He had existed at the Zero Point for more than a year, with time receding from him in both directions, belonging to neither the days ahead nor those behind. It was as though he had been suspended in a tank of liquid nitrogen and lay deep in cryogenic slumber.
Now he stood at another Zero Point, the physical one, where his wife and daughters had perished. He wanted so badly to have them back that the wanting tore like eagle’s claws at his viscera. But at last he wanted something else as welclass="underline" justice for them, justice which could not give meaning to their deaths but which might give meaning to his.
He had to get all the way up from his cryogenic bed, shake the ice out of his bones and veins, and not lie down again until he had dug the truth out of the grave in which it had been buried. For his lost women, he would burn palaces, pull down empires, and waste the world if necessary for the truth to be found.
And now he understood the difference between justice and mere vengeance: genuine justice would bring him no relief of his pain, no sense of triumph; it would only allow him to step out of the Zero Point and, with his task completed, die in peace.
Down through the vaulted conifers came fluttering white wings of storm light, and again, and still more, as if the cracking sky were casting out a radiant multitude. Thunder and the rush of wind beat like pinions at Joe’s ears, and by the many thousands, feathered shadows swooped and shuddered between the tree trunks and across the forest floor.
Just as he and Barbara reached her Ford Explorer, at the weedy end of the narrow dirt lane, a great fall of rain hissed and roared through the pines. They piled inside, their hair and faces jeweled, and her periwinkle-blue blouse was spattered with spots as dark as plum skin.
They didn’t encounter whatever had frightened the deer from cover, but Joe was pretty sure now that the culprit had been another animal. In the run to beat the rain, he had sensed only wild things crouching — not the far deadlier threat of men.
Nevertheless, the crowding conifers seemed to provide ideal architecture for assassins. Secret bowers, blinds, ambushments, green-dark lairs.
As Barbara started the Explorer and drove back the way they had come, Joe was tense. Surveying the woods. Waiting for the bullet.
When they reached the gravel road, he said, “The two men that Blane named on the cockpit tape…”
“Dr. Blom and Dr. Ramlock.”
“Have you tried to find out who they are, launched a search for them?”
“When I was in San Francisco, I was prying into Delroy Blane’s background. Looking for any personal problems that might have put him in a precarious psychological condition. I asked his family and friends if they’d heard those names. No one had.”
“You checked Blane’s personal records, appointment calendars, his checkbook?”
“Yeah. Nothing. And Blane’s family physician says he never referred his patient to any specialists with those names. There’s no physician, psychiatrist, or psychologist in the San Francisco area by those names. That’s as far as I carried it. Because then I was awakened by those bastards in my hotel room, a pistol in my face, and told to butt out.”
To the end of the gravel road and onto the paved state route, where sizzling silver rain danced in a froth on the blacktop, Barbara fell into a troubled silence. Her brow was creased, but not — Joe sensed — because the inclement weather required that she concentrate on her driving.
The lightning and thunder had passed. Now the storm threw all its energy into wind and rain.
Joe listened to the monotonous thump of the windshield wipers.
He listened as well to the hard-driven drops snapping against the glass, which seemed at first to be a meaningless random rattle; but gradually he began to think that he perceived hidden patterns even in the rhythms of the rain.
Barbara found perhaps not a pattern but an intriguing puzzle piece that she had overlooked. “I’m remembering something peculiar, but…”
Joe waited.
“…but I don’t want to encourage you in this weird delusion of yours.”
“Delusion?”
She glanced at him. “This idea that there might have been a survivor.”
He said, “Encourage me. Encouragement isn’t something I’ve had much of in the past year.”
She hesitated but then sighed. “There was a rancher not far from here who was already asleep when Flight 353 went down. People who work the land go to bed early in these parts. The explosion woke him. And then someone came to his door.”
“Who?”
“The next day, he called the county sheriff, and the sheriff’s office put him in touch with the investigation command center. But it didn’t seem to amount to much.”
“Who came to his door in the middle of the night?”
“A witness,” Barbara said.
“To the crash?”
“Supposedly.”
She looked at him but then quickly returned her attention to the rain-swept highway.
In the context of what Joe had told her, this recollection seemed by the moment to grow more disturbing to Barbara. Her eyes pinched at the corners, as if she were straining to see not through the downpour but more clearly into the past, and her lips pressed together as she debated whether to say more.
“A witness to the crash,” Joe prompted.
“I can’t remember why, of all places, she went to this ranch house or what she wanted there.”
“She?”
“The woman who claimed to have seen the plane go down.”
“There’s something more,” Joe said.
“Yeah. As I recall…she was a black woman.”
His breath went stale in his lungs, but at last he exhaled and said, “Did she give this rancher her name?”
“I don’t know.”
“If she did, I wonder if he’d remember it.”
At the turnoff from the state route, the entrance road to the ranch was flanked by tall white posts that supported an overhead sign bearing graceful green letters on a white background: LOOSE CHANGE RANCH. Under those three words, in smaller letters and in script: Jeff and Mercy Ealing. The gate stood open.
The oiled-gravel lane was flanked by white ranch fencing that divided the fields into smaller pastures. They passed a big riding ring, exercise yards, and numerous white stables trimmed in green.
Barbara said, “I wasn’t here last year, but one of my people gave me a report on it. Coming back to me now…It’s a horse ranch. They breed and race quarter horses. Also breed and sell some show horses like Arabians, I think.”
The pasture grass, alternately churned by wind and flattened by the pounding rain, was not currently home to any horses. The riding ring and the exercise yards were deserted.
In some of the stables, the top of the Dutch door at each stall was open. Here and there, from the safety of their quarters, horses peered out at the storm. Some were nearly as dark as the spaces in which they stood, but others were pale or dappled.
The large and handsome ranch house, white clapboard with green shutters, framed by groupings of aspens, had the deepest front porch that Joe had ever seen. Under the heavy cape of gloom thrown down by the thunderheads, a yellow glow as welcoming as hearth light filled some of the windows.