His expectations deflating, Jergen says, “?‘Years’?”
“At least three years. Maybe longer.”
Although they try to wring additional details out of Norbert Gossage, there is no more to be wrung.
By now, three small children are clutching Dubose’s pant legs, and the big man is looking like he might start swatting them.
Time to go.
21
Jane recovered the tote and the flashlight and crossed the plank, resisting the urge to look back, as if Hendrickson would stay dead only as long as she remained convinced that she had killed him.
She made her way to the stairhead and out of that building into the snowy day. Thirty-eight minutes had elapsed since she’d fled Anabel’s lair at the foot of the crooked staircase.
No doubt the woman, from her winter home in La Jolla, had reported Jane’s whereabouts to those with a burning desire to see her dead. She needed to keep moving, faster than fast, but the storm that had hampered her on the journey north was now her ally. They might be able to marshal a hit team out of Las Vegas, even out of Reno, possibly out of Sacramento. However, the snow was falling harder than ever, and the light breeze had become a stiff wind. The only way they could reach her in a timely manner was by chopper, but the wind and the poor visibility and the certainty of ice forming on the rotary wings, bringing the helo down, would force them to delay.
By the time she reached her Explorer Sport, she was shaking uncontrollably, not entirely because of the weather, for which she wasn’t adequately dressed. The engine started on the first try. She turned the heat up.
From the shorter forest-service road to the longer one, to the county road, to Highway 50 South, the word for the world was white. By the time she crossed the state line from Nevada into California, she was able to dial down the heat.
She stopped for fuel in South Lake Tahoe and considered staying there for the night, because they would not expect her to be in the area come morning. But though road conditions were far from ideal, the plows were working and 50 West was open, and she decided to try for Placerville.
Since the struggle with Hendrickson, she’d felt pain in her left side, above the hip and below the rib cage. A week earlier in San Francisco, she’d been wounded. Nothing serious, although she’d needed stitches and was sewn up by a friend who was a doctor. She might have pulled a stitch or two, but now wasn’t the time to check.
She drove.
What beauty snow usually held for her was absent this storm. There was something of ashes about it this time, as if beyond the limited view that the blizzard allowed, the world was burning and, when the ashfall ended, would be revealed as blackened ruins to every horizon.
Survival might be a matter of training and intuition, but it was also always a gift for which gratitude was required. Mile after grudging mile, the desolation that shrouded her heart would not relent, would not allow grace to find her.
At last she resorted to music and turned it loud, so that the monotony of the tire chains could not be heard. Rubinstein at the keyboard, Jascha Heifetz on violin, Gregor Piatigorsky on the cello. Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio in A Minor, op. 50.
She didn’t know at what point she began to weep as she drove, and she didn’t realize at what point she stopped weeping, but by then the ash had become snow again, and gratitude rose in her and grace settled upon her, and hope.
22
Half an hour of daylight remained, but Travis knew he couldn’t wait any longer. Something terrible had happened.
He wasn’t supposed to go outside, but the rules weren’t the rules anymore. He had to think for himself.
He fed the dogs and leashed them and took them out to potty. They were good dogs, and they didn’t run off when he dropped the leashes to pick up their poop in blue bags. He twisted the necks of the bags and knotted them and set them on the porch.
He took the leashes in hand again and walked with the dogs to the falling-down barn that wasn’t really falling down, though it sure looked a mess.
He stood in front of the door Uncle Gavin had stood in front of earlier in the day, when everything seemed like it was going to be all right.
He didn’t try the door or knock. Uncle Gavin had said there were cameras and Cousin Cornell would know when anyone was waiting there.
Maybe Cousin Cornell was sleeping or maybe he took a while to make up his mind what to do, but after a long time, there came a buzz and a clunk, and the door swung open.
Travis stepped into a little room, bringing the dogs with him. The door behind him closed all by itself.
The door in front of him didn’t open right away. The dogs fidgeted, but Travis didn’t.
He looked up at the camera, and after a while, he thought he ought to explain, so he said, “Something very bad has happened.”
Another minute or two passed, and then the inner door opened.
He went into a big room full of books and comfortable chairs and lamps, with many pools of light and pools of shadow.
Duke and Queenie were so excited by this new place that they pulled their leashes out of Travis’s hands and scampered off this way and that, sniffing everything.
A man stood by an armchair, in lamplight. He was very tall and not as black as Uncle Gavin. Tall and thin like a scarecrow on stilts or something.
The man said, “Those are big dogs. Don’t let those big dogs kill me, please and thank you.”
23
With daylight fast fading, Jergen and Dubose are still touring Borrego Valley in search of they know not what. Or at least Carter Jergen knows not. His partner, apparently now gripped by the delusion that he is clairvoyant, cruises slowly, waving impatient drivers past him, squint-eyed behind his sunglasses, surveying the inhospitable landscape as if Travis Hawk might be traversing it in full camouflage, regarding every structure as though he suspects that a five-year-old fugitive is holed up there with a cache of weapons and a hundred thousand rounds of ammunition.
“We can’t be looking for the peculiar-green Honda, because that’s back in town, at the market.”
Dubose says nothing.
“And whoever drove it years ago must be driving something else now, but we don’t know what.”
Dubose cruises in silence.
“What we should be doing,” Jergen says, “is digging deep into the Washingtons’ background, see if we can find any link between them and anyone in this godforsaken desert.”
Dubose deigns to speak. “We’ll start doing that after dark, when there isn’t any more light to search by.”
“All right, but what exactly are we searching for?”
Dubose keeps his strategy to himself.
He slows as they approach a small, faded-blue stucco house with a white metal roof shaded by unkempt palms.
24
While Travis reported how Uncle Gavin and Aunt Jessie changed the way they looked and went into town and didn’t come back, the big strange man never stopped moving as he listened. He went to a chair and started to sit down, but then didn’t, and he chose another chair that he almost also sat in, but again he stood up before his butt met the cushion.
Moving, moving, moving this way and that, here and there, he also kept rubbing his ginormous hands together like he was washing them under running water. When he wasn’t doing that, he covered his face with his hands as if there must be something he didn’t want to see and had forgotten he could just close his eyes. He kept moving with his hands over his face, not able to see where he was going, and almost fell over a chair. He walked into a table, rattling the lamp on it.