Although rain was as natural as sunshine, although Nature functioned without intentions, Jane saw malice in the coming storm. Lately, her love of the natural world had at times been tested by a perception, perhaps irrational but deeply felt, that Nature was colluding with humanity in enterprises wicked and destructive.
5
* * *
FOURTEEN THOUSAND SOULS lived in Alpine, a percentage of them sure to believe in fate. Fewer than three hundred were from the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians, who operated the Viejas Casino. Jane had no interest in games of chance. Minute by minute, life was a continuous rolling of the dice, and that was as much gambling as she could handle.
Graced with pines and live oaks, the central business district was frontier-town quaint. Certain buildings actually dated to the Old West, but others of more recent construction aped that style with varying degrees of success. The number of antiques stores, galleries, gift shops, and restaurants suggested year-round tourism that predated the casino.
San Diego, the eighth largest city in the country, was less than thirty miles and eighteen hundred feet of elevation away. Wherever at least a million people lived in close proximity to one another, a significant portion needed, on any given day, to flee the hive for a place of less busy buzzing.
The white-clapboard black-shuttered Lambert residence stood on the farther outskirts of Alpine, on approximately half an acre of land, the front yard picket-fenced, the porch furnished with wicker chairs. The flag was at full mast on a pole at the northeast corner of the house, the red-and-white fly billowing gently in the breeze, the fifty-star canton pulled taut in full display against the curdled, brooding sky.
The twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit allowed Jane to cruise past slowly without appearing to be canvassing the place. She saw nothing out of the ordinary. But if they suspected that she might come here because of the bond she shared with Gwyneth Lambert, they would be circumspect almost to the point of invisibility.
She passed four other houses before the street came to a dead end. There, she turned and parked the Escape on the shoulder of the lane, facing back the way she had come.
These homes stood on the brow of a hill with a view of El Capitan Lake. Jane followed a dirt path down through an open woods and then along a treeless slope green with maiden grass that would be as gold as wheat by midsummer. At the shore, she walked south, surveying the lake, which looked both placid and disarranged because the rumpled-laundry clouds were reflected in the serene mirrored surface. She gave equal attention to the houses on her left, gazing up as if admiring each.
Fences indicated that the properties occupied only the scalped-flat lots at the top of the hill. The white pickets at the front of the Lambert house were repeated all the way around.
She walked behind two more residences before returning to the Lambert place and climbing the slope. The back gate featured a simple gravity latch.
Closing the gate behind her, she considered the windows, from which the draperies had been drawn aside and the blinds raised to admit as much of the day’s dreary light as possible. She could see no one gazing out at the lake—or on the watch for her.
Committed now, she followed the pickets around the side of the house. As the clouds lowered and the flag rustled in a breeze that smelled faintly of either the rain to come or the waters of the lake, she climbed the porch steps and rang the bell.
A moment later, a slim, attractive, fiftyish woman opened the door. She wore jeans, a sweater, and a knee-length apron decorated with needlepoint strawberries.
“Mrs. Lambert?” Jane asked.
“Yes?”
“We have a bond that I hope I can call upon.”
Gwyneth Lambert raised a half smile and her eyebrows.
Jane said, “We both married Marines.”
“That’s a bond, all right. How can I help you?”
“We’re also both widows. And I believe we have the same people to blame for that.”
6
* * *
THE KITCHEN SMELLED OF ORANGES. Gwyn Lambert was baking mandarin-chocolate muffins in such quantity and with such industry that it was impossible not to suppose that she was busying herself as a defense against the sharper edges of her grief.
On the counters were nine plates, each holding half a dozen fully cooled muffins already covered in plastic wrap, destined for her neighbors and friends. A tenth plate of still-warm treats stood on the dinette table, and another batch was rising to perfection in the oven.
Gwyn was one of those impressive kitchen masters who produced culinary wonders with no apparent aftermath. No dirty mixing bowls or dishes in the sink. No flour dusting the counters. No crumbs or other debris on the floor.
Having declined a muffin, Jane accepted a mug of strong black coffee. She and her hostess sat across the table from each other, fragrant steam rising languidly off the rich brew.
“Did you say your Nick was a lieutenant colonel?” Gywn asked.
Jane had used her real name. The bond between her and Gwyn required this visit be kept secret. Under these circumstances, if she couldn’t trust a Marine wife, she couldn’t trust anyone.
“Full colonel,” Jane corrected. “He wore the silver eagle.”
“At only thirty-two? A boy with that kind of pep in his step would’ve gotten stars in time.”
Gwyn’s husband, Gordon, had been a lieutenant general, three stars, one rank below the highest officers in the corps.
Jane said, “Nick was awarded the Navy Cross and a DDS plus an entire chest full of other stuff.” The Navy Cross was one step below the Medal of Honor. Innately modest, Nick had never spoken of his medals and commendations, but sometimes Jane felt the need to brag about him, to confirm that he had existed and that his existence had made the world a better place. “I lost him four months ago. We were married six years.”
“Honey,” said Gwyn, “you must have been a true child bride.”
“Far from it. Twenty-one. The wedding was the week after I graduated Quantico and made the Bureau.”
Gwyn looked surprised. “You’re FBI?”
“If I ever go back. I’m on a leave of absence now. We met when Nick was on assignment to the Corps Combat Development Command at Quantico. He didn’t come on to me. I had to come on to him. He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and I’m mule-stubborn about getting what I want.” She surprised herself when her heart clutched and her voice broke. “These four months sometimes feel like four years…then like just four hours.” Her thoughtlessness at once dismayed her. “Damn, I’m sorry. Your loss is fresher than mine.”
Waving off the apology, unshed tears in her eyes, Gwyn said, “A year after we were married—’83 it was—Gordie was in Beirut when terrorists blew up the Marine barracks, killed two hundred twenty. He was so often somewhere bad, I imagined him dead a thousand times. I thought all that imagining would prepare me to handle it if one day someone in dress blues knocked on the door with a KIA notice. But I wasn’t prepared for…for the way it happened.”
According to news stories, on a Saturday little more than two weeks earlier, when his wife had been at the supermarket, Gordon let himself out the back gate in the picket fence and walked down the hill to the lake shore. He carried a short-barrel pistol-grip pump-action shotgun. He sat near the water, his back against a grassy bank. Because of the short barrel, he was able to reach the trigger. Boaters on the lake sat witness as he shot himself in the mouth. When Gwyn came home from shopping, she found the street filled with sheriff’s cruisers, her front door standing open, and her life forever changed.
Jane said, “Do you mind my asking…”
“I’m hurting bad, but I’m not broken. Ask.”
“Any chance he went to the lake in the company of someone?”
“No, none. The woman next door saw him going down there alone, carrying something, but she didn’t realize it was a gun.”
“The boaters who witnessed it—have they all been cleared?”
&nbs
p; Gwyn looked puzzled. “Cleared of what?”
“Maybe your husband was to meet someone. Maybe he took the shotgun for protection.”
“And maybe it was murder? Couldn’t have been. There were four boats in the area. At least half a dozen people witnessed it.”
Jane didn’t want to ask the next question because it could seem to be an accusation that the Lamberts’ marriage had been in trouble. “Was your husband…was Gordon at all depressed?”
“Not ever. Some people throw hope away. Gordie was chained to it all his life, an optimist’s optimist.”
“Sounds like Nick,” Jane said. “Every problem that came his way was just a challenge, and he loved challenges.”
“How did it happen, honey? How did you lose him?”
“I was making dinner. He went to the john. When he didn’t come back, I found him fully clothed, sitting in the bathtub. He’d used his combat knife, the Ka-Bar, to cut his neck so deeply that he severed his left carotid artery.”
7
* * *
THIS HAD BEEN a wet El Niño winter, the second in the past half decade, with normal rain in the intervening years, a climate anomaly that had ended the state’s drought. Now the morning light at the windows dimmed as though dusk must be descending. Once glass-smooth, the lake below lay stippled with white, a breeze scaling it as if it were a great serpent slumbering in the shadow of the pending storm.
While Gwyn took the finished muffins out of the oven and put the pan on the drainboard to cool, the ticking of the wall clock seemed to grow louder. During the past month, timepieces of all kinds had periodically tormented Jane. Now and then she thought she could hear her wristwatch ticking faintly; it became so aggravating that she took it off and put it away in the car’s glove box or, if she was in a motel, carried it across the room to bury it under the cushion of an armchair until she needed it. If time was running out for her, she didn’t want to be insistently reminded of that fact.
As Gwyn poured fresh coffee for the two of them, Jane wondered, “Did Gordon leave a note?”
“Not a note, not a text message, not a voice mail. I don’t know whether I wish he had or should be glad he didn’t.” She returned the pot to the coffeemaker and settled in her chair once more.
Jane tried to ignore the clock, the louder ticking no doubt imaginary. “I keep a notepad and pen in my bedroom vanity drawer. Nick used them to write a final good-bye, if you can bend your mind to think of it that way.” The eeriness of those four sentences frosted the chambers of her heart every time she considered them. She quoted, “ ‘Something is wrong with me. I need. I very much need. I very much need to be dead.’ ”
Gwyn had picked up her coffee cup. She put it down without drinking from it. “That’s damn strange, isn’t it?”
“I thought so. The police and medical examiner seemed to think so, too. The first sentence was in his tight, meticulous cursive, but the quality of the others steadily deteriorated, as if he had to struggle to control his hand.”
They stared out at the darkening day, sharing a silence, and then Gwyn said, “How awful for you—to be the one to find him.”
That observation didn’t need a reply.
Staring into her coffee cup as though her future might be read in the patterns of reflected light made by the ceiling fixture, Jane said, “The U.S. suicide rate dropped to about ten and a half per hundred thousand people late in the last century. But the last two decades, it’s returned to the historic norm of twelve and a half. Until last April, when it began to climb. By the end of the year, the annual tally was fourteen per hundred thousand. At the normal rate, that’s over thirty-eight thousand cases. The higher rate is more than another forty-five hundred suicides. And from what I’m able to tell, the first three months of this year, it’s running at fifteen and a half, which by December thirty-first will be almost eighty-four hundred cases above the historic norm.”
As she recited the numbers for Gwyn, she puzzled over them yet again, but she still had no idea what to make of them or why they seemed germane to Nick’s death. When she looked up, she saw Gwyn regarding her with rather more intensity than before.
“Honey, are you telling me you’re doing research? Damn right you are. So there’s more to this than you’ve said. Isn’t there?”
There was a great deal more, but Jane wouldn’t share too much and possibly put the widow Lambert in jeopardy.
Gwyn pressed her. “Don’t tell me we’re back in some cold war with all its dirty tricks. Are there a lot of military men in those extra eighty-four hundred suicides?”
“Quite a few, but not a disproportionate share. It’s equally distributed across professions. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, police, journalists…But they’re unusual suicides. Successful and well-adjusted people with no history of depression or emotional problems or financial crisis. They don’t fit any of the standard profiles of those with suicidal tendencies.”
A gust of wind pummeled the house, rattling the back door as if someone insistently tried the knob to see if the lock was engaged.
Hope pinked the woman’s face and brought a liveliness to her eyes that Jane had not seen before. “Are you saying maybe Gordie was—what?—drugged or something? He didn’t know what he was doing when he took the shotgun down there? Is there a possibility…?”
“I don’t know, Gwyn. I’ve found the littlest bits of things to piece together, and I can’t see what they mean yet, if they mean anything at all.” She tried the coffee but had drunk enough of it. “Was there any time in the past year when Gordon wasn’t feeling well?”
“Maybe a cold once. An abscessed tooth and a root canal.”
“Spells of vertigo? Mental confusion? Headaches?”
“Gordie wasn’t a man for headaches. Or for anything that slowed him down.”
“This would’ve been memorable, a real hardcore migraine, with the characteristic twinkling lights that mess with your vision.” She saw this resonated with the widow Lambert. “When was it, Gwyn?”
“At the WIC, the What If Conference, last September in Vegas.”
“What’s the What If?”
“The Gernsback Institute brings together a panel of futurists and science-fiction writers for four days. It challenges them to think outside the box about national defense. What threats are we not concentrating on that might turn out to be bigger than we think a year from now, ten years, twenty years?”
She put one hand to her mouth, and her brow furrowed.
“Something wrong?” Jane asked.
Gwyn shrugged. “No. Just for a second, I wondered if I should be talking about it. But it’s not a big secret or anything. It’s gotten a lot of press attention over the years. See, the institute invites four hundred of the most forward-thinking people—military officers from every branch of service, key scientists, and engineers from major defense contractors—to listen to the panels and ask questions. It’s quite a thing. Spouses are welcome. We women attend the dinners and social events, but not the sessions. And it’s not any kind of bribe, by the way.”
“I didn’t think it was.”
“The institute is an apolitical nonprofit. It doesn’t have any ties to defense contractors. And when you receive an invitation, you have to pay your own travel and lodging. Gordie took me with him to three conferences. He just loved them.”
“But last year he had a bad migraine at the event?”
“His only one ever. The third day, in the morning, for almost six hours he was flat in bed. I kept after him to call the front desk and find a doctor. But Gordie figured anything less than a bullet wound was best dealt with by letting it work itself out. You know how men are always having to prove things to themselves.”
Jane warmed to a memory. “Nick was woodworking, gouged his hand when a chisel slipped. It probably needed four or five stitches. But he cleaned the wound himself, packed it full of Neosporin, and bound it tight with duct tape. I thought he’d die of blood poisoning or lose his hand, and he thought my concer
n was so cute. Cute! I wanted so bad to smack him. In fact, I did smack him.”
Gwyn smiled. “Good for you. Anyway, the migraine went away by lunchtime, and Gordie missed only one session. When I wasn’t able to persuade him to see a doctor, I went to the spa and spent a bundle for a massage. But how did you know about the migraine?”
“One of the other people I’ve interviewed, this widower in Chicago, his wife had her first and last migraine two months before she hung herself in their garage.”
“Was she at the What If Conference?”
“No. I only wish it was that simple. I can’t find links like that between a significant number of them. Just fragile threads, tenuous connections. That woman was the CEO of a nonprofit serving people with disabilities. By all accounts she was happy, productive, and beloved by virtually everyone.”
“Did your Nick have a one-and-only migraine?”
“Not that he mentioned. The suspicious suicides that interest me…in the months before they died, some complained of a few brief spells of vertigo. Or strange, intense dreams. Or essential tremors of the mouth and the left hand that resolved after just a week or two. Some experienced a bitter taste that came and went. Different things and mostly minor. But Nick didn’t have any unusual symptoms. Zero, zip, nada.”
“You’ve interviewed these people’s loved ones.”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Twenty-two so far, including you.” Reading Gwyn’s expression, Jane said, “Yeah, I know, it’s an obsession. Maybe it’s a fool’s errand.”
“You’re nobody’s fool, honey. Sometimes it’s just…hard to move on. Where will you go from here?”
“There’s someone near San Diego I’d like to talk to.” She leaned back in her chair. “But this What If event in Vegas still intrigues me. Do you have anything from the conference, a brochure, especially a program for those four days?”