“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.