A dozen names were printed on a parchment in a round, childish hand, and traced with pressed leaves and flowers. It had been a project of Shana’s for a history class — years ago, she had been only a child, in second or third grade, he couldn’t remember which.
But he remembered her looking up the colors of the Israeli flag in the atlas and then finding a plant and flower book at the library, an old curio of a book which listed the traditional virtues and vices associated with flora of all kinds down through the years. Shana had bordered her tribute with leaves and flowers from their own woods and meadow, the leaves and petals pressed and waxed and intertwined... oak leaves for valor, white dogwood for strength and laurel for glory, aspen leaf for lamentation, white chrysanthemum petals for truth and orange, feathery strands of wild marigold, fading now, as the flower of grief. A woven design of nature’s message to honor the names of the Israeli athletes who had been murdered in Munich, Germany, at the Olympic Games. Selby looked at those names in the lightening dawn, a hand still touching his daughter’s slim, young shoulder. Yaacob Springer, Kehat Schorr, Mark Slavin and Eliazar Halfin...
He started when he heard Shana’s voice. She had murmured the word “hell” and another word he couldn’t make out.
Davey came into the room. “Did you hear that, did you, dad?”
“Not all of it. ‘Hell’ and then something else.”
The morning light covered her bed. Her arms were outside the covers, the bandages small and white about her wrists and one of her hands. Her sandy eyelashes accentuated the blue-black bruises on her cheeks.
She stirred suddenly and Selby put a hand tightly on her arm. An expression of panic twisted her features. But her eyes remained closed.
“Mommy, I’ll kill it. I’ll kill it.” Shana’s lips barely moved, but the words were clear and spaced deliberately.
“The waves,” she said then, and tears started under her eyelids and glinted on her swollen face. Her voice became deep and rasping, as she cried out, “I am worse than men, in my heart is hatred—”
A phone began ringing. “Stay here,” Selby said to Davey. “Try to remember everything she says.”
He went into his bedroom and picked up the phone from Sarah’s worktable, still cluttered with jars of pencils and books and files, recipes and random news clippings.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Selby, this is Mr. Stoltzer, Clem Stoltzer in Summitt City. It’s early, I know, I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
“No, what is it?”
“Mr. Selby, your brother, Jarrell, left Summitt unexpectedly this morning. I was wondering if he’d mentioned anything about a change of plans to you?”
“When was this?”
“Around five or six o’clock, according to the guard at the north gate.”
“Well, is that unusual? For someone to leave that early?”
“Of course not, people come and go as they like here, anytime they want. But the cleaning crew assigned to your brother’s unit reported that his clothes and gear are gone. If he intended to resign, he would have mentioned it, I think, and collected his money from the credit union, seen about his pension and insurance, things like that. He’s got a fine future with Harlequin, and it’s not like him to leave this way...”
Selby wasn’t too interested, his mind and heart were with his daughter, but he said, “We were supposed to meet for dinner last night. Sergeant Ledge told me Jarrell was planning to stop by my motel. I don’t know where he is or why he left, Mr. Stoltzer. Maybe his girl friend knows.”
“That’s a thought, Mr. Selby. Do you happen to have her phone number or address?”
Selby told him no, that he didn’t even know her last name. Stoltzer said, “If Jarrell gets in touch with you, I’d appreciate it if you’d ask him to call me. Would you do that, please?”
As Selby hung up, his son hurried into the bedroom. “She’s talking too fast for me to remember, so I got my tape recorder. She’s saying she’ll kill something, she said something about a tunnel and something that sounds like poetry. She’s talking about birds too.”
The phone rang again. Selby said, “You go back and stay with her, Davey.”
It was Casper Gideen. In his typically brusque fashion, he said he’d stop by in ten minutes if that suited Selby. If it didn’t, he’d stop by when it did.
Selby put on a hunting jacket and went to the parking lot. The sun was up and the meadow was slick and white with frost. Beyond it was the smooth shine of the pond, and the white beeches.
The log cabin near the garage was named for Casper Gideen, who had built it for Shana and Davey. Davey had burned the letters into a piece of notched and varnished pine. When Gideen saw the sign swaying on its chain, he had said slowly, “My name looks funny printed out. But I’m proud to see it. It was Gideon once, my daddy told us.”
Gideen did occasional work on the Selby place, keeping the meadow in trim with a tractor and cutter bar, and chopping down old fruit trees when they were ready for the fireplace.
Tall and thin, about Selby’s age, with a rough, weathered face, Gideen’s cool, blue eyes could become dark and wary at even a hint of disrespect or ridicule. He wanted to be “let be,” in his words. Gideen could hunt pheasant and take his limit without a dog to point or flush them. He knew spring holes in local ponds where panfish were layered by the hundreds; and he took Shana and Davey there in the summer and cooked them breakfasts of perch and bluegills before the sun was up. He knew when game was tiring, and had taught Selby to watch for the sign of tracks going downhill. At night, hunting raccoons, they had often sat on frozen hills and listened to Casper’s red-bones bugling over the valleys, the sound seeming to carry forever on the winds.
One winter night Gideen had got savagely drunk and smashed his truck into a tree. His wife, Lori, had called Selby, who had found Casper half frozen in his truck and had driven him home. It was after this that Gideen built the log cabin for Davey and Shana. But he had never once mentioned the “accident” or Selby’s aid.
When the blue van stopped in the parking lot Gideen climbed out with a cardboard box under his arm.
“I came by to ask for the girl.” He handed the box to Selby. “It’s from the woman, a new pie and a jar of raisins in pepper sauce. She said it would be good for her.” From the front of the van, he took out a jug and worked the stopper loose with his thumb. “We could have a drink, you and me, Harry.”
Selby nodded and took a swig of the powerful, colorless liquor. He handed the jug back without wiping off the rim of the neck.
Gideen said, “How is she?”
“Sleeping now. Dr. Kerr’s been here.”
Gideen drank and stoppered the jug and put it back in the truck. “There was some talk at Little Tenn this morning.” Gideen’s cold, blue eyes were darker now. “Then it stopped. That means something’s started, something’s coming. I heard enough to know it’s touching your daughter and Goldie Boy Jessup. Don’t ask me how. They’re afraid. And that could mean the law’s in on it. It’s against my raisin’ to go against my people but I’m with you, Harry. I’ll find out what it is. And I’ll tell you one more thing now. In my granddaddy’s day, they catch the son who did it, that’d be the end of him right there. You tell me we do better, I say prove it. Goodbye to you, Harry.”
Davey was waiting for Selby in the foyer. “Dad, Shana’s bike is gone. I put it behind the kennel run yesterday, where it’d be out of the way. But it’s gone now.”
“What about the garage? Somebody might have put it inside, the troopers or Mrs. Cranston. Let’s look.”