“You sound indifferent.”
“Not at all. I’ve just learned to trust the flow of events.”
“Que será será, “he said. “Like that?”
“Yes.”
“Sounds fatalistic. Or like AA. You know, surrender and trust God.”
She laughed and he loved the sound of it. Musical, yet not like any music he’d heard in the last twenty years. “It’s not AA and it’s not God. I guess I just trust the underlying order of things. I mean, how’d you feel when your brothers died? What’d you think was happening on a deeper level?”
He admired the slick and effortless way she did this, veering the conversation away from herself and back to him. “I avoided deeper levels.” And regretted it now. “I didn’t really know my youngest brother very well. He was the midlife surprise for my parents and was only five when he died. As for what I thought. . .” He shook his head. “Shit happens. There didn’t seem to be any order about it at all.” That wasn’t quite true, but he didn’t want to go there. He still remembered the night of the funeral when he and Dean had tossed little Ray’s favorite things into the pool, their tribute to him. He still vividly recalled how great it had felt when he’d slugged Allie.
“And the other brother?”
Curry picked up his coffee mug, sipped, thought about it. “There was always something special about Dean. I felt like he had the bigger picture and I was just I don’t know, a pawn. Not his pawn, but a pawn. He believed in a lot of things that I felt were so far out there they weren’t worth thinking about.”
“Like what?”
“Well, he was part Buddhist, part Spiritualist, part pagan. A real amalgam. He believed in life after death, reincarnation, that it’s possible for the dead and the living to communicate. A lot of stuff like that.”
“And what do you believe, Keith?”
“It’s all random.”
And she set down her coffee mug, leaned toward him, touched his chin with her soft, cool fingers, then kissed him. A simple kiss. “Is that random?” she whispered.
“It could be hormones.” He took her hand in his own, and they both laughed and then he ran his fingers through her hair, satisfying an urge he’d been feeling ever since the episodes on his boat this morning. He drew her face toward him and kissed her.
“This could be complicated.” She pulled away.
“By?”
She ran her hands nervously over her slacks, tugged at the hemline of her shirt, went through her purse and brought out a pack of cigarettes. She lit one, sat back, and blew a smoke ring into the air just above his head. “It’s a long story, Keith.”
“I have time,” he said.
“It basically amounts to the fact that you and I come from different worlds. I’m looking for answers and I don’t know what you’re looking for. Maybe a quick fuck.”
He liked her bluntness, but her conclusion pissed him off. “That’s right, you don’t know. From my perspective, it looks like you were using me to get a free trip back to the States. Now that you’ve got it, things are conveniently complicated.”
“That’s not how it is at all.” She sounded indignant. “You’ve got it all wrong, Keith.”
“Yeah? I don’t think so, Faye. I’ve met dozens of women Eke you down here. Some want money, others want a free place to crash at night, and others are just pure parasites. You wanted something a bit different, but basically you’re cut from the same cloth.”
She rolled her eyes, as if to make it clear that everything he said was absurd. “You’re wrong, that’s all.” “Then convince me otherwise.”
“I don’t have to convince you of anything, you sanctimonious prick.”
And right then, all the old habits and emotional defenses kicked in. Curry knew that if he stuck around here much longer, this woman would suck out the core of his heart and the walls would cave in. He dropped bills on the table to cover their lunches. “See you at the airport tomorrow. If you want a ride to the airport drop by the boat.”
With that, he left the restaurant, his bruised and empty heart crying out for her to convince him that she wasn’t like all the others.
Chapter 18
1
By five that afternoon, Sheppard was starting to see double. Nadine suggested he and Annie run down to the grocery store to get something for dinner, and Sheppard, grateful for an excuse to get away from the endless mountains of files, seized the opportunity.
Since Mira’s disappearance, he’d left the farm only twice— yesterday, for a brief news conference that he and King had given in downtown Asheville, and right now. He felt a little guilty leaving Nadine and Goot to the paperwork, but knew that he needed a break, however brief, to begin processing all that he’d been reading. He also felt he owed the time to Annie. Not only had her mother disappeared, but she had seen the killing field—the Stevens bodies, one of the farmhands.
As he drove down the hill from the firm, the late-afternoon sun popped out from behind a bank of clouds and light burst against the windshield of the van. It seemed like nature’s equivalent of a marching band. His gloom lifted enough for him to appreciate the beauty of the surrounding mountains.
The Smoky Mountains contained Asheville, embraced it, protected it like some ancient and mystical presence. However, the immediate landscape reflected his deeper mood—the ground frozen, the trees stripped of greenery, everything stalled in a kind of weather warp. Even during the worst months on Tango Key, he rarely felt as he did now, as though every step, word, and thought required extreme effort to break through a physical torpor.
On Tango he knew the names of the trees: banyan, buttonwood, mahogany, ficus, gumbo limbo, acacia. Here he had a kindergarten education when it came to trees, just pines and maples and oaks, and barely cleared second grade when it came to everything else. He felt so displaced and out of sync with his surroundings that it affected him on a primordial level. He just didn’t function well.
Annie was seated next to him in the van, one of Robert Monroe’s books open on her lap. She’d been reading him excerpts, but now was fiddling with the buttons on the radio, switching from one station to another, like some maniacal kid channel-surfing on satellite TV He finally reached out and touched her hand. “Hey,” he said. “You’re making me crazy.”
“I’m making myself crazy.” She rubbed her palms against her jeans. “Shep, I need to know something.”
“What station plays rap?”
She laughed, but it was a halfhearted laugh, merely courteous. “Well, there’s that, yeah, but I’ve been wondering what’s going to happen to me if Mom doesn’t.. .” She paused, shook her head. “Nana Nadine is eighty-two years old, my dad is dead, my mom is gone. Nadine won’t live forever and… and would you adopt me?”
Jesus, he thought. Right to the point.
“I mean, I wouldn’t be any trouble, I’m a smart kid, and I know how to take care of myself. I’d live with Nadine until she.. . she. . .” Her voice cracked and she bit at her lower lip and quickly turned her face toward the window.
His heart broke like an egg, pieces of the shell scattered about. She’d lost her father when she was three and now, at the age of fourteen, it appeared that her mother might be lost to her, too. “We’ll find her, Annie.” The words echoed with a terrifying emptiness.
“I’m just saying.. . if.. .”
Sheppard squeezed her hand. “I consider it an honor that you’d even want me in your life and you know I’d make you mine in a heartbeat. Never worry on that account, Annie. But we both need to stop thinking such dark thoughts. We’re going to find her.” And the bitch who did this.
It had taken them hours of painstaking work to sift through the hundreds of case files. Goot had brought hard copies, CDs, and had downloaded many of the cases from the bureau’s computers. They’d divided the cases into thirds and looked for those that either involved female perps or male perps with wives, girlfriends, or female family members who might seek revenge for what had happened to thei
r loved ones. The last category was a judgment call that was largely intuitive. Sometimes the presentence report had something in it that raised a red flag. Other times a red flag might be raised by the crime itself or by the family members’ insistence on the perp’s innocence.
Shortly before Sheppard and Annie had left the cabin, they had narrowed the cases down to sixty-five possibilities.
Of these, they had eliminated more than twenty for a variety of reasons—the perp was still in prison or had died, the girlfriend or wife had remarried, the possibly vengeful sibling or mother or daughter had gone on to establish a whole new life for herself. In some of the cases, Nadine had been adamant that the person wasn’t remotely connected to anything that had happened to Mira.
They now had forty-three cases, an alarmingly high number when he considered that with each one, they had to investigate the person’s present status. Was he or she still in prison, on work release, parole, or free? And if the person was free, where did he or she live and work? They needed time frames, details, specifics. Nadine and Annie had taken copious notes on names and dates, crimes and locations and work, but so far, they hadn’t found any perp named Rose or even any family member named Rose. With every passing hour, the trail grew as cold as the weather.
Moments later, Sheppard pulled into the shopping center where Ingles grocery store was. The first time Mira and Annie had seen the sign for the store, they both had pronounced it as Inglés, with an accent over the e, the Spanish word for English. When Sheppard laughed and told them it rhymed with Pringles, a conspiratorial look passed between them. To us, it’s Ingles, Annie had said.
So that was how he said it now, making it clear he was a full-fledged member of the Morales club.
The shopping center was still festooned with Christmas lights and holiday decorations. Festive music drifted through the cold air and some of the trees outside had been strung with lights. It all depressed Sheppard and Annie sensed it; she took his hand as they crossed the parking lot. “We’ll have her back before New Year’s Eve,” she said. “I feel strongly about that.”
He immediately felt like a shit. Christ, he was the adult, but she was comforting him.
They headed up and down the wide, brightly lit aisles, selecting items from the list that Coot and Nadine had made. Annie and Sheppard added their own items. Each of them, he thought, was idiosyncratic about food, but Nadine beat them all. No meat products, no meat byproducts, no meat-based soup, only soy. No fat, no cholesterol, minimal sodium. Yada-yada.
“I need yogurt,” Annie said. “I’ll meet you in the video section, okay?”
“Sure. And if you don’t show up in five minutes, I’ll have you paged.”
She rolled her eyes. “You sound like my mom,” she remarked, and veered away from him.
Sheppard stood there a moment, watching her, her words echoing in his skull. Would you adopt me?
Would he?
Absolutely.
2
Five minutes, that was all she needed. Five minutes alone, wandering through the aisles, puzzling over the soft, insistent voice in her head. Go up aisle three.
Whose voice was it? She didn’t have a clue. Maybe it was more of a feeling than a voice, but her perceptions heard it as a voice. Or maybe she was going crazy. This seemed like a distinct possibility to Annie, lunacy at the age of fourteen—schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder—she’d watched all those movies on Lifetime. And she’d seen The Three Faces of Eve, Pollock, Frida, Girl, Interrupted, the fine edge of madness.
She clenched and unclenched her fingers as she turned into aisle three. Why this aisle? she wondered. She glanced at the sign above her head: crackers, sauces, cookies, pasta, jellies, peanut butter. That hot taste flooded her mouth again, the same hotness she’d tasted when she and Nadine had been reading the barn. But she didn’t know what it meant, what it was. A food? Was it a food that the killer liked? Was it something that simple?
Slow down, look at everything carefully.
She felt a presence, it was the only way she could describe it, a sense that someone or something was peering over her shoulder. Mom? Is that you?
Annie paused in front of the vast selections of peanut butter. The hotness had invaded her nose, it was all that she smelled. Hot, spicy. Forget the peanut butter. No brand that she knew of tasted hot or spicy.
Mom?
Silence from her mother. This was someone else. Something else. Annie glanced around uneasily and sidestepped down the aisle. Jellies.
Nope.
Pasta.
Nope.
Cookies?
She didn’t know, but the Vanilla Wafers would taste good with ice cream, she thought, and grabbed a box.
Annie turned, eyeing the products on the other side of the aisle. The hotness had invaded her senses so deeply that her eyes now watered. Had Jerry or Ramona or the farmhand smelled something like this as they’d died? Had her mother smelled it as she’d fallen in the barn?
Tears burned as they spilled down her cheeks. Annie swiped at her eyes and blinked to clear her vision. Don’t cry like some stupid baby. Keep moving, right foot, left foot, down the aisle. Had it been five minutes yet?
Mom? You there?
Nothing, nothing, nothing. But the hotness in her mouth was now so hot, so spicy, she knew she was close. Her eyes scanned the shelves. She clutched the box of Vanilla Wafers tightly to her chest. Help me, please, she thought, and wondered who she was pleading with.
And suddenly she felt it, a sense that she should stop. That she should look hard. That she should pay very close attention.
Sauces and spices and cooking powders. Dozens of varieties and types. Who made all this stuff? She suddenly felt as she did when she Googled a word or phrase and pages of sites came up. Who entered all the information? Whose busy fingers typed it all in? Who manufactures all these sauces?
Annie took a step to the right, scanned the shelves, took another step, and stopped. There. Eye level. “Holy crap,” she whispered, and snatched a bottle off the shelf.
And then she tore up the aisle, the soles of her shoes squeaking against the polished floors, her urgency bursting in the center of her chest. Shep, where was Shep? Not in aisles four or five or six. Not in aisles seven or eight. “Shep!”
She shrieked his name, bellowed at the top of her lungs, and broke into a run, ignoring the furtive looks, the open, embarrassed looks, the frankly annoyed looks of other customers. “Shep, Shep, I found it, I know who it is, I found it!”
Then he was there, right in front of her, his eyes wide with worry and shock, and he took her by the shoulders and someone hurried over to them, to him, a tall, skinny man with a badge, a name tag, who snapped, “Sir, you need to contain your—”
Sheppard turned his hard, furious eyes on the skinny guy and whipped out his badge and shoved it in the skinny man’s face and snapped, “Back off. Back the fuck off.”
Then he tucked Annie against him and led her into the wine area and she thrust the bottle at him. “Curry. The name’s Curry.”
He jerked back as though she’d struck him, took the bottle from her. “Christ,” he whispered. “Oh, Christ.” And he backed right into a rack of wine and murmured, “Dean Curry. Vehicular homicide. Twelve, thirteen years ago. The judge was Rose, Annie. Rose Udell. She died a few years back. The old man was a cancer researcher. My God, Annie. Good work. Fantastic.” And he hugged her hard.
Then he fumbled for his cell phone and called Goot, set the bottle of curry powder on a shelf, draped an arm around her shoulders, and they hurried out of the store, their groceries forgotten.
Winter—Summer 1990
Utica, New York/
Cassadaga, Florida
1
Lia’s grandparents live on a country road outside of town, in an ancient Victorian house that smells of mothballs, dusty quilts, cat piss, and old age. The curtains hanging in the windows remind her of folds of fabric in a coffin. A fitting metaphor she thinks, for how she feels
most of the time, as though she is a corpse whose heart still beats, whose mind still thinks, and whose emotions are in a constant state of rage because she must pretend that she is dead.
At the moment she is trudging through the intense and bitter cold, making her way to the bus stop. The school bus will arrive around seven-thirty and she will get on it without speaking to anyone and no one will speak to her She will eat lunch alone. Her classes bore her. At three-thirteen in the afternoon, she will board the bus again and around four will walk into her grandparents’ kitchen to find a glass of milk and a plate of cookies waiting on the table for her. If her grandmother is sleeping then she’ll have about an hour to herself before one of her grandparents is in her face, asking questions about school, homework.
The only break in this routine is that on Wednesdays or Thursdays, one of her grandparents drives her into town to the drugstore or to Wal-Mart to buy stuff she needs for school. On Tuesday or Friday evenings, they go out and play bridge with friends and she has the house to herself. But even the breaks in the routine are routine and predictable. Lia has considered calling Dean or even Mr. Barker on one of these nights and reversing the charges, but she doesn’t have any idea if Dean will be home or if Mr. Barker will be at the store. The only other choice is to send a letter for Dean to Mr Barker and ask him to forward it. But whenever she goes into town with her grandparents, they watch her like hawks. If they saw her mailing a letter or using a pay phone, no telling what would happen. Dean doesn’t even have an address for her because when she mailed him that last letter, she didn’t have an address or a phone number for her grandparents’ house.
But she has to try. She must be braver and take risks. After all, what’s the worst that can be done to her? What can be worse than what her parents have already done to her?
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