by Rachel Lee
"Sounds like a feast."
She closed the door behind him and led him to the kitchen, where she promptly began digging through her refrigerator. Even through the shapeless house-dress, the curves of her hips and long lines of her legs were obvious.
"I'll be just a minute."
"No rush," he said. "And don't put yourself out on my account. I can eat them plain."
"If you're kind enough to bring bagels," she said, "the least I can do is find something to put on them."
She emerged with a package of smoked salmon, a tomato and half a red onion wrapped in cellophane. With swift, efficient movements, she guided the knife through the tomato, leaving slices so thin he could have read through them. The onion was next, transparent pink rings accumulating on the cutting board as if by magic. She took down two plates and poured a small circle of olive oil in the middle of each, then added quick shakes of dried basil and oregano, a sprinkle of horseradish, and a dash of freshly crushed black pepper. Humming an idle, haunting melody, she arranged twists of salmon, tomato and onion around the dressing.
"Breakfast is served," she said, sliding a plate across the island to him.
"Amazing," he said. "I'd have just slathered on some cream cheese."
She smiled. "This is healthier for you."
"And beyond my culinary skills," he replied. "Especially first thing in the morning, when I only have one eye half-open. I don't know how you do it."
"Practice, I guess," she said. "I'm still on automatic pilot."
He cut his bagel, then swirled the salmon and veggies in the sauce she'd prepared and piled them atop a half.
"Wow," he said around a mouthful, the bright blend of flavors having left his manners in an untended synapse far from his taste buds. He swallowed and offered a sheepish smile. "I'm sorry."
"For what?" she asked.
"For talking with my mouth full."
"Oh, that," she said, tossing a hand. "I'll take it as a compliment."
"It certainly is."
"Well, thank you."
"You're welcome."
They ate in silence for a few minutes, until she lowered her plate to the floor for Kato to clean. As his pink tongue lapped up the last of the oil, she looked up. "So, to what do I owe this honor? I'd have thought you'd be busy at the hospital."
His lips tightened for a moment. "Apparently Joe Gardner has decided my services are…superfluous. CDC doctors only in the lab, he says. If he needs me, he'll page me."
"In short, he's peeved about last night and playing the petty tyrant."
"That's about right."
"I'm sorry," she said.
"It's not your fault, Markie. And in a sense, he's right. They certainly know more than I do about these kinds of things. I'd just be in the way."
"But you still hate to be out of the loop."
He nodded. This woman was far too perceptive. "Yeah. I do. But there it is. So I thought maybe we could go up to the fort. Have a look around. I doubt we'll find anything, but…"
"But it's better than stewing and fretting."
"Exactly."
She paused for a moment. "Okay, I'm game. But I need to swing by the clinic first. Check on my patients. And I was thinking I'd go to Mass today."
"Mass?"
She nodded. "It's Sunday. We're all scared. I thought it couldn't hurt. You're…welcome to join me."
"Sure," he said. "I guess."
"You don't sound very enthusiastic."
He looked down as Kato finished licking the plate. "I guess I'm not. It's been a long time since I've been inside a church."
She smiled and patted his hand. "I'm sure God will remember you."
If there is a God, he thought. Oh, well. It was, as she'd said, better than sitting and fretting. Or maybe it was just something else to sit through, something else to fret about.
"Make yourself at home," she said. "I'm going to get dressed."
"Take your time," he said.
Preferably, enough time that Mass will be over when we get there.
* * *
But of course Markie was ready in plenty of time. For the first time in many years, Dec found himself sitting in a church. Worse, he was sitting in a wooden pew in the front, unsure if he even remembered the prayers or the times to sit, stand or kneel. He supposed God could forgive an almost-atheist.
The thought amused him, leavening for a few brief moments the sorrow of the past hours and his discomfort at being swaddled in the lingering aroma of frank-incense, a smell so much a part of his childhood and youth that even the merest whiff could carry him back twenty years in time. This old church, however, was so permeated with it that it seemed to rise from the pews and sink from the rafters. The odor would probably still be there another hundred years from now, even if incense never again burned within these walls.
Rituals that had once engaged him mind and heart now left him unmoved. His mind wandered, working through all that had happened last night, trying to come up with some logical reason for Alice's horrible death dance. Kato's behavior could be explained away, but not Alice's seizure. He'd seen a lot of seizures in his day, but never one that looked so much like it ought to be a scene in The Exorcist.
He struggled, trying to find a way to categorize it, to make it finite and graspable. And for some reason his eyes kept going back to the crucifix behind the altar.
Back to the infinite.
Back to the same old question: If there was a God, how could he or she allow such terrible things to happen to people? Oh, he knew all the standard explanations. But he still didn't know why a God would send his own son to such a terrible death as a ransom for the sins of the imperfect people he himself had created.
The priest tried to offer a rationale during his homily, a discourse on fear, illness and the need to turn the heart toward God and our loved ones. None of us knew how long we have on this earth, he was saying, no matter how healthy or fortunate our present state. How often we neglected a fleeting opportunity to show love and kindness because we were caught up in our plans for the future. The current epidemic, he said, frightening though it was, ought to be an occasion for each of us to remember that life is brief and only love is eternal.
On one level, it made sense, Dec supposed. On another level, he had often wondered why people who had just escaped crisis or tragedy talked about how the experience had taught them to cherish what was "really important." It said something about the human race that we would ignore each other for most of our lives, then suddenly grieve the lost time when we were separated. A dog, after all, leaps in joyous greeting whenever the owner comes through the door, even if the owner has only gone to the mailbox. It seemed to Dec that an omniscient, perfect God would have recognized that canines were a better bet than humans and folded the human hand long ago.
Instead, he allowed humans to go on neglecting and hurting and killing each other in the most senseless ways and for the most senseless reasons, convincing themselves that they were at the top of the evolutionary ladder, when in truth they usually showed less "humanity" than their nonhuman companions. If God's purpose in this epidemic was to teach the people of Santz Martina to value one another, it seemed to Dec a shocking and terrible lesson wasted on a genetically incapable audience. Why invest so much in such a brutish species to begin with?
The corpus on the wooden crucifix returned his stare in utter silence. As always.
Relief nearly overwhelmed him when the Mass was at last over. There might be no answers to his questions, but that didn't mean he liked being reminded of the silence that always greeted them. The silence of the stone markers in the cemetery, mankind's tribute to those who had gone before, most of them probably pondering the same futile questions en route to their destiny as worm fodder.
As he and Markie made their way out of the cathedral, he was surprised to see Loleen Cathan kneeling in front of the statue of the Blessed Virgin, murmuring quietly, her fingers counting off the beads of a rosary. The old woman seemed to
sense his stare and looked up to meet his eye.
"Di you wan summin?" she said, having caught up to them in the street outside. Her deep brown eyes held no malice, only curiosity. "Saw you starin'."
"I'm sorry," Dec said. "I guess I just didn't imagine you being Catholic."
"Make us even," she said. "I din figure you Catholic, neider."
He nodded. "I was raised in the church. But it's been a long time."
"Don' make it so long next time," she said. She studied his face for a moment. "You tink I'm odd."
"I wouldn't use that word," he said.
Loleen reached into her bag and pulled out her rosary in one hand and the beads she'd been shaking the night before in the other. "God know which prayer he hear which way. God have an open min'. Not like you."
He stopped in midstride, taken aback by the woman's forwardness. "I'm sorry?"
"Saw you last night. Saw you dis mornin'. Scared as de last chicken in de yard when de farmer come. Not scared coz what you saw. Scared coz what you din' see."
In a few words, she had summarized every feeling he'd had in the past eighteen hours. He had no trouble seeing why so many of the locals looked to her as a juju-priestess-cum-grandmother. The rational part of his mind announced that she was merely an astute observer of human behavior, mannerisms and body language. The other part of his mind—the part he tamped down at every opportunity—whispered that the locals just might be right.
"So what didn't I see?" he asked.
She smiled. It was an enigmatic smile, the sort that hid far more than it revealed and virtually dared him to press the issue.
"What didn't I see?" he repeated.
"Dat's de wrong question," she said. "You already know what you din' see. De question is, are you gon' let yourself see it, or go on chasin' dem bugs dat don' exist?"
"Okay," he said, growing impatient. "What did you see that I didn't?"
She tapped her temple. "Ol' eyes. Dey don't see so much of dis," she said, sweeping an arm around the street corner. "But de ol' eyes, dey see dis." She touched her small, sagging breasts.
Then she put her hand to his chest. "You wan see what hap'nin, doc? You gots look in here. Not out dere. Like de father say today. De real world not out dere. De real world in here."
It would have sounded like so much superstitious hokum but for the deep intensity of her eyes. Eyes that held his gaze paralyzed. Finally she looked away, over at Markie.
"You ask her, Doc. Trust her. She gots de eyes dat see. She gots de eyes dat see," she repeated.
With that, she turned and walked away. Only then did he notice the thudding in his chest, the cold sweat trickling down his back despite the tropical heat.
She was right. He was afraid. In so many ways.
13
Kato had taken the opportunity to nap, and yawned hugely when Markie and Dec returned to the house for him. As soon as he was in the back of Dec's borrowed Range Rover, he turned in circles, then flopped down on the back seat and closed his eyes.
"I thought we'd need four-wheel drive to get to the fort," Dec said. He nodded toward Kato. "I guess he was up a lot last night."
"I don't think he slept at all," Markie agreed, remembering how alert his eyes had been when she'd awakened just before dawn.
"I'm taking it as a good sign he's comfortable enough to sleep," Dec replied. "And I'm not kidding."
The day was turning into a tropical standard for this time of year, temperatures headed to the mid-eighties, the breeze steady and balmy. It was, upon occasion, possible to grow sick of sunshine, a fact that sometimes still amazed Dec.
This morning the sunshine seemed like an insult after last night. The sight of some dark clouds on the western horizon almost cheered him. It ought to be a stormy day, a wildly stormy one, after what had been going on around here.
He steered around a pothole, then returned to his lane. No one else was out and about on this end of the island. None of the usual sunbathers or swimmers or picnickers. It was still early, but it was also Sunday. The tropical storm a couple of months ago had taken out a lot of the beach, but there was still enough to be usable. Beyond the narrow strip of white sand, the water glowed a gorgeous shade of aquamarine. There was so much beauty on this island that no camera could ever capture.
And now so much ugliness that didn't bear thinking about.
"I talked briefly to Joe Gardner this morning," he said, just to hear the sound of his own voice and banish the demons that were chortling evilly at the edges of his mind, whispering of ghosts and ghoulies and other unnatural things.
"Yes?" Markie's biting tone conveyed her opinion of Joe Gardner with perfect clarity.
"Well, he may be an arrogant son of a bitch, but he's a reasonably smart one. I told him I thought we might be seeing the effects of some kind of weapons test."
She turned on her seat to look directly at him. "And he said?"
All of a sudden he was aware of two days' worth of beard stubble on his cheeks. He had to force himself to focus on the matter at hand and not Markie's closeness. "He says that if the army were testing something here they wouldn't have sent him. USAMRIID—the Army's biological research agency—would have been here instead."
"Like we'd even know."
"What do you mean?"
She gave a short laugh. "That's a fairy tale, Dec. CDC would be here, all right. And we'd never ever know USAMRIID was here, too. Not if this was some kind of weapon driving the dogs nuts. No, they'd let us think CDC was handling it so we wouldn't start to wonder about weapons."
"You have a very devious mind."
She shrugged. "Well, I grew up knowing my country would put a virus in the New York subway system to test dispersion." She gave another laugh, this one a little easier. "You want the truth, Dec? I can't believe I'm thinking the things I'm thinking. The Shippeys and Alice died from a cause unknown. It wouldn't be the first time in the history of the world. For all we know, some ship at sea disposed of something it shouldn't have, something that's made a few people sick and is annoying the dogs."
"I like that explanation. I'd like to buy it. But the back of my neck won't let me." Again he felt her gaze on him.
"The back of your neck?"
"Yeah. My gut instinct. My bullshit meter. My early warning system. Whatever you want to call it. I won't rest until it quits."
"You could get awfully exhausted."
He laughed then, and it felt good to laugh. For a while his mood didn't feel quite so dark. "At the very least, I'm going to enjoy a day with a beautiful woman and her cute wolf in one of the greatest places on earth. So today is very worthwhile."
She studied him for a moment, as if weighing his words. As soon as they came out of his mouth, they seemed to him to clank against the mood of the day, utterly out of place given what had happened and what they were out here to do. He wished he could snatch them back.
Then her laugh answered his, a wonderful cascade of sound. "Sounds good to me, as long as I can nap afterward." Then she chuckled again. "Yeah. Laughing in the teeth of death. I can't think of a better way to handle it, can you?"
"Unfortunately, no."
She turned to face front again and added almost grimly, "It sure fits the history of this damn island."
* * *
The fort on the west end of the island had started life during the Spanish period, as protection from pirates. It had been built in the customary star shape, with jutting sentry and cannon towers to be able to rake fire directly along the walls. It was built of coquina, a wonderfully durable, almost indestructible, mix of shell and limestone. But later it had been upgraded, first by the British, then by the Americans during the Spanish American War, and a little more during World War I, only to be deserted from 1926 until the Cuban Missile Crisis. A considerable amount of work had been done then, both in restoration and in additions. In 1969 it had been abandoned yet again.
After more than thirty years, the tropical forest had encroached mightily. The road surface ha
d become little more than a track through thick growth. Dec felt fortunate that he and some of his friends had come out here to explore a couple of years back, or he might not have been at all sure of his way.
From time to time, though, the rough road emerged from the densest growth to give a glimpse of the Caribbean. And finally it yielded a view of the fort.
Dec stopped the Range Rover, giving them a chance to soak up the view.
"It's amazing," Markie said. "It almost looks brand-new from here."
It did. The coquina, imported from St. Augustine three centuries ago, had withstood the years as well as solid granite would have. Here and there, even at this distance, they could see vines climbing the walls, and inside the fort somewhere a palm tree rose higher than the walls. Otherwise, it might have been built yesterday.
"I'm surprised nobody's built out here," Markie said.
"I think it's all still federal reservation. Maybe someday they'll turn it into a park."
Federal reservation. They were on it now, this close to the fort. He glanced back at Kato, who was still dozing on the back seat, his head in a puddle of sun-light. Apparently all was right with the world, at least for now.
Dec released the brake and restarted the cautious drive toward the fort.
"I wonder what it was like here back then," Markie mused. "At one point, pirates pretty much ran the island."
"Yeah. I imagine it was a rough-and-tumble place, and the decent people tried to stay as far from the harbor as they could."
"Oh, of course. Some of them worked for the crown. Jamison Black, for example. But…"
He nodded. "Didn't mean they were nice people. Or that their crews were. I'll bet they were hell on wheels when they pulled into port after battling the Spanish. They didn't have military police then. And, of course, some of 'em were just plain outlaws, fighting for nobody but themselves."
She laughed. "A lot of them got their letters of marque as an alternative to prison or hanging. Not many were patriots or idealists. Just opportunists. It's a fascinating period of history."
He nodded. "I've been too busy since I got here to think much about history."