by Simon Toyne
“Where’s the kitchen?”
She studied him curiously, as if she had only now noticed him. “You look so pale.”
“So do you. The kitchen?”
She gestured at a doorway and Solomon headed over to it, passing a TV unit that had been pulled away from the wall and emptied, its contents strewn across the pale oak floorboards.
The kitchen was a similar story: drawers pulled out, cupboard doors hanging open, but not all of them. There was a line beyond which the neat order remained undisturbed, which suggested to Solomon that the intruder had either found what he was searching for or he had been disturbed, warned maybe that the funeral had ended and Holly was heading back.
It would be odd to hide something that was so clearly valuable in the kitchen, so his money was on them being disturbed. Which meant they had not found whatever it was they were looking for.
He grabbed a glass from the drain and filled it from a filter jug while he breathed in the smell of the room—detergent, polish, and an outdoor smell, engine grease and dry hay, that seemed to float above the other household scents like an oily film. He breathed deeper and caught something else too, the chalky trace of something that hinted at the true depth of the widow’s despair. He looked down at the granite worktops and saw the source of it: traces of white powder. He dabbed it with the tip of his finger, tasted it, and his mind identified it for him.
Zolpidem—muscle relaxant—anticonvulsant—most commonly used as a sleeping pill.
He shut off the water and headed back into the living room.
“Sip this,” he said, handing Holly the glass. He placed his hand on her forehead. She was warm but not dangerously so. “Have you taken anything?”
She stiffened. “No.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, I’m . . . who are you?”
“I was hoping you might tell me.” He pulled the copy of Jack Cassidy’s memoir from his pocket and held it out. “I think your husband may have given me this.” He opened the book to the dedication and handed it to her.
“Solomon Creed,” she said, and shook her head. “I never heard Jim mention your name. Why do you only think he gave it to you?”
“Because I can’t remember anything—not my name, not where I’m from, nothing. All I have is this book and a strong feeling that I’m here because of your husband. I think that I’m here to . . .”
“To what?”
“To save him.”
Pain clouded her face and she handed the book back. “Then you’re too late. My husband is dead. He can’t help you, and neither can I.”
Solomon took the book and thought about the white powder he had found in the kitchen. “Maybe I’m here to help you too?”
“I don’t need your help. I need to be left alone. Thank you for your concern, but I think you need to leave now.”
Solomon didn’t move. “I can’t do that.”
“You’re in my house. If I ask you to go, then you should go.”
He continued to look at her, taking her in, her fragile beauty, her pain, her wide pupils, dilated with shock or perhaps something else.
“If you don’t go right now, I’ll call the police.”
Solomon shook his head. “No you won’t. The police were just here. You shot the police with a shotgun. Why did you do that, I wonder?”
“What do you want?”
“I told you. I want to find out who I am.”
“But I don’t know who you are.”
“Maybe your husband did. Why would he send me this book if I wasn’t connected to him in some way? And why would I feel so strongly that I’m here because of him? I think something is wrong here. I think your husband was in trouble and you know what it is, and that I am tied up in it somehow.”
Holly stared up at him, her black eyes solid with mistrust. “Why do you think Jim was in trouble?”
Solomon nodded at the trashed room. “Because of this. Because you shot a police officer in the face. Because I get the feeling that no one wants to talk about what happened to your husband.”
A flicker of interest. “Who doesn’t?”
“The mayor, Morgan. I think the only reason he agreed to bring me here was because he wanted to stick around while we talked and see what you had to say, or make sure you said nothing because he was here. But he’s not here now. So what is it he didn’t want you to tell me?”
Holly opened her mouth as if she was about to say something, then stopped herself. “I just buried my husband,” she said. “I can’t help you right now. I’m sorry, I need to take care of myself. So, please, leave me alone.”
Solomon nodded. Took in the mess. Breathed in the smells of the house, the engine grease and hay, and the chalky note floating beneath it all. “All right,” he said. “If you want me to go, I’ll go. But you should know that sleeping pills are a notoriously unreliable method of self-destruction.”
She blinked and her hand rose up and across her chest, the gesture of someone who felt exposed, which told him he had guessed correctly.
“I can only imagine the pain you’re feeling now, losing someone so close and so young, so if you want to end that pain, who am I to stop you? But if you’re really serious, you should run in place before swallowing the pills, get your heart pumping a little—it’ll make the drugs work faster. And don’t dilute them too much. It weakens the effect.”
Holly studied him for a long time, her face unreadable, her mind trying to work out what Solomon was up to. “Who are you?” she said at last.
“I genuinely have no idea. And trust me, I don’t want to be here, bothering you like this, but I don’t know what else to do. I have and am nothing more than what you see in front of you. This is the sum total of me. I’m lost and trying to find myself. And I’m asking you, will you help me?”
“You came here with Morgan,” she said. “Why should I trust you?”
“I didn’t leave with him though, did I?”
“Doesn’t prove anything. You could still be with them, brought here to show me sympathy and talk about wanting to help Jim to get me to trust you and find out what I know.”
“You think if they wanted to do that they’d bring someone who looked like me?”
She studied him, her eyes lingering on his bare feet for a moment before fixing back on his face. The rain thrummed above them, filling the silence like a drumroll anticipating her answer. She held out her hand. “Show me the book.”
Solomon handed her the memoir and watched her read the dedication page again then frown and nod her head as if she had made up her mind. Then she stood and smoothed her dress down.
“Come with me,” she said. “There’s something you should probably see.”
33
CASSIDY WATCHED THE CHARCOALED WORLD SLIP PAST HIS WINDOW AND despaired. It was going to cost a fortune to fix all this, let alone replace the amount of lost revenue that would come from having major roadworks on the main highway into town.
“Looks like ground zero up ahead,” the NTSB agent said.
What was his name again? Not like him to forget a name. Shows how distracted he was. His daddy had taught him the value of remembering a man’s name when he was still a boy. “They’ll know yours,” he’d said. “Everyone knows a Cassidy in this town, so it’s up to you to even the score and put people at their ease. You shake their hand like you’ve been waiting all your life to meet that person and you repeat their name twice while staring them straight in the eye. Nothing wins respect more than remembering someone’s name. You forget someone’s name, you might as well spit in their face.”
And he’d forgotten the agent’s name.
They cruised to a bumpy halt twenty or so yards short of what was left of the plane. The fire had burned away everything but the metal; the road surrounding it looked like a puddle of boiling tar had been dumped on the ground and left to set.
“I’m going to take a look,” the agent said. “Stay in the car if you want.”
“I’d like to
see what nearly destroyed my town, if you don’t mind.”
—What might still destroy it.
“Suit yourself,” the agent said—Davidson, that was his name. “Just stay back from the wreckage and don’t touch anything.”
Mulcahy could have done without the mayor tagging along but he couldn’t do much about it. He opened the trunk and sheltered from the rain under the tailgate as he gathered what he needed from his own kit bag—a pair of nitrile gloves, some evidence bags, a Maglite. He had learned that the best way to remove something from a crime scene wasn’t to sneak in and try to smuggle it out, it was to walk up as if you belonged there, put it straight in an evidence bag, and carry it away. It helped to get there fast, while the local cops were still in charge and the situation was fluid. Like now.
“Okay, let’s go take a peek,” he said, closing the trunk and opening his umbrella with a sound that reminded him of a silenced weapon being fired. The mayor joined him beneath the umbrella and they moved forward together, picking their way across the melted road.
Mulcahy could feel trapped heat radiating up through the soles of his shoes. “Some fire here, huh?” he said, trying to relax the mayor and soften him up a little so he might talk. “Looks like the road boiled.”
The mayor nodded. “You must see things like this all the time,” he said.
“Nope,” Mulcahy said truthfully. “Truth is, planes don’t usually crash on roads.”
“What about runways?”
“Runways are not like roads. They’re much tougher—usually paved concrete or a concrete-asphalt mix—so they tend to hold up better in a fire,” Mulcahy said, reciting some, quite possibly bullshit, WikiFacts Siri had read out to him on the drive over. “Most planes crash at sea. Actually, most planes don’t crash at all, it’s still the safest form of transportation. Even when they do crash, it’s not always fatal. You had someone walk away from this one, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Well, he walked away from the crash site, but he says he wasn’t on the plane.”
“We’ll need to talk to him, get an official statement.” He stopped and turned to the mayor. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to stop here, sir.”
“Of course.”
“I need to take the umbrella with me.”
“That’s okay, you do what you gotta do.”
Mulcahy turned and moved on alone, picking his way carefully through the rising forest of jagged aircraft parts and steam toward the large mess of twisted metal in the center of a crater. He pulled out an evidence bag and the Maglite from his pocket and squatted down at the edge of it.
The rain thrummed on his umbrella and made pinging sounds as it struck metal inside the twisted structure. He shone the Maglite through the blackened ribs into the dark center, picking up details of what lay inside. The asphalt had melted here and various heat-damaged objects were embedded in it. He swept the torch beam over them, recognizing very little of what he was seeing but searching for something very specific.
Once, back when he was still working homicide, he’d been called to a warehouse fire set to hide evidence of a triple murder. He’d seen plenty of death in his career, but the blackened pile of bones he had seen in that warehouse had made a deeper impression on him than anything else. There were the remains of three people lying on that warehouse floor, three people who had woken up that morning, kissed their wives and kids or whatever, and ended the day as nothing more than a pile of blackened bones. There’s not much of a human body that won’t burn if the temperature is high enough. Hell, even bone will crumble to nothing if it’s hot enough, and this fire must have been like a furnace.
He was starting to wonder whether all of this was a waste of time and he should get back to the mayor and start pumping him for more information about the survivor. Then he saw something in among the wreckage.
It was sticking up from the melted road and lying in a spot where the rain ran off the tangle of metal in a steady stream. It was a human bone, a femur, the longest bone in the whole body. He changed his position, moving around to where he imagined the front of the aircraft might have been, probing the twisted metal with his flashlight. Beneath one of the thicker metal bands he spotted the jagged edges of a couple of shattered ribs. He traced backward and the flashlight picked out a blackened jawbone embedded in the surface of the road, then a little way up from the jawbone he found what he was looking for. The skull was lying on its side, mostly crushed by a large metal strut with rain running over it, making the white bone easier to see. A small rectangle of metal was fixed to it with surgical screws, about an inch or so above what was left of the right eye socket.
“There you are,” Mulcahy murmured, putting the flashlight in his mouth. He shone the beam at the skull and took several photos on his phone.
“You found something?” the mayor shouted, his voice cutting through the thrumming rain.
Mulcahy pulled the flashlight from his mouth. “Human remains,” he called back.
He stood and slipped the phone in his pocket to protect it from the rain, then turned away and headed back to the car. The real feds would be here soon. He needed to stay out of their way if he wanted to remain useful and keep his father alive.
“I’ve seen enough,” he said, walking straight past Mayor Cassidy and toward the car. “The crash scene investigators can take it from here.”
He got in the car, fired up the engine, and started backing away before the mayor even had a chance to buckle his seat belt. “I’ll drop you at the control line,” he said, turning around and driving as quickly over the ruined road as he dared. “If you could keep this road clear until the main unit arrives. I’ll call in what I’ve seen to get them up to speed. They’ll do everything they can to get the road open as soon as possible.”
The mayor nodded. He seemed distracted and Mulcahy could guess why.
They drove in silence and Mulcahy dropped him at the billboard, where people were still celebrating. The mayor peered out anxiously at the crowd, checking for faces he didn’t recognize.
I’m here already, Mulcahy thought. You’re looking in the wrong direction.
“Thanks for your help,” he said, eager for the mayor to get out.
“You’re welcome,” Cassidy replied, still scanning faces. “If there’s anything else you need . . .”
“Actually, there is,” Mulcahy said, pulling his phone from his pocket and opening up the map application. The Jeep had built-in GPS, but he never put information into a car he might have to dump. “The survivor you were talking about. If you could tell me where I might find him, I sure would like to talk to him about what happened here.”
34
HOLLY LED SOLOMON THROUGH THE QUIET HOUSE, THE ONLY SOUND THE rain on the roof above them.
“This is Jim’s study,” she said and pushed open a door into a room that looked like a tornado had ripped through it. Every drawer had been pulled out, every filing cabinet opened and emptied. Financial documents carpeted the floor, along with leather-bound legal books that had once lined the walls, their covers lying open like the wings of dead birds. A computer monitor sat in the middle of a desk that had been swept clear, the screen lighting up the devastation in the room.
Solomon stepped inside and breathed in, catching the musky scent of the room, leather and wood. The smell of engine grease and hay was here too, lifted from the skin of the man who had trashed it by the heat of his efforts.
“You say you want to find out who you are.” Holly moved over to the far wall. “Well, so did Jim.”
The wall was entirely covered with file cards, scraps of paper, maps, photographs. There seemed to be two distinct columns of information; on the left was a large map of the area covered with old photographs and photocopied pages from a journal written in old-style copperplate that reminded Solomon of the dedication in his copy of Jack Cassidy’s memoir. On the right a column of dates ran from floor to ceiling—1850 at the bottom to the present at the top—with names written on separat
e cards next to various dates in between. A copy of the page of an old Bible had been pinned at the top between both columns. It was from Proverbs. A section had been underlined: “A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favor rather than silver and golde.”
“This is Jim’s family tree,” Holly said, pointing to the right-hand side of the wall. “As far as he’d managed to trace it. He’d been contacting all kinds of people recently in connection with it. Perhaps you were one of them.”
Solomon stepped closer, his blood humming in his ears at the thought that the wall might contain a clue to who he was. Some of the names had photographs next to them, the more recent ones mostly, but there were also a few steely tintypes capturing the firm jaws and faraway stares of folks long dead. Solomon’s eyes picked hungrily at it all, sucking in the details, but his name was not there, his face did not stare out at him from the jumble of images.
He turned to the maps and documents filling the left-hand side of the wall. “What’s this?”
“Research for a book Jim was writing about the lost Cassidy fortune—you know what that is?”
Solomon recalled all the books and treasure maps he’d seen in the souvenir shops that referenced it. He had also read something in Jack Cassidy’s memoir that had hinted at it. “‘I have become famous in my lifetime,’” he quoted from memory, “‘for finding a great fortune out in the desert, but in truth there is another treasure far greater than the first, that I discovered late in my life after a great amount of study.’”
“You’ve read his memoir.”
“Yes.”
“So have lots of people. Ever since it was first published, people have been coming here looking for it. They still get busloads of folks turning up to search for the lost fortune.”