“All right, we’re off,” Lauren said, rising from her chair. “Tell DJ goodbye, boys,” she said.
Nessa hated the familiar use of his initials, but it seemed petty to say so. They didn’t get together with Lauren and her sons all that often, and Daltrey lit up whenever he saw them. Maybe being around them would actually encourage him to talk. Food for thought.
Lauren gave Declan MacManus a jowl rub, strapped her basket back on, and put on her hat. Her sons ran out the back door.
“See you the twenty--first,” Lauren said as she and the boys exited through the open door to their waiting horses. Nessa locked the door behind her and watched through the window as the family mounted their rides and rode west through the woods toward their property.
Nessa gathered the berry jars Lauren had left. “Daltrey,” she said. “You want to go down to the cellar?”
He signed “Yes” over and over. He loved the spooky dirt--walled hole in the ground where she kept canned goods and holiday decorations, and where they’d be safe if a tornado ever came their way. John had made a practice of leaving small items around in the cellar for Daltrey to find. He didn’t want Daltrey to be afraid of dark places, so he would leave a little plastic animal, or a quarter, or a shiny stone, and tell his son the little -people had left it there for him to find because they wanted him to be happy.
Daltrey followed her out the back door and down the steps to the side of the house where wooden doors concealed a cement staircase leading down into the earth.
She had been scared to death of her grandmother’s storm cellar when she was a kid, thinking of it as a tomb, a dark, dank place where she imagined demon hands would reach out and grab her ankles before she could get to the string that when pulled would illuminate a single bulb. Her cellar was much the same, and she still got a creepy feeling going down there. So she was glad to have even little Daltrey with her, because her protective instinct tended to drown out her fear.
She lifted the heavy wooden doors and then felt her way down the stairs until she found the string and yanked it. Daltrey came down backward, as if descending a ladder, then promptly sat on the damp cement floor while she shelved the berries.
Daltrey rooted around, looking for his prize, but there would be none this time.
“Let’s go, honey,” Nessa said. “I don’t think the little -people have—-”
But to her utter surprise, he held up a little red die cast car, his face awash in delight.
Nessa felt unexpected tears spring to her eyes as she took it from his outstretched hand and turned it over.
“How about that?” she said, handing it back to him. She led him up the stairs and out into the sunshine. She shut the cellar door and they went back in the house.
Daltrey ran into the living room to show Isabeau his new car.
“What have you got there?” she said. He placed the new toy on Isabeau’s palm and she looked it over. “This is way cool.” He nodded and ran up to his room, no doubt to put the car with his other “little -people” treasures on his bookcase. Nessa wiped her eyes and sat down in front of her computer.
Right. She’d been researching that trivia question. On the screen was the list of words common to all five artists’ songs:
part
ground
roll
vine
old
water
rosie
She stared at her screen in disbelief, an electric buzz covering her skin.
A quick search confirmed it.
Norah Jones’s “Rosie’s Lullaby”; Tom Waits’s “Rosie (Closing Time)”; Jackson Browne’s “Rosie”; AC/DC’s “Whole Lotta Rosie”; and Neil Diamond’s “Cracklin’ Rosie.”
Rosie.
Nessa’s real name.
Chapter Eight
THERE WAS SIMPLY no chance someone out there had figured out who she was. Or, more precisely, who she used to be.
Nessa had taken every precaution to make sure her photo was nowhere on the Internet, no link between her current identity and her birth name. She had it written into her Altair contract that they were prohibited from using her photo in promotions, using the excuse that it helped retain an air of mystery. If she wrote about John or Daltrey, she referred to them as J and D. She used Hushmail for email, Tor software that allowed her to browse and post anonymously, and the Tails OS, an operating system that prevented anything being written onto her computer’s main drives. Everything was designed to mask her IP and leave her untraceable by anyone except security experts.
She had a flash of John’s abandoned truck. Were these two things connected somehow?