Birdwine was shaking his head. “Dammit. I should have texted you her movements.”
I couldn’t fault him for this. It was standard to give a PI a list of known associates, but I hadn’t a clue about any of Kai’s current people or places. I’d been thinking about brain cancer, delusions, heavy meds. I’d imagined some crazy flight from Texas child protective services into a murky future—not into our own ancient history.
“That’s my bad. I told you to call me only when you had results,” I said, but it was an icy absolution.
Julian shifted his weight from one foot to the other, uncomfortable. “Do you think it’s possible she’s still alive?” he said into the silence.
Birdwine shook his head, and his gaze on my brother was both sad and very gentle. “The guy who bought the wagon in Dothan said”—he paused, but Julian still had that baby bird look on his face, like he was hoping to be filled with something lovely—“that she looked like the walking dead. He barely recognized her from her picture. He said the Kai he met could have been November Kai’s grandma. I’m sorry.”
Julian swallowed, looked away.
Birdwine filled the silence. “From Dothan, they went Greyhound. In Asheville, they stopped taking the bus. She got a ride or bought another car. Not at a dealership. I checked all over. She could have found one on Craigslist or passed some junker with a For Sale sign in the window.”
“Or stolen one. Or gotten a man to give them one,” I said.
“Worst-case scenario, they started hitchhiking. At any rate, I lost them,” he said, flipping through the notes I’d printed out last night. Kai was touring Hana through her past, but it had been my past, too. I’d written it all out for him and traced it on the map in blue. “But now, see, I know her destinations.”
The search radius had narrowed from “anywhere in the world,” to a journey from fixed point to fixed point. She was visiting every city where there had been a different boyfriend, a different Kai, a different me. How expurgated or invented was the tour that Kai gave Hana? So far, the geography matched Kai’s real history, which in itself was shocking. The truth was not a story that my mother told.
Julian said, “After Asheville, Kai moved west of Atlanta with Dwayne. Then downstate.” He flushed. “That’s where I was born. But Paula thinks she might leave that part out. The prison part, and the me part, too. So it was Asheville, to Paulding County—”
“To here,” I finished for him. There was no other destination possible. Kai didn’t know Ganesh’s new name, and she’d never left a lover without burning every bridge behind her. She’d meant to bring Hana here. “To me.”
Birdwine was nodding. He remembered Kai’s note as well as I did. Death is not the end. You will be the end.
She’d meant it literally, exactly as written. She’d had a plan for Hana, after all. To bring my sister to me. It was a desperate move, but all the gods knew that I owed her. I would have taken Hana in, no questions, had I truly been her journey’s end. She’d miscalculated, though. Somewhere on her wobbly path from Asheville to Paulding County to my place in Atlanta, my mother had run out of time.
“I’m on it,” Birdwine said.
“Great. Julian, let’s go. Your car is still parked by my office.”
Julian was looking back and forth between us, bewildered. “But, wait, what happens now? We can’t go home. We’re so close!”
“We’re closer,” Birdwine said. “But I’ve got a crap ton of phone calls and database searches to do now. Every hospital, every police department, every wrecking service along every route that she could have taken. A terminally ill woman traveling with a little girl will have left a footprint, but realistically, it will take days or even weeks of grunt work to find it.”
“So you aren’t going back to Asheville,” Julian said, thoughtful.
“I’ll be more effective here. My PI license gives me access to search engines that would blow your mind, kid, and I know how to work a phone. If that fails, then, yeah. I’ll run her possible routes in person, with pictures. I’ll canvass, asking everyone with eyes. I hope it won’t come to that.”
I hoped not, too. I’d have to make a much more comprehensive list. Would Kai have taken Hana to the Dandy Mart, shown her the row of pay phones I had used to break our lives? Did places still have pay phones? Maybe they’d been ripped out, and all my mother could show Hana was the hole where they’d once been. That was the journey itself in a nutshell—looking at the holes where we’d once been.
“If it’s phone calls and computer stuff, I could stay and help,” Julian offered. “It will go faster with two.” He looked back and forth between us, eager.