Her mother still lived in Canonsburg, in the same house Moss had grown up in, a little blue house on the steep hills northeast of East Pike, just a few blocks up from the Sarris candy factory. Her childhood had been scented with chocolate. Moss popped two wheels onto the sidewalk whenever she parked, angling the wheels, setting the brake. She made her way along the weedy path to the side door and unlocked the dead bolt with the same key she’d used since middle school.
“Mom?” she said.
“Up here,” said her mother.
Surprised to find her mother home, figuring she might be at McGrogan’s—almost every night after her shift at the call center, her mother changed into stone-washed jeans and a tight top and rambled downhill to the bar, walking so she wouldn’t have to worry about driving home. Everyone knew her mother to see her, she was always ambling about the neighborhood to find cigarettes, to find a drink, a forty-four-year-old often lit after last call, bumming in empty lots with other barflies too stoned to want to go home. A character, a regular. McGrogan’s was an off-and-on bar, some nights quiet with nothing to do but watch the news on the TVs and chat up the bartenders, other nights so full you had to shuffle sideways just to get to the bathrooms. Her mother had her usual stool, at the corner of the bar where she could relax with her back to the wall and see what developed. Her hands were rippled with veins, and her natural hair had dulled to the color of wheat bread, but she could still turn heads if she wore the right outfit and the lights were dim. Moss looked at her mother and saw herself in a few years. The irony of traveling to IFTs was that Moss’s body aged in these futures even if the terra firma of the present had seemed to pause, waiting for her. Chronologically, Moss was only twenty-seven, born in 1970 when her mother was seventeen. Biologically, though, Moss was almost forty, just a few years shy of her mother. Moss and her mother never mentioned their ages to each other, however, even though Moss was certain her mother must have noticed the contracting gap between them—a sibling more than a daughter, a weirdness too disturbing to discuss or even acknowledge. No intimacy had ever developed between them, though, no sense of equal footing—their experiences too divergent, their lives lived in such different places. Moss was taller, toned, serious, while her mother was brassy—people invariably figured they were sisters the rare times they went drinking together.
Her mother was at the kitchen table tonight, already in her pajamas, flipping through a Reader’s Digest.
“Not at McGrogan’s?” asked Moss.
“I saved you some chicken if you’re hungry,” said her mother.
“I already ate.”
“Eat more,” her mother said. “Shiner’s been going around with that girl from . . . wherever the hell she’s from—South Fayette or somewhere. I don’t want to drink with them tonight. Deb wants to start going to that new place I told you about—what’s it called? I tried to call you. Anyway, I made the chicken.”
“I’ve been working,” said Moss.
“Trying to find that girl? I couldn’t believe it, the news made it seem like that family was killed over in Courtney Gimm’s old house,” said her mother.
“Yeah,” said Moss.
“The same house? Is that what you’re working on?”
“Looked like that family was already trying to sell the place. They couldn’t have been the people who bought the house from the Gimms, right? Someone named Mursult?”
“No, no—they must have been renting,” said her mother. “Her brother, what’s his name?”
“Davy.”
“He’s the one that enlisted? I think he started renting out the place after his dad moved to Arizona. I ran into Davy—must have been a few years ago—’93 maybe? ’94? I think he said he wanted to hold on to the place, draw some income if he could. I’m so nebby but can’t never remember what I’ve nebbed about.”
“They use a referral service to find housing for one another,” said Moss. “Military families.” She had been rattled at finding the crime scene at Courtney’s house, the chilling synchronicity of her present and past braiding, but it was just a coincidence, she reminded herself. Davy Gimm had listed the house for rent, and another Navy family had moved in—a referral service. Talking with her mom settled things, made her feel like she was rousing from an unpleasant dream to find the waking world as normal as it ever was.
“What happened?” said her mother.
“I don’t know,” said Moss. “Domestic abuse, I think.”
“Awful,” said her mother. “I’ve been following the missing girl’s story on the news because of Courtney—made me think of Courtney.”
“Marian Mursult,” said Moss. “Reminded me of Courtney, too. The hair.”
“I was going to mention her hair,” said her mother. “Courtney had that beautiful hair, all those curls.”
Growing up, Moss thought of her mother as just another Guntown drunk, a wreck, but now she saw her mother was wounded, a perspective that came with age, when everyone settled into the same slew of adulthood, when everyone was wounded and could more easily overlook the wounds of others. Moss picked at the Shake ’n Bake, tough and dry. She found rum in the liquor cupboard, mixed it with Cherry Coke. Her mother poured herself vodka.
“Anyway, I’m meeting Cheryl down at McGrogan’s tomorrow night,” her mother went on.
“Cheryl from work?” said Moss. “I thought you were over each other.”
“I sold the most subscriptions this past month, so I promised I’d take Cheryl out with the gift certificate they’re giving me, fifty bucks. By the way, I saw your subscription to Homemaker’s Companion lapsed, so I signed you up for a renewal. Helped push me over the top.”
“I hate those things.”
“That ain’t the point.”
Her mother at the call center, pushing magazine subscriptions. Moss drank her rum and Cherry Coke in the living room, took her place on the leather love seat, her mother reclining on the full-size couch. Moss had almost gone to work for the call center—her mother had pulled some strings with the manager, but Moss had blown off the chance. That near miss of a career was one of the few true forks in the road she’d traveled. Fashionable to think of a “multiverse” consisting of infinite directions, infinite paths, but the forking paths weren’t truly innumerable, she knew; there were only so many options available to most people, especially girls who grew up poor. Had she taken the job at the call center, she could have turned out just like her mother. She would have made a good alcoholic, she always thought. Call centers and bars and sleeping with whoever was willing to pay her tab for the night—sometimes she thought of that lifestyle with disgust, other times she found comfort in the daydream, wishing she could have just lived a regular life of men and stress and shit jobs. A quarto-size framed picture of Moss’s father stood on the mantel above the television. His smile was more a smirk, but the glint in his eye hinted he’d keep on laughing forever, wherever he was. Moss had grown up with this strange, formal picture of her father as a young man who was younger in the photograph than her memories of him—he had been in the Navy, and in the photograph he wore his dress whites. When she thought of the call center or thought over the ways her life might have been different or wondered why she had joined NCIS, she sometimes told herself she was searching for her father—but that was a bullshit answer, she knew it. He had left the Navy before she was born; he had left the family when Moss was five.
“We can watch The X-Files,” said her mother. “I know you like that show.”
Sunday nights were Scully nights, but tonight’s was a repeat—“Fallen Angel,” the episode a Mulder episode, so Moss told her mother to flip channels if she wanted. Her mother a newshawk, Headline News interrupted by CNN’s BREAKING STORY banner. RAPPER DEAD was blunt enough, though they followed with a headline released from the L.A. Times: GANGSTA RAP PERFORMER NOTORIOUS B.I.G. SLAIN. Four shots fired through the side of his SUV. A black GMC Suburban roped off by police tape. Her mother sat up. “Oh, damn,” she said. “Damn it. I’ve got to call Shelly. She loves him.”
“I think I’m heading to bed,” said Moss, her mother waving good night but staring mournfully at the screen. Moss’s old bedroom had been converted into her mother’s junk room over the years, but the spool-turned Jenny Lind bed that had once been her grandmother’s had been kept, and the bookshelves still had a few of her old books: The Black Stallion, A Wrinkle in Time, some Choose Your Own Adventure books with the death-scenes dog-eared. The rocking chair was covered with boxes of clothes. She turned out the lights, thinking she would fall immediately asleep, but the news of the rapper’s death bothered her, mixed with the heaviness already in her heart. Moss felt like the world was dissolving. She had the sensation of constellations disappearing from the sky. “Nestor,” she said, thinking of the immortality of souls, the resurrection of the body—Nestor’s naïvety, the ignorance of his faith, but still trying the sound of his name, how it started on the tip of her tongue and worked its way back.
In the darkness of her bedroom, surrounded by familiar shadows, she imagined the world around her buried under snow and blizzard winds, the only warmth the pocket beneath her comforter where she lay curled. The muffled sound of the distant television, the sound of her mother’s voice speaking on the kitchen telephone. Sounds from her childhood. Easy enough to convince herself she was still just a child, a little girl in her bed, that her entire life was nothing but a strange dream, and if she were to wake now, she would wake years younger, everything as it was twenty-five years ago. She felt like an interloper on her own past and so reached to touch her left thigh, run her fingers along the bumps of bone and scarred skin tissue of her stump, reminding herself of who she was now. Her mother must be calling everyone about the news she was watching. Moss loved the sound of her mother’s laughter—how casually she made lasting friendships, how she gave of herself freely, unguarded. Moss too easily became entangled. She tossed in the twin bed, thinking. Thinking again of Nestor. Never able to spark casual relationships like her mother, never one for trysts—Moss’s infatuations developed suddenly, her emotions came with thistles, like a bur. Once a photographer, he had mentioned, and Moss wondered at that—she wondered who he was, if he was always so pious. Anyway, annoyed at how he’d reduced the deaths of children to Christian bathos about eternity, but nevertheless she wondered at the women in his life, wondered if there was one. She tried to remember if he had worn a ring. Nestor. The glare of headlights on her ceiling, fragmented by her window, made her remember mirrored images of Elric Fleece and skeletons in the trees. A ship named Libra disappearing into Deep Waters, lost sailors returning. A dissected black bear swathed in maggots. A trick Moss had taught herself for falling asleep was to imagine a river of black water—she would stand naked before wading into the river, the water creeping to her knees, her thighs, black as ink against her white skin, stomach, her breasts, and soon the water would be above her head, the wavering sunlight disappearing over her, falling deeper into ever expanding darkness. When she drowned, she slept.
—
A telephone ringing. The tone of her cell on her nightstand.
“Hello?” she said.
“This is Brock.”
Red digits hovering in the dark, 2:47.
“One of our guys just called about the pager you and Nestor recovered at Elric Fleece’s residence,” said Brock. “Figured something out.”
“Tell me.”
“We found saved pages. No phone numbers, only codes. We haven’t figured out what most of the codes are, but we did find a few that repeated—143 and 607. My guys tell me codes like these are shorthand for ‘I love you’ or ‘I miss you,’ things like that. Teenagers use them.”
Mursult and the woman in the Polaroid photographs scheduling times to meet, maybe using codes learned from his daughters.
“Having an affair,” said Moss. “There were twenty-four pictures of a woman.”
“We checked Mursult’s home-phone records against the pager and found a correlation,” said Brock. “Several times when the pager received the code 22, he placed a call to the Blackwater Falls Lodge, down in Tucker County.”
Blackwater Gorge was familiar—a section of the massive Monongahela National Forest, touristy and accessible because of the stunning waterfalls like pearls on the string of the Blackwater River. Moss had once stayed for a week in the lodge, exploring the miles of trails through the gorge, grueling treks with her prosthesis over uneven terrain, searching the Red Run branch of the Dry Fork River where she had been rescued from her near death in the Terminus. She had looked for the part of the river where she had hanged, had searched for the ashen tree she remembered, the burnt-white tree that had seemed to repeat, but she never found the site of her crucifixion. She’d returned to the cabins around Blackwater Falls often in her summers, losing herself on the trails, gazing for hours at the crashing eddies and whirlpools of the Elakala Falls—reminding herself of the beauty of the world, when it was so easy for her to remember this landscape as desolation and ice.
“That lodge is a few hours from here, but would be a good place to meet someone,” she said. “Romantic, remote.”
“Mursult called the lodge dozens of times, twice in the last month,” said Brock. “I called over to the lodge, but the clerk didn’t have records for anyone named Patrick Mursult. I’ll call the Tucker County Sheriff’s Department first thing in the morning, see if they can send someone out.”
“I’ll head over,” said Moss, doubtful she’d be able to get back to sleep. “I’m in Canonsburg. I can make it out there. I need to head home out that way.”
Her mother snoring from across the hall. Moss crept downstairs, feeling like a teenager again, sneaking out in the middle of the night—she remembered which stairs creaked, knew where to put her weight to stay silent. She brewed a pot of coffee in the kitchen, splashed water on her face to wake up. Marian Mursult was three days gone, last seen this past Friday; Monday morning would dawn in just a few hours. A bottle of aspirin above the sink—Moss took the pills with coffee. She drove the dead-hour interstates, Canonsburg to 79 South, West Virginia, allowing images to swirl in her mind, glom together, the Challenger in the immensity of the sky, a ship for the dead built of fingernails, the forest in winter. The interstate was a river of asphalt illuminated by streetlamp light. She was aware that the mountains grew around her, but she couldn’t see them—they were gargantuan darkness, snuffing out the stars.
A serpentine cut through pinewoods that opened into a parking lot—only a sparse few cars parked here. The lodge was built like a longhouse, red-roofed, with an exposed-stone chimney stack crowning the front entrance. Moss made her way through the vacant lobby, a dropped ceiling and a cream tile floor, the front desk the color of natural cherrywood, everything bathed in garish fluorescence. Moss lingered for a few moments at the unattended front desk, peering behind the counter into an empty manager’s office.
“Hello?” she said.
The murmur of a distant television. She followed the sound around to the hotel bar, where varicolored liquors lined the mirror-backed shelves. A young woman sat alone, drinking coffee, looking over a Vogue piece about the Spice Girls. She was willowy, in knee socks and a skirt embroidered with a forest scene, deer and rabbits, wildflowers, her lip and eyebrow pierced with silver rings, her hair voluminous save for the shaved sides, dyed a jolting shade of electric blue.
“Excuse me,” said Moss.
“Sorry,” said the young woman. “I should be at the desk.”
“Are you in charge here?” asked Moss.
“Checking in?” she asked. “We should have rooms available.”
Maybe in her early twenties, just out of college, or maybe this was a student job. Fine features and dark, lovely eyes. Moss held out her identification.
“NCIS,” she said. “I’m wondering if you can answer a few questions for me, maybe help me out.”
“Are you, like, a cop?” the young woman asked.
“Naval Criminal Investigative Service,” said Moss. “I’m a federal agent investigating crimes relating to the Navy.”
That explanation often calmed people who might otherwise have feared becoming entangled in police business—NCIS something remote, harmless-seeming to people with no connection to the armed forces.
“Like the FBI?” she asked. “Someone just called here a little bit ago.”
“I’m not the FBI,” said Moss.
“I’ll see what I can do,” said the young woman. “I can serve alcohol, if you want a drink. Or coffee. I just brewed a fresh pot.”
“Coffee, thank you. I don’t normally keep these hours.”
“I feel like a vampire sometimes,” she said, heading behind the bar to pour Moss’s cup. She set out sugar and a carton of half-and-half. “Petal, by the way.”
“Petal?” said Moss. “That’s beautiful. Shannon.”
“Skeleton crew tonight,” said Petal. “Got the lobby to myself. More staff will show up closer to breakfast.”
“You work here regularly?” asked Moss.
“Most nights,” said Petal. “Two nights off a week, not necessarily together. Hard to plan a life with no real weekends. And it’s boring. I’m glad you showed up, gives me something to do.”
“Do you know someone named Marian Mursult? Or Patrick Mursult?” asked Moss.
“They aren’t familiar names,” she said.
“I believe Patrick Mursult may have stayed here frequently,” said Moss. “What kind of information do you keep on file about your guests?”
“Basic stuff,” said Petal. “Name, how many people are checking in. That sort of thing. Credit-card number, unless they pay with cash.”
“Phone calls from the room? Incidental costs, damages?”
“Sure,” said Petal.
Moss showed Petal a photograph of Mursult. “Do you recognize him?” she asked.
Petal scrutinized the picture. “No,” she said. “But I don’t have a lot of contact with our guests at my hours. Most people check in before I’m here, check out after I leave—and most of the time they’re out through the forest, hiking. I see people occasionally at breakfast if I stick around to eat.”
“I have dates this man would have stayed here over the past year or so,” said Moss, “and the phone number he used to make the reservations.”
“The phone number wouldn’t be much help,” said Petal. “The dates, though—we could try to cross-check by date.”
“You can run a search like that on the computer?”
“Oh, no,” said Petal. “Our computer system is nonexistent. Ever play Memory?”
They set up in the lounge on either side of a glass table, sitting by a fire that Petal had kindled in the stone fireplace, several file folders arranged between them by date. Each folder contained a stack of receipts from past occupants, some handwritten—Moss started with the lightest folder, flipping through names, credit-card numbers, room numbers—information blurring together as she read. No “Patrick Mursult.”
“Read the names out loud so I can hear them,” said Petal. “Or—don’t bother with the names, let’s stick to credit-card numbers. I have an idea. Give me the last four numbers, and I’ll write them down, we’ll check for duplicates.”
“All right,” said Moss, unaccustomed to receiving this level of engagement, but Petal seemed particularly game, readying her notebook, starting a new column next to a poem she’d been writing. Moss read out the credit-card numbers, and Petal checked each number against her list, looking for repeats. They worked for nearly forty minutes, taking a break only to refill their coffee.
“Wait, wait—can you give me that last one again?” asked Petal.
Moss repeated the number and Petal said, “Here we go. Yes. I found a match, here. Patrick Gannon.”
“Patrick Gannon,” said Moss.
Moss jotted down the credit-card number that “Patrick Gannon” had used to make his reservation. He hadn’t reserved a room in the lodge but rather one of the cabins along the south rim of the gorge: Cabin number 22, the same number as the code on his pager. She had him. She checked all the past receipts—the number of guests was listed as two, though there was no information on the second guest.
“Anything unique about that cabin?” Moss asked. “About the name ‘Gannon’? Maybe someone you work with might have an idea about him? Might remember him?”
“I’ll ask around when the morning shift clocks in,” said Petal, tying her bright blue hair into a loose knot. “Let me check the file for Cabin 22, see if we’ve kept any notes about it.”
“Are you in college?” asked Moss as Petal gathered up their paperwork.
“I’m working a few years,” said Petal, “not sure if I want to go to school. I wanted to backpack across Africa, but my dad found me this job.”
“Consider a career in law enforcement,” said Moss. “You’re a natural. You’ve been a help tonight.”
Petal replaced the files of room receipts in the management office before stepping behind the front desk, opening up the three-ring binder labeled CABINS. She flipped to the back, scanned a series of forms. “Wasp’s nest in Cabin 22 in 1983,” said Petal. “Looks like it was taken care of.” She opened another three-ring binder labeled CHECK-IN, said, “Oh, shit. Gannon’s checked in right now. Cabin 22.”
“Tonight?” said Moss. A prickle of adrenaline. She thought of Marian, wondered if she was in one of the cabins, possibly held here.
Petal checked a pegboard full of keys on the rear wall, checked again in her binder. “He made the reservation Friday night, checked in Saturday, and has the cabin through the week.”
A Friday-night reservation—he’d booked his cabin just as Marian had been kidnapped. “I need to get there,” said Moss, no moment to spare if she might recover Marian here, now. “I can follow one of the roads that lead from the parking lot?”
“About a mile from here,” said Petal. “It’s tricky in the dark, I can take you over.”
Petal threw on a pea coat, brought Moss through the administrative office to the garage, where she found a golf cart spattered with mud. They left the garage and rode along the cabin path, a winding strip of concrete lit only by the dim wattage of the golf cart’s front light. Moss gripped the crossbar as Petal drove, taking the bends quickly. The stars were thick out here, without the diluting light of cities. Orion and the Dippers were clear, but the sky was dominated by the silvery flare of the comet Hale-Bopp, the cosmic ice and burning tails like a thumb smudge of light.
Two dozen cabins were situated near the gorge rim, each private, separated by dense hemlocks. A few were booked, Moss figured, seeing cars tucked into the woods, but most of the cabins stood empty—March was still too cold for most people. Petal drove around to one of the distant cabins. “Here’s 22,” she said. A Wrangler was parked in the gravel patch, the spare tire draped with a POW*MIA cover. No lights. The cabin seemed consumed by night.
“Petal, go ahead and wait back here, all right?” said Moss, standing from the golf cart. Petal bundled up in her coat, lit a cigarette. Marian might be here, thought Moss. She picked her way along the mulch path to the cabin. The night was so opaque she could barely see Petal and the golf cart, could see only the orange tip of her cigarette bobbing like a firefly. Moss knocked on the door, waiting a few moments. Nothing stirred inside the cabin, no lights snapped on, no movement. She knocked harder.
“Special agent, NCIS,” she said. “I need to speak with Patrick Mursult.”
Silence. She unsnapped her holster, ready to draw. Moss knocked again, no answer. Or maybe there was no one here—the cabins were small enough she should have heard movement if someone were inside.
“Do you have keys?” Moss called back.
“Yeah,” said Petal. “I have to open the door for you. I can’t hand over the manager’s keys.”
Moss watched the cigarette tip bob closer. Petal had a ring of keys, squinted to find the one marked 22. “I wish I had a flashlight,” she said, stepping around Moss, feeling for the cabin lock with her fingers. Moss heard the key slide in, heard the lock unlatch. Petal stepped inside just as Moss was smacked by the odor of blood.
“Petal, don’t—”
Petal flipped on the lights, and when she registered the wash of blood, she screamed, her cigarette dropping from her mouth. Moss took the girl by her shoulders, held her, led her from the cabin, “It’s okay, it’s okay—go back to the office, call 911—”
“I’m all right,” said Petal, her voice bubbling with hysteria. “I’m all right, it’s fine, I didn’t see it, I didn’t see—”
Moss put her hands to Petal’s cheeks, steadied her. “Listen to me, listen,” she said, and registered the moment when Petal regained herself. “Go back to the office, call 911,” said Moss. “My cell won’t work out here. I need you to do this for me, okay? Call 911.”
Moss waited until she heard the sound of the golf cart’s motor diminish before returning to the cabin. She crushed out Petal’s cigarette, smoldering on the floor. She closed the door behind her. The cabin’s interior was wood, with exposed ceiling beams. Patrick Mursult’s body was beside the bed, his head resting on the mattress, his wrists tied behind him with a belt. Someone had shot him through the back of the head, an execution. Blood had sprayed from the exit wound, dousing the headboard with blood that glistened in the room lights.
She checked the rest of the cabin. There was no one else here, no sign of Marian. Mursult had been staying here alone. She spotted a gun on the floor, a Beretta M9. Could be a service weapon, she thought, wondering if the Beretta had been Mursult’s or if his killer had left it here. But even if it was his service weapon, the NSC SEALs she worked with strongly preferred the SIG Sauer P226. The M9 might have been the weapon Mursult was originally issued back in the mid-eighties. An older gun.
She heard sirens piercing the silence long before they arrived. The first on scene was an ambulance from the Broaddus Hospital, Moss waiting outside the cabin, waiving off the EMTs so they wouldn’t contaminate the crime scene. When the Tucker County sheriff arrived, Moss asked him to radio in, ask for the FBI. Deputies woke the few others in the cabins, taking their names, contact information, asking them what they might have heard, what they might have seen. An FBI unit from the Clarksburg field office arrived, already in contact with Brock, who was on his way down from Pittsburgh.
No cell reception here, but Petal let Moss use the office telephone. The lodge office was stuffy, with a minuscule metal writing desk and a calendar of the Blackwater Falls photographed in different seasons. Moss dialed for an out line—at this hour O’Connor must be asleep, she figured, so she tried his home number rather than NCIS headquarters. She thought of him now, wisps of white hair, sandpaper stubble, sitting up in bed and shuffling through his vast house in Virginia, chasing down the ringing telephone before his younger wife’s sleep was disturbed.
“O’Connor,” he said.
“Moss,” she said. “I located him. Patrick Mursult’s dead. I’m calling from the Blackwater Falls Lodge, in West Virginia. He had a cabin here.”
“Homicide?” O’Connor asked.
“He was shot through the back of the head,” said Moss. “Wrists tied behind him. An execution. I don’t think Mursult killed his family—someone hunted him down, killed them all. We still have no leads about his daughter.”
“The FBI will handle the search for Marian,” said O’Connor. “Our primary concern remains Patrick Mursult—and Elric Fleece. I spoke with Special Agent Nestor earlier, pulled Fleece’s record. Navy, Electrician’s Mate—submarines in the late seventies, NSC in ’81. Zodiac.”
“Libra?” asked Moss.
“That’s right. We need to find out what these men were involved in, why they weren’t on the ship. We need to know about Libra. I’m meeting with the NSC director tomorrow, Admiral Annesley.”
“There’s something else,” said Moss. “Fleece had seen the Terminus, or knew about it, his place was . . . his property was decorated with sculptures of the hanged men. I think he had seen the future. Remember when I lost my leg, I had that confusion about the reflections? Do you remember, I thought I’d seen myself—”
“Of course,” said O’Connor, that time of her life delicate between them—how what should have been a routine training exercise in the Canaan Valley had resulted in the loss of her limb. He’d been inconsolable when the medical staff of the William McKinley mentioned amputation as the only way to save Moss from gangrene and had been present during the two surgeries needed to remove her leg at the thigh.
“This man, Fleece, had made a sculpture of the reflections,” she said. “I can’t explain it, but he knew. I’d been thinking Mursult never sailed on Libra, never made the assignment, but if Fleece knows the Terminus . . .”
A pause on O’Connor’s end. “We need to get out ahead of this investigation. It’s spreading like wildfire, we have to contain it,” he said. “I have to move you to the future on this one.”
Moss’s jaw clenched at his words, her shoulders tightened. Traveling to IFTs took a toll on her body, years of her life spent in futures. She had lost relationships the last time she was called on to travel, had a boyfriend she imagined a life with, but when she traveled, she had left her boyfriend’s bed one morning and returned within the week aged four years, distant from him, her heart and mind already long past the moment she’d been living.
“Just give me a few more days,” she said. “We have leads. There are pictures of a woman—”
“I’m moving you on this,” said O’Connor. “I have to. Mursult turning up like this, and now Fleece. They’re a national security risk, Shannon. We need to know about these men now. We need to know about Libra.”
Twenty years from now, this current investigation will have concluded—everything happening here will be history; with any luck, whoever murdered Mursult and his family will have been captured, Mursult’s missing-in-action status will have been explained, his connection to Libra understood. Moss might arrive twenty years from now and be handed a folder with every question answered, every opaqueness made clear. A framed photograph of the Blackwater Lodge staff stood on the desk—Moss picked out Petal, her hair not blue in this picture, her natural color a dark shade, almost black. Marian, thought Moss. You can find Marian.
“All right, I’ll get ahead of this thing,” she said. She was unable to slide backward through time to prevent Marian’s disappearance, the butchery to her family, but she could travel forward to learn what had happened to her or what might happen to her. Maybe I can save her, she thought. Maybe we’re not too late. “I’ll go,” she said. “I’ll leave from here, can make it to Oceana by midmorning.”
“I’ll make arrangements,” said O’Connor.
Moss found Petal at the front desk. The young woman had been crying, her eyes pinkish, but she had collected herself. Already this world, terra firma, seemed to Moss like a distant recollection, like it belonged to a past age, bathed in a haze of memory. Even Petal seemed like someone remembered from long ago. Moss handed her one of her business cards, said, “This is my name, here. Shannon Moss. When the sheriff’s department or someone from the FBI asks you about what happened tonight, make sure you talk with Special Agent William Brock of the FBI. Tell him everything.”
“Brock,” said Petal. “Okay.”
“You’ve done great,” said Moss. “Hang in there.”
Moss pulled away from the Blackwater Falls Lodge. She turned on the radio to drown out her thoughts, the tuner scanning, picking up static channels. Moss listened to the white noise, the night burning with stars. The vast body of heaven, the body of the woman in the Polaroid photographs. There had been a woman who’d met Mursult in the Blackwater cabin, who had known him, had been intimate with him. Who was she? Moss thought of that unknown woman, she thought of Marian. She thought about the search parties that would comb through these woods in the coming days, men and women searching tight grids, looking for a sign of the girl somewhere among the pines. Maybe they would find her, maybe they would pull Marian’s body from the soil, or maybe they would find her months from now, wasted away and desecrated by wildlife, or maybe they would never find her. The pinewoods stretched out like a vast dark sea on either side of Moss. She thought of Marian, she thought of Courtney. She imagined Courtney wandering alone, lost among the pines—her thoughts of Courtney were so vivid Moss felt she could almost see her, a blur of white among the subsuming darkness of the woods, a girl lost, lost and so far from home, lost in the eternal forest, lost forever.