Sole Survivor (30 page)

Hurrying after her, Joe said, “Then you know about them?”

“Sure do. Been on the TV news today. The news people show you stuff to curl your hair, then try to sell you Fritos. This awful business changes everythin’.”

He put an arm on her shoulder, halted her. “TV news?”

“Some people been murdered after she talks to them.”

Even with the large culinary staff in white flurries of activity around them, they were afforded privacy for their conversation by the masking clang of pots, rattle of skillets, whir of mixers, swish of whisks, clatter of dishes, buzz, clink, tink, ping, pop, scrape, chop, sizzle.

“They call it somethin’ else on the news,” Mahalia said, “but it’s murder sure enough.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he said. “I’m talking about the men in the restaurant.”

She frowned. “What men?”

“Two of them. Black slacks, white silk shirts, black leather jackets—”

“I walked ’em to their table.”

“You did, yeah. I just recognized them a minute ago.”

“Bad folks?”

“The worst.”

Baffled, she shook her head. “But, sugar, we know you weren’t followed.”

“I wasn’t, but maybe
you
were. Or maybe someone else who’s protecting Rose was followed.”

“Devil himself would have a hard time finding Rosie if he had to depend on getting to her through us.”

“But somehow they’ve figured out who’s been hiding her for a year, and now they’re closing in.”

Glowering, wrapped by bulletproof confidence, Mahalia said, “Nobody’s gonna lay one little finger on Rosie.”

“Is she here?”

“Waitin’ for you.”

A cold tide washed through his heart. “You don’t understand—the two in the restaurant won’t have come alone. There’s sure to be more outside. Maybe a small army of them.”

“Yeah, maybe, but they don’t know what they’re dealin’ with, honey.” Thunderheads of resolve massed in her dark face. “We’re Baptists.”

Certain that he could not have heard the woman correctly, Joe hurried after her as she continued through the kitchen.

At the far end of the big room, they went through an open door into a sparkling scullery where fruits and vegetables were cleaned and trimmed before being sent in to the main cookery. This late in the restaurant’s day, no one was at work here.

Beyond the scullery was a concrete-floored receiving room that smelled of raw celery and peppers, damp wood and damp cardboard. On pallets along the right-hand wall, empty fruit and vegetable crates, boxes, and cases of empty beer bottles were stacked almost to the low ceiling.

Directly ahead, under a red
Exit
sign, was a wide steel exterior door, closed now, beyond which suppliers’ trucks evidently parked to make deliveries. To the left was an elevator.

“Rose is down below.” Mahalia pressed the call button, and the elevator doors slid open at once.

“What’s under us?”

“Well, one time, this was the service elevator to a banquet room and deck, where you could have big parties right on the beach, but we can’t use it like the joint did before us. Coastal Commission put a hard rule on us. Now it’s just a storeroom. Once you go down, I’ll have some boys come move the pallets and empty crates to this wall. We’ll cover the elevator real nice. Nobody’ll know it’s even here.”

Uneasy about being cornered, Joe said, “Yeah, but what if they come looking and they
do
find the elevator?”

“Gonna have to stop callin’ you Presentable Joe. Better would be Worryin’ Joe.”

“After a while, they
will
come looking. They won’t just wait till closing time and go home. So once I’m down there, do I have another way out?” he persisted.

“Never tore apart the front stairs, where the customers used to go down. Just covered the openin’ with hinged panels so you don’t really see it. You come up that way, though, you’ll be right across from the hostess station, in the middle of plain view.”

“No good.”

“So if somethin’ goes wrong, best to skedaddle out the lower door onto the deck. From there you have the beach, the whole coast.”

“They could be covering that exit too.”

“It’s down at the base of the bluff. From the upper level, they can’t know it’s there. You should just try to relax, sugar. We’re on the righteous side, which counts for somethin’.”

“Not much.”

“Worryin’ Joe.”

He stepped into the elevator but blocked the sliding door with his arm in case it tried to close. “How’re you connected with this place, Mahalia?”

“Half owner.”

“The food’s great.”

“You can look at me the way I am and think I don’t
know
?” she asked good-naturedly.

“What’re you to Rose?”

“Gonna call you Curious Joe pretty soon. Rosie married my brother Louis about twenty-two years ago. They met in college. Wasn’t truly surprised when Louis turned out smart enough to go to college, but I was sure surprised he had the brains to fall for someone like Rosie. Then, of course, the man proved he was a pure fool, after all, when he up and divorced her four years later. Rosie couldn’t have kids, and havin’ kids was important to Louis—though with less air in his skull and any common sense at all, the man would’ve realized Rosie was more treasure than a houseful of babies.”

“She hasn’t been your sister-in-law for eighteen years, but you’re willing to put yourself on the line for her?”

“Why not? You think Rosie turned into a vampire when Louis, the fool, divorced her? She’s been the same sweet lady ever I met her. I love her like a sister. Now she’s waitin’, Curious Joe.”

“One more thing. Earlier, when you told me these people don’t know who they’re dealing with…You didn’t say ‘We’re Baptists’?”

“That’s exactly what I did say. ‘Tough’ and ‘Baptists’ don’t go together in your head—is that it?”

“Well—”

“Mama and Daddy stood up to the Klan down in Mississippi when the Klan had a whole lot more teeth than they do now, and so did my grandma and grandpap before them, and they never let fear weigh ’em down. When I was a little girl, we went through hurricanes off the Gulf of Mexico and Delta floods and encephalitis epidemics and poor times when we didn’t know where tomorrow’s food was comin’ from, but we rode it out and still sung loud in the choir every Sunday. Maybe the United States Marines are some tougher than your average Southern black Baptist, Joe, but not by much.”

“Rose is a lucky woman with a friend like you.”

“I’m the lucky one,” said Mahalia. “She lifts me up—now more than ever. Go on, Joe. And stay down there with her till we close this place and figure a way we can slip you two out. I’ll come for you when it’s time.”

“Be ready for trouble long before that,” he warned her.

“Go.”

Joe let the doors slide shut.

The elevator descended.

14

Here now, at last and alone, at the far end of the long room, was Dr. Rose Marie Tucker, in one of four folding chairs at a scarred worktable, leaning forward, forearms on the table, hands clasped, waiting and silent, her eyes solemn and full of tenderness, this diminutive survivor, keeper of secrets that Joe had been desperate to learn but from which he suddenly shied.

Some of the recessed-can fixtures in the ceiling contained dead bulbs, and the live ones were haphazardly angled, so the floor that he slowly crossed was mottled with light and shadow as if it were an underwater realm. His own shadow preceded him, then fell behind, but again preceded him, flowed here into a pool of gloom and vanished like a soul into oblivion, only to swim into view three steps later. He felt as though he were a condemned man submerged in the concrete depths of an inescapable prison, on a long death-row walk toward lethal punishment—yet simultaneously he believed in the possibility of clemency and rebirth. As he approached the revelation that had lifted Georgine and Charlie Delmann from despair to euphoria, as he drew nearer the truth about Nina, his mind churned with conflicting currents, and hope like schools of bright koi darted through his internal darkness.

Against the left-hand wall were boxes of restaurant provisions, primarily paper towels for the rest rooms, candles for the tables, and janitorial supplies purchased in bulk. The right-hand wall, which faced the beach and the ocean beyond, featured two doors and a series of large windows, but the coast was not visible because the glass was protected by metal Rolladen security shutters. The banquet room felt like a bunker.

He pulled out a chair and sat across the table from Rose.

As in the cemetery the previous day, this woman radiated such extraordinary charismatic power that her petite stature was a source of continual surprise. She seemed more physically imposing than Joe—yet her wrists were as dainty as those of a twelve-year-old girl. Her magnetic eyes held him, touched him, and some knowledge in them humbled him in a way that no man twice his size could have humbled him—yet her features appeared so fragile, her throat so slender, her shoulders so delicate that she should have seemed as vulnerable as a child.

Joe reached across the table toward her.

She gripped his hand.

Dread fought with hope for his voice, and while the battle raged, he could not speak to ask about Nina.

More solemn now than she had been in the cemetery, Rose said, “It’s all going so badly. They’re killing everyone I talk to. They’ll stop at nothing.”

Relieved of the obligation to ask, first, the fateful question about his younger daughter, Joe found his voice. “I was there at the house in Hancock Park with the Delmanns…and Lisa.”

Her eyes widened in alarm. “You don’t mean…when it happened?”

“Yes.”

Her small hand tightened on his. “You saw?”

He nodded. “They killed themselves. Such terrible…such violence, madness.”

“Not madness. Not suicide. Murder. But how in the name of God did you survive?”

“I ran.”

“While they were still being killed?”

“Charlie and Georgine were already dead. Lisa was still burning.”

“So she wasn’t dead yet when you ran?”

“No. Still on her feet and burning but not screaming, just quietly…quietly burning.”

“Then you got out just in time. A miracle of your own.”

“How, Rose? How was it done to them?”

Lowering her gaze from his eyes to their entwined hands, she didn’t answer Joe’s question. More to herself than to him, she said, “I thought this was the way to begin the work—by bringing the news to the families who’d lost loved ones on that airliner. But because of me…all this blood.”

“You really were aboard Flight 353?” he asked.

She met his eyes again. “Economy class. Row sixteen, seat B, one away from the window.”

The truth was in her voice as sure as rain and sunshine are in a green blade of grass.

Joe said, “You really walked away from the crash unharmed.”

“Untouched,” she said softly, emphasizing the miraculousness of her escape.

“And you weren’t alone.”

“Who told you?”

“Not the Delmanns. Not anyone else you’ve spoken with. They have all kept faith with you, held tight to whatever secrets you’ve told them. How I found out goes all the way back to that night. Do you remember Jeff and Mercy Ealing?”

A faint smile floated across her mouth and away as she said, “The Loose Change Ranch.”

“I was there early this afternoon,” he said.

“They’re nice people.”

“A lovely quiet life.”

“And you’re a good reporter.”

“When the assignment matters to me.”

Her eyes were midnight-dark but luminous lakes, and Joe could not tell whether the secrets sunk in them would drown or buoy him.

She said, “I’m so sorry about all the people on that plane. Sorry they went before their time. So sorry for their families…for you.”

“You didn’t realize that you were putting them in jeopardy—did you?”

“God, no.”

“Then you’ve no guilt.”

“I feel it, though.”

“Tell me, Rose. Please. I’ve come a long, long way around to hear it. Tell me what you’ve told the others.”

“But they’re killing everyone I tell. Not just the Delmanns but others, half a dozen others.”

“I don’t care about the danger.”

“But I care. Because now I
do
know the jeopardy I’m putting you in, and I’ve got to consider it.”

“No jeopardy. None whatsoever. I’m dead anyway,” he said. “Unless what you have to tell me is something that gives me a life again.”

“You’re a good man. In all the years you have left, you can contribute so much to this screwed-up world.”

“Not in my condition.”

Her eyes, those lakes, were sorrow given substance. Suddenly they scared him so profoundly that he wanted to look away from them—but could not.

Their conversation had given him time to approach the question from which at first he’d cringed, and now he knew that he must ask it before he lost his courage again. “Rose…Where is my daughter Nina?”

Rose Tucker hesitated. Finally, with her free hand, she reached into an inner pocket of her navy-blue blazer and withdrew a Polaroid photograph.

Joe could see that it was a picture of the flush-set headstone with the bronze plaque bearing the names of his wife and daughters—one of those she had taken the previous day.

With a squeeze of encouragement, she let go of his hand and pressed the photograph into it.

Staring at the Polaroid, he said, “She’s not here. Not in the ground. Michelle and Chrissie, yes. But not Nina.”

Almost in a whisper, she said, “Open your heart, Joe. Open your heart and your mind—and what do you see?”

At last she was bringing to him the transforming gift that she had brought to Nora Vadance, to the Delmanns, and to others.

He stared at the Polaroid.

“What do you see, Joe?”

“A gravestone.”

“Open your mind.”

With expectations that he could not put into words but that nevertheless caused his heart to race, Joe searched the image in his hand. “Granite, bronze…the grass around.”

“Open your heart,” she whispered.

“Their three names…the dates…”

“Keep looking.”

“…sunshine…shadows…”

“Open your heart.”

Although Rose’s sincerity was evident and could not be doubted, her little mantra—
Open your mind, open your heart
—began to seem silly, as though she were not a scientist but a New Age guru.

“Open your mind,” she persisted gently.

The granite. The bronze. The grass around.

She said, “Don’t just look.
See
.”

The sweet milk of expectation began to curdle, and Joe felt his expression turning sour.

Rose said, “Does the photo feel strange to you? Not to your eyes…to your fingertips? Does it feel peculiar against your skin?”

He was about to tell her no, that it felt like nothing more than what it was, like a damned Polaroid, glossy and cool—but then it
did
feel peculiar.

First he became conscious of the elaborate texture of his own skin to an extent that he had never before experienced or imagined possible. He felt every arch, loop, and whorl as it pressed against the photo, and each tiny ridge and equally tiny trough of skin on each finger pad seemed to have its own exquisitely sensitive array of nerve endings.

More tactile data flowed to him from the Polaroid than he was able to process or understand. He was overwhelmed by the smoothness of the photograph, but also by the thousands of microscopic pits in the film surface that were invisible to the unassisted eye, and by the
feel
of the dyes and fixatives and other chemicals of which the graveyard image was composed.

Then to his touch, although not to his eye, the image on the Polaroid acquired depth, as if it were not merely a two-dimensional photograph but a window with a view of the grave, a window through which he was able to reach. He felt warm summer sun on his fingers, felt granite and bronze and a prickle of grass.

Weirder still: Now he
felt
a color, as if wires had crossed in his brain, jumbling his senses, and he said, “Blue,” and immediately he
felt
a dazzling burst of light, and as if from a distance, he heard himself say, “Bright.”

The feelings of blueness and light quickly became actual visual experiences: The banquet room began to fade into a bright blue haze.

Gasping, Joe dropped the photograph as if it had come alive in his hand.

The blue brightness
snapped
to a small point in the center of his field of vision, like the picture on a television screen when the Off switch is clicked. This point shrank until the final pixel of light hung starlike for an instant but then silently imploded and was gone.

Rose Tucker leaned across the table toward him.

Joe peered into her commanding eyes—and perceived something different from what he had seen before. The sorrow and the pity, yes. They remained. The compassion and the intelligence were still there, in as full measure as ever. But now he saw—or thought he saw—some part of her that rode a mad horse of obsession at a gallop toward a cliff over which she wanted him to follow.

As though reading his thoughts, she said, “Joe, what you’re afraid of has nothing to do with me. What you’re truly afraid of is
opening your mind
to something you’ve spent your life refusing to believe.”

“Your voice,” he said, “the whisper, the repetitive phrases—
Open your heart, open your mind
—like a hypnotist.”

“You don’t really believe that,” she said as calmly as ever.

“Something on the Polaroid,” he said, and heard the quiver of desperation in his voice.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“A chemical substance.”

“No.”

“A hallucinogenic drug. Absorbed through the skin.”

“No.”

“Something I absorbed through the skin,” he insisted, “put me in an altered state of consciousness.” He rubbed his hands on his corduroy jacket.

“Nothing on the photograph could have entered your bloodstream through your skin
so quickly
. Nothing could have affected your mind in mere seconds.”

“I don’t know that to be true.”

“I do.”

“I’m no pharmacologist.”

“Then consult one,” she said without enmity.

“Shit.” He was as irrationally angry with her as he had briefly been angry with Barbara Christman.

The more rattled he became, the deeper her equanimity. “What you experienced was synesthesia.”

“What?”

All scientist now, Rose Tucker said, “Synesthesia. A sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied in a different modality.”

“Mumbo-jumbo.”

“Not at all. For instance, a few bars of a familiar song are played—but instead of hearing them, you might see a certain color or smell an associated aroma. It’s a rare condition in the general population, but it’s what most people first feel with these photos—and it’s common among mystics.”

“Mystics!” He almost spat on the floor. “I’m no mystic, Dr. Tucker. I’m a crime reporter—or was. Only the facts matter to me.”

“Synesthesia isn’t simply the result of religious mania, if that’s what you’re thinking, Joe. It’s a scientifically documented experience even among nonbelievers, and some well-grounded people think it’s a glimpse of a higher state of consciousness.”

Her eyes, such cool lakes before, seemed hot now, and when he peered into them, he looked at once away, afraid that her fire would spread to him. He was not sure if he saw evil in her or only wanted to see it, and he was thoroughly confused.

“If it was some skin-permeating drug on the photograph,” she said, as maddeningly soft-spoken as any devil ever had been, “then the effect would have lingered after you dropped it.”

He said nothing, spinning in his internal turmoil.

“But when you released the photo, the effect ceased. Because what you’re confronted with here is nothing as comforting as mere illusion, Joe.”

“Where’s Nina?” he demanded.

Rose indicated the Polaroid, which now lay on the table where he had dropped it. “Look. See.”

“No.”

“Don’t be afraid.”

Anger surged in him, boiled. This was the savage anger that had frightened him before. It frightened him now, too, but he could not control it.

“Where’s Nina, damn it?”

“Open your heart,” she said quietly.

“This is bullshit.”

“Open your mind.”

“Open it how far? Until I’ve emptied out my head? Is that what you want me to be?”

She gave him time to get a grip on himself. Then: “I don’t want you to be anything, Joe. You asked me where Nina is. You want to know about your family. I gave you the photograph so you could see. So you could see.”

Her will was stronger than his, and after a while he found himself picking up the photograph.

“Remember the feeling,” she encouraged him. “Let it come to you again.”

It did not come to him again, however, although he turned the photograph over and over in his hands. He slid his fingertips in circles across the glossy image but could not feel the granite, the bronze, the grass. He summoned the blueness and the brightness, but they did not appear.