Tio’s prayerful hands separated, and he nervously fingered his scarred throat. “I don’t see no reason to share that with Ricky.”
Jane smiled and nodded. “We don’t want to make him sad. You just tell Ricky that I said nothing you told me about him was news to me. I’ve always admired him from a distance, first as a married woman with vows to respect and now as a widow in mourning.”
When Jane rose to her feet, Tio said, “I also gotta tell how Ricky is crazy about music, you bein’ a piano player and all.”
“Come along now. I’ve got work to do before I, like Roxane, take myself off to a nunnery.”
As Jane was speaking, Tio got out of the booth with the tote full of money. When she got to the word nunnery, he flinched as if he’d been slapped. “No, usted no puede! You cannot! I tell you Maya is hotter than hot, and you’re so very hotter than her. This is a crazy thing for you. For my sister, yes, but never for you.”
Of course he did not get the reference and therefore did not get the joke, but Jane saw value in his lack of understanding, a way to keep Enrique at bay if she should need another vehicle from him in the future. With great solemnity, she said, “If I survive this business I’m caught up in, considering all the violence to which I’ve been a party, I’ll be most at peace if my in-laws raise my son and I withdraw from the world. There is an order at a monastery in Arizona, the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration. I believe I would be happy there. After all, Audrey Hepburn became a nun.”
Tio was doubly nonplussed. “Audrey who?”
“She was the most gorgeous movie star of her time, the Jennifer Lawrence of her day, but even more beautiful, and she became a nun, Sister Luke. She served the poor in the Congo, where she contracted tuberculosis.” Jane neglected to add that this occurred in a movie, The Nun’s Story.
Clearly distressed, Tio said, “I am broken to hear you’ll do this.”
She squeezed his shoulder as if with affection and moved him toward the front door of the motor home. “Just be happy for me, Tio. Be happy for me and go back home to Maya. After all, you are hers forever.”
15
MINETTE AND ROBERT BUTTERWORTH were assigned to pay surprise visits to the homes of their students, who would now be in school. In the case of well-behaved and studious kids, Min and Bob would represent to the parents that the child was being evaluated as a possible recipient for a full college scholarship under a program sponsored by a wealthy philanthropist. As regarded ill-behaved or underperforming kids, the visit supposedly would be about evaluating them for possible placement in a program funded by a philanthropist who developed new high-tech methods of instruction for struggling students.
While in the residence, they would be alert for any indication that something was not right. They had been provided with a list of clues that might indicate sympathy for Jane Hawk and the presence of her son. Min and Bob had memorized that list, though she couldn’t recall exactly when she had studied it.
If no one was home when they came calling—quite likely to be the case, because most families needed two incomes these days—then she and Bob would enter and search the place. They had been provided with a police lock-release gun, a nifty device that could open any deadbolt.
Two German shepherds had disappeared with the boy. Minette didn’t understand why kidnappers would take dogs or why the dogs would allow themselves to be taken. But that’s the way it was. No point in puzzling over it. No point at all. Just accept the facts and move on. Do what you’re told. Be useful. The dogs weren’t dangerous. She and Bob didn’t have to worry about being bitten. No need to worry at all. In fact, if they found two German shepherds that responded to the names Duke and Queenie, then the boy would be somewhere nearby. However, there was a chance that the kidnappers found the dogs to be too much trouble and killed them. Therefore, it was necessary to search outside each residence, too, for any signs that something had recently been buried on the property.
Minette thought she would be nervous about entering other people’s homes uninvited and poking around in their things. But at the second, fourth, and fifth of the first five houses, when no one answered the bell or knock, she breezed through those places with no sense that what she was doing might be improper or dangerous.
After all, they were working with the authorities as part of a new citizen’s support team for the police. They were doing the right thing. It wasn’t dangerous, really. Heck, it wasn’t dangerous at all. There was nothing to be concerned about. Nothing. Nothing at all. Besides, it felt so darn good to be useful.
The fifth house belonged to Walter and Louise Atlee, parents of Minette’s student Colter Atlee. Colter was a nice kid, good student, and Minette thought it unlikely that his mom and dad would be mixed up with kidnappers. But a little boy’s life was in jeopardy, and it was like that nice African American policeman, Deputy Kingman, had said—these days, you just couldn’t be sure who anyone was or what they might do. You couldn’t risk a little boy’s life by giving a pass to people like Walter and Louise Atlee just because you thought you could be sure they were good people.
As Minette pored through the papers taken from the desk in Walter Atlee’s study, a weird thing happened. Speaking in a stage whisper and yet bell-clear, a man’s angry voice spewed out a long stream of obscene and blasphemous words, dozens and dozens of them, like the ravings of a madman, as disgusting as they were meaningless. She had never heard anything so raw and vicious. The whisperer sounded as though he must be there in the study with her, but she was alone.
When the voice fell silent after perhaps half a minute, Bob entered the study. “Min, what the hell? You hear that?”
“Yeah. I did. Someone’s in the house.”
“No one’s here but us.”
The cursing resumed, still a stage whisper but louder than before, and Minette realized the voice wasn’t in the study, after all. It was in her head.
“The whispering room,” she said.
She’d never heard that term before, but she knew immediately what it meant, and it neither surprised nor frightened her. The whispering room allowed microwave communication between others like her and Bob, others who had been made useful. When you had something important to share in the whispering room, it went out to everyone else who had a whispering room within a radius of twenty miles, so they could be coordinated for a purpose and function well together. Functioning smoothly together was essential in this increasingly dysfunctional world. The whispering room was a tool that made a person more useful.