Dawes watches the four agents as they unpack the luggage from their trucks and tote it into the bungalow. She’s curious about the unending stream of hardware. She’s curious, too, about how all this is going to go down. She’s been prepped, naturally, by Cooper, earlier this morning, before the agents arrived, on the events of the previous night: On how, spurred by Cooper’s faith in Dawes’s intuitive and quite ingenious suspicions, he’d called Dean into the police trailer for a late-night chat. How he’d explained to Dean that Dawes had pieced together a compelling trail of evidence that connected him to Gable and, before that, Colfax. And how Cooper then mentioned to Dean that Dawes had intercepted the box of 9 mm bullets addressed to his real name, Lester Vogel, in that very morning’s shipment of contraband mail. And how Dean, confronted with this evidence, had cracked and confessed to killing Gable and then, in a panic, pulled his 9 mm gun on Cooper, the same gun that had killed Gable and Colfax, Cooper was sure. And how, so confronted, Cooper had been forced to draw and fire first with his revolver, killing Dean.
A remarkable feat of quick-draw survivalism, Dawes thinks, given what she knows about Cooper’s surgically reconstructed right shoulder.
But that’s the official story, as relayed to her and Robinson by Cooper. As long as they all communicate this story clearly to these agents, Cooper explained, he was confident these agents would wrap up their business shortly and be gone quickly out of everyone’s lives. Everything would return to normal, or as close to normal as this town gets.
It might even be the truth, Dawes thinks. Maybe that is how it went down.
She’s certainly not about to mourn Lester Vogel, not after learning what she did at that library computer terminal about his copious and hideous crimes. She did not mention to Cooper, of course, that she’d been to a library in Abilene, or that she’d run a search on “Lester Vogel,” so she knew all about his past transgressions. She also didn’t mention that, as a result, she now finds herself peering at every person in the town, wondering what abominable sins they, too, might be hiding, forgotten, in their buried histories.
People like Spiro Mitchum. Orson Calhoun. Marilyn Roosevelt. Fran Adams.
People like Calvin Cooper.
When she ran her search on “John Barker” and “Fell Institute,” she got a hint of his sins.
She also didn’t mention that to Cooper.
But that’s not what’s truly troubling Dawes this morning, as she watches the agents unpack.
What’s truly troubling Dawes is this: She never told Cooper about the box of bullets in the morning’s contraband mail. So how did he know about it when he confronted Dean last night?
As she watches, and wonders, she feels idly for the notebook she keeps tucked in her breast pocket, just to make sure it’s still there.
23.
BETTE BURR STARES into an empty suitcase and wonders if she should bother to pack it.
She arrived with two suitcases, mostly for show, one of them full of bedsheets to give it heft, and the other with barely enough of her clothes in it to last for a week. She figured she’d be in Caesura for three days, tops—that’s what they told her—but now it’s already day number four. When the Institute contacted her about her father, she was very curious to meet him. She had spent her whole life trying to figure out just who exactly her father was. He was never spoken of by her mother, and when she finally got old enough to press, her mother would only say that Eleanor was the product of a very short and long-forgotten relationship. Possibly as short as one night. Possibly as short as an hour. Her mother would never elaborate.
When she got to be a teenager, Eleanor found out a few things about her father on her own. For example, she knew that her father was a criminal. That he went to prison. Her mother let that slip once late at night after too many drinks. And after many more years of badgering, cajoling, and persistent coaxing, Eleanor even managed to convince her mother to tell her the man’s name.
John Sung.
But when Eleanor searched the public records for any trace of John Sung, there was no mention of any such man, living or dead, in the prison system. And that was pretty much it.
Until she got a call one day.
Eleanor was living in Palo Alto at the time, doing graduate work at Stanford, a promising student with the plan of becoming a clinical psychologist. (Something about her open face made people open up to her, it seemed.) She knew the work of Johann Fell and Judy Holliday vaguely—she’d studied their research in one of her seminars on radical alternate treatments for trauma survivors. Johann Fell, who’d worked closely all his career with damaged refugees and torture victims, pioneered a method by which you could chemically nullify traumatic memories in someone’s brain. It was crude, but it was a notorious breakthrough, and promised an entirely new tool in helping people move on from horrifying pasts. Since his death, however, his protégée, Dr. Holliday, had taken the research in a different direction.
Eleanor hadn’t realized just how different until she sat one day across a table from Dr. Holliday in a large, empty boardroom on the Stanford campus. Dr. Holliday cut an impressive figure. She was well-spoken, elegant, and incandescently intelligent. She outlined to Eleanor the broad parameters of a project called Caesura—a small and privately funded element of the Fell Institute’s overall mission, but a crucial one, Holliday explained. Eleanor spent most of the early part of this interview wondering what exactly she was doing there. Then Dr. Holliday asked Eleanor what she knew about her father.
I know his name, and that’s about it, Eleanor told her.
There’s a man, Dr. Holliday explained, currently in the Caesura program whose backstory might shed some light on your history. His name is William Wayne. He’s been the beneficiary of a unique arrangement in Caesura, and that arrangement involves another man, who’s currently living under house arrest in Hawaii, and has been for eight years.
A criminal by the name of John Sung.
After that conversation, Eleanor traveled to Hawaii—to Kauai, specifically—where she was met at the airport by a police officer in a panama hat and a floral Hawaiian shirt, who took her on a two-hour drive in an open-topped Jeep through the lush and picturesque mountains, to a remote shack off an unpaved laneway, almost totally obscured by overgrown foliage, where she met her father and sat with him in a quiet living room, alongside the policeman who’d been her father’s minder and sole friend for the past eight years.