“Who did what to the kitchen floor?”
“The workmen,” she said. “They ripped up the old floorboards today. It’s all gone!”
“Oh,” I said. “Uh, that was supposed to be a secret.”
“What?” she cried.
“I’ll explain when I get there, Nana,” I said, and hung up.
Bree said, “Told you not telling her was a bad idea.”
“I wanted to surprise her.”
“One thing I’ve figured out about your grandmother?”
“What’s that?”
“She doesn’t like surprises.”
Over the course of the next hour we drove once again past all the places Ava had mentioned during the time she lived with us. We talked to kids her age and showed them her picture. But as before, none of them said they’d seen her.
We were about to go home when I decided to swing past Owens Road Park. I’d never heard her talk about Owens Road, but I knew it was a hangout for kids as much as Seward Square was. As we drove past the park, I spotted a girl about Ava’s age sitting on a park bench and pulled over immediately, saying, “I know her. She came to the house to visit Ava once.”
Chapter
42
I searched my brain for the girl’s name and came up with it.
“Yolanda?” I called to her after getting out.
She looked at me, puzzled, until I got closer. Then her face clouded.
“You remember me?”
Yolanda nodded. “You’re the Man, right? After Ava?”
“Yes. But I’m looking for Ava as her friend. Not as the Man.”
She chewed the inside of her cheek before replying, “Lot of people looking for Ava, I hear.”
“Why?” asked Bree, who’d come up behind me.
Yolanda looked at her suspiciously, then said, “She owe people money.”
“Drug people?” I asked.
“Them, too,” she said.
“You know where we can find her?” Bree asked.
Yolanda pursed her lips, shook her head. “I ain’t seen that girl in two weeks. Last time she was dirty and smelled bad, like smoke. She was strung out, too, acting all paranoid, said somebody tried to kill her, and he still trying. I figured she was just in need of an oxy. But I gave her twenty bucks and told her to run.”
“So she was doing oxycodone?”
“And Percocet. Anything painkilling.”
“You see her, you give her a message,” Bree said in a strained voice. “You tell her Bree and Alex just want to talk to her. No judgments. No matter what time it is, she can call us. Okay?”
Yolanda shrugged. “Way I figure it, way I hope it, that girl is long gone, way out to California by now and got that monkey off her back. I know that’s how it would be I had that many people chasing my ass.”
Back in the car, heading home, I waited several minutes before I said, “Two weeks ago she was dirty and smelled like bad smoke.”
Bree closed her eyes and started rubbing her temples. “I know. Right about the time Jane Doe was set on fire.”
“I’ve got to tell the captain about this tomorrow. Show him Prough’s statement.”
My wife said nothing but nodded. We drove the rest of the way in silence.
It was nearly nine when I followed Bree up onto the porch, carrying the sweet potato pie from Henry’s. Nana Mama makes a mean sweet potato pie herself, but she loves Henry’s version. I figured to use it as a peace offering.
Bree said, “I’m going to take a shower.”
She opened the door and I watched her climb the stairs as if she had an anvil strapped to her shoulders. I felt similarly when I turned toward the front room, where the television was on.
My ninety-something grandmother, former English teacher and vice principal, was sitting on the couch in her pajamas and bathrobe, watching a bunch of zombies attack a family. I couldn’t help smiling.
“You’re watching The Walking Dead?” I asked incredulously.
Nana Mama acted as if she’d just noticed me, said, “Hush now, this is bad stuff going down.”
Two zombies had cornered the mother when the episode ended.
I looked at Nana Mama, still amused.
Nana Mama raised her chin defiantly, said, “Ali made me sit down and watch the first episode with him on DVD. He’s right. It’s not really about zombies. They’re sort of interchangeable. It’s the people who are running from the zombies who are interesting.”
“Right,” I said, and handed her the bag from Henry’s. “Your favorite.”
She didn’t take the bag. “What’s this secret?”
I sighed. “Remember that Italian tile you loved that I said we couldn’t afford?”
“Yes?”
“I figured out a way to afford it.”
That surprised her, and she softened. “Really?”
“I thought they weren’t going to rip up the old wood flooring until just before the appliances went in,” I said.
My grandmother got up. She’s a tiny woman. She reached up and stroked my cheek and said, “You are a good man, Alex.”
“Still friends, Nana?”
“Of course. Now let me get a plate so I can have some of Henry’s pie.”
We ate and talked until her eyelids started to droop. Then I went around and shut off the lights and helped her up the stairs. After she’d gone into her bedroom, I said good night to Jannie, who was still up studying, and looked in on Ali, fast asleep.
So was Bree when I climbed into our bed. My mind still swirled with all that had happened that day. I recalled my brief phone conversation with Damon, and how I’d had to cut him off in the middle of a question.
That kind of thing had happened too often in his life, and I felt a pang of guilt. Watch over him, God, I prayed as I drowsed into sleep. Keep my boy safe.
Chapter
43
The moon was high overhead around one that Tuesday morning. The wind was picking up, and the air smelled like coming rain when Acadia Le Duc prowled like a jaguar through branches and vines in the leafless woods between the county highway and the Kraft School campus.
Acadia often thought of herself as one kind of animal or another. She’d grown up in rural Louisiana surrounded by bayous and dense forests, with deer, ducks, goats, sheep, dogs, a monkey, and a cockatoo. Her father even kept several alligators in a penned backwater down the far bank from their home.
But Acadia was not a gator. She was a jaguar, a panther. She was always a big cat at moments like this, hunting for that darkest part of herself. She checked the compass app on her phone every few minutes to stay on a steady northward course over blown-down trees and through boggy bottoms until she hit an old two-track path she’d seen on Google Earth.
Following the path in the direction of the school, she could not help flashing on deep, dark secrets. In Acadia’s memories, cicadas thrummed in a terrible heated night. There were lightning, far-off thunder, and the patter of rain. Her mother screamed for mercy. Her drunken father’s fists gave none.
Acadia remembered it all as if it had been yesterday, but she roused from the memory when she passed several stacks of freshly cut wood before the way bent hard to the right beneath a giant spruce tree. She couldn’t be more than a quarter-mile from the North Dorm now.
She almost laughed. It all felt so delicious. How did Marcus describe this feeling? Free from restraint? Free enough to be authentic?
Whatever you called it, Acadia truly loved feeling like this, an outlaw of the body and the mind. The half-pint of vodka and the joint smoked in the car hadn’t hurt, either, and she flashed once again on that steaming night long ago when the lightning cracked over the bayou and the thunder almost drowned out the slamming of the porch door.
Acadia spotted three lights through the trees and soon saw that they were mounted on the roof of North Dorm, aiming down at the rear lawn.
Damon’s window was at the far end of the building.
Sticking to the dark shad
ows right next to the woods, she was soon opposite his room, which was dark. To her delight, she could see that his window was raised several inches above the sash.
A spotlight shone down brightly from above the window, revealing a metal pipe jutting out of the ground beside the dorm wall. She could climb up onto that pipe and be almost at chest height to the window sash. She’d push the window up, climb through, and rock that boy’s…
Intoxicated by the idea now, Acadia was nevertheless aware that she would be exposed as she moved across the lawn and when climbing through the window. She would have to be quick and precise. Noticing clouds smothering the moon, she took one last look around before bursting from her hiding place and racing across the lit-up lawn in less than ten seconds.
Acadia reached the pipe below Damon’s window and stepped up onto it, so focused on keeping her balance as she reached for the window sash that she didn’t notice the flashlight beam in the distance.
A man far to her left yelled, “Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”
Chapter
44
Acadia spun at the shout, launched herself off the pipe, and hit the ground running. She used fear as a whip that drove her across the lawn, into the shadows, sprinting toward that two-track path she’d come in on.
Ten yards shy of where she figured the path would be, she glanced over her shoulder and saw to her astonishment that the security guard was racing right down the middle of the lawn, holding the flashlight like some goddamned Olympic track star’s baton and gaining ground on her by the second.
Terrified that she might get caught, she felt adrenaline spike through her. She dodged onto the two-track, found a higher gear, and accelerated into the woods.
But without the moon, the forest was much darker than before. Roots grabbed at her shoes and threw her off-balance several times in the first hundred yards. Behind her she heard a stick crack and heard the guard yell, “Hey, lady, stop!”
Acadia wasn’t stopping for anything or anybody. But she was a very, very smart woman, with a keen sense of logic and strategy; and it was instantly apparent to her that the guard was going to run her down. She flashed on the image of the hunting cat she’d carried in her mind earlier.
She felt the jaguar come up in her the same way it had the first time, when she was sixteen and her father had come out of the house through the door of the screened porch, his wife’s blood on his knuckles as he stumbled toward the bayou and the fenced-in pool where he kept his gators.
In the woods behind Damon’s dorm, Acadia spotted the looming shape of the huge spruce tree on the two-track and remembered that the way bent left beneath it, not far from where she’d left the deep woods.
Acting instinctually, before she’d even consciously devised her plan, Acadia sprinted around the tight curve in the road and cut hard left toward the dim shape of the stacked logs and limbs.
She snatched up a stout chunk of tree branch about six inches around and two feet long. It felt familiar and weighty in her hands when she darted behind the spruce tree and jammed her back against the trunk, already hearing the pounding of the guard’s footfalls, already seeing the slashing of his flashlight.
Seeing that cutting beam, Acadia remembered the lightning that long-ago night when she snuck up behind her father as he aimed his flashlight down the bank into the pool, calling his reptiles by name and laughing drunkenly. The hatchet she’d carried that night was almost the same weight as the chunk of wood in her hands now.
The guard had slowed to a trot. Acadia heard the patter of the first raindrops falling and tightened her grip when the flashlight beam played on the track right in front of her.
Acadia coiled her muscles, became the jaguar. The guard was walking and gasping for air now.
He took a step into her field of view and was swinging the light her way when Acadia uncoiled and whipped the primitive club as if it had a steel cutting edge. There was a dull cracking noise when it hit the guard square on his forehead. His went down in a heap, dropping his light.
Her heart pounding wildly, Acadia picked the light up and shined it on the guard. She’d opened up a nasty gash that gushed blood. His eyes were partly closed and rolled up in his head. He was wracked with twitches and spasms.
She crouched over him a few moments and watched, as fascinated as she’d been when she’d seen the first alligator attack her father and heard how he screamed for help and found none.
The skies opened up over the Berkshires. Rain poured down on the woods. Acadia stood and set off with the flashlight and her club, not giving the guard another look. He’d been in the way. He’d had to be removed. And for a few moments there, she’d been treated to those death throes. They’d made her legs grow weak and spawned a warm feeling that traveled in her lower tummy.
Acadia got out her phone, checked the compass heading, and turned into the deep forest. Even in the pouring rain, she’d be at her car in ten minutes.
In twenty, she’d be at the motel, gathering her things.
With luck she’d be back in bed with Marcus Sunday by dawn.
Chapter
45
Helmet on, facing the Kinect camera in the apartment’s storage room, Sunday moved ultraslowly as he crept into Alex Cross’s virtual home, trying to take in everything, studying the dimensions and quirks of the old house, imagining the rooms filled with furniture and people.
The writer moved as a ghost might, out through the kitchen under construction into the backyard, where the foundation for the addition was already curing. He saw the blueprint in his mind and realized that this would be the part of the house Cross would know least. That could matter, he reasoned, and he made a mental note to have Acadia advance the software the next time so he might experience the addition half done and then complete.
Sunday returned to the bottom of the virtual staircase. He practiced slipping up the stairs, seeing every riser, imagined himself silent, lethal. He moved from room to room, conjuring up Cross’s grandmother asleep, and his son and daughter, too.
Lingering in the great detective’s bedroom, Sunday fantasized Bree Stone in his mind so vividly that he swore he could smell her. But once again, he was drawn to the third floor and the detective’s home office.
He stayed up there for a long time, altering his perspective by inches, examining every bit of the space, especially the articles about the mass killings outside Omaha and Fort Worth. When Sunday saw his own name and the quotes he’d given the journalist, he could not help smiling.
Your doom is right here, Cross, and you have no clue.
Reluctantly, the writer turned from the office and went to stand in the doorway. Then he took off, bounding down the virtual staircases and landings and bursting out the front door. When he removed the helmet, he was sweaty, exhilarated, and disoriented. The virtual model was so real he felt like he’d just escaped the place.
Outside, the sun was rising. He shut the Kinect down, went to the fridge in his own kitchen, and found cold Ethiopian takeout food. Acadia’s, no doubt. She loved that kind of stuff. Anything strange.
But why hadn’t he heard from her since she’d gone to the Berkshires on a scouting assignment? Sunday had tried her cell several times and had gotten nothing but voice mail. He popped the food into the microwave, thinking that this silence wasn’t that unusual. Acadia often fell out of touch. Hell, he did, too.
But for a moment, thinking about her, Sunday remembered how electric it felt when he was with her, how it had been that way right from that first night. They’d wandered the French Quarter drinking, listening to music, and telling each other their life stories.
Around two in the morning, back in his hotel after they’d made passionate love for the first time, Acadia had asked him what his deepest, darkest secret was. Looking into her fathomless eyes, Sunday had felt compelled to tell her something he’d never told anyone else. He’d killed his father with a shovel. He’d fed the body to his father’s hogs.
When the writer had
finished his story, Acadia had looked at him in wonder and said, “I think we were meant to be together, Marcus, to meet tonight.”
After hearing her explain how she’d killed her wife-beating father and destroyed the evidence by feeding her father to his pet alligators, Sunday had believed the same thing. He didn’t believe in souls or Kismet or Karma, but he did believe their meeting was destined somehow.
“How did you feel after you hit him?” he’d asked. “Your father.”
“Same way I do now,” she’d said, and rolled on top of him hungrily. “You?”
“Exactly the same way.”
The microwave dinged in the kitchen, waking him from his memories.
Sunday ate the leftover Ethiopian beef dish and got his mind off Acadia by thinking about Cross. He wondered whether he was moving too slowly, not putting enough pressure on the man. As he finished his meal, he ticked through the basic strategy once again.
After several minutes of detached analysis, he decided the overall plan still worked. It still did the job. He wasn’t going to try to short-circuit the process.
But perhaps there was more to be done in the short term.
The writer thought over everything he’d discovered about the Superior Spa killings in the last twenty-four hours. Could he use that information now? And then he saw how it might work, how it might dovetail nicely with his recent monkey business at the Mandarin Oriental.
Returning to the storage room, he sat at Preston Elliot’s laptop and called up Microsoft Word. He started futzing with the fonts, changing them every few words, until he had a letter that looked sufficiently bizarre but read rather well.
The writer considered it a moment and decided one more thing was needed. He put on leather gloves, fed his printer new paper. After printing the letter, he took the page into the living room, where he turned on the television and found a pen.