“I’m sure if she thought you could help, she’d be in touch.”
“There was an incident in California. She’s deep in something.”
“I don’t know what’s what in California. You’re ahead of me there, Mr. Silverman. Should be me tryin’ to pick your brain.”
“Texans,” Silverman said with frustration.
“You’ve had some experience of us, have you?”
“On a few occasions.”
“Then you’ve been seasoned for some disappointment here.”
Silverman got up from the chair. He went to the porch railing and stared past the yard, across the great flatness of grassland, toward a horizon as far away as if he had been at sea. He was city-born and city-raised, and these great open spaces made him uneasy. It seemed as if gravity wasn’t at full strength here, as if he and the house and anything not rooted in the earth might float up and away into the immense all-encompassing sky.
His back to Ancel Hawk, he said, “Her mother’s dead. She’s estranged from her dad. If she won’t turn to you, she has no one.”
“You better believe that troubles me and Clare. We love the girl like she was our own daughter,” the rancher said.
“Well, then?”
“She won’t come to us because she feels she’d be puttin’ us in harm’s way. That maybe isn’t the same reason she won’t come to you.”
Silverman turned his back to the daunting vista and faced his host. “Do you mean she doesn’t trust the Bureau?”
Ancel Hawk’s eyes were the clear gray of rain on weathered cedar. “Sit down a bit, why don’t you.”
Silverman returned to the rocking chair. Neither man rocked. Crickets sang in the stillness, but there was little else.
After a while, Silverman said, “You thinking about cooperating with me or what?”
“I’m thinkin’, Mr. Silverman, so let me think. Jane respects you. That’s the only reason you’re still here.”
With agitated cries, a flock of nuthatches burst out of the clear air as though flung into this world from another, swooped past the porch, and disappeared into nests and cavities in the big oak tree at the northwest corner of the house, as though taking refuge from some pending change in the weather.
Finally the rancher said, “Nick’s suicide wasn’t suicide.”
“But Jane found him, and the medical examiner—”
The rancher interrupted. “Suicide rate started climbin’ last year, now it’s up more’n twenty percent.”
“It fluctuates, like the murder rate.”
“No fluctuation. No down. Just higher every month. And these are people like our Nick, with no reason to kill themselves.”
Frowning, Silverman said, “A suicide is a suicide.”
“Not if people are somehow made to do it. Jane started lookin’ into it, diggin’ deep like she does. So they come into her home, and they promise to rape and kill Travis if she doesn’t drop it.”
Stunned to hear this paranoid conspiracy theory coming from the no-nonsense rancher, Silverman said, “They? They who?”
“Wouldn’t that be what she needs to find out?”
“Forgive me, but if I’m not suicidal, no one can make me—”
“Jane doesn’t lie except to other liars, of which I’m not one.”
“I’m not questioning your truthfulness.”
“No offense, Mr. Silverman, but I don’t care what you think of me.” The rancher got to his feet. “I’ve told you what little I can. You either look into it or you don’t.”
Getting up, Silverman said, “If you know how to reach Jane—”
“We don’t. Blunt fact is, she doesn’t trust everyone in your Bureau. Maybe you shouldn’t, either. If you folks come after me and Clare with your agents and lawyers and all the angels in Hell, it doesn’t matter. There’s no more you’ll get here. Now, I’d be obliged if you’d leave by walkin’ around the house instead of through it.”
Ancel Hawk closed the kitchen door behind him.
Going down the porch steps and rounding the house, Silverman tried to pinpoint where he’d gone wrong and lost the rancher, whose Texas grace and natural demeanor ordinarily made him polite almost to a fault. He decided that what offended Ancel Hawk was not that his own veracity had been challenged but that Silverman had seemed to question his daughter-in-law’s story. Doubt me and we can still talk, the rancher was saying, but doubt Jane and I’m done with you.
As he reached the front of the house, out of a sky as blue as moonflowers, sudden hard gusts of warm wind seemed to blow the very sunlight past him and across the pastures in bright shudders. The illusion was born of flickering shadows from the thrashing oaks and, far above, from a scrim of cirrus clouds that, lashed by higher currents, gave off a stroboscopic pulse.
Looking out across the vast land, Silverman wished that he were not in this lonely, alien place but back in Alexandria with Rishona, cities crowding all around them.
3
* * *
JANE IN A SOUTHBOUND HURRY on Interstate 405, grateful for the light traffic, had nothing now except the half of an idea that had come to her the previous night, the crazy and reckless idea based on a wild guess. She tried to put this half-assed plan in a better light by telling herself that she wasn’t really operating on a wild guess, that it was keen intuition inspired by her bear-trap memory, which didn’t let go of even the most esoteric facts once it sank its teeth into them. But she was no good at self-delusion. She couldn’t deny that she hustled now toward San Diego out of sheer desperation.
Of the things she had learned from Dr. Emily Jo Rossman, the revelation that most disturbed her was not the image of the control web across Benedetta Ashcroft’s brain, but was instead the image of it deliquescing in mere moments, leaving little evidence that it had existed, except for whatever an autopsy camera might have captured.
These days, however, when digital photographs could be easily manipulated, few people gave any credence to that old maxim Words may deceive, but photos never lie. Every form of evidence, except perhaps DNA, was now within the domain of liars. To arouse the public, an entire world of doubters would have to be present at an autopsy when the top of the skull came off and, for a minute or so, the truth of Shenneck’s implant lay revealed.
And this happened to be a bizarre age, a strange time when great numbers of people believed every manipulative junk-science claim, dreading armageddons of infinite variety, yet denied the most common-sense truths that lay luminous before them. Even if millions could be shown the control mechanism that guided Benedetta Ashcroft to kill herself, perhaps most of them would turn their faces from the truth and prefer the more comforting fear that civilization would be destroyed by an imminent invasion of extraterrestrials.
Jane had been an optimist all of her life. But after the events of the past twenty-four hours, she worried that she might be racing toward oblivion, that the only thing waiting for her in San Diego was disappointment, a blank wall into which she would take a header at high speed.
In San Juan Capistrano, before transitioning to Interstate 5, she found a Mailbox Plus store at which she purchased two large padded envelopes, a roll of tape, and a black Sharpie.