“He thinks he’s clean,” she told Tim on the phone.
She followed Cass over the Nearing Bridge. When the highway divided on 843, he headed north, away from the airport to which she’d suspected he might be heading. She remained about four hundred feet behind, just beyond the focal distance of his rearview mirror, in the lane to the right of him, maintaining his speed.
Cass went about six miles, then branched west on 83. He was zipping along now, well over seventy, and Tim called to say he was falling behind. He respected his age and couldn’t drive much over sixty. After an hour, he was at least fifteen miles behind and worried that he wasn’t going to do her much good.
“Keep me company,” she told him.
“He’s headed to Skageon, I figure,” Tim answered. You could find nice country in any direction from the Tri-Cities, but Skageon to the north was by far the most popular destination. Unlike the prairie to the west and south, the land in Skageon was rolling, with panoramic vistas over the many lakes. Tim said he seemed to recollect a feature story talking about Paul’s family retreat up there. Evon thought she remembered the same thing, once he mentioned it. Maybe Cass had taken over that, too.
The Hyundai exited on 141, a two-lane road.
“He’s going to the Berryton Locks, I bet,” Tim said. These days, most people traveled to Skageon by following the winding course of the Kindle through the Tri-Cities and then heading upstate on the other major highway across town, 831. But from here, you could still reach the eastern shore of the Kindle by a ferry that departed from Berryton, where the Wabash and the Kindle met in a small falls that had been forded by locks erected in the 1930s as a WPA project.
The ferry, a massive white thing, was already docked when Evon arrived there in half an hour. Even on Friday afternoon in late May there was not much of a crowd. That would start changing in a week or two, once the Tri-Cities schools were out. On summer weekends, the cars in line to board could stretch back a mile and the ferry often filled, meaning at least an hour’s wait until the next departure. But now, with about ten minutes to spare before the 4:35 embarkation, there was still plenty of room. Six cars were between the Hyundai and her when she paid her fee. She followed Cass down the gangway into the iron innards of the ferry, which always reminded her of being in the belly of Jonah’s whale. A flagger kept the cars straight within the bright yellow lines. When the lane beside Cass filled, she saw him get out of the Hyundai. The profile was still Paul’s. He took the stairs up to the cafeteria, where he, like most folks, was going to wait out the thirty-minute ride. Cell phones didn’t work inside the iron hull, and even in the cafeteria everyone tended to lose reception for a few minutes out in the middle of the water.
Once Cass was out of sight, Evon stretched her legs. She asked the flagger how long before the ferry departed.
“Three minutes.”
At the rail, she got enough reception to call Tim. There was no way he was going to make it. He’d been on 141 for only a few minutes.
“I’ll wait for the next ferry,” Tim said. The plan to start had been to give Cass no choice: Tell us the truth about Dita’s death, or we have to call the police right now and tell them about the identity switch. They’d planned to let Tim deliver that message, and that still seemed the better course.
“He’s just going to take me as Hal in another body,” she said. “It’s a lot more likely that he’d trust you enough to make a deal.” They knew for certain that Cass wasn’t going anywhere for half an hour. The Hyundai was parked in by now.
A moment later, she could feel the ferry lurch as it unmoored. It would take another ten minutes, while the locks brought the vessel up about thirty feet to the level of the Kindle, before they started across the river.
She hung over the rail to feel the sun. It was a great early spring day, upper sixties, with high clouds plump as doves. When the little breeze kicked up periodically, it carried some of the chill of the water. She took a second in the ladies’ room, then returned to her car and thumbed through her e-mail the rest of the ride.
When the other shore came into sight, heavily wooded between the little shacks that served as marinas and restaurants, drivers began to filter back down to their vehicles, starting their engines once the vessel banged to rest. The iron mouth of the ferry slowly opened, admitting daylight into the dungeon darkness.
The cars on both sides of her slid forward, but there was no motion in her lane. After another minute, horns were blaring, and the PA blasted an announcement asking for the driver of the red Hyundai with New York plates to move his vehicle before it was towed. Evon knew Cass wasn’t going to appear. Eventually, an orange-vested flagger got into the coupe, in which the keys had apparently been left, and drove the car off the ferry.
She had no cell reception until she was onshore.
“He burned us,” she told Tim.
31
Tim was on 141, about five minutes from the ferry launch at Berryton Locks, when he saw Sofia’s gold Lexus coming toward him. It was the mid-size model, close to ten years old, which was what clicked first, even before he recognized the vanity plate, RECNSTRCT. He saw two figures in the car as it surged past, Sofia in a headscarf and dark glasses, and someone in back. Tim pulled onto the shoulder and waited for a break in the traffic before crossing the road and taking off behind her. Something had to be up. He tried Evon’s cell, but she was out of coverage on the ferry.
On the two-lane road, he could keep pace. The land began to roll here and every time he hit a rise he could see the Lexus several hundred yards ahead of him. Outside Decca, a hay wagon pulled by a pickup swung on in front him, doing no more than twenty-five. At his age, it froze his heart solid when he pulled into the oncoming lane to pass, but he needed to get closer. He fell in with two cars between Sofia and him.
When Evon called, he didn’t even let her talk.
“I think I got him,” Tim told her. “Never saw a surveillance the damn Feebies didn’t muck up.” He just wanted to make her laugh, and she did. The Feds, in fact, were usually better at the cloak-and-dagger. Talking it over now, she and Tim decided Evon should get on the highway on the other side and meet him at the Indian Falls Bridge about fifty miles north, the next point to cross the Kindle.
Near Bailey, the two vehicles that filled the gap between Sofia and Tim exited, and a few miles on, the speed limit lowered to thirty, as the road passed through Harrington Ridge. Tim now recognized the second figure in the back of the car. It was the dog.
“They could have had a second car up there at the ferry,” Evon said, when he told her he still didn’t see Cass.
“But Sofia’s headed away from home,” Tim said. “And she ran out on a reception room full of patients. Odds are she’s running somewhere we wanna go.”
Here, the footprint of the glacier had left undulant farmland, a picture from the Saturday Evening Post, with red barns and white farmhouses rearing up against the broken black soil, some stubbled by soybean sprouts. Occasionally the long vistas were interrupted by stretches of the old-growth forest of hickory and oak. The Indians had burned down much of it centuries ago so they could drive their prey into the open and see enemies across a distance. The white settlers had leveled more woods to farm.
As he expected, when 141 intersected with the highway, Sofia got back on 83. She took off north on the interstate, driving faster than Tim was willing to go, doing at least seventy-five. Before she disappeared, Tim thought he could make out another head beside her in the passenger seat. If it was Cass, he must have been reclined before, sleeping or hiding.
“If they don’t take the bridge at Indian Falls, we’re probably going to lose them,” Tim told Evon over the phone.