Ben Davenport’s room was in post-surgery ICU on the ninth floor, on the far side of the nurse’s station. The rooms on either side were empty, and a cop stood vigil just outside Ben’s door so that he could see everyone who came by. I checked in with the unit clerk, then approached the officer and showed my badge. He nodded for me to go ahead, but the clerk called after me.
“Not your dog,” she said. “The rooms are off-limits to animals. Risk of infection.”
I looked at the cop. “Okay if he stays with you?”
A grin broke across the officer’s face. “Of course.”
“Clyde,” I said, “bleib.”
Clyde looked betrayed. He was a Marine, too. I promised I’d be quick.
Ben’s room was standard ICU. The adjustable bed, the tray table, and the privacy curtain, now drawn back so that the nurse had a clear view of her patient. There was a TV bolted to the wall and a single chair. Because it was the ICU, there was also a vast array of monitors, bags, and tubing, accompanied by the steady, subdued beeps and clicks of the instruments. In the middle of it all, Davenport lay unconscious, his head bandaged, his face sunken and gray. A respirator had been forced through his open mouth, the tubes running along his chest.
Ben bore so little resemblance to the man whose picture I’d studied that morning, to the man he had been just twenty-four hours earlier, that something inside me cracked. How could it be right for him to have survived so much in war, only to come home and lose almost everything? How could one person be asked to carry so much?
I lifted my eyes to the window. Outside, the lights of Denver glowed. The clouds had cleared the mountains and now sat above the city, orange in the city lights. The sun burned in a sullen, western sky. I edged past the bed and leaned my head against the glass. Traffic streamed far below, but the sidewalks were empty of pedestrians. I closed my eyes for a moment, imagining the block where I stood replicated thousands of times across Denver. Thousands—millions—of garages and warehouses and condos; parks and fields and sewers; ditches and culverts and basements.
A hundred million places to hide a child.
A hundred million places to bury her.
A draft blew through the vent, chilling the room, and suddenly Samantha Davenport was there beside me. Her long hair whispered against her back, and the draft fluttered the hem of her dress. She pressed her ghostly fingers to the glass and traced the outline of her husband, his form reflected in the window. I stumbled back until I got caught up against the chair, trapped between pity and fear, wondering if it would always be my lot to carry the dead, certain I didn’t have the strength.
How much, I wondered, had Ben told his wife about what had happened in Iraq? Most vets said nothing to their families, for all the reasons the chaplain had offered. But others found someone not only willing to listen, but also able to understand and accept what they heard. Samantha’s photographs—the bleak ones—made me think she was strong enough to take whatever Ben had offered. And to give comfort in return.
The fan shut down, and the room went silent save for the machines keeping Ben alive. With a last glance at her husband, Samantha stepped through the window. She shimmered along the glass like sunlight rippling on water, then vanished.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, unsure if I was speaking to her or to Ben or to myself.
Outside Ben’s room, a phone rang, and somewhere beyond the nurse’s station a gurney rattled. I turned my back to the window and all the impossibilities beyond the glass and looked at Ben Davenport.
He hadn’t stirred. I’d heard the newscast on the drive here—the surgery had successfully removed the pressure on his brain. But there had been damage to the brain itself, and the doctors didn’t know how much of Ben would remain when he woke up.
My attention was caught by the only nonmedical thing in the room—a framed photograph of Ben and Samantha and their children. Maybe Ben’s father had brought it. The five Davenports lay on their backs, the children smiling up at the camera. The boys looked goofy. Lucy—lying between her brothers—beamed. Their parents lay shoulder to shoulder. Samantha’s hair spilled over Ben’s chest and his hand clasped hers. Their gazes had locked just before the camera went off, their expressions both knowing and jubilant. Whatever complaint Samantha might have expressed about her husband to Stern, there was no hint of it here.
I looked from the photograph on the tray table to the man on the bed. Did Ben know what had happened to his family? He would have been down and presumably unconscious before the boys died, before Samantha and Lucy were taken away. In his artificially induced sleep, did he dream about them? And in his dreams, were they all still alive?
I reached out a hand, ready to turn the picture facedown so that it wouldn’t be the first thing Ben saw when he opened his eyes. In case he knew. In case it broke his heart all over again. But then I stopped, my fingertips on the frame, unable to take away this last thing.
“We’ll find her,” I told him. “She’s alive and we’ll find her. When you wake up, she’ll be here for you.”
I left the picture where it was and walked out of the room to where Clyde waited.
CHAPTER 15
Hope is that thin gold line at the horizon on the far side of a blasted landscape.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
By the time we reached Cohen’s house, the day had settled into my bones like wet sand.
I parked and retrieved my duffel bag while Clyde went about his business. When he went sniffing for squirrels, I whistled for him to follow, then headed toward the stairs of the carriage house.
The nearby main house had belonged to Cohen’s grandmother, and he had inherited it from her. The place was over ten thousand square feet, maintained by an invisible army of maids, gardeners, and handymen. But Cohen said living there would have made him feel like the last man on earth, which was why he had decamped to the carriage house. The only time he went back was when he wanted something from his grandmother’s library. Or to raid the wine cellar.
As soon as Clyde and I reached the bottom step, a motion-detector light came on. I was so tired that for a moment the staircase looked like the Swiss Alps. I saw the glittering soil where I’d scraped my boots clean earlier that day and aimed for that. Once there, I kept going.
At the front door, I fumbled for my key. And noticed another scrape of dirt.
I hesitated.
The alarm was still armed. Clyde’s casual demeanor said there was no one around. He sniffed the dirt, then paid it no more attention. But unease pressed a heavy hand against my neck. In the light from the porch, the dirt glittered faintly, just like the soil I’d scraped off my boots. Someone who’d been at the cement factory had also been here.