equipment they needed to wire Nadine and Annie for sound. He, Goot, and Sheppard hung back as Annie and Nadine began their descent down the shallow slope of the hill toward the barn.
He sensed, as he had so many times in the past since he’d met Mira, that he was superfluous in the grander plan. He believed this plan had more to do with women than with men, that perhaps the ultimate energy in the universe was feminine, not male, and that anyone with a dick would be playing a very small role in the world that was evolving. He had read two science fiction novels like that, both of them written by women and recommended to him by Mira.
In The Shore of Women, author Pamela Sargent saw men as the threat against a walled city in which only women lived. In The Blue Place, author Nicola Griffith hadn’t included a single man. The entire novel took place on another planet populated only by women.
There was suddenly no doubt in his mind that regardless of how long he knew Mira, whether they got married or simply continued as they were, Nadine would remain the matriarch of this family and he, Sheppard, would still be the bastard gringo son. Especially now.
“Neither of them has said a thing,” King whispered.
“It means they haven’t picked up anything,” Sheppard replied.
“If one of them says something, won’t that influence the other?” King asked.
“It could,” Goot answered. “But that’s not necessarily bad.”
Sheppard nodded and licked snowflakes off his lip. “But what usually happens is that what one says feeds into the impressions of the other.”
“They become like one mind,” Goot said.
“Sounds like bees,” King remarked.
“I taste something hot,” Annie said, and the men fell silent.
“Like pepper,” Nadine added. “Hot peppers. Jalapeños.”
Annie reached for her grandmother’s hand. ‘That’s it exactly, Nana.”
“She had a fever,” Nadine went on.
“A raging fever,” Annie agreed. “But what I taste is different than a fever.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” King asked. “Nothing yet,” Sheppard said.
“Scared, I’m scared.” Nadine spoke and she sounded breathless. She moved very fast. “Screaming for help. Where’re the dogs? Where is everyone?”
She and Annie now broke into a run and raced through the door of the barn, and Sheppard broke away from King and Goot to catch up with them. The horses and the goats were gone now, but the smell of animals lingered in the barn, thick odors that assaulted Sheppard—the ripe stink of manure, the sweetness of hay, the powerful smell of the earth. Nadine and Annie were sitting on their heels, near the spot where Mira’s blood had been found, their hands still joined.
“She fell here,” Annie said softly.
Sheppard hadn’t told them anything about where Mira’s blood had been found.
“Someone else was here, too. She fell over a body,” Nadine added.
“Hot, my mouth is so hot,” Annie went on.
Nadine stood, pulling Annie to her feet. They stood for a moment in the quiet, their breaths visible in the cold air, their free hands clenched tightly over the earring each one held. Mira’s earrings. Then Nadine let go of Annie’s hand and dropped into a crouch. In a voice that sounded nothing like her own, she said, “Why’d you run? Why? It’s not in the pattern.”
“What the hell’s that?” King asked.
Sheppard shrugged. He didn’t
have a clue.
“If she starts to move, get out of her way,” Goot said. “Because she won’t see you.”
“Get her into the car, “ Nadine continued in a voice that wasn’t hers. “Wrap the wound to stop the bleeding. Pump her full of antibiotics.”
Annie seemed to realize what was happening and quickly stepped out of the way. Nadine stooped over and went through the motions of picking up something---or someone—and then walked fast, her arms curved in front of her.
Nadine was now inside the killer, who was carrying Mira. It was bizarre to witness; not only had her voice changed, but she moved differently, her spine straighter, her stride longer. Instead of going through the front of the barn, she went out the rear door, the closest door, and Sheppard and Annie hurried after her, with Goot, King, and the dog falling in behind them. Annie took Sheppard’s hand.
“She’s hooked into the killer, Shep,” Annie whispered. “I could feel the energy there, waiting for one of us to claim it, but it scared me. The energy is so powerful. But Nadine’s not afraid of anything.”
“You did great, Annie. You okay?”
Her head bobbed once, then she fell silent. Ricki trotted alongside Annie and every so often she reached down and ran her fingers through the retriever’s fur.
“What do you mean by powerful, Annie? Is it like electricity? Powerful in that way? Or like wind? What?” Tell me, help me understand.
She thought about this, her shoes crunching over the snow. “In history class we saw a film about the bombing of Hiroshima. It’s that kind of energy.”
“Is it the killer’s energy that’s like that or the energy of the event?”
“I can’t separate them in that way. Nana Nadine can, Mom can, but I can’t do that yet.”
“When you saw your mom last night, in that dream or whatever it was, how’d she seem?”
“Sick. She looked bad.”
Shit. “Can you describe Rose?”
Annie thought for a moment. “Black hair, really pretty. Like I said before, she isn’t bad.”
Her answer didn’t tell him enough. What he really wanted to ask was what, exactly, had she experienced? A dream? An out-of-body experience? Telepathy? Clairvoyance? What the hell was he supposed to call it?
Ridiculous. He should know by now that he couldn’t attach labels to the phenomena in Mira’s world.
At the top of the slope, just past the cabin, Nadine stopped behind King’s Explorer. Sheppard gestured for him to open the back of the vehicle. Once the rear door swung upward, Nadine leaned over and put the body -Mira’s body—in the back. Her hands were busy—moving as though she were unfolding a sheet or a blanket, pulling it up over the body, tucking it in around the feet. She climbed into the back of the car, reached into her jacket pocket. Sheppard couldn’t imagine what she held when she removed her hand from her pocket and didn’t have a clue what she was doing. He was tempted to question Nadine, as he sometimes did Mira when she was in this state, but was afraid she might snap out of it if he spoke.
“The killer handcuffed Mira to something on the floor,” Goot whispered.
A pit tore open in Sheppard’s stomach.
Nadine scrambled out of the Explorer and stood still for a moment, her face lifted into the air like a dog who has caught an intriguing scent. She walked fast toward the cabin, through the door, down the hall, and into their bedroom. “What’d I touch?”she muttered, and looked wildly around.
Back up the hall, into the kitchen. The rest of them hurried after her. Nadine grabbed a dish towel and returned to the bedroom. She wiped down drawer handles, surfaces. She stuffed the dish towel into her jacket pocket and practically ran back up the hail and into the living room. Every gesture that she made, every movement, suggested haste, but attention to details.
Outside again, she hurried over to the Explorer, King’s Explorer. He looked worriedly at Sheppard. “She can’t drive in this condition.”
“I’ll drive,” Sheppard said. “Everyone else get in the back. One of you help Nadine into the passenger seat.”
Annie helped her into the car and everyone else, including the dog, piled into the back. Sheppard could tell from Nadine’s silence and her focused concentration that she was completely immersed in an altered state, but that she was aware of how easily that focus could be broken. She sat quietly, staring straight ahead, her palms flat against her thighs.
As he headed down the steep, crooked road that led away from the farm, the wipers whipped back and forth across the windshield, clearing a half-moon in the accumulated snow on the glass. At the bottom of the hill, Sheppard stopped and glanced at Nadine. “Which way?” he asked.
“I’m outta here, “she said in that strange voice that was not her own. West. Two-lane roads. Interstates could be closed.”
Goot leaned forward and fit a mini digital recorder between the driver and the passenger seats. It was on, getting it all. He had worked enough with Mira to appreciate the importance of a record. Sheppard headed west, the wipers making a rhythmic, mesmerizing noise. The road led through a wooded area, past a small, frozen lake shaped like an eye. A couple of ice-skaters sped across the ice, surreal figures in the light snowfall. At an intersection three miles later, Sheppard caught the red light and stopped.
If he headed due west as the compass read, he would enter a hillside neighborhood. If he turned right, he eventually would end up on 1-240, the Asheville bypass that fed into I-40. If he followed 1-40 west, it would lead him into Asheville, then the Biltmore estate area, and then onward toward the Smoky Mountain National Park.
“Which way, Nadine?”
“Mierda, lo perdí,” she spat.
She’d lost the trail.
“Pull off to the side of the road, Shep.”
He pulled onto the shoulder and Nadine threw open the door and stepped outside. She turned slowly in place, arms bent at the elbows, palms upward, facing the sky. Then she brought her hands out in front of her, palms facing outward, and kept turning, turning. She looked, Sheppard thought, like some ancient warrior, knees slightly bent, body positioned for defense. The wind blew through her hair.
“What’s she doing?” King asked.
“Trying to pick up my mom’s signal,” Annie said. “But I don’t think she can do it here.”
Annie got out and she and Nadine appeared to be arguing. Sheppard watched them, his eyes aching from lack of sleep, and wondered what Annie could possibly say to stubborn Nadine that would get her back in the car. Again he was struck by the reality: Their world was not his world. At best, he was just a visitor, a tourist, a guy passing through.
“So we know they were headed west,” Goot said, studying a map spread open in his lap. “We know the killer wanted two-lane roads because he thought the interstate might be closed.”
“There’re dozens of two-laners through the national park,” King said. “We need more specific information.”
“South,” Nadine said as she and Annie got back into the car. ‘The destination is south, but she had to go west to get there. South to northern Georgia, someplace by a river, that was what Annie got last night.”
“The Blue Ridge Parkway goes through the Smoky Mountain National Park and was shut down by ten that night,” King said. “If this guy went south, he would take two-lane roads that skirted the park so he could get to the Georgia line. There, he could connect with 1-75 or I80. As for rivers. . .” King shook his head. “There’re dozens of rivers in Georgia. But at least we know the general direction now.”
“Weren’t those interstates closed that night by the snowstorm?” Goot asked.
“For a while. But the North Carolina stretches shut down first.”
“He?” Nadine frowned and turned around in her seat. “Who’re you talking about?”
“The killer,” Goot and King replied simultaneously.
“The killer,” Nadine said, “the person who has Mira, is a woman.”
Chapter 15
The power of Mira’s own fe
ar shocked her. For the longest time after the basement door slammed shut, she stayed where she was, on the cold, hard floor, too terrified to move. She was sure Wacko would know about it and would burst through the basement door to kick her some more. She wondered if this was how political prisoners felt, particularly those Americans who had no access to legal counsel and were interrogated off U.S. soil.
Wacko’s departure had to be a trick. After all, Mira thought, she hadn’t been handcuffed, strapped down to the bed, drugged, or immobilized in any way this time. She was free to move around the basement—and yet, her fear paralyzed her.
She finally rolled onto her back and sat up. She stared at the basement door, but it didn’t fly open. Wacko didn’t appear. There were no surveillance cameras down here.
Mira moved slowly, prowling back and forth in front of the stairs. Her ribs hurt, her thigh hurt, every goddamn part of her body hurt and every step required enormous effort. She finally grabbed onto the staircase railing and began to climb.
She wouldn’t break any speed records. She tested each step for creaks before she put her full weight on it. She counted the steps, engaging her mind in this useless act to allow her intuitive self greater freedom. But that self seemed to be out to lunch again. Even though wood usually held psychic residue, nothing about Wacko surfaced.
At the top of the stairs, she pressed her ear to the door, listening. She didn’t hear any sounds. She brought her hand to the knob, turned it, pushed. Locked. Definitely locked. And why didn’t she pick up any impressions from the metal knob?
Because you’re now half a person. Get over it and get out of here.
She started back down the stairs, paused, sat down on the fourth step and turned, peering between the steps to the space under the staircase. A good hiding place. But she didn’t want to hide. She wanted to escape.
At the bottom of the stairs, she eyed the small, supposedly shatterproof windows on the other side of the room. A soft light now filtered through them. Even if Wacko had lied about the glass being shatterproof, the windows were too small for her to fit through and much too high to reach without standing on something. However, if she could reach a window and break one, she could scream and her screams might be heard by someone passing by. Maybe heard by Nick? Where did Nick live in relation to this house? It seemed like a long shot. But she had to try.
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