My lower back ached. My favorite flannel nightgown was still on the chair by my bed. Voodoo’s nuzzling was already making me drowsy. My eyes won’t feel so dry when I shut them. Kate was right; this is over. I will offer support. I will be stable. I will pick up the pieces of our family and put us back together in time. I will move us away from this property and fulfill Daddy’s last wish.
I closed my eyes, ready to let the darkness lull me away. But instead, all I could think of was a little boy. Not William, but Brian, lying in this very bed on the night William disappeared, after he had whispered the last words he would ever speak.
We lost two children that night.
I was on the stairs a moment later, hurrying to where my coat lay limp on the table. I quickly buttoned it up and looked out the window, seeing the embers from Kate’s cigarette flashing in the spitting snow as she and Stella argued near the back porch.
Keys in hand, I walked through the dining room and into the formal living room, exiting through the rarely used front door. I quietly locked it behind me and slowly walked down the front stairs, then rushed to the Volvo. I slipped in, fired it up, and tore down the driveway, embarrassed by the gravel I was kicking up.
In my rearview mirror, I saw the girls waving and calling out my name frantically. I hated that I would cause them to worry, on top of the news of William’s supposed death.
I reached over to silence the phone as the first call came in from Stella. I pressed the gas, knowing I would be long gone before either could get to their cars and hope to follow.
The late-night patrons at the Waffle House near downtown appeared even bleaker under fluorescent lights. It was nearly midnight, and the crowd from the honky-tonks on Lower Broadway wouldn’t start filing in until closer to three or four. I sat stirring my tepid coffee across the aisle from two drunk sorority girls and a furiously texting man wearing a cowboy hat. You can always spot the tourists, Tom always said, because they’re the only ones in town wearing Stetsons.
There was no chance anyone I knew would come across me here.
I glanced at my dark phone, long since powered off, knowing Tom would be trying to reach me once Kate reported that I’d driven away. Are you on the road still, insisting on driving so Anne or Chris could sleep, even though neither will? Have you repeatedly called, now that you’ve had the time to piece together the fact that some man from our far-flung past will be charged with our grandson’s murder? Are you wondering why he would come after us? Are you surprised that you didn’t even remember his name?
Or, even worse, would you lean into the phone and ask quietly, “Did you love him back?”
Steven had actually been quite brave, standing in front of me as the agents burst into the room. I should have reached out to him, reminded him he was old and so was I, and it was an unnecessary gesture. I cannot bear to think of an old man in a jail cell because of me.
And had the agents found Barbara? Was she still on the run too?
It was all my fault, all of it. What I did decades ago was slowly taking down one life at a time. If I did tell people, even the local police, what I suspected, the story would eventually unfold in the papers, online, on television. The looks of pity I would get from customers, from friends. It isn’t your fault, Lynn, they would say. He was crazy.
I reached for my purse to open the envelope Steven had given to me, smoothing out the two pieces of paper tucked inside. One was an enlarged section of a map of Colorado from an atlas in the National Geographic magazine. The upper left-hand corner revealed a copyright of September 1960.
The other was a map of the stars.
I remembered what I learned during my time in the astronomy department, so I knew the placement of the constellations was comical. The Big Dipper was in the wrong place. So was Andromeda. Whoever did the map had skills in graphic design, but the artist knew nothing of the heavens.
There was only one true accuracy: my star, right where it should be.
“Look for your star,” he had whispered, softly enough that the recording devices in the room from the FBI couldn’t pick up his words.
And then, he had said something about Argentum.
Another ghost from the past. That theory that Steven dismissed when Barbara first mentioned it all those years ago. He’d said he didn’t even know what it was, and it was not worth discussing. I’d heard that again outside the motel room, when Steven and the Researcher had discussed going into hiding. Steven referred to it as an urban legend about aliens, without a shred of proof. He’d clearly been annoyed with it.
A quick Google search on my phone revealed only two explanations: that argentum meant silver in Latin and that a senior-living association had adopted the name.
I scanned the enlarged section of Colorado, dotted with the names of towns and counties. I’d have to dig out my reading glasses to attempt look at them all.
Again I returned to the star map. My star wasn’t the only one of a different hue. While most were a brilliant white, a few others were larger in scale and gold.
My fingertips were smudged from ink. Both documents had been recently printed.
I felt a flare of anger. I didn’t have time for this. Too much was happening, too much was at stake, to sit here and try to unravel a riddle. Just like those files, all those years ago, with all the blacked-out words that so infuriated me—
I stood so quickly I almost banged my knees on the table. I walked briskly to the counter.
“Excuse me,” I asked a ponytailed young man scraping burnt leftovers on the stovetop. “Do you have any tape?”
He laughed. “When your menus are this old, something has to hold them together.” He rummaged around under the counter. “Aha!”
I thanked him and hurried back to my table. Taking a deep breath, I placed the Colorado map on top of the celestial map, taping them together at the top and bottom so they would align and not slip.
The two fit nearly perfectly on top of each other.
An encryption. Just like all the blacked-out documents. The stars were in the wrong place because Steven had made the celestial map not for accuracy, but as a key.
I slowly raised both towards the light. The smaller stars didn’t show through the state map, but I could see the larger gold ones.
My star was harder to find because it was nearly lost in the Rocky Mountains. I squinted, seeing it match up at the base of the range. The star appeared to be in a gap in the mountains in the Colorado map.
I tore off the tape and separated the two pages, madly scrambled to find my glasses in my purse, and looked closely at where the star had rested in the state. That area was completely barren, void of anything except for the tiny name of one town, deep in the mountains.
The town’s name was Argentum.
FOURTEEN
I balled up my scarf, the only spare piece of clothing I had besides my coat, and tried to use it as a pillow. The few other passengers quietly chose their seats. I turned to the window and looked out on the blackness of the tarmac.
There would be snow when we landed. I would have to buy not only boots, but days’ worth of clothes and all my toiletries. I would have to rent a car, drive in a strange city, and navigate a mountain range. I almost wished I were going to Washington; at least I knew where to catch the taxi at the airport.
There’s still time to get off the plane and get home before anyone notices—
“I don’t suppose this seat is taken.”