They could have faked a carjacking or a burglary and shot her in the head. They could have staged an accident, a house fire or a gas-line explosion, and taken out both her and Travis. Murder caused them no twinge of compunction, certainly not remorse. Instead of simply killing her, they warned her off, and she could think of no explanation for receiving mercy from merciless people other than that, in recognition of her status as an FBI agent, they were extending her professional courtesy, either on their own hook or because someone in the Bureau or elsewhere in government had asked them to do so.
In addition, the warning they had given her was both over-the-top vicious and delivered with unnerving confidence that they could fulfill the threat and convey the boy into the embrace of the most savage murderers and worst child molesters on the planet, half a world away. Such transport wasn’t something the standard malevolent banker or wicked businessman, so familiar in modern fiction, would in real life be able to pull off. Mr. Droog was letting her know that he had connections, perhaps corrupt people in the intelligence services or the State Department, who could and would convey Travis into a new life far from home, a life of brutal rape and endless humiliation, just to keep her silent or to spite her if she would not be silenced.
The problem with such a vile threat, however, was that it convinced her of the perfection of their evil. You couldn’t make deals with the devil, because the devil had no honor and would never adhere to the terms of the contract. If the warning dissuaded her from seeking the truth, if it reduced her to the purest cowardice, they would eventually reward her by killing her and Travis anyway, when in time she felt safe and let her guard down.
She was left with one role to play: David to their Goliath. She had no illusions that she could bring them down with one stone and a slingshot. They were not one giant. They were an army of Goliaths, as far as she knew, and her chances of coming out of this triumphant and alive were a decimal point away from zero.
Nevertheless, you played the cards you were dealt, and if jokers were wild, you hoped to get one before the game was done.
Now she returned to the armchair and put her legs up on the footstool. She drew the blanket over herself.
She could see the bedside clock—11:36.
Her eyes at last grew heavy, and on the backs of her lids were projected faint constellations of stars that in their turning made her pleasantly dizzy and spiraled her toward sleep.
7
* * *
SOMETIME IN THE NIGHT, she half woke to the sound of one of the dogs snuffling along the threshold of the closed bedroom door.
Gavin claimed that when he and Jess went to bed, the dogs rarely both slept at the same time, but spelled each other, taking turns on patrol of the house. They had not been trained to do this, but an instinct to assume guard duty was in shepherd genes.
Whether this was Duke or Queenie, the dog satisfied itself that Travis remained abed and all was well. Its nails clicked faintly on the mahogany floor as it continued on its rounds.
As Jane fell into sleep again, she also fell into the past and was a child, cozy in blankets, snow falling past the windows, dogs nearby to keep her safe. This wasn’t the truth of her childhood, but a fantasy version, for she’d had no dogs or sense of safety.
8
* * *
JANE SET THE COFFEE to brewing, toasted the bread and buttered it. Gavin cracked the eggs and scrambled them, and tended to the skillet of cottage fries. Jess fried sliced ham with slivers of yellow peppers and onions, piled it on a warming platter.
Although they had been fed first, the dogs remained alert and hopeful, though they did not get underfoot.
As they had busied themselves with the cooking, making it seem more of a task than it had really been, making of it a distraction from the fact of Jane’s impending departure, so they also made much of eating, as if they were all starving. And the conversation was a little too loud, too fast, some of the laughter forced.
Travis talked of what they could do with their day, as if his mother would be there for all of it, including dinner and a game of glowing Frisbee in the dusk. He suggested names for the pony, spoke about saddling it for the first time as if Jane would see him take his inaugural ride days from now. She let him talk, joined him in the pony naming, because he knew that for all their talk, she would be leaving; this was only heartfelt wishing, while there was still time to wish away the day that must be and hope to conjure in its place the day that ought to be.
When the time came, after she’d said good-bye to Jess and Gavin, the boy alone accompanied her to the Ford Escape. He thought the car was cool, and he sat in it with her for a while, as they recalled for each other moments of the drive they had made across the country back in January, in a less reliable car.
When he sensed that there would be no more delay, he turned his face away from her, toward the side window, and knuckled his eyes. He put one salty knuckle in his mouth to bite on it. She could see that he bit hard, biting back more tears.
She didn’t patronize him by telling him not to cry. His self-control would mean more to him if he managed it on his own.
Neither did she assure him that everything would be all right in the end. She could not lie to him. He would know a lie at once, and it would frighten him that she felt the need to pretend things must be better than they were.
“You’re safe here,” she said.
“I know.”
“Do you feel safe here?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’ve always wanted dogs.”
“They’re good dogs.”
“They are. They’re special.”
“When can you arrest somebody?”
“I’m making progress.”
“You’re FBI. You can arrest them.”
“Gathering evidence comes first,” she said, wondering if she would ever unravel enough of it. “You know evidence?”
“Proof,” he said.
“That’s right. You’re a regular FBI kid, knowing all this cop stuff.”
He looked at her again. His eyes were red, but his lashes were not beaded with fresh tears. He was something, this little toughie.
From a pocket of his jeans, he withdrew part of a broken cameo locket: a woman’s face in profile, carved of soapstone and embedded in a silver oval. Half a hinge was fixed to one side of it. Perhaps a lock of a loved one’s hair had been kept in the small case when it had been intact and hanging on a silver chain.
“Last time you came here, like after you left, I found this down at the creek, washed up on some stones. She looks like you.”
There was no remarkable resemblance, but Jane said, “She sort of does, doesn’t she?”
“I knew right away it was good luck.”
“Like finding a shiny new penny.”
“Bigger luck. You came back and all.” He was solemn when he held the cameo out to her. “So you’ve got to have it.”
She understood the necessity of matching his solemnity. She accepted the charm. “I’ll always keep it in my pocket.”
“You gotta sleep with it, too.”
“I will.”
“Every night.”
“Every night,” she agreed.
The idea of one last kiss, one last touch, seemed too much for him. He opened the door, scrambled from the car, closed the door, and waved good-bye.
She gave him a thumbs-up and then drove off. As she followed the long graveled driveway to the state route, he was always there in the rearview mirror, watching after her, a small figure becoming quickly smaller, until the lane curved and the colonnade of oak trees intervened between them.
9
* * *
DURING THE PREVIOUS NIGHT, the valley had come to seem remote to her, as she wished it to be, a refuge beyond the horizon of the modern world, where the civilization of the mechanized hive did not encroach, where each individual could exist unto himself or herself, free from the forced intimacy of the digital collective—therefore safe.
As she drove west once more, she soon ascended on an undulant ribbon of blacktop, through the chaparral-stubbled hills that were as they had been ten thousand years earlier. In the hard clear light of morning, the borderline desert landscape did not seem natural, appeared instead to be devastated, as if the final war at world’s end had raged across this terrain long ago.