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17. Neither the time

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Mother’s Day in Lincoln, Nebraska should have been about breakfast in bed, home-made cards, brunch at The Egg & I or Greenfields, or just kickin’ back with the kids.

For Avery Snyder, it was about visiting the Lincoln Memorial Cemetery.

Her daughter Brynlee had died of an overdose twelve years earlier, and every one of the four thousand three hundred ninety-eight days since had been as black and barren and lonely as the one before.

‘Got to be honest with you, Mr. Garland. The five stages of grief are just not holding up for me. I’ve gone through denial and isolation, the anger, the bargaining – maybe not in that exact order. Depression’s been with me from day one. But I can’t bring myself to move on to the last stage. And I won’t.’

‘Acceptance?’

‘How am I supposed to do that, Mr. Garland, and still face myself in the mirror when I’m in Bryn’s room?’

Mrs. Snyder, clutching a framed photo of her daughter, had been ID’d by the Ciph from her posts to a Facebook group called Moms Against Drugs.

Ped could see over her shoulder his press secretary having trouble keeping the muck slingers behind the ropes set up a respectable distance from the headstone.

He put his arm on Mrs. Snyder’s shoulder. ‘Shall we?’

‘Of course. A vein for a vein.’

She never got to say the words. The douchebag pounced before Ped finished his introduction.

‘Can you clarify, Mr. Garland, why we haven’t been able to locate anyone in West Virginia who has made a contribution through your campaign website?’

‘I beg your pardon. What are you talking about?’

‘We’ve spent...’

‘Who’s we? And who are you? The hell you think you’re doin’? This is a cemetery, for heaven’s...’

‘I’m with the Charleston Gazette-Mail. We’ve spent...’

‘Well, I’ll be speaking with your editor sir, this is neither the time nor...’

‘I serve as the editor, Mr. Garland. Our story is scheduled for publication tomorrow regardless of whether you choose to comment. According to your website, over two thousand West Virginians have contributed to your campaign. We’ve conducted interviews with five thousand individuals across the state, including Charleston, Huntington, Parkersburg, Morgantown, and Wheeling, and we haven’t been able to find a single person who claims to have donated.’

Ped glanced around. Where was his press secretary when he needed her?

‘Where’s the money really coming from Mr. Garland?’

*****

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During a mission several years earlier to Egypt, where Jay had been sent to investigate an imminent environmental disaster at a gold mine near the Red Sea town of Marsa Alam, he’d been forced to spend several days on a stake-out at a beach bar.

Jay had traced the whistleblower, whose tip warned of a dangerous pile-up of cyanide tailings behind a dam, through the informant’s use of a poste restante service. The bait had been set, and Jay had laid claim to a corner table in the beach bar that gave a good view of the town’s post office.

The bar wouldn’t have been such a bad place to while away a few days if it wasn’t for the irritating presence of a whining expat Englishman.

Jay thought about him now as he sat in the Jukung beach bar at Jimbaran. He had drawn the Nyalahutan Jimbaran, and after forty-eight hours was past bored. He was ready to answer any question about the architecture of the restaurant, bar, lobby, or pool. The fancy weave in the bamboo panels, the carving on the teak beams and posts, the lotus motifs on the cornices and lintels, the thickness of the grouting between tiles at the deep end. Hell, he could write the quiz – and throw in sections on the gilded frames around the puri pura artwork and the workmanship in the Hindu statues. It was light years from the trinket junk sold in tourist stores, as you’d expect for the room rate.

The final straw for Jay was discovering the roles of two of the Nyalahutan’s staff. One did nothing but swoop on frangipani flowers that dared land on the marble paths; the other spent his entire shift making sure nobody walked on the lawn.

Jay would have broken his promise to Bec to give the stake-out three days if he hadn’t stumbled across the Jukung. The bar, named after the traditional wooden outrigger canoes anchored offshore, was Jay’s sort of place. Cheap Heinekens, all-day breakfast of scrambled eggs, smashed avo, bacon, mushroom, tomatoes, and reggae. And by positioning a bean bag on the sand beyond the last lounger, line-of-sight to the driveway of the Nyalahutan.

The rafters of the open-air joint were covered in nautical paraphernalia – life preserver rings, anchors, spear guns, starfish, ceramic turtles – and a Bintang beer sign was nailed to a stunted ketapang tree, next to a shrine for the daily offerings. Modern Bali summed up on a tree trunk.

The only downside of the Jukung was Shane, an overripe Australian hippie who’d adopted the sign over the bar, Beer is the reason I get up in the morning, as his mission statement. The loser spent his days bordering on comatose, doing violence to local place names like Seminyak and Canggu.

After ten hours of Shane, and no sign of any pattern with the limos collecting and depositing guests at the Nyalahutan, Jay was ready to take the direct route.