The money was his. He needed it.
That Heather had known Joe for years — in fact, attended the same Lutheran church where Michelle had taken Chrissie and Nina to Sunday school and services — did not obviate her need to see his driver’s license. The days of common trust and common sense were so far in America’s past that they seemed not merely to be ancient history but to be part of the history of another country altogether.
He remained patient. Everything he owned was on deposit here, including nearly sixty thousand dollars in equity from the sale of the house, so he could not be denied the money, which he would need for living expenses. With the same people seeking him who were searching for Rose Tucker, he could not go back to the apartment and would have to live out of motels for the duration.
The assistant manager had concluded his call. He was staring at a note pad on his desk, tapping it with a pencil.
Joe had considered using his few credit cards to pay for things, supplemented by small sums withdrawn as needed from automated teller machines. But authorities could track a suspect through credit-card use and ATM activity — and be ever on his heels. They could even have his plastic seized by any merchant at the point of purchase.
A phone rang on the assistant manager’s desk. He snatched it up, glanced at Joe, and turned away in his swivel chair, as if he worried that his lips might be read.
After procedures were followed and everyone was satisfied that Joe was neither his own evil twin nor a bold impersonator in a clever rubber mask, the assistant manager, his phone conversation concluded, slowly gathered the hundred-dollar bills from other tellers’ drawers and from the vault. He brought the required sum to Heather and, with a fixed and uneasy smile, watched as she counted it for Joe.
Perhaps it was imagination, but Joe felt they disapproved of his carrying so much money, not because it put him in danger but because these days people who dealt in cash were stigmatized. The government required banks to report cash transactions of five thousand dollars or more, ostensibly to hamper attempts by drug lords to launder funds through legitimate financial institutions. In reality, no drug lord was ever inconvenienced by this law, but the financial activities of average citizens were now more easily monitored.
Throughout history, cash or the equivalent — diamonds, gold coins — had been the best guarantor of freedom and mobility. Cash meant the same things to Joe and nothing more. Yet from Heather and her bosses, he continued to endure a surreptitious scrutiny that seemed to be based on the assumption that he was engaged in some criminal enterprise or, at best, was on his way for a few days of unspeakable debauchery in Las Vegas.
As Heather put the twenty thousand in a manila envelope, the phone rang on the assistant manager’s desk. Murmuring into the mouthpiece, he continued to find Joe of interest.
By the time Joe left the bank, five minutes past closing time, the last customer to depart, he was weak-kneed with apprehension.
The heat remained oppressive, and the five-o’clock sky was still cloudless and blue, although not the profound blue that it had been earlier. Now it was curiously depthless, a flat blue that reminded him of something he had seen before. The reference remained elusive until he had gotten into the car and started the engine — and then he recalled the dead-blue eyes of the last corpse that he had seen on a morgue gurney, the night he walked away from crime reporting forever.
When he drove out of the bank lot, he saw that the assistant manager was standing beyond the glass doors, all but hidden by the reflected bronze glare of the westering sun. Maybe he was storing away a description of the Honda and memorizing the license-plate number. Or maybe he was just locking the doors.
The metropolis shimmered under the blind blue stare of the dead sky.
Passing a small neighborhood shopping center, from across three lanes of traffic, Joe saw a woman with long auburn hair stepping out of a Ford Explorer. She was parked in front of a convenience store. From the passenger side jumped a little girl with a cap of tousled blond hair. Their faces were hidden from him.
Joe angled recklessly across traffic, nearly colliding with an elderly man in a gray Mercedes. At the intersection, as the light turned from yellow to red, he made an illegal U-turn.
He already regretted what he was about to do. But he could no more stop himself than he could hasten the day’s end by commanding the sun to set. He was in the grip of a bizarre compulsion.
Shaken by his lack of self-control, he parked near the woman’s Ford Explorer. He got out of the Honda. His legs were weak.
He stood staring at the convenience store. The woman and the child were in there, but he couldn’t see them for the posters and merchandise displays in the big windows.
He turned away from the store and leaned against the Honda, trying to compose himself.
After the crash in Colorado, Beth McKay had referred him to a group called The Compassionate Friends, a nationwide organization for people who had lost children. Beth was slowly finding her way to acceptance through Compassionate Friends in Virginia, so Joe went to a few meetings of a local chapter, but he soon stopped attending. In that regard, he was like most other men in his situation; bereaved mothers went to the meetings faithfully and found comfort in talking with others whose children had been taken, but nearly all the fathers turned inward and held their pain close. Joe wanted to be one of the few who could find salvation by reaching out, but male biology or psychology — or pure stubbornness or self-pity — kept him aloof, alone.
At least, from The Compassionate Friends, he had discovered that this bizarre compulsion, by which he was now seized, was not unique to him. It was so common they had a name for it: searching behavior.
Everybody who lost a loved one engaged in a degree of searching behavior, although it was more intense for those who lost children. Some grievers suffered it worse than others. Joe had it bad.
Intellectually, he could accept that the dead were gone forever. Emotionally, on a primal level, he remained convinced that he would see them again. At times he expected his wife and daughters to walk through a door or to be on the phone when it rang. Driving, he was occasionally overcome by the certainty that Chrissie and Nina were behind him in the car, and he turned, breathless with excitement, more shocked by the emptiness of the backseat than he would have been to find that the girls were indeed alive again and with him.
Sometimes he saw them on a street. On a playground. In a park. On the beach. They were always at a distance, walking away from him. Sometimes he let them go, but sometimes he was compelled to follow, to see their faces, to say, “Wait for me, wait, I’m coming with you.”
Now he turned away from the Honda. He went to the entrance of the convenience store.
Opening the door, he hesitated. He was torturing himself. The inevitable emotional implosion that would ensue when this woman and child proved not to be Michelle and Nina would be like taking a hammer to his own heart.
The events of the day — the encounter with Rose Tucker at the cemetery, her words to him, the shocking message waiting for him at the Post—had been so extraordinary that he discovered a gut-deep faith in uncanny possibilities that surprised him. If Rose could fall more than four miles, smash unchecked into Colorado rock, and walk away…Unreason overruled facts and logic. A brief, sweet madness stripped off the armor of indifference in which he’d clothed himself with so much struggle and determination, and into his heart surged something like hope.