Last night. Standing in the wet dark. Soaked and chilled and lonely and wildly happy. Cataloguing the details of the foul weather as well as her physical and emotional responses to it, the better to write about the journey of the lead character in her novelette. The storm spoke through the medium of the nearby ancient oak, each leaf a tongue empowered by raindrops, the tree telling the storm’s story in a chorus of soft clicks and hisses.
When she had returned to the house, she’d slipped on the rain-puddled glossy paint of the back-porch floor. Slipped and fell face-first into…into one of the rocking chairs. The arm of one of the chairs. Stupid of her. Clumsy. She would need to eat and drink with care for the next couple days.
Now, as she got up from the bed, she felt sticky, dirty, and sore in places that the fall did not fully explain. An odor clung to her separate from the stale smell of her night sweat, a malodor that was familiar, disturbingly familiar…but her past experience of it—where, when?—eluded her.
As she went into her bathroom, step by step, the odor became a stink, became a stench, and incipient nausea slid around the walls of her stomach. She had felt dirty a moment earlier; but she felt filthy now. She was overcome by an urgent desire for a shower, an almost frantic need to be clean.
The compulsion was peculiar. But it meant nothing. Nothing at all.
Standing in a forceful spray of water as hot as she could tolerate, scrubbing herself with a soapy washcloth, she winced at the pain in her breasts and discovered they were bruised. She must have fallen more fully into the chair than she remembered.
When she felt clean at last and the threat of nausea had passed, she continued to linger there, eyes closed, turning slowly, letting the hot shower melt some of the soreness out of her. The sound of the rushing water returned to her a memory of the previous evening’s storm: the sky black; the rain like an inkfall where there was no light to color it; the old oak an elaborate black figuration against the deeper black of the night; and sudden movement that was also black on black, three robed and hooded figures hurrying through the downpour, like a scene from some film concerning medieval monks engaged in an urgent mission during apocalyptic times.
Tanuja’s breath caught in her chest, and she opened her eyes, half expecting to see those monks gathered around the shower stall, three walls of which were glass. Of course, no hooded figures stood watching her.
Such an odd moment. But it meant nothing. Nothing at all.
After she’d blown dry her hair and dressed, she went in search of Sanjay. She found him in his study, where the door stood open to the hall. He sat at the computer, his back to her, hunched over the keyboard, typing faster than she had ever before seen him type, as though a scene from his current novel in progress flowed from him on a tide of inspiration.
To write fiction well, long periods of intense concentration were nearly as important as talent. She and her brother so respected the creative process that neither would interrupt the other during working hours except for matters significant and urgent.
She went to the kitchen. As she fitted the paper filter in the coffeemaker, she detected an astringent chemical odor, the source of which was not at once evident. By the time she put the coffee and a half teaspoon of cinnamon in the filter, the smell so bothered her that she prowled the room in search of its origin.
The kitchen was sparkling, in fact cleaner than she recalled leaving it the previous night. The offensive odor was not strong, but waned and waxed and waned again. Indeed, it wasn’t entirely a bad smell. There was in general a lemony fragrance, like that of the antibacterial spray she used to wipe down the counters, but under it lingered a persistent acridness.
She was drawn to the quartz-topped table, where red roses—the stems cut short in a low arrangement—filled a crystal bowl. Neither of the odors came from the flowers, and yet the blooms fascinated her.
She stared at the coagulum of blood-red petals for a long moment…until her gaze was drawn to an unlikely object lying on the table beside the bowl. A hypodermic needle. The barrel of the syringe was filled with a cloudy amber fluid.
It was an exotic item, but at the same time curiously familiar. A sense of déjà vu overcame her, and the feeling that some moment of a forgotten dream had here manifested in real life.
When she reached for the syringe, it ceased to be there on the table, and her fingers closed only on each other.
In that instant, she recognized the chemical odor as that of insecticide, specifically Spectracide hornet spray.
Mystery solved. Except that hornets were not in season. Well, yes, but she and Sanjay did sometimes use the spray for ants.
As for the syringe…how strange. But it meant nothing. Nothing at all.
Tanuja returned to the coffeemaker. She filled the Pyrex pot with water to the ten-cup level, because when Sanjay smelled the coffee brewing, he would want some, too.
In a few minutes, the kitchen grew redolent of the fine Jamaica blend, and Tanuja breathed deeply of the wonderful aroma while she cracked eggs for an omelet. She wanted some potatoes as well, and bacon, and toast. She was ravenous.
21
At one time there had been security cameras, because in recent decades too many schools were not merely centers of education, but also dens of drug dealing and violence. In the aftermath of the fire, however, there were no cameras intact and no electricity to power them.
Nevertheless, Jane felt watched, and she studied one broken-out window after another, searching for a faint human form in the charry darkness beyond. Her intuition, which she trusted implicitly, told her that no one lurked in the building, but she scanned the windows anyway. Months of being on the run, with enemies who commanded a panoply of surveillance platforms ranging from simple traffic cams to satellites in orbit, had brought her to that point at which healthy stage-one paranoia could metastasize into a cancerous stage four, which might paralyze her or lead her into fatal misjudgments.
When Gilberto returned in eight minutes, Jane dragged open the damaged gate in the construction fencing to admit him. He backed the Suburban up to the Mercedes GL 550. Together they moved Hendrickson from one vehicle to the other. She also transferred her tote, the attaché case packed with money, and the Medexpress carrier that she had for a while stowed in one of Simon Yegg’s refrigerators.
As Jane closed the tailgate, a sudden siren coiled through the morning, close and spiraling louder, surely within a block of the school, much too close for them to escape without being seen. Once spotted, the Suburban would inevitably later be identified, because it would be tracked from the school by Arcadian operatives able to review archived video from traffic cameras, its ultimate destination uncovered. When the vehicle was associated with Booth Hendrickson’s abduction, with Jane, it would incriminate Gilberto and bring hellfire upon him and his entire family.
Their eyes locked, and they froze in anticipation, as though they stood on a hangman’s platform with rope around their necks, waiting for trapdoors to fall open beneath their feet. The siren Doppler-shifted to lower frequencies as the cops or paramedics, or whoever they were, passed the school and raced away to whatever crime or car wreck they had been summoned.
Gilberto drove and Jane sat in the backseat, the better to monitor the unconscious captive lying in the cargo area.
“I called Carmella,” Gilberto said. “She’s taken the kids to visit her sister in Dana Point. They’ll stay the weekend.”
“I’m so sorry. This is exactly what I didn’t want—bringing all this right into your home.”
“Not your fault. What happened happened. There’s no other option that makes sense.”
“I’m still trying to think of one.”