CHAPTER 20
Caroline fell into bed exhausted but happy after her afternoon up on the mountaintop with Ken. She slept fitfully, dreaming vivid dreams as her mind explored the perils and possibilities that awaited her in the days and weeks to come…
The first wave of flights touched down at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, bringing the day’s first group of transfer passengers. Most were traveling north or south along the eastern corridor of the United States. Uniformed staff checked boarding passes at the entrance to the first-class lounge, ushering premium-class passengers inside, away from the hustle and bustle of the terminal, so they could help themselves to complimentary cocktails, juice, snacks, and gourmet coffee. At this hour the lounge was filled mostly with businessmen working on laptops and talking on cell phones.
And one elderly woman in a wheelchair. On the woman’s lap was an FAA-approved Sherpa bag for the carriage of live animals. A small dog pushed its nose through the steel grid in the container door.
“Hello. Welcome to the Red Carpet Club,” said the passenger services agent. “I hope we can make you comfortable today.” She smiled at the elderly passenger.
The old lady smiled back and handed over her boarding pass and ticket.
The dog snarled, working its sharp fangs around the steel grid opening.
“Good morning, Mrs. Nan Birmingham,” the agent said, entering something into her computer. “You are connecting from Denver to Naples, Florida, is that right?”
The old lady nodded.
Inside the container, the dog growled.
“And your dog,” the agent said.
“He hates to fly,” the elderly woman explained.
“We sure are glad you chose Delta,” the agent said brightly.
The dog snarled.
The passenger services agent walked out from behind the desk and leaned over to greet her first-class special assist.
Which sent the dog into another round of frenzied yapping.
The agent’s smile lost some of its sparkle. All airline employees hated pets, at least when they flew. “Let’s find a quiet spot where you and the doggy will be comfortable.” She steered the old lady and her wheelchair to the farthest corner of the big lounge, settling her with hot tea and a package of sugar cookies. She winced when the woman requested cheese, a bottle of water, and a bowl for the dog.
“It’s time for his tranquilizer,” Nan said.
A series of low growls emitted from the cage.
The agent frowned. “I’m afraid all dogs must be kept inside their traveling container at all times inside the airport. For their safety as well as that of your fellow passengers.”
“It’ll help him sleep,” Nan explained. “It’s a long trip from Denver. Which is why I paid for first class.”
That settled it. The passenger services agent looked around. The only person nearby was a guy in a black suit, traveling on a group fare to a conference in Miami, hunched over his Sony Vaio laptop like it contained the Da Vinci code. He didn’t look up.
“Okay,” the agent replied. “But remember, I told you we don’t allow it. If you open the door to his cage while my back is turned, that’s another story.”
First-class passenger Birmingham gave a happy smile.
“Please don’t let him off the leash.” The passenger services agent took one last look at the tiny fangs that were working the cage door before heading to the kitchenette for some mini cheese packages, which she loaded onto a china plate. She chose two bottles of mineral water, one sparkling and one still, a glass, and a small bowl. She placed them all on a tray with some napkins and deposited them on the table in front of her wheelchair passenger.
The old lady beamed.
The passenger services agent bent down, close enough to the cage to set the animal growling again, and whispered, “Please, Mrs. Birmingham, please don’t let him off his leash.”
Nan smiled and waved her off. “Not to worry.” She searched her purse for the medication the vet had prescribed. The little terrier didn’t behave well on planes. He didn’t behave well off planes, for that matter. Scout had been the Colonel’s dog.
“Wretched animal. Take your pill,” Nan grumbled, stuffing one of the pills inside a wad of cheese. She set the cage on the floor, opened it, and quickly clipped his leash to his collar.
Scout nosed out and gobbled the morsel. He sniffed the carpet for crumbs, straining at the end of his leash.
“No exploring,” Nan said quietly. “Sit.”
The dog pulled harder and whined.
The man at the table glanced up from his laptop and frowned.
Scout tugged at his leash.
Nan tugged back. “Hush,” she whispered.
Scout whined, louder this time.
Nan sighed. She reached for another mini cheese packet.
Scout sat on his haunches and barked.
Frowning, Nan broke off a piece of cheese and tossed it to him.
Scout gobbled it and backed away, ears erect. He gave a low whine.
Nan took another piece of cheese and held it out. “Sit.”
The dog inched closer and sat.
“Good dog,” Nan said, the way her new housekeeper had shown her. “Now shake.”
Scout did not move.
Nan repeated the command. “Shake.”
Scout licked his chops.
“Shake,” Nan said again, louder.
The man in black released an audible sigh, closed his laptop noisily, and stood.
Scout eyed the cheese and yapped once.
Nan scowled and shook the cheese near Scout’s mouth. “Shake,” she commanded.
Scout did not move.
“Stubborn dog,” Nan muttered.
The man in black collected his belongings, his face twisted in a grimace.
Nan tried one last time. “Shake.”
Scout rushed at Nan’s hand and nuzzled it, looking for the cheese.
The man began to walk away.
Exasperated, Nan opened her hand.
Scout gobbled the cheese.
“It always works with Pippin,” she muttered.
The man stopped and stood, stock-still.
Nan unwrapped one more piece of cheese and tossed it to the dog. “Might as well,” she said, “We’ve got a long way to go.”
The man did an about-face and surveyed Nan through steel-rimmed spectacles. He walked over and smiled. “That’s a good-looking dog you’ve got there,” he said…
Caroline woke from her dream with a pounding heart, her breath shallow and ragged. It was only a dream. A nightmare, something about Porter. She couldn’t remember the details, only that it was something long and complicated and twisted. Her mouth was dry and had the taste of wet slate that, she had learned long ago, accompanied panic.
She tried to calm herself with knowledge she had acquired from Porter. Nightmares, she knew, were usually the acting out of conflict, in this case guilt from kissing Ken. Which, in turn, was an externalization of guilt from that other, older stain that was stamped on her soul forever.
And yet Caroline’s gut had a different interpretation.
She would never be safe if she stayed in one place too long.
Going back to sleep was impossible now. She rose and went to the window. The night was crystal clear, the yard silvery with light from a brilliant orange moon that hung low in the sky. The harvest moon, Ken had told her, explaining that every full moon had a name.
She watched as a ghostly shape unfolded itself from a branch, taking flight across the night sky on giant black wings. The creature wheeled across the pasture like a phantom and was gone. An owl on the hunt.
Her grandmother had believed in omens.
A shiver passed through Caroline, wracking her all the way to her core. A familiar claustrophobia took hold of her chest, sending tendrils of despair up into her throat so that breathing became difficult. She could not escape the past. Not really.
She spent the hour
s until dawn in a restless state that was neither sleep nor wakefulness, rising at dawn to let herself out.
The dogs scampered past her into the yard. Snow had fallen on Ute Peak overnight, dusting it with white so it looked like a confectioner’s dessert. The air was clear and shimmering with frost.
Lack of sleep left her edgy, nervous. She loved the pinkish light of dawn when the day was new, but today was different. The sky didn’t seem bright enough, leaving the forest in shadow. Small sounds made her jump. She decided too late she would have felt safer in bed.
Great billows of steam rose from the pond.
She stripped, anxious for the soothing effect she felt in the bubbling water, and waded through the shallows until she was knee-deep. She sank down, turned onto her back, and floated, drifting toward center. The shoreline receded, and all that remained was the steamy wet cloud hanging just above her head, masking all sound except the splashing of her own limbs in the dark water.
It was a lonely sound.
Pieces of the nightmare drifted back, slowly at first. Porter. He was hunting her like she was some sort of animal. Her pulse quickened at the thought of him focused on one single powerful objective. Finding her. Her pulse quickened as the night terror returned.
She was not safe. Not here, not anywhere.
She forced herself to draw deep breaths, reminded herself of where she was, that she was awake now. But it was no use. Unease took root at the base of her spine and spread, like spiders racing across bare skin. She shuddered, telling herself the dream was induced by her own guilt and meant nothing.
But guilt was a powerful emotion.
More snatches of the nightmare popped into her mind, crowding in faster and faster until they fit together and told one terrible truth like pieces of a puzzle.
Porter was good at solving puzzles.
Panic set in. She imagined unseen hands pulling her down into murky depths. She began to flail, her limbs jerky and uncoordinated, rudderless in the dark water. She was gripped by a terror that, she realized, had taken hold of her in her sleep. It grew in ferocity now, gripping her, filling her mouth with the taste of slate, panic.
She screamed, and the sound hung in the air above her head as she scrambled for the shallows, splashing loudly. The sound, she was sure, would alert the unseen phantoms that would reach up to pull her down.
The pond, usually so inviting, had turned on her.
She gasped for air and took in water instead. She rotated her limbs, splashing wildly, and felt herself sinking down into that vortex.
The message of her nightmare hit home. Porter would find her. And once he did, she would not have many hours left to live.
Caroline screamed again.
Her feet touched bottom. She scrambled on all fours to the edge, bracing to be grabbed from behind at any moment.
As though Porter had already arrived.
She nearly jumped out of her skin when Pippin and Scout appeared in the mist at the water’s edge. She barely toweled off, pulling on her clothes with hands that shook.
She ran back through the woods, gripped by the fear that she was pursued by phantoms. She recalled that the ancient people who had settled here believed the waters held powerful magic. If the mountain didn’t accept a person, it would turn its power against him.
Caroline knew the time had come to leave Storm Pass.
CHAPTER 21
MODESTO, CALIFORNIA
Tom Fielding had spent a restless night, wedged onto an ever smaller area of their queen-sized mattress by a cranky febrile twin. Sometime around dawn, he gave up and went to the couch in the den.
But still, he could not sleep.
He had received a notification message in his inbox indicating his e-mail to Caroline had been opened and read, but no phone call. Not even a reply to his e-mail.
This bothered Tom, but he didn’t feel any real sense of urgency about it until he was lying there in the darkness just before dawn, trying to stay warm beneath a small SpongeBob blanket that smelled of milk.
That’s when the truth struck Tom Fielding, in that awful way of truth.
Caroline Hughes was in danger. He knew it then with such certainty he wondered why he hadn’t seen it before.
The two hours that followed were the slowest of Tom Fielding’s life, but he found himself at last in his office with the door closed so he could talk on the phone without interruption.
He entered the number he had Googled on the Web, hoping he wouldn’t come across sounding like a nut.
A woman answered on the second ring, her voice robotic with efficiency. “Washington, D.C., Police Service Area 2. What is the nature of your call?”
Tom took in a breath. “I, ah, I am very concerned for the safety of one of your residents.”
DENVER, COLORADO
Porter Moross watched a look of pure elation wash over the car salesman’s face. The guy tried hard not to show it. He was in his late forties, with a thickening middle and ruddy patches of skin around his nose and mouth. A drinker who fought for every sale. And those, Porter suspected, would come fewer and further between with each passing year.
The salesman swallowed and licked his lips, tilting his head closer to make sure he’d heard Porter right. “You’ll take it?”
“Yes,” Porter said with no hint of a smile. He kept his features neutral, enjoying the salesman’s nervous attentiveness. The man had offered Porter a shitty deal, and now he couldn’t believe Porter was taking it. Porter kept his steely blue eyes locked on the man’s face, certain the guy was probably creaming in his pants right now.
“We have on-site financing with a bank here in Denver,” the salesman began, his eyes darting around the showroom floor.
In search, no doubt, of another salesman he could do a mental high five with, to celebrate selling the biggest gas-guzzling SUV ever to roll off a Detroit assembly line. Porter cut him off. “I have cash.”
The man swallowed again, his bushy eyebrows yanking up into his forehead. “Okay. Okay, then. I’ll just get the paperwork going, Mr. Moross.”
“Doctor.”
“Doctor. Dr. Moross.”
There was, Porter thought, nothing like cash to improve someone’s attention to detail. Especially for the specimen of shallow humanity who even now was pounding his keyboard as fast as his meaty fingers would go, no doubt trying to calculate whether he’d get laid tonight if he blew some of his commission on dinner with his wife at the local chain steakhouse.
“There we go,” the salesman said, reverting to his smooth, professional bullshit voice. He pressed one last key, and a nearby printer whirred to life. He busied himself with things on his desk, opening and closing drawers with an air of importance like he had just unlocked the genetic code for cancer. But not too busy, Porter noticed, to check out the ass on one of his coworkers when she walked by. The salesman collected the papers from the printer and brought them back to his desk, bouncing them several times on the Formica. He raced through the contents, tapping at places for Porter’s signature with an expensive gold-plated pen.
“This signifies your agreement to sell us the Saab at the price we agreed on.” He watched Porter sign, keeping his voice bland as though what he had just witnessed wasn’t the best thing since Guinness started bottling ale for export.
“This is your agreement to the terms of purchase for the Yukon, including the discount for your trade-in.” He tapped the paper again with his pen and waited for Porter’s signature. “So, Dr. Moross, once we, ah, finish up, I can get you temporary plates and get you on your way. Once we receive payment,” he sat, eyes narrowed, waiting.
A deal wasn’t a deal until money changed hands. The basic fact of every salesman’s life. This was the moment when the guy sweated bullets, because the pendulum would take one last swing in favor of the customer he had just spent hours or even days greasing. The time when the guy’s thoughts were no doubt running through the list of repairs needed on the crappy tract house he shared with the wife,
smiling in a dated wedding gown from the frame behind his desk.
Porter sat for several moments longer than the salesman would have liked, enjoying the stillness that settled around them. He watched as the guy fumbled for a tissue, pretending to wipe his nose.
“Allergies,” the salesman mumbled.
But Porter saw him mop at beads of sweat that had clustered along his upper lip.
Porter hated the salesman. Not because the man had just ripped him off, deepening the fissure of corruption that ran through his personality. Not because the guy would never scratch below the surface of his stupid life to understand the reasons he’d never make district sales manager for southern Colorado, or why, after a few beers, he was compelled to stop at the local whorehouse on his way home. No, the reason Porter hated the guy was that it didn’t matter in the end. Because the man across the desk, who had been sneaking sideways glances for the last hour at Porter’s too white skin and albino hair, had achieved everything he had bargained for in life.
Whereas he, Porter Moross, had not.
To his credit, the salesman said nothing. Only waited.
Porter opened his portfolio, black leather handcrafted in Milan. It contained a mixture of old and new, including keys to the townhouse in Georgetown as well as those few items he needed now, such as a heavy manila envelope he had obtained from Riggs National Bank in Washington, D.C., and his gleaming .38 semiautomatic.
Porter undid the purple string outside the envelope now and withdrew a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills, counting them out with his slender fingers.
Across the desk, the salesman shifted in his seat and mopped once more at his lip.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
From his office window, John Crowley could see historic Blair House, official guest residence for visiting dignitaries and heads of state, located just across Pennsylvania Avenue. The view did not quite make up for the tiny office he was squeezed into, at the end of a twisting hallway that led through the rabbit warren that comprised the Old Executive Office Building.
What the place lacked in comfort, it made up for in prestige.
A Dark Love Page 17