In a deserted corner of the parking lot, she slipped thirty thousand of William Overton’s cash—three bundles of hundred-dollar bills—into the first envelope and thirty thousand into the second. The envelopes were self-sealing, but she further secured the flaps with tape. With the Sharpie, she printed DORIS MCCLANE on the first envelope, then the address. Doris was Clare’s married sister, Nick’s aunt, and lived sixteen miles from the Hawks’ ranch. Jane addressed the second envelope to Gavin and Jessica Washington; if she could trust them with her child, she could trust them with mere money.
When she had taken a considerable sum from some bad guys in New Mexico, she had sent Doris and the Washingtons a previous package of cash to stash against her future need of it. Then as now, she didn’t include a note of explanation. They would identify the sender by the fact that the return address in each case was the same as that of the recipient, and the sender’s name above it was in both instances simply Scooter, the name of a beloved dog from which Nick had been inseparable during eleven years of his childhood.
Jane returned to the mailbox store and paid to send both envelopes priority.
She had kept sixty thousand of Overton’s money for operating expenses. She hoped to God she would have some use for it.
When she had chosen to stop in San Juan Capistrano instead of in any other town, she had intended to send only one envelope, that to Doris McClane, and to hand-deliver the other thirty thousand to Gavin and Jessie, who were only an hour inland from there.
But in her current state of mind, she dared not go there. Optimist though she long had been, she was more than half convinced that this would be the last chance she would ever have to see her child, to tell him that she loved him. The urge to go to him was overwhelming. But Travis was a sensitive boy, as intuitive in his way as she was in hers. He would read her fear and know why she had come, and she would leave him more unsettled than before her visit.
She sat in her car, in the parking lot, gripping the soapstone cameo, working her thumb over the carved profile, as Travis must have done, thinking of her as she now thought about him. She didn’t cry easily, but for a while the world blurred away.
When she was dry-eyed, she pocketed the cameo and started the engine and followed the directions to the library that she’d gotten from the clerk in the mailbox store. At a computer, armed with the address she had pried from William Overton, she used Google Earth to make a quick study of Shenneck’s ranch in Napa Valley, especially the gatehouse at the entry and the area around the main house.
From the library, she drove south on Interstate 5, determined to be in San Diego before noon. There might be nothing there for her, but she had nowhere else to go.
4
* * *
HAVING COME A LONG WAY for a short interview, Nathan Silverman was back in Austin International hours before his flight to D.C. Claiming a seat near the gate by which he would later be boarding, he returned to his copy of Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts, the true story of an American family in Berlin during Hitler’s rise to power. Soon he was enthralled by it again.
At first he didn’t realize he was being spoken to. “Is that you? Good heavens, it is.” He assumed someone seated nearby was the target of the query. “Nathan? Nathan Silverman?”
For an instant, the face looming over him seemed to be that of a stranger. Then he recognized Booth Hendrickson. Booth had been a special agent with the Bureau for more than a decade, during which he had earned a law degree, after which he had transitioned out of the FBI into the Department of Justice proper, three or four years earlier.
“No, no, don’t bother getting up,” Booth said, taking the seat beside Silverman. “Austin isn’t at the end of nowhere, far from it, but it’s rather a small world when two old Quantico dogs find themselves knocked together in the capital of the Lone Star State.”
Booth Hendrickson had the diligently practiced grace of a bad but earnest dancer, the air of a patrician New Englander who in fact had been born and raised in Florida, and the face of a hawk, though he was barbered to suggest a lion. As an agent, he had worn custom-tailored suits and shoes that cost as much as a mortgage payment, and he currently dressed in that same fashion.
Although they had crossed paths many times, they had not often worked the same case. Now Silverman remembered that he didn’t much like the man. “Looking well, Booth. Justice must agree with you.”
“The place is a maelstrom of ambition—or instead of maelstrom, should I say cesspool? In either case, I swim in it well enough.” He laughed softly at this self-deprecation. “Some good gets done, of course. It always does no matter what.”
“What brings you here?” Nathan wondered.
“I was on the flight that just landed, saw you as I came off the air bridge. I’ve got to get my luggage if it isn’t still stuck somewhere on the East Coast. I’m on vacation. First here and then San Antonio. How’s Rishona? Well and good, I trust.”
“Very well, thank you. And your missus?” Silverman asked, unable to recall her name.
“Divorced. No, don’t commiserate. I’m the one who filed for it. Thank God, we never had children. How are your kids, Nathan? How are Jareb and Lisbeth and Chaya?”
Silverman was only mildly surprised that Booth remembered their names. The man assiduously memorized such things to later flatter valuable contacts, like Silverman, with the implication that he actually found them interesting and memorable.
“All done with college. Lisbeth graduated last year.”
“All safe and healthy and taking on the world?”
“Safe, healthy, and best of all employed.”
Booth laughed more than the line deserved. “You’re a lucky man, Nathan.”
“As I tell myself every night and first thing every morning.”
Booth tapped the Erik Larson volume that Silverman held. “Terrific book. Read it a couple years ago. Makes you think.”
“Yes, it does.”
“Makes you think,” Booth repeated. He glanced at his watch, shot to his feet. “Got to run. A week of leisure calls.”
He thrust out his right hand, and they shook, and Booth held it a beat or two longer than he should have.
“Lucky man,” he repeated, and then he was off.
Silverman watched Booth Hendrickson blend in with travelers on the concourse and dwindle away through the terminal.
He didn’t at once return to the Larson book.
Did even a man like Booth Hendrickson go on vacation in a three-piece suit and tie?
He hadn’t seen Booth in maybe three years. He wasn’t sure he would have recognized him from a distance, as Booth had spotted him.
Unless the man had the memory of an array of supercomputers, which he didn’t, it was remarkable that he recalled the names of the kids. Rishona, yes. Booth had met her once or twice. But he’d never met the children. Jareb and Lisbeth and Chaya. The names had come off his tongue as if he’d heard them only an hour earlier.
And now it seemed to Silverman that when Booth had spoken their names, his stare had sharpened and a different tone had come into his voice. A subtle solemnity.
Perhaps Silverman’s many years with the Bureau had steeped him too long in suspicion. Or maybe Ancel Hawk’s tight-lipped paranoia was a bit infectious.
All safe and healthy and taking on the world?
Most people would ask if your kids were healthy and happy. How odd for anyone to ask if they were safe.
In memory, he heard Booth’s voice: Makes you think. Makes you think.
Silverman looked at the book in his hands.
He had asked Booth what brought him to Austin, but Booth had not returned the question. As if he already knew what Silverman was doing there.
5
* * *
THE FREE KITCHEN that he had mentioned, to which he intended to contribute the forty dollars that Jane had given him, turned out to be only a block from the branch library in San Diego where she had first seen him five days earlier. The librarian gave her directions.
The operation was housed in what had once been a building owned by a fraternal club. The letters of the club’s name had been removed from the limestone fa?ade, but the ghost of them remained lighter against the time-darkened stone.