Silent Scream

by Karen Harper

  “Oh, yeah. I’m getting overprogrammed.”

  “Aren’t we all and no wonder. I guess he wants to ask her style type questions.”

  “Style?” he asked, turning back in the kitchen doorway. “About an aid to help people with face recognition problems?”

  She got up and started to clear dishes. “I think like whether to put the tiny computer camera in a sort of bulky necklace, some kind of pin or sunglasses, something like that.”

  “Oh, he did mention that on the phone. Got to get going, sweetheart. TGIF! Our private date night, even if we don’t go out.”

  “Right—and tomorrow we have a date for a funeral. But remember, we promised Lexi a Saturday walk on the beach.”

  “When I say goodbye to her, I’ll tell her we’ll go midmorning tomorrow. Be right back.”

  At least there were several things to look forward to when they’d been through so much, Claire thought. She glanced down at the obituary on the table, then sat to read it carefully. You just never knew when someone who was so busy and full of life, maybe someone you needed and loved, wasn’t coming home.

  * * *

  Heck asked Claire to sit in with him and Kris to give her opinion too. He showed them three computer-generated drawings of where he could secrete the camera lens so that when a person with face blindness was approached by someone who was not a stranger, but had his or her image already recorded and identified, a tiny, invisible device in one ear would give the person’s name. If there was another short prompt needed, that would have been recorded along with the person’s identity.

  “Amazing,” Kris said, beaming. “But can you make the camera micro-sized and make it work fast enough so there won’t be a stupid pause, waiting for that message? That’s the way I’ve always felt as I stand there like an idiot, trying to ID the person, looking for telltale signs, something familiar they might be wearing, hair color—like with Claire—anything.”

  “Got to admit size and speed will be the challenges,” Heck said. “And finding a partner company to manufacture a good-looking necklace, large pin, glasses or sunglasses. But I’ve got to get this computerized camera and earpiece down first.”

  “Which means,” Kris said, “you might not like my answer. I think it would be great if face blindness sufferers had a choice of devices to do this great spy work. Especially for a male to use this, the glasses would seem the best, but you know women like a variety of things. I suppose a chunky necklace would be my first choice, something ceramic, not a precious metal, to keep the price down, right?”

  She looked at Claire, who nodded. Was Kris also picturing Reaching Woman’s broken necklace? That reminded Claire that she wanted a moment alone with Kris before she left.

  While Heck and Kris continued to confer, Claire went to get Trey up. The door to the guest room was open, and Nita was packing a suitcase on the bed. Claire gave a little knock, knock on the door frame, and Nita jumped.

  “You’re okay with moving into your house this weekend?” Claire asked, hovering in the doorway.

  “Bronco says if it’s too tough, I can’t sleep or whatever, just stay two nights, then talk it over. I want it to work, Claire. But if there’s one more thing that happens there, I got to say the house is cursed and we somehow got to find another.”

  Claire stepped in and hugged her. “It will all work out. I’m sure it will.”

  “I know you got guests. I heard Hector’s voice. I was just going to get Trey up, change him and bring him down to all of you.”

  “I’d appreciate that. I’ll see if Heck and Kris are done yet.”

  She stepped back and put her hands on Nita’s shoulders. “You’re a strong woman, Nita Gates. You are going to be more than okay.”

  Nita nodded, and as Claire went back out, she hoped that could be true for her too.

  * * *

  Still holding a very curious Trey, who seemed enamored of Kris, Claire walked her friend out to her Jeep.

  “Kris, I wanted to ask you something before I ask Brad. Do you recall, either on Hunter’s dagger or on Leader’s staff, that there was a picture or carving of a woman with her hands uplifted? You know, kind of like a ref signaling a touchdown in a football game?”

  “Now there’s a mixed message,” Kris said with what Claire thought was a forced laugh. “But Andrea whisks the artifacts themselves away pretty fast for preservation and cleaning. Besides, since the Senator’s claustrophobia bothers him if he comes out in the bog all hemmed in by those trees, he kind of panics. With my disability, I feel for him. So I get it that Andrea snatches the artifacts up and gets them to him so he can study them in his office or lab to feel part of a new discovery. That and fundraising are his part in all this.”

  “Wait. You said Brad has an office as well as that large lab with the screen to show the photos?”

  “His office is behind the lab, through a door off it. Considering his problem with closed spaces, I don’t think he uses it much. I only saw it once—desk, chairs, bookcase, locked drawers of relics, as he likes to call them, I think a safe with papers, contracts, stuff like that. Yi Ling helps him with his photography of items, so maybe you could ask her if she saw that raised-arms petroglyph too.” She frowned and looked down at the ground. “But no, I don’t recall that myself among all the other pictures or depictions.”

  “And it would have stood out. If it was a rendition of Reaching Woman, the upraised arms would mean something important. Maybe that she worshipped a higher being—some sort of creator or god, good or evil—or it could mean that she herself should be worshipped.”

  “What? I never thought of that. But she has a dagger in her!”

  “I know what I’m going to say now sounds insane, but you’re the only one I’m telling. I want you to promise you won’t even tell Andrea or the dig team, let alone the senator, until I think this out to present to them.”

  “All right, I promise. But if you’re on to a new theory—or some kind of suspicion—you are going to have to tell me that. Now you promise me!”

  “When I can. I know we’ve been looking for a reason someone would have stabbed Reaching Woman. I have, anyway. But the angle of that dagger—kind of upward into her chest—and the feeling we have that something was wrong among the three of them... Kris, what if she stabbed herself? Decided to or was reared to be a sacrifice or was even made to because she broke some sort of rule about belonging to Leader but loving Hunter?”

  “Claire,” she said, hands on hips, “you’re married to a criminal lawyer who gets people off from murder charges. Are you sure that isn’t coloring your theory on this—I mean, like, you don’t want her to have been murdered by one of the men? I know Nick’s new client is up for murder—double murder now—and I know the two of you have been through tough times, but you’re not transferring some of your past into this ancient death, are you?”

  Claire bounced Trey in her arms. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’m going to ask Brad to let me see those items on Monday, and I hope you’ll back me up on that.”

  “Andrea makes all those decisions, and I have to honor what she wants.”

  “Does Andrea make final decisions? Or does he?”

  “They’re a team. You know that. Like you and Nick. Like I hope to be someday with a man—maybe Mitch, though I don’t know about falling for men with dangerous careers.”

  “Yeah. Been there, done that,” Claire admitted, realizing Kris had shifted them off the subject of murder-suicide—murdercide, Nick called it. “And who knows that Reaching Woman didn’t share that fear with us? In her world, Hunter was living a dangerous life, but maybe that made him more appealing to her, more desirable.”

  “The price we pay for the exciting, macho guys, right?”

  “Right. See you on Monday then since we’re going to have a family weekend here. And let me know if you get any hint about what the Vances—all fo
r one and one for all—might say about my looking at and handling the artifacts.”

  Kris nodded and patted Trey’s back before she climbed in the Jeep. Claire lifted his little hand to wave goodbye as Kris pulled out.

  She had learned a couple of interesting things. Brad probably kept the artifacts in his closed-in office he didn’t like, so he wanted badly enough to hide them that he braved that room for storage. Yi Ling worked closely with him. And, although she hadn’t heard this from him, he called the artifacts relics, which connoted they were especially dear and precious—almost sacred or holy—to him.

  * * *

  On the beach as they waded in the surf, the wash of waves felt so good around their bare legs. Claire and Nick held Lexi’s hand for a while, then let her pick up shells. The water slid up the slick sand, depositing them and uncovering the tiny coquina, which then upended themselves and dug in again.

  Lexi chattered on about everything she saw, but Claire was only half listening. “Mommy, those little shells! The ones that are open look like butterflies, see?” she said, extending an almost plaid coquina in her open palm.

  “They sure do. Let Dad see them up close.”

  Claire was still floating on air, or maybe it was more like riding the waves, after Nick’s lovemaking last night. Tender at first, almost teasing. She replayed some of it like a recorded favorite show. They danced, then kissed, then finally couldn’t wait to love each other, and she was, as ever with him, swept away with passion and abandon...

  “Oooh, what’s that?” Lexi broke into her reverie, pointing at a blob in the sand that looked like a plastic bag full of air.

  “Oh, oh,” Nick said, tugging her back from it. “That’s what they call a Portuguese man-of-war. It’s an animal, and those purple cords are tentacles that can sting you really bad, so we have to walk way around.”

  “You can see inside of it. Ick!” Lexi said, but she let him lead them in a large path to avoid it. “I think it’s dead!”

  “It can still hurt you,” he warned.

  Claire noted a sign up on a grassy slope above the concrete breakwater: Sold. Pine Ridge Luxury Realty. While they avoided being stung, she remembered the for sale sign that Cyndi had posed with on her LinkedIn page.

  “I’ll watch out for more bad man-of-war tents,” Lexi promised as she ran a bit ahead of them.

  “Pretty close to man-o’-war tentacles,” Nick said with a little laugh.

  “Nick, this house—even though we’re at the back of it—looks familiar,” she told him, stopping to study the mansion with its fabulous view of the Gulf of Mexico. “It would face on Gordon Drive, right?”

  “Sure. All these along here do. Why?”

  “The Vances just sold a home along here, and this sign says sold.”

  “So, maybe it was their house. And?”

  “And when we walk back to the car, can we drive by the front of it? There’s a picture on Cyndi Lindley’s LinkedIn page where she’s standing in front of a house with a for sale sign as if she’s the Realtor. That was either wishful thinking or a con job, which she was obviously capable of. Wouldn’t that be something if the house she chose to take a fake picture in front of was the Vances’ place—and being sold by that Harmon Kingsdale’s company?”

  “A spider’s web of possibilities,” he said as Lexi ran back to them with a piece of warped driftwood with some kind of small shells clinging to it. “But I’ve learned to honor what Ken Jensen likes to say: ‘There are very few if any coincidences in detective work.’ Sure, we can drive around.”

  “What are these?” Lexi asked, pointing to the piece of wood.

  “I think they’re called limpets,” Nick told her. “They are a lot like little snails that just grab on with a sticky foot and won’t let go.”

  Claire patted Lexi’s back and nodded. Her suspicions about Cyndi and Marian—even Brad Vance—hung on, suspicions that clung like fears. Ones that just would not let go.

  33

  Marian James’s funeral was held at the Saint Leo Catholic Church in Bonita Springs. It was a large lovely building of Spanish decor with a bronze statue of the Virgin Mary in front as if guarding the place.

  Claire stared at the Madonna’s slightly outstretched hands with her palms open. Were those hands supposed to be reaching out with a message of welcome? Of peace? Of help? This was another reaching woman from the past, one venerated and worshipped here. Claire could not shake the idea that Reaching Woman had been something like that to her people. She had to examine those hands-off relics Brad had evidently been hiding. Surely, he and Andrea wanted her to do what they’d hired her for.

  They sat halfway back in the large sanctuary where they could watch people, since most sat closer to the front.

  “There’s Harmon Kingsdale,” Nick whispered but he didn’t point. “The one with the silver hair, mustache and light blue sport coat. Let’s see who he sits with.”

  “That must be his wife. Really pretty. Younger.”

  Out of the side of his mouth, Nick whispered, “People are saying that about us.”

  She elbowed him and smiled. The glow of their lovemaking last night and their fun with Lexi earlier still warmed her.

  They stood with everyone as the closed casket with an arrangement of roses and carnations was rolled down the aisle with the priest following. Boys with censers led the procession, their wisps of smoke a reminder to Claire of the terrible way Marian had perished. No, she was strangled first, Claire reminded herself. Two women dead, one frozen, one burned. And one—eons ago—stabbed to death by an enemy or by herself.

  The priest’s message praised all Marian had done for people, for her community. Still, Claire thought, it didn’t seem that the priest had actually known her, as he offered no memories or comments of his own about her. Had she attended here, was she active in this parish? He hadn’t said so. Maybe she’d been born and baptized Catholic but had fallen away and the church was being kind to bury her.

  She drew her attention away from the service and admired the high wooden beams overhead with the stained-glass window of Noah and some animals from the ark just above the large statue of Christ on the cross. She skimmed the people gathered there again and jolted so hard she punched Nick with her elbow.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t see him slip in. That’s Brad Vance sitting with the Kingsdales.”

  “You’re right. He hasn’t changed much since he left office. But why are you surprised? You said Harmon must have sold their house—his company did, I mean.”

  “Or Brad was one of Marian’s committee’s silent partners, but I doubt it since money seems tight at the bog.”

  “Claire, Bradley Vance was a state senator for years. He probably knows most movers and shakers in the state, not just around here. Maybe Harmon Kingsdale was a big donor or the senator did some favor for him or for Marion too, if you must tie her in.”

  “Right. Right,” she repeated.

  But something just didn’t feel right.

  * * *

  Monday morning as she drove toward Black Bog, Claire was still agonizing. In a reversal of her plans, she had given up involving Gina and Heck and had talked Nick out of their going to Harmon Kingsdale’s office to see if they could get more information about Marian’s silent partners and investors in the Endangered Properties Committee. If Kingsdale mentioned the Vances were on board with that, he might tell Brad or Andrea they had been asking and she didn’t want to get any more friends in trouble. And so what if the Vances did contribute to Marian’s work? Or perhaps they got some financial backing from her since they always seemed concerned for money. But how much had Marian known about the Vances’ secret project, and had Cyndi just picked their house at random to lie about her real estate career on LinkedIn? Cyndi could have just stumbled on the house, walking the beach, as she and Nick had earlier today.

  Claire
waved to the guard at the gate. Of course, he took a salary too, a lot of outlay to run this operation and to keep it quiet. Her own salary was very generous; then there was Kris, the dig team, the office and labs they’d built. If Brad was trying to make extra money for their project by selling knockoff artifacts or things inspired by ancient designs, so what, the Vances would probably argue.

  As she parked, she studied the Vances’ new home they had built here. So modest compared to their mansion on the beach. And, although a few hours of sun hit it during midday, didn’t all these ficus trees hanging over the bog make the claustrophobic former senator feel oppressed even in this house? Or was it just the bog itself here that disturbed him?

  Though Brad’s car was there, Andrea’s was not. Nor was it in their short driveway or in their carport. Yes, even that was a real comedown from the three-car garage at their beachside home, but then, as she’d picked up more than once before, when the Vances were ready to go public and sell rights to things, all of that would change, because they’d be famous and rich.

  Claire used her security card to get in the building. She turned on the lights in her and Kris’s office, then put her purse in her desk drawer and took her two-way radio out. Kris must be out at the bog, unless she was in Andrea’s or Brad’s lab areas. Maybe she had asked him to see the artifacts or more complete photos, but if not, Claire was going to.

  She headed for his lab. Andrea’s door was closed. Claire knocked on that door then tried the knob. Locked. As for Brad’s lab, the door was open as usual, but not wide, only slightly ajar. And someone was crying inside.

  “I don’t want to go back home. It’s not really home anymore. A whole year?”

  Yi Ling’s distinctive voice.

  “I just think it’s best. You’ve been great, but we can’t risk going on like this or someone might figure it out,” Brad told her. “I’ll pay for the round-trip ticket, of course, and your salary while you’re away. We cannot have people finding out, questioning you, blaming you. We’ll tell everyone your family asked you to come back for a while since your father is ill.”