by Mary Eicher
“Oh, they would!” Claire insisted. “The rest of the media is going nuts about her. Have you seen cable? They show her every chance they get. Not that they say one word of truth about her. But they like using her photograph.”
Lucy didn’t find Artemis’s explanation of the Harbinger to be exotic. She found it perfectly plausible to know things, to sense things when they aren’t right in front of you. She could hear Artemis’s voice even when she wasn’t speaking. She could feel her touch, smell her scent, know what her partner was feeling even when they were far apart. She was aware of Temmie just then and closed her eyes. She could sense her waking and knew her first thoughts were of her.
*
Artemis opened her eyes and smiled at the vision of Lucy sitting at the breakfast table, chatting with her mother with Angie seated between them. She missed them all. It didn’t feel like the holidays to her. Much as she loved the island, Maui never seemed the proper place to spend Christmas and certainly not this year, not without her family.
She got up and dressed and drove to the beach where she walked along the sand and watched the waves. Had she fulfilled her purpose, she wondered. Solving the mystery behind Ichabod’s death had not brought her peace. Peace is not in the nature of the hunter. She found a sheltered bluff and sat on the sand to watch the seabirds scurry along the surf.
Strang had offered her an avenue of escape. He was hunched over his photos most of the time and still adjusting to Willa’s absence. They didn’t talk about what had happened at the conference, not even once. It was as if that door had closed behind them.
A familiar figure stepped from the shadows and sauntered toward her. The thin early morning sunlight lent a glow to brown skin, and the breeze blew the woman’s long luscious hair about her like a cape. Ethereal and beautiful, Pele moved sensuously, stepping in rhythm with the lapping of the waves. She was dressed in a yellow cloth with a necklace of shells and bracelets high on her arms. She walked leisurely around Artemis, her finger once again lightly drawing a line along her shoulders and finally resting momentarily on her lips.
“This one better now.” Her eyes beamed with a beguiling light. “She learn, ola I ka makana ma ke akua.”
Artemis smiled. “Yes, I accept that life is a gift.”
She rose to her knees as Pele knelt in front of her. The goddess raised her arms and released Artemis’s long black hair from the clasp at the back of her head. Then Pele leaned forward and kissed her gently on the forehead. Warmth from the touch flowed sweetly through her body.
Pele gathered her golden cloth around her and sat on the soft sand.
“He la nani keia la,” she said of the beautiful new day. She took Artemis gently by the hand and had her move closer.
For a time, they sat silently gazing out at the ocean. Then Pele began the message she had come to tell her. She spoke of her island and the riches she lavished upon its wild nature. She spoke of the cleansing rain and the loving embrace of the sea. Her voice was soft as it carried on the breeze but grew harsh as Pele spoke of the volcano and how she stirs up the fires when events provoke the need in her. She turned her head and set her bright eyes at Artemis.
“This pretty sister need use fire soon.” Pele rose gracefully to her feet and put her hand beneath Artemis’s chin. “Aloha au ia ’oe, kama’aina.”
Artemis understood the meaning; Pele was indicating her approval of what Artemis had done. The island goddess had welcomed her home not to rest but to endure.
*
Artemis didn’t return to California as planned. She sent plane tickets for her family to join her in Maui. She met them at the airport and conveyed them to Strang’s cottage. On New Year’s Eve they sat on the edge of the mountain overlooking Wailea and watched the fireworks. The next day, she drove them up the coast to Kapalua and showed them their new home. It was a small, simple bungalow buried in the wild foliage of the West Maui Mountains.
“What do you think, Angie?” Lucy asked her excited daughter.
“I told you before. I love our new home.”
Artemis took her hand. “Want to see inside?”
“Yes!” all three of them answered in unison.
There were three bedrooms each with a bath. Lucy’s mother selected the bedroom in front next to Angie’s choice. Lucy followed Artemis to the master room at the back. It had a lanai that wrapped around to the living room and a huge yard edged with a riot of plumeria and ferns. An enormous bougainvillea hugged the side fence on the right. On the left was a young banyan tree large enough for Angie to climb. Artemis pulled Lucy into an embrace.
“So, what do you think?” she asked, a crooked half smile on her face.
“I think we are going to be very happy here, Temmie.” Lucy turned her face up and kissed her. “Are there any newspapers on Maui that need a reporter?”
Artemis shrugged. “Don’t know. I was thinking about opening a little gift shop in Lahaina. We could sell books and T-shirts and touristy stuff. I’ve got the perfect name for it. Ichabod’s Place. He liked to collect things. He’d have felt right at home in a souvenir shop.”
*
After a month to ponder, Hemsley determined he was pleased. The news cycle had moved on from his convention and its aftermath. The intervening holidays had helped. Coverage was down to an occasional mention even on the cable channels. The opinions of Fielding and Andronikos had caused a passionate debate at first. And every talking head loved the subject of whether the kids had truly predicted the explosion. The scientific community had stopped castigating Strang. But neither the astrophysicist nor Artemis had been available to defend themselves. They had evaporated like mists on a summer day. He couldn’t blame them.
At first, Hemsley had figured the media frenzy would end up helping to get his measures through the legislature. He knew precisely how to play the politicians involved. They loved the fundraising angle on either side of the issue. Still he had the haunting suspicion his administration could be moving too fast, and he wasn’t especially comfortable with the direction. If the ship of state had gone too far, he didn’t want to overcorrect and run it aground. People’s perception of the Harbinger was already beginning to change.
“So now you’ve had time to think things through, have you decided she convinced you?” Jim asked. He brought a stack of press reviews he’d collected since the convention and set them on the governor’s desk.
“She surprised me; I’ll give her that. I’m still bemused by what she said. Basically, she just told us to stop being afraid. And we are all connected. Mystics have claimed that before.”
Jim placed his hand on the stack of papers. “She surprised everyone. It’s not every day we get told we have become a new species.”
“What do you have there?”
“My media scrapbook.” Jim chuckled. “The liberals think she’s fabulous. The conservatives are skeptical but, as usual, haven’t reached a unified conclusion. The lunatic fringe thinks she’s one of theirs. She—or I should say her presentation—made segments on all the cable outlets for weeks. Jeanine Pirro thought she might be a genius. CNN wanted her facts checked. Rachel Maddow promised to get her on her program. Bet you a nickel that will never happen. And the scientific community went apoplectic before closing ranks. Strang is an apostate as far as they’re concerned. And they aren’t too proud of Fielding either. He’s been put on indefinite leave from the NIH.”
Hemsley shrugged. “They are worried about their government grants. Strang has always been rogue. He’s brilliant but not a member of the club if you know what I mean. I checked him out. What about the religious leaders?”
“Some want Miss Andronikos drawn and quartered. Protestants think she might be right, only she forgot to give the credit for the Harbinger to God. The miracle angle seems to be playing well. The big guys like the pope haven’t said a word. The Muslims don’t listen to women and don’t care what she said. As far as the Buddhists and the Daoists and whatnot, I haven’t a clue.”
“
I’m not going to do anything any time soon, Jim. I know politically the time to do something is now, at the beginning of my second term, but I want to let the people mull things over. Let’s see what the public decides about all this.” He stood up and stepped around the desk. “I want you to pull the bills we were preparing to submit. I want to work with the legislators and empower them to determine if any new laws are necessary. I’m not going to force the issue.”
“You’ve changed your mind?” Jim sounded disappointed.
Hemsley shook his head. “This is about what the people want.”
Jim folded his arms and tried to think of how to urge his boss to use the opportunity before them. “I think Sarah would want us to forge ahead.”
“That’s going low.” Hemsley bristled. “There’s no rush. We can’t impose change anymore, Jim. That’s the message. We have to get our thoughts aligned. We have to create our reality together.”
*
It was unmistakable. But there it was—another change in the object he had detected at the edge of the Great Rift. Feeling mounting excitement, Strang stared at the tiny speck. The object, whatever it was, was quincunx to Altair, and although his brain wanted to reject the very idea, it was unquestionably growing.
He sat back in his chair and set the viewing lens down. “Of course!” He rubbed the strain from his eyes, realizing it wasn’t growing. It was moving. It was coming closer, inspiring both awe and trepidation in him.
His first impulse was to tell Artemis. He hesitated, not wanting to involve her until he’d done the calculations. If indeed an object was headed out of the Great Rift toward their solar system, he needed to compute how long such a journey would take. The rift itself was more than three hundred light years from Earth. It was also true that the object could be much, much closer. It might be merely between the Great Rift and Earth, its distance yet to be determined. It was a mercurial object—appearing from nowhere, changing shape, and now changing again.
He went to the kitchen to make a fresh pot of coffee. He needed to know what else he needed to know.
“Willa, my darling,” he spoke aloud as he scooped coffee into the brewer’s basket. “Time for you to have that conversation with Phaeton you promised. Perhaps you can visit the answer upon me in a dream.”
He poured a cup of strong coffee and headed back to his desk, knowing he wouldn’t be getting sleep anytime soon. Whether from Willa, Phaeton, or the more probable source, the computers at the Keck, he knew the answer would take time to calculate. Strang focused his efforts on a plan to convince the astronomers of the world to take a serious look at what he’d found. He thought of what had happened at the convention. He considered it another feather in his rebel cap but not the kind of feather that granted him reentry into the club.
Accepting after a period of reflection that he had no chance of returning to the scientific fold, he took out his phone, ready to make the contact he had rejected making earlier. Instead he had to field an incoming call. The voice was distorted, but the message was clear. He’d received several such threats in recent weeks. There were angry people who wanted to harm him rather than reason with their anxiety. This call went much further than the others. They were going to do terrible things to Artemis. He ended the call before the speaker had finished detailing the threat. All thoughts of the Great Rift dissipated as Strang realized danger was much, much closer.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The body floated in the surf just below Nāpili cliffs. It was wrapped in a red blanket secured with duct tape. The blanket had been opened to reveal a small body in a pink shirt and blue pants with lace-covered pockets. Detective Kioki knelt to examine it. The child had curly hair and a once sweet little face, he assumed, a vision of his own young daughter filling his mind. Kioki assessed this little girl’s age to be about five or six years old, the same as his daughter. She was thin but not undernourished. She had been cared for and loved.
He stood and fought a wave of nausea. The girl’s throat had been slit, and her body had been dragged back and forth over the jagged rocks. But she hadn’t been there long or there would have been much more damage.
“It’s just like the other one,” he said to the approaching coroner. “Only there’s no note with this one.”
The coroner looked at the gentle surf. “Maybe it got carried out on the waves. I’m surprised the body wasn’t.”
“Twenty feet that way and it would have been,” Kioki told him. “The surf eddies here until the tide comes in.”
“So, who is killing our children?” the coroner asked as he signaled for his assistant to help him load the child into a body bag.
“I hope it’s someone from the mainland,” Kioki said, slapping sand from his hands on his thighs. “I can’t accept one of our people doing this.”
The coroner zipped the bag closed and nodded. The note found with the first body had spoken of witches and devils and a lot of unintelligible Harbinger bullshit.
“You think the perp’s a mainlander?”
Detective Kioki made an entry in his notebook. “We don’t believe in witches, Frank. That’s a haole concept.”
“How could anyone believe a little child would be a witch?”
The coroner trudged up the slope without expecting a reply. Ahead of him was the unpleasant duty of helping the parents identify the little girl’s body. The wind made his jacket flap as he crested the cliff. He turned to look at the dark clouds in the distance. A powerful storm was approaching. Then he looked at the body being loaded into his van. For another poor family, the worst possible storm was already here.
*
Jake was out of ideas. Lucy had stopped returning his texts, and he wasn’t entirely sure where she was. Her last paycheck was automatically deposited, and she refused to leave a forwarding address. Once she’d submitted her resignation, she’d just disappeared. He had a delicious offer for a finder’s fee if he could arrange an interview with that Andronikos woman, but she, too, had gone missing. Jealousy stabbed him as he retrieved his suit coat from the rack and slipped it on.
Uberdorf had been right about a relationship between the two. Jake didn’t much care about that other than a twinge of envious disappointment. He wanted to make money, and Lucy was his one link to being able to get the interview. And the interview was worth a fortune if he got it before the other members of the press.
“Lucy’s moved. There’s a For Rent sign out in front of her house,” Brian said, leaning into Jake’s office. “And the other address is boarded up.”
“So, they are both really gone.” Jake sighed.
“Not exactly.” Brian smiled. “Andronikos left an address on Maui with her law firm. Cost me two hundred bucks to get it. She’s apparently staying with that Strang fellow. But he’s not taking any visitors, and even the big guys can’t get an interview. I’d be happy to go there and look for them.”
Jake stuck his pipe in his mouth and frowned. “No. If anyone goes to Maui around here, it will be me.”
“Taking the wife with you on that vacation?” Brian teased. “Just saying.”
“Shut up and go write something.”
He locked his office and shuffled out to his car. He had handled the situation all wrong, he knew. He should have given Lucy more freedom to write what she wanted. But he had been late to the fair, finding the idea of the Harbinger too unbelievable. Those days were gone, and he wasn’t going to get them back. He saw that the Harbinger billboard had been replaced with an ad for Nike’s latest athletic shoe. Running was apparently the cause du jour.
Jake gave the idea of going to look for the two women a final consideration. It was difficult to hide on an island, particularly when you looked like Artemis Andronikos. Maybe it was worth a trip. But if MSNBC or the AP couldn’t find her, his chances were slim. Still, he had to consider it. And he did until he figured the Times would beat him to the punch.
*
The first of a series of bills devised by the state legislature was a go
od one. It sat on the governor’s desk awaiting his signature. It contained funding for the churches that had been victimized by the Servants of the Harbinger. Hemsley hadn’t signed it yet because there was an imminent phone call he felt obliged to take, and he wanted the signing to be an event. Jim had Susan Stone and the participants waiting outside his office, and he was eager to join them. But first, there was the phone call.
The pope was displeased with the information that had been disseminated at Hemsley’s conference and begun to take root in the lay consciousness. He was displeased with any public discussion of the Harbinger. And he particularly hated the anti-religion bias he had detected in several of the California conference leaders. With the distraction of the holidays over, he had completed a novena and prepared himself for a course of action his prayers had revealed to him. The monsignor handed him the phone. He put it to his ear and heard a deep male voice say hello.
“Governor Hemsley, so good of you to accept our call,” the pope responded. He drew a rosary from his cassock pocket and began to fondle the beads.
Hemsley cleared his throat. “I am honored by the invitation to speak with you, your holiness. An opportunity to speak with the leader of a billion Catholics is not one to be ignored.”
The pope sat in an ornately carved chair in a room just off his bedchamber. He kept his back straight and leaned slightly forward as a way of focusing his attention rather than settling comfortably. The opulence of his surroundings had the tendency to dull his mind, and this was a conversation that required discomfort if he was to be successful. He wound the rosary tight about his fingers while he spoke.
“Many of my flock reside in your beautiful state. We are told they are not especially supportive of your governance.”
“They have been more supportive lately,” the governor pointed out. He had done well with Catholics in the recent election. Sarah’s sacrifice had achieved its purpose.