But she still could dominate him with her indignation, with her demand that a wrong be righted. Despite her physical disintegration her words had retained the power to make him feel the grief, the injustice she’d endured.
“I have heard the news,” she said in her strange talk. “It is done and it is good. You are good.”
He stood and looked out the window at the grounds of this place that he thought they still called a sanatorium. Stacked neatly on the windowsill were the four newspapers that she read every day, cover to cover, word for word. When the papers were done she listened to the radio, or watched the TV, until she fell asleep late at night. The morning would bring more news that she would devour. There was nothing in the world that she seemed to miss.
“And now you move on to the next,” she said, in a higher voice as though she feared her words might not reach him from across the room.
He nodded and said, “Yes.”
“You are a good son.”
Harry resumed his seat. “How’s your health?”
“What health?” she said, smiling and swaying her head. She had always done that, he remembered. Always, as though she heard a song no one else did. As a child he had loved that about her, that mysterious quality all children sought out in their parents. Now he didn’t like it as much.
“I have no health. You know what they did to me. You cannot believe this is natural. I am not that old. I sit here and I rot a little more each day.”
They had poisoned her, years ago, she had told him. They had gotten to her somehow, she wasn’t quite sure how. The poison was meant to kill, but she had survived it. Yet it was eating away at her, from the inside out, laying claim to organs one by one until there would be none left. She probably believed that one day she would simply vanish from the earth.
“You can leave. You’re not like the others here.”
“And where would I go, tell me that? Where would I go? I am safe here. So here I will stay until they take me away in the bag and burn me. Those are my wishes.”
Finn held up his hands in mock surrender. They had this same discussion during each of his visits, with the same result. She was rotting and afraid and here she would die. He could have articulated both parts of this conversation, so well did he know them.
“And how is your wife, and those beautiful children?”
“They’re fine. I’m sure they miss seeing you.”
“There’s not much left to see. Your little one, Susie. She still has the bear I gave her?”
“It’s her favorite. She’s never without it.”
“You tell her never to let it go. It represents my love for her. She must never let it go. I have not been a proper grandmother to them. I know this. But it would kill me if she ever let go of the bear. Kill me.”
“I know. And she knows. Like I said, she loves it.”
She rose on shaky legs, went to a drawer and pulled out a photo. In twisted fingers she clutched the item before handing it across to him. “Take it,” she said. “You’ve earned it.”
He slipped the photograph out of her hands and held it up. It was the same picture that Judd Bingham, Bob Cole and Lou Cincetti had seen before they died. Carter Gray, too, had gazed on this image before he was blown to the next world.
Finn traced the delicate line of Rayfield Solomon’s cheek with his index finger. In a flash the past came racing back to him: the separation, the news of his father’s death, the erasing of the past and meticulous creation of a new one, and over the years the devastating revelations of a wife and mother telling her son what had happened.
“And now Roger Simpson,” she said.
“Yes. The last one,” Finn replied, a hint of relief in his voice.
It had taken him years to track down Bingham, Cincetti and Cole. Yet he had finally located all of them, and that’s when the killing had started a few months ago. He had known the whereabouts of Gray and Senator Roger Simpson since they were public figures. But they were also harder targets. He had gone for the points of least resistance first. It made it more likely that Gray and Simpson would be forewarned, but he had built that into his equation. And when Gray had left the government, he had also left most of his protection behind. And even forewarned, Finn had managed to kill him. Simpson was next in line. Senators had protection too, but Finn was confident he would eventually get to the man.
When Finn looked on the life he had now as part of a family of five in a quite ordinary Virginia suburb complete with a lovable dog, music lessons, soccer matches, baseball games and swim meets, and compared it to the life he had as a child, the juxtaposition was close to apocalyptic in its effect on him. That’s why he rarely thought of these things together. That’s why he was Harry Finn, King of Compartmentalization. He could build walls in his mind nothing could pierce.
Then his mother said, “Let me tell you a story, Harry.”
He sat back in his chair and listened, though he had heard it all before-in fact, could have told it as well as she could now. And yet he listened as she spoke in her fractured, discordant collage of words that still managed to radiate a visceral power; her memories carved out an eloquent factual case that only truth could arouse. It was both wonderful and terrifying-her ability to conjure a world from decades ago with such force that it appeared to be occupying the room they were in with the agonized heartbreak surrounding a flaming pyre. And when she was finished and her energy spent, he would kiss her good-bye and continue his journey, a journey he carried on for her. And maybe for him too.
CHAPTER 29
“CALM DOWN, CALEB,” Stone said. “And tell me exactly what happened.” Stone had pulled off the road on the way to Maine when he’d received Caleb’s frantic call. He listened for ten minutes to his friend’s breathless recounting of his face-to-face with Jerry Bagger.
“Caleb, are you sure he didn’t know you were lying? Really sure?”
“I was good, Oliver, you would’ve been proud of me. He gave me his card. Said to call if I had any other information. He offered to pay five figures.” Caleb paused. “And I found out her real name is Annabelle Conroy.”
“Don’t tell that to anyone!”
“What do you want me to do now?”
“Nothing. Do not contact Bagger. I’ll give you a call later.”
Stone clicked off and then phoned Reuben in Atlantic City, relaying what Caleb had told him. “Well, your information was correct, Reuben, Bagger is in D.C.”
“Hopefully this Angie gal will be even more informative tonight. By the way, where are you, Oliver?”
“I’m on my way to Maine.”
“Maine? Is that where she is?”
“Yes.”
“Why Maine?”
“Let’s just say our friend has some unfinished business up there.”
“Having to do with this Bagger dude?”
“Yes.”
Stone put his phone down and continued driving. Caleb’s car, though old and rotting, had performed well enough, though on no occasion had he been able to coax it past sixty. Hours later, the night well established, Stone crossed from New Hampshire into Maine. Checking his map, he exited off the interstate and headed east, toward the Atlantic Ocean. Twenty minutes later he slowed and drove through the downtown area of the place Annabelle was staying. It was quaint and filled with shops offering everything from touristy items to nautical gear, as many coastal New England towns did. This was the off-season though, and most of the visitors were long gone, having no desire to expose themselves to the coming Maine winter.
Stone found the B amp;B where Annabelle was staying, parked in the small lot, grabbed his duffel bag and went in.
She was waiting in the parlor for him, standing in front of the fire that flickered pleasantly behind her. The floors and doors here creaked; the smell was of a recently served dinner mixed with the aroma of centuries-old wood and the heavy bite of the ocean’s salt air.