by Simon Toyne
Solomon studied the maps, the documents, the photocopies of Bible pages with notes scrawled on them. “Was your husband searching for it too?”
Holly shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know if he actually believed in it. He liked the idea of it, he was a romantic that way, but he kind of abandoned writing the book once he got a lead on his real family.”
Solomon turned back to the column of dates and names. “How long had he been working on his family tree?”
“Not long. Only since he got elected, a month maybe. As sheriff elect he got access to the town’s confidential records so he could start familiarizing himself with the finances and all the charitable trusts he was going to be managing. But it also gave him access to other parts of the archives, including the admission papers to The Cassidy.”
“The Cassidy—what’s that?”
“The orphanage. It closed about ten years ago when money started getting tight. Jim grew up there. He was an orphan.”
The word was like a bright lamp that shed new light on everything: the white picket fence outside, the white gables, the rocker on the porch—it was all a projection, a child’s idea of a perfect family home, imagined and then created by someone who had never had one. It also explained James Coronado’s obsessive need to find out where he was from and who he was. Solomon understood that well enough.
“One of the things Jim campaigned on was reopening The Cassidy,” Holly continued, “putting the heart back into the community, he called it, returning the town to what Jack Cassidy had always intended it to be, a place of charity and Christian goodness. Jack Cassidy originally set it up as a home for abandoned women and children, but over the years it became an orphanage. It was Jim’s home for the first seventeen years of his life, the closest thing he ever had to a family. But the admission files opened a door to his real family.” She took a photocopied form from the wall and handed it to Solomon. It detailed the admission of the infant James Coronado. There was a girlish, looping signature at the bottom of the page in the section for next of kin: Carol Nielsen, then, in parentheses (mother).
“Jim managed to track her down to a trailer park north of Nogales. She’d been living there for years with some guy. He was still there, but she had died of cancer a few years back. He had a bunch of her stuff and was more than happy to get rid of it.” She looked up at a bookcase that had been swept clean, then down to the pile of things on the floor below it. She crouched and retrieved a clear plastic bag from the pile and handed it to Solomon. “He found this among her things.”
The seal at the top of the bag had been opened then folded back over again, presumably when it had been found not to contain whatever the intruder had been searching for. Inside it was a small black book. He opened the bag and a smell of old cigarettes billowed out like a foul genie escaping a bottle. He pulled the book out and turned it over in his hand. It was old and worn and bound in thin leather that might have been pale blue when it was new but had gone a mottled, greasy bluish gray from years of being handled by unclean hands. The spine had started to crack and the gold lettering was mostly worn away, leaving only the outline of the words HOLY BIBLE stamped into the leather.
He opened the cover and saw tiny writing inside recording a family’s history stretching back to the middle of the eighteenth century. It was the same list of names pinned to the wall in front of him, only with one significant difference. In the Bible the family tree ended at Carol Nielsen’s name. She had not recorded the birth of her son.
“Look at her birth date and then Jim’s,” Holly said. “She was sixteen when she had him. We thought maybe she’d gotten pregnant and either the father didn’t want to know or wasn’t around, so she took him to The Cassidy and left him with nothing but a name she’d borrowed from her oldest relative.” She pointed at the first name written in the greasy Bible—James Coronado (b. 1857—d. ?).
“She was so young and she must have been so scared. I can’t imagine how awful it must be to walk up to a building with your baby in your arms and walk away again without him.”
Solomon caught a glimpse of how enormous Holly’s loss had been. When James Coronado died she had lost more than her husband, she had lost her own future as well, the years they would have spent together, the family they’d planned on having. He looked up at the top of the wall where a card with five blank spaces marked on it was pinned next to James and Holly’s names.
“That was kind of a joke,” Holly said, following his gaze. “Jim always said he wanted enough kids to form a junior soccer team.”
“How about you, how many did you want?”
She looked at the empty card and her eyes misted over. “One would have been fine.”
Solomon felt her sadness deepen and wondered whether he should move away from this tender subject. He glanced down at a small square of paper he had spotted when he first stepped in the room, half-buried in a pile of papers by the desk. Maybe it was nothing to do with him, but he felt, somehow, that it might be.
“So what happened?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
Solomon stepped over to the desk, picked up the square of paper, and handed it to her. “What happened to the baby?”
Holly caught her breath when she saw what it was. She took it and crumpled slowly down into the chair by the desk. “I didn’t know he’d kept this,” she said, her finger tracing the lines of the barely formed nose and chin picked out on the ultrasound scan. “This is the twelve-week scan. We lost him a week later.”
“Him?”
A single tear dripped down her cheek. “Jim Junior, we called him, though I don’t think he would’ve ended up being called that. We thought we had plenty of time to come up with another name.” She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. “Turns out we didn’t.”
“How did your husband take it?”
She let out a long sigh. “Like a man, and by that I mean he was strong and stoic and supportive but kept his own feelings hidden. He did that a lot, it seems, more than I knew.” She turned in the seat and moved the mouse across the screen. “I found this the other day.” She clicked on an icon with “For JJ” written beneath it and a screen popped open showing a still of a man sitting in the chair Holly now sat in.
“Hi,” the man said as the clip started playing and Solomon felt the skin on the back of his neck tighten when he realized who it must be. “I just found out you were coming and felt like I wanted to talk to you, so here I am. I never had a dad when I was growing up, so I don’t really know how this works. I always wished I’d had one, so I could talk to him, ask him about stuff. So that’s what I want to say to you, little man, that I was thinking about you and wanted to talk to you before you were even born. So remember that, if you ever feel like you can’t tell me anything. Because you always can. I’ll always be here for you. You’ll always have me and your mom. And I can’t wait to meet you. Take care, little man.”
The picture froze and Solomon studied the face of James Coronado, the man he had come in search of, the man he was here to save. He looked up at the wall behind the screen and the same face stared out of a series of framed photographs showing a group of five boys standing by a campfire and in front of what appeared to be a house with no walls and a woven, wooden roof.
Ramada—the word floated up in Solomon’s mind—Hohokam Indian word for a shelter.
The landscape beyond the ramada was prehistoric, unchanged since before the Hohokam or anybody else had stood there. An escarpment rose behind them on the horizon, a deep V-shaped niche cut into it by an unseen river.
Solomon studied the boys’ faces, frozen in time by flashbulbs that had charted their childhood in yearly increments. Each year they grew a little more, until the last picture showed men in their twenties, some fatter, some with hair that was starting to thin, but still recognizably the same boys who had posed for that first photograph. James Coronado stood at the center, a little taller than the rest and with a gravity to him that seemed to pull the others in. If
this group of boys had a leader, it was him.
Solomon studied his face, willing it to be familiar. But he didn’t recognize him. James Coronado, the man who had recorded this message for the son he would never see, the man he was here to save, was a stranger to him.
35
MULCAHY EASED THE JEEP TO A STOP SEVERAL HOUSES SHORT OF THE ADdress the mayor had given him. He cut the engine and scanned the street through the rain. It was small-town Americana perfection with decent-size plots and double-car driveways with garages at the end. Only one car was parked in the driveway of Holly Coronado’s house, but he could see a light in a lower window showing that someone was there.
He picked up his phone and studied the archived Web page of a local newspaper. The article had a picture of the other car that was usually parked here, all twisted up, like an empty beer can, at the bottom of a ravine. The headline above it read:
SHERIFF-ELECT DEAD IN TRAGIC ACCIDENT
He scrolled down through the article and found another picture, a photograph of the dead man and his wife standing in an old graveyard and smiling for the cameras. She was pretty. They were a handsome couple. They looked like they had it all worked out and everything going for them. Just goes to show.
He looked up again and studied the street. A single porch light was glowing weakly in the shade of a wide veranda a few houses down from the widow’s home, but he could not sense any life behind the windows of the house. Probably just a sensor that had tripped automatically in the flat gray light beneath the storm clouds. Most of the townsfolk were still down at the control line. He figured they would stay there awhile, even with this rain. It wasn’t every day you saved your town from destruction. If he lived here, he would want to stay there too, savoring every happy, noisy, back-slapping moment before he had to return to his nice house on a safe street like this where lights came on automatically to keep the darkness at bay.
This was the kind of street he had once imagined living on, before his life had veered off in a different and darker direction. For a long time, when the life he had left behind was still fresh in his mind, he had replayed certain events over and over like an armchair quarterback trying to win a lost game, thinking about how things might have turned out differently if he had made other choices, or been a better man, or a stronger man, or a smarter one. It was only over time he gradually realized that he had never had any choice in the first place. Nobody did, really. The truth of it was that if someone with power wanted to reach into your life and tear the heart out of it, there was nothing much you could do about it.
He attached the photograph he had taken at the crash site to a new message, pressed Send, and watched it go. It would get bounced around a few times before it got to Tío. Then things would get interesting. People would die because of what had happened here. Some of them would deserve it, but not all. He clicked on another message and studied the blurry photographs Tío had sent him of the pale man with pure white skin and hair, and a mark on his arm that may or may not have been a kill tag—the man who was in the house he was looking at.
He opened the glove compartment, took out his Beretta and the sunglasses case with the suppressor inside it. He replaced the partially spent magazine with a full one, checked his gun, then screwed the suppressor to the muzzle. Tío had said he wanted the man alive, but Mulcahy wasn’t going to take any chances. He laid the gun down on the seat and looked back up at the house. The storm was easing now, the drumming of the rain on the roof of his car getting softer.
He would have liked it if his pop had lived somewhere nice like this instead of the ratty three-room apartment over the Laundromat. Then again, Pop didn’t seem to mind where he lived. He had never been particularly good at holding on to money either. Easy come, easy go, that was the closest they got to a family motto. He remembered when he was eleven and Pop would return from his week-long trips to the exotic-sounding places, his car covered in road dust. It was only later in life, when Mulcahy had been to these places himself, that he figured out why Pop had sometimes returned happy and bearing gifts and other times quiet and broke.
He ran through the names in his mind now, a roll call recalled from his youth: Oklahoma City, Des Moines, Shakopee, Omaha, Kansas City. He went through it again, adding other names: Remington Park in Oklahoma City, Prairie Meadows in Des Moines, Canterbury Downs in Shakopee, Ak-Sar-Ben in Omaha, Woodlands in Kansas City. Racetracks. Every place had a racetrack.
He reached down and pulled the laundry sack out from beneath the seat, the sharp edges of magazine clips and gun sights stretching the plastic and poking through in some places. He picked out Carlos’s Glock and a spare magazine, then stashed the bag back in the foot well. He tested the Glock’s action and swapped the magazine for a full one. He would need a backup weapon in case the guy was cartel like Tío suspected. The Glock was reliable and had no safety, which made it a good choice for a backup piece—you didn’t want to be fiddling around with safety options in the middle of a firefight. It was also generic and untraceable. Carlos had done him the service of filing off the serial number. He laid it on the seat next to the Beretta and checked the street again.
If he had managed to buy a house like this for Pop, chances are he would only have remortgaged it on the sly for some up-front cash and lost it all at the track or in some back-room poker game. Just the way it was, no point in getting bent out of shape about it. If you started having issues with the bad things in people and trying to change them, you were in danger of losing sight of what was good about them too. And for all his faults, he wouldn’t change Pop for anything. If it hadn’t been for him, he might not even have made it out of childhood.
He picked up the Glock, slipped it into his shoulder holster, then took the silenced Beretta in hand. He owed him everything, could never repay him for what he had done, but right now, in the next hour or so, he was going to have to do whatever it took to try.
36
HOLLY WATCHED SOLOMON MOVING AROUND THE STUDY, HIS HEAD TURNing slowly, taking everything in. He seemed unreal in some ways, his white skin and hair making him seem like a beautiful, classical, marble statue that had been brought to life and then dressed in ordinary clothes. He had an extraordinary stillness about him and she found it calming, like staring at the surface of a deep lake.
During her recent Internet trawls she had come across several accounts of potential suicides who had been saved by what one had described as a “familiar stranger,” someone who had just appeared and seemed to know them and understand their pain. Some described these strangers as angels, others as the spirits of loved ones—fathers, mothers, grandparents—who had come to stop them from crossing over to the other side. When she had read these stories, she had put it down to some kind of extreme mental and emotional state creating subconscious projections of the survival instinct. Perhaps that’s what he was. Except in all the reported cases the stranger had dissuaded the witness from suicide whereas Solomon had given her specific instructions on how she might do it more effectively. Then again, that was exactly the slightly perverse, counterintuitive way her subconscious would work, tell her to do something while knowing she was most likely to do the exact opposite.
He turned and looked at her, his pale, gray eyes so piercing she imagined he could read her thoughts. “What do you think they were after?” he asked.
“A file, something like that—I don’t know for sure. I think Jim found out something about the town, something they didn’t want getting out.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“The town elders. The sheriffs. They run this place. Redemption is more like a corporation than a town, with members of the board instead of public officials. There’s the mayor, who is the chief executive, then there are two sheriffs who answer to him, one for commerce and one for philanthropy. Jim had been elected sheriff in charge of philanthropy.”
“Seems a grand title for such a small town.”
“This whole place has delusions of grandeur. Have you seen the chur
ch? It’s like they shipped a cathedral over from Europe and dropped it in the middle of the desert. Can you imagine what it must have looked like when most people here were still living in tents or one-room cabins? Redemption was built on Christ as much as copper, Mr. Creed, never forget that. And you can’t win a fight against someone who thinks they have God on their side.”
“I thought God was supposed to be on everyone’s side.”
“Not in this town. Here, if your name is Cassidy then you are God. Morgan and the other sheriffs, they’re disciples. Except Jim wasn’t. He was never part of their club. I think to them he was always going to be an orphan boy from The Cassidy who made good. But they needed him because of the trusts.”
Solomon nodded. “Morgan mentioned those. What are they?”
“They’re the lifeblood of this town and also why the Cassidy family is so powerful here. Jack Cassidy set them up when he founded the town. They act like a localized welfare system, a large charity fund, run by his family, that supports the community. As long as a Cassidy lives here, they’re protected and so is the town. But no more Cassidys, no more trusts.”
“And Mayor Cassidy has no children.”
“Exactly. As soon as he dies, the trusts will revert to the church. When Jack Cassidy set them up, this wasn’t a problem because the church was part of the town. But now it’s not, now it’s part of the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona. So when Cassidy dies the trusts will no longer be owned or administered by the town alone, they will be managed by the church, which means the funds could go anywhere in the state—and probably will. And most people here rely on subsidies from the trusts to keep going.”
“What about the mine? Morgan said it was still producing.”
“If it is, it can’t be much. They had to close down production about fifteen years ago because of groundwater contamination. Bunch of people got sick from the chemicals they were using. Cost the town a fortune to clean it all up and pay damages. If it wasn’t for the trusts, this whole place would have gone under. The trusts are where the money is, not the mine, not the airfield, and not the tourists. Jim’s job was to try to find ways of securing them for the town. It was his area of expertise. That’s why they needed him.” She spotted a card on the floor, picked it up, and gave it to Solomon: