“What?”
“I don’t know. But before she boarded the flight in New York, she called a reporter out in Los Angeles, an old friend of hers, and set up an interview, with trusted witnesses, at the arrival gate at LAX. She said she was bringing something with her that would change the world forever.”
Barbara searched his eyes, obviously seeking some sign that he was not serious about this change-the-world-overnight fantasy. She was a woman of logic and reason, impressed by facts and details, and experience had shown her that solutions were found at an inchworm’s pace, in a journey of countless small steps. As an investigator, for years she’d dealt with puzzles that presented her with literally millions of pieces and that were hugely more complex than virtually any homicide case to which any police detective was ever assigned, mysteries of human action and machine failure that were solved not with miracles but with drudgery.
Joe understood the look in her eyes, because investigative journalism was not unlike her own work.
“Just what are you saying?” she pressed. “That when the plane rolls and plummets, Rose Tucker takes a squeeze bottle out of her purse, some fabulous new topical lotion that confers temporary invulnerability on the user, sort of like a sunscreen, and quickly coats herself?”
Joe almost laughed. This was the first time he’d felt like laughing in ages. “No, of course not.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. Something.”
“Sounds like a big nothing.”
“Something,” he insisted.
With the forge fire of lightning now gone and with the crack of thunder silenced, the churning clouds had an iron-dark beauty.
In the distance the low, wooded hills were veiled in mists of enigma — the hills across which she had come that night, untouched out of fire and destruction.
Skirling wind made cottonwoods and aspens dance, and across the fields, billows of rain whirled like skirts in a tarantella.
He had hope again. It felt good. Exhilarating. Of course, that was why hope was dangerous. The glorious lifting up, the sweet sense of soaring, always too brief, and then the terrible fall that was more devastating because of the sublime heights from which it began.
But maybe it was worse never to hope at all.
He was filled with wonder and quickening expectation.
He was scared too.
“Something,” he insisted.
He took his hands off the railing. His legs were sturdy again. He blotted his wet hands on his jeans. He wiped his rain-spattered face on the sleeve of his sportcoat.
Turning to Barbara, he said, “Somehow safe to the meadow, then a mile and a half to the ranch. A mile and a half in an hour and fifteen minutes, which might be just about right in the darkness, with a small child to carry or help along.”
“I hate to be always the pin in the balloon—”
“Then don’t be.”
“—but there’s one thing you have to consider.”
“I’m listening.”
Barbara hesitated. Then: “Just for the sake of argument, let’s accept that there were survivors. That this woman was on the plane. Her name is Rose Tucker…but she told Mercy and Jeff that she was Rachel Thomas.”
“So?”
“If she doesn’t give them her real name, why does she give them Nina’s real name?”
“These people who’re after Rose…they’re not after Nina, they don’t care about Nina.”
“If they find out Rose somehow saved the girl, and if she saved the girl because of this strange, radical news-truth-thing-whatever that she was bringing with her to the press interview in Los Angeles, then maybe somehow that makes the girl as big a danger to them as Rose herself seems to be.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t care right now.”
“My point is — she’d use another name for Nina.”
“Not necessarily.”
“She would,” Barbara insisted.
“So what’s the difference?”
“So maybe Nina is a false name.”
He felt slapped. He didn’t reply.
“Maybe the child who came to this house that night is really named Sarah or Mary or Jennifer…”
“No,” Joe said firmly.
“Just like Rachel Thomas is a false name.”
“If the child wasn’t Nina, what an amazing coincidence it would be for Rose to pluck my daughter’s name out of thin air. Talk about billion-to-one odds!”
“That plane could have been carrying more than one little blond girl going on five.”
“Both of them named Nina? Jesus, Barbara.”
“If there were survivors, and if one of them was a little blond girl,” Barbara said, “you’ve at least got to prepare yourself for the possibility that she wasn’t Nina.”
“I know,” he said, but he was angry with her for forcing him to say it. “I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’m worried for you, Joe.”
“Thank you,” he said sarcastically.
“Your soul’s broken.”
“I’m okay.”
“You could fall apart so easy.”
He shrugged.
“No,” she said. “Look at yourself.”
“I’m better than I was.”
“She might not be Nina.”
“She might not be Nina,” he admitted, hating Barbara for this relentless insistence, even though he knew that she was genuinely concerned for him, that she was prescribing this pill of reality as a vaccine against the total collapse that he might experience if his hopes, in the end, were not realized. “I’m ready to face that she might turn out not to be Nina. Okay? Feel better? I can handle it if that’s the case.”
“You say it, but it’s not true.”
He glared at her. “It is true.”
“Maybe a tiny piece of your heart knows she might not be Nina, a thin fiber, but the rest of your heart is right now pounding, racing with the conviction that she is.”
He could feel his own eyes shining with — stinging with — the delirious expectation of a miraculous reunion.
Her eyes, however, were full of a sadness that infuriated him so much he was nearly capable of striking her.
Mercy making peanut-butter dough balls. A new curiosity — and wariness — in her eyes. Having seen, through the window, the emotional quality of the discussion on the porch. Perhaps catching a few words through the glass, even without attempting to eavesdrop.
Nevertheless, she was a Samaritan, with Jesus and Andrew and Simon Peter marking the month of August as a reminder for her, and she still wanted to do her best to help.
“No, actually, the girl never said her name. Rachel introduced her. The poor child never spoke two words. She was so tired, you see, so sleepy. And maybe in shock a little from the car rolling over. Not hurt, mind you. Not a mark on her. But her little face was as white and shiny as candle wax. Heavy-eyed and not really with us. Half in a sort of trance. I worried about her, but Rachel said she was okay, and Rachel was a doctor, after all, so then I didn’t worry about it that much. The little doll slept in the car all the way to Pueblo.”
Mercy rolled a ball of dough between her palms. She put the pale sphere on a baking sheet and flattened it slightly with the gentle pressure of her thumb.
“Rachel had been to Colorado Springs to visit family for the weekend, and she’d taken Nina with her because Nina’s dad and mom were on an anniversary cruise. At least that’s how I understood it.” Mercy began to fill a brown paper lunch bag with the cooled cookies that were stacked on the platter.