This set up an immediate chorus of protest around the table, which Gonzalez squelched by raising an enormous meaty paw.
“I can’t go,” he said reluctantly. “I’m supposed to have the FBI in here sometime tomorrow, and I have the valley to take care of. I have two drunks in jail tonight already. I can’t go haring off into the dunes.”
“I think we need to look at Joe’s simulation,” Marcia said. She had not spoken much so far. Her voice was warm and clear. It was the voice of a lifelong teacher and carried a little whip pop of authority. Everyone immediately turned to her, even Beth. “I think Joe’s simulation might be the key.”
“The key to what?” Susan asked.
“To the murders, of course,” Marcia said, and looked around the table with her dark, intelligent gaze. “There’s a pattern. I can almost see it.”
“Yes!” Joe said. His laptop was sitting by his chair like a faithful pet. He reached down a hand and patted it. “The day after tomorrow if they set off the New Madrid, we could be talking about—”
“Millions of people,” Gonzalez interrupted. “I know.” He looked a little dazed, like he had the first time Joe had explained about his simulation. “I still don’t get it.”
“Let’s look at this logically,” said Marcia in her clear, carrying voice. “First, we have to decide if we think these earthquake people are going to set off the New Madrid tomorrow. If so, that’s our first priority. We have to stop them, either because they don’t know what they’re doing, or . . .”
“Or because they do,” Sam Williams said heavily.
“Yes,” Marcia said. Joe found himself wishing she’d been at their impromptu information-gathering session the other night—was it last night? Yes, only last night. Twenty-four hours ago the snow had been howling outside his house and Eileen had been sleeping in his bed. No sense wishing things were different now. “If they think their earthquake is going to help prevent a large-scale disaster, then we have to convince them otherwise.”
“If they know they’re going to create this disaster, they’re going to kill Alan and Eileen,” Rosen said flatly.
“But why?” Beth asked, her eyebrows drawn together in distress. “Why would anyone want to do that?”
There was silence around the table. Everyone looked at Marcia.
“I can think of a half-dozen reasons right off the top of my head,” she said dryly. “But I don’t know that any of you want to hear them.”
In chorus, everyone at the table disagreed. Marcia shrugged her shoulders, an oddly cynical shrug.
“Okay, then. Here’s several. A New Madrid earthquake would cut the country in two. Set off a couple of earthquakes in Washington, D.C., or just blow a couple of canisters of anthrax virus. By the time you’ve gotten the mess straightened out, you have a new capitol in Washington State, or California, and another one in Washington, D.C. Two countries, just the way the South wanted us to be in the Civil War.”
“A second Civil War,” Rosen said thoughtfully.
“And we’d all be speaking Japanese pretty soon, or Chinese, or German,” Daniel said. “As soon as they could figure out how to take over. But how about a revolution? A newly minted America with no taxes, no government, no bloated bureaucracy? Just a Constitution and a new Congress and no more of the old crap.”
“Or a theocracy where homosexuals are hanged in public and attendance at church is mandatory,” Joe said. “Just to balance out the concepts.”
“It all sounds terrible,” Beth said, wiping her hands slowly on a dishrag. She poured hot water into a cup and started rummaging around her cabinets. “What else can you think of?”
“How about the biggest bank robbery ever? Fort Knox, Kentucky,” Marcia said apologetically. “Set off a massive earthquake as a diversion. Take a helicopter from here, kill anybody who’s left there, grab all the gold you can carry.”
“Hell, just be ready to rob a few banks here or there,” Sam Williams said. “How much currency could you get in a day, in conditions like that?” No one answered. Beth found a tea bag and stirred it around her cup, making small clinking sounds with her spoon.
“We could sit here all night,” Marcia said. “I could come up with many evil reasons to kill millions of people, if you really want. I think we all know about evil.” She stared around the table and Joe found himself dropping his eyes like a kid afraid to be called upon in class. “We have a chance to stop it. The question is, how?”
“Since we’re not evil, we can’t just go in and blow everybody away, just to be sure, right?” Susan asked. She sounded like she wanted to be convinced otherwise.
Gonzalez gave her a quick fond grin. “Not how it’s done. We have to give them a chance to show us they’re not going to set off this machine. Hell, we don’t even know what it looks like.”
“It’ll look like a machine,” Joe said. “In the middle of the dunes. I think we’ll be able to figure out what it is.”
“And when it starts, it’s going to create a hum. If we’re close, a loud hum. I figure about two minutes after the hum starts, it’ll be too late,” Marcia said.
“I can arrest anyone out there for the murder of Krista Lewis, on suspicion,” Gonzalez said thoughtfully. “Maybe I should go.”
“I could arrest people, as your deputy,” Rosen said. “Captain Harben wouldn’t object.”
“You realize that you probably will be arresting Krista Lewis’s murderer?” Daniel Grantham said with a mirthless smile. “And Jim Leetsdale’s, too. I doubt these people are going to be friendly. They’re not going to allow themselves to be cuffed and hauled away.”
“And if we don’t get there before they meet up with Alan and Eileen, I wouldn’t give them much chance of making it out,” Beth said worriedly.
“Who’s going to make it out?” Joe asked. “Depends on who sees whom first. But I still want to be there. She barely made it away from the last attempt.”
“Let me call Paris,” Gonzalez said. Joe thought he hadn’t heard correctly, but he saw Marcia’s puzzled expression. Daniel Grantham, however, was shaking his head.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Save us all.”
“Paris?” Rosen asked.
“You need to get out there fast. You need Paris.”
“Paris Linsley is just a guy who lives in the valley,” Daniel said, and rolled his eyes. “Just a guy. Right. He’s an engineer, invented some kind of pollution sniffer device that every factory in America has to have on every smokestack. Now he’s retired, and he invents other stuff that’s mostly crap but occasionally makes him even richer.”
“And he’s only twenty-nine,” Susan said, with a twist to her mouth. Joe had seen that look before on a woman’s face. Paris Linsley had made a try for Susan and had been shot down in flames. She was obviously attached to Frank, nose and holsters and all.
“Why do we need this guy?” Joe asked. Rosen wasn’t saying anything, but his eyebrows were drawn together.
“Because he owns Babe, his own personal hummer,” Gonzalez said. “It’s a two-hundred-thousand-dollar Humvee, outfitted for the sand and painted a color of purple that I have only seen on dead people.”
“He helps with search and rescue,” Susan added, with that bit-into-a-sour-grape expression. “He loves to help with search and rescue.”
“I’m going to call him,” Gonzalez said, heaving an enormous sigh. “I’m going to send Detective Rosen, who will be my sworn deputy in about a half-hour, Joe Tanner, Marcia Fowler, and Daniel Grantham. No, Susan, you can’t go.”
“Why Marcia?” Susan all but wailed. “Why Daniel?”
“Because they might have a handle on things if they turn a direction that we haven’t discussed openly,” Gonzalez said heavily.
“What the hell does that mean?” Joe asked.
“It means aliens,” Marcia said matter-of-factly, her face wreathed in a smile that made her look about sixteen years old. “Thank you, Sheriff. I’m sure we’ll just be along for the ride.”
“I hope so,”
Daniel said fervently.
22
Great Sand Dunes, San Luis Valley, Colorado
Eileen couldn’t sleep. She was wire-tense. Her shoulders ached, not with the strain of the backpack but with the strain of lying a foot away from her father. He was unmoving, probably asleep, but she couldn’t see his face. His interesting tent had an igloo-type opening and they’d left the flap open. Outside, the stars crowded the sky. The sand was still and moveless, so Eileen knew morning was still a few hours away. If, in fact, the morning wind blew. If it did not, they would have to come up with a different plan when they reached the center of the dunes tomorrow. They had to be completely hidden when Jacob Mitchell’s people came, if they did come. She hoped one of them would have a bruised chest from her bullet. Eileen shifted a little in her sleeping bag. The sand was marvelously comfortable, as good as a mattress. She should be sleeping. She had to sleep. She was certainly not going to say anything. Certainly not.
“Do I have any brothers or sisters?”
“No,” Alan said immediately, in a voice that told her that he was as wide awake as she was, and was waiting for her to speak. “I never married again.”
“Any older brothers or sisters?”
“No,” Alan said, in a surprised voice. “We got pregnant on our honeymoon with you. Didn’t she tell you? And Linda—that’s your mother—she had those cycles.”
“Bipolar cycles,” Eileen said. Linda, she thought, through the sick pounding in her chest. My mother’s name was Linda.
“Yeah, that’s what I figure, but I couldn’t get her to go to a doctor,” Alan said. His voice was rough. He shifted a little in his sleeping bag and rose on one elbow. There was a faint gurgle of his water bottle as he drank. “I’m sorry. This is hard for me.”
“No kidding,” Eileen said under her breath. Alan chuckled rustily.
“Can you—tell me about your mom? Your adoptive parents? How did you end up in their care? I tried so hard to find you, and I never could.”
“My parents called every state to see if a three-year-old and her mother had been reported missing, after Mom died. They never found any reports,” Eileen said harshly, and louder than she intended.
“She’s dead, then,” Alan said, after a long silence.
“She’s dead.” Eileen took a long sip from her own water bottle, easing a throat that felt suddenly rough.
“I’m sorry,” Alan said quietly.
“It’s a long time ago,” Eileen said with a shrug he couldn’t see.
“I reported you both missing the minute I got home from my trip. The police never found anything. That’s what they said. And—Linda knew where I was. I knew she could find me, if she wanted to. She never did. Now I know why.”
“Maybe the police reports you filed never made it to South Dakota,” Eileen said grudgingly. She was in police work. She knew how many things slipped through the cracks every day.
There was silence again, not as tense as before. Eileen could feel dampness at her hairline and down the line of her back. The tent was warm, even though there was snow not twenty feet from the entrance.
“I never knew she was dead, you know. I didn’t know why she never wanted support of some kind, or a divorce. I—I missed you a lot.”
“Really.”
“Yeah, really,” Alan said. His voice was rougher, and Eileen heard the gurgle as he took another sip of water. “Your mother wasn’t right when I married her, Eileen. You know what she was. I didn’t know, not for a long time. When we brought you home from the hospital you were so little and sweet. You had beady little eyes like some sort of wild animal baby, and it seemed like you were always awake. She nursed you, she would do that, but once you were done, she would just lie back and turn away. I had to burp you and change you and walk with you.”
“She must have been in the low part of her cycle,” Eileen commented. She had faint memories of digging in her mother’s handbag and devouring crackers wrapped in crackly cellophane, crackers that seemed to taste like heaven, while her mother lay in a curled-up position on some motel room bed. She was sure there were more memories like that, if she dug for them. She didn’t really care to dig for them.
“I know that she was, now. Then, I was just frantic. I had a job and a new wife and a new baby and nothing was turning out like I thought. I talked to my neighbors, thank the Lord for them. Maria Escobar came over every day while I was at work and looked after the two of you. She would fix supper and leave it on the stove, and I paid her in cash because she was an illegal alien, a refugee from Nicaragua. Her husband worked as a gardener with a big crew of mostly illegals. I would feed your mother and change your diaper and then I would rock you, for hours. We’d talk, you and I.” Alan made a ghastly little chuckling sound. “I’d coo and say hola and hello and guten Tag and every other hello in every language I could think of, and you would look at me with those bright eyes and spit up on my shoulder. Then we’d talk some more. I loved my little girl. I was sure that Linda would pull out of it. The birth was so hard, you know. So hard on her.”
“But things didn’t get better,” Eileen whispered, in a voice that felt like something run over in the road and left to dry in the sun.
“No, they didn’t. So when I tried to have her evaluated, she thought I was going to have her committed, or killed. I should have waited until the manic phase of her cycle, but I didn’t. My mistake.”
Outside, the sand started to pick up in tiny swirls and drifts. There was a sighing sound. The toasted, burned smell of the dunes drifted into the tent.
“I think we’d better close the flap,” Eileen said. She let Alan reach forward and fix the tent flap in place. Spatters of sand immediately began to strike against the entrance, and there was a mournful hooting sound as the wind began to pick up. The tent was now pitch dark inside, and a little stuffy. Eileen could smell some sort of soap smell from Alan, and a whiff of old-man sweat. The smell of her father. It didn’t smell familiar to her, and for a moment she was swamped with a feeling of desolation. What was she doing here in the sand and the dark with this stranger?
“So I thought I’d got over hating her,” Alan said hoarsely. “Can you tell me how she died, just to put my mind at rest? I know I have no claim on you, on your story. But I want to know what happened, where you went, how she died. I want to know why I couldn’t—” he stopped.
“Couldn’t what?” Eileen asked cruelly. She knew he was overcome with some strong emotion, but she didn’t care. He owed her that much.
“Couldn’t see you off to prom,” he said, and laughed the laugh of a man who was trying very hard not to weep.
“Oh,” Eileen said, feeling very strange, blinking in the stuffy darkness. Her prom had been like a checkmark in a series of things to do to graduate. Finish finals, get her graduation robe, go to prom. Owen Sutter was still trying to choose her instead of Molly although it was obvious to both girls that Molly belonged with Owen. So he took both of them, because there were always more senior girls than boys, and they’d smirked for the prom photographer and pretended they were a sophisticated, decadent threesome. Her mom and dad had taken lots of pictures of her in her pale green prom dress, and she supposed it was a fun night.
“I would like to know about your mother,” Alan said simply. So Eileen told him. She told him about the little dented sedan and the failed run at the bridge and John Reed, her angel brother, sent to die so that she would live.
The near-total darkness made it easier for her to tell her story. The unseen weight of the sand pressing on the tent and the warmth of their sleeping bags, pressed shoulder to shoulder, made her feel curiously isolated and intimate at the same time. They lay curled close to each other like twins in a womb, sharing nothing but their warmth and their voices. And this was no stranger, assessing her flaws. This was her father, the only other person in the world who knew what it was like to live with the monster who had inhabited Linda Doran.
When she was done, there was silence. The sand scrat
ched at the tent entrance like tiny hands, and the wind hooted against the flap.
“I’m so sorry,” Alan said finally, in a voice so low she could barely hear him. “I couldn’t save you from that. I’m your father, and I couldn’t save you.”
“I survived,” Eileen said, shrugging in the darkness. “I was lucky, what happened to me. What—what did you do?”
“I survived, too,” Alan said grimly. “After the first six months I gave up sales. I couldn’t sell anything anymore. I used to be such a whiz, and it all turned bad. I quit before I got fired. Then I waited tables while I tried to decide what to do. I finally went back to school and got my master’s degree in English literature. I know that sounds funny, but I didn’t know what else to do. I was just drifting. Then I landed a job in Wyoming, at the community college in Cheyenne. That was pretty much it for me. I taught. I learned how to fly-fish. I learned how to love life again.”
“But you never married,” Eileen said.
“No, I didn’t. I had a lot of girlfriends, if you want to know,” Alan said, with a ghost of his old humor in his voice. “But marriage was poisoned for me, forever. I lost my wife. I lost my baby daughter. I wouldn’t take that kind of risk again.”
“Marriage is risky,” Eileen whispered with an effort. She realized she was getting sleepy, which was insane. She should be asking him the careful questions that would let her know if Krista Lewis, recently murdered, was one of his girlfriends that he wouldn’t risk marrying—if Krista Lewis had entered these dunes with him last week—and never come out. But it all seemed far away and silly, to imagine this man a murderer. He couldn’t be.
“What was that?” Alan asked, from a long way away.
“I trusted Joe,” Eileen said after an eternity. She thought she was explaining everything about Joe, how he was a suspect in her first big military case and how she couldn’t believe in her heart that he was a murderer. How she’d been right, which was very good because if she’d been wrong he could have killed her and would have killed her. But she wasn’t saying anything, she realized, surfacing for a last time. She was drifting down again, and across the now enormous floor of the tent she heard the measured, slow breaths of her father, asleep.
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