“You shouldn’t have promised,” Nina said. “You can’t guarantee you’ll find Alli, let alone bring her back.”
Jack found it interesting and enlightening that Nina Miller had been privy to his conversation with the Carsons. Garner’s deliberate exclusion was an all-too-graphic example of the schism within the task force, behind which, of course, was the disagreement between the fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party currently in power and the moderate wing about to take that power away from them. It was no surprise that a political agenda governed the task force. This was precisely what Bennett had warned him about, and he knew there was no good news to be had here.
“What I can guarantee is hope,” Jack said shortly. “Hope is her food and drink. Only hope will keep her going through the darkest hours.”
“Hope dangles people from a slender thread,” Nina said. “It’s patently unfair.”
They had been striding down the hallway. Now Jack stopped, turned to her. “Do you know anything about darkest hours?”
Nina stood staring at him. She didn’t answer, because apparently she had nothing to say.
“I’ve had my darkest hours,” Jack continued. “And now the Carsons are having theirs.”
He stood very still, but there was so much energy coming off him that Nina, as if slapped in the face, took an involuntary step back.
His eyes glittered. “I will bring Alli back, Nina. You can make book on it.”
Jack led her to the right, skirting the shed. There was a swath of lawn, rather narrow by the standards of the rest of the property, beyond which lay a thick stand of fluffy pines and large, gnarled, very old oaks. By the time they reached the trees, Jack had determined that Nina had low-slung hips and a walk that, defying the odds, was distinctly sensual.
“I want you to know …” Nina stumbled over a stone as well as her words.
“What?”
“I’ve … had my darkest hours, too.”
Jack, navigating through the rooty trees, said nothing.
“When I was a kid.” Nina picked her way under tree branches, over exposed roots, the knuckles of angry fists. “My older brother … he molested me….”
Jack stopped, turned back to regard her. He was startled at her admission, which couldn’t have been easy to make. But then again, it was often easier to confess to a stranger than to someone you knew.
“And when I fought back, he beat me. He said I needed to be punished.”
Jack felt a ping, like the ricochet of a steel ball bounding from bumper to bumper in his own shameful pinball machine. “You know that’s not true.”
Nina’s face was pinched, as if she wanted to make the past disappear. “He’s married, got two kids. Now he’s got a whole new family to dominate. How I hate him. I can’t stop.” She made a little sound in the back of her throat that was either a laugh or a sob. “My parents loved God, they believed in his loving kindness. How wrong were they?”
“When we were growing up,” Jack said, “parents were unconscious when it came to their effect on their kids.”
Nina paused for a moment, considering. “Even if you’re right, it doesn’t make what they did better, does it?”
They resumed their trek through the stand of weeping hemlocks and pin oaks. He heard the rustle of the wind through brittle branches, the hiss of faraway traffic, the call of a winter bird. The melancholy sounds of winter.
At length, Nina said, “Where are we going?”
“There’s a secret path.” Jack pointed ahead. “Well, it isn’t a secret to the juniors and seniors, but to the adults …”
They had reached the far side of the tree-line. He took three or four steps to his left, moved some brush away, revealing a narrow, well-trod earthen path through brambly underbrush and the occasional evil-looking hemlock.
“Except you.”
He nodded. “Except me.”
Nina followed him along the twisting path, at times half bent over in order to avoid shaggy low-hanging branches. Their shoes made dry, crunching sounds, as if they were walking over mounds of dead beetles. The wind, late for an appointment, hurried through the hemlocks. Grim bull briars and brambles pulled at them.
“With all the manicured lawn, why hasn’t the school pulled this stuff out?”
“Natural barbed wire,” Jack said.
“What do the kids do in here?” With a hard tug, Nina pulled her coat free of a tenacious bramble. “Drugs and sex, I expect.”
“I have no doubt that drugs and sex are on the students’ minds,” Jack said, “but so is escape.”
Nina frowned. “Why escape from the lap of luxury?”
“Well, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?”
“Who told you about it? Emma?”
Jack’s laugh held a bitter edge. “Emma never told me anything.” Like so much in life, this was a matter of trust. Edward Carson certainly trusted Nina, and she had bravely trusted him with her secret, and that had touched him in a way she could never imagine. “It was Alli. She was worried about Emma.”
“Worried? About what?”
“She never said. I got the impression there was only so much she was prepared to tell me. But she did say that several times when Emma thought she was asleep, she crept out of the room. Alli said the one time she followed her, she saw her vanish down this path.”
“Did she go after Emma?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Didn’t you ask?”
“I take it you don’t have a teenager. I went after Emma myself.”
“And what happened?”
They had reached the high brick wall that surrounded the property. It was guarded on this side by a double hedge: low, sheared boxwood in front of tall privet. Jack was already behind the boxwood, had found the slight gap in the stately privet. Pushing aside the sturdy branches, he vanished into the thicket.
When Nina tried to follow him, she found the privet was so thick, she was forced to leave her coat behind, press herself bodily into what she was sure had a moment before been a gap. Shouldering her way through, she found herself on the other side, almost flush up against the brick wall. Jack was on his haunches, hands pulling at the bricks. To Nina’s astonishment, they came away easily until he had a pile of approximately twenty, which left a hole in the wall large enough for a human being of small to normal size to wriggle through.
“I followed her through here.”
Crouching down, Nina saw a wedge of lawn, the bole of a tree, and beyond, a field at the end of which were stands of oaks, birches, and mountain laurels.
“I saw her meet someone; I couldn’t tell who, it was just a shadow standing beneath that tree,” Jack said. “Either she heard a noise or some instinct caused her to look back. She saw me, she came after me, pushed me back to this side, snarling like an animal.” Jack sat back on his haunches, his eyes far away. “We had a real knock-down, drag-out shouting match. She accused me of spying on her, which was, of course, the truth. I told her I wouldn’t have had to spy on her if she wasn’t sneaking around in the dead of night. That was a mistake. She blew up, said what she did was no business of mine, said she hated my guts, said some things I don’t think she really meant, at least I hope not.”
Nina was kind enough not to look at him directly. “You never found out?”
Jack dived through the hole in the wall.
On hands and knees they picked their way through. There was about the hole the stink of the grave, a sickly-sweet scent that reminded Jack of the time when he was a kid and the neighbor’s black cat got stuck inside the wall of his room and died there, giving off the stench of slow decay. The neighbor, an old woman married to a male harem of feral cats, wanted the black one back, to bury it properly beneath her fig tree, but Jack’s father refused. “It’s good for the boy to smell death, to understand it, to know it’s real,” he explained to her papery face and sour breath. “He needs to know that his life isn’t infinite, that death will come for him, like it does for everyone, one day.”
In starless night, he lay in rageful silence, listening to the sound of his own ragged heart as he breathed in the stench that penetrated to the pit of his stomach until, unable to keep to inaction, he ran across the hall, there to violently lose his supper in the low porcelain bowl. In the adjacent room, his parents made love aggressively, raucous as sailors on shore leave, with no thought that they were not alone.
Jack and Nina stood close together on the other side. Jack wondered whether Nina was thinking the same thing he was: Is this how Alli’s abductors smuggled her out of the school? Over Nina’s right shoulder, the hills rolled on, leading eventually to the Georgetown Pike.
Saigon Road, the site of Emma’s crash, lay just five miles west down the Pike. He felt a stirring, as if a cold wind were blowing on the back of his neck. A prickling of his scalp. Was Emma here in some form or other? Was such a thing possible? In the course of his work, he’d come across a psychic who believed that spirits of the dead who had unfinished business couldn’t cross over into the light or the dark until that business was finished. These thoughts sent his mind racing back to when Emma was alive.
At Sharon’s fierce insistence, Emma had applied to Langley Fields. Jack saw no need for his daughter to be sequestered in what seemed like a four-year straitjacket, but Sharon had prevailed. The education was exceptional, she argued, and Emma would be exposed to a wide variety of students from all over the world. All Jack saw was the pretension of the consumerati: Mercedes, Bentleys, and tricked-out Hummers disgorging siliconed mothers, cell phones blaring Britney Spears, yapping dogs the size of New York City rats, the flash of platinum Amex cards held aloft. He had been obliged to take out a second mortgage on their house in order to pay the exorbitant tuition. He fervently wished he’d fought harder, insisted that she attend Georgetown or even George Washington, the other colleges to which she’d wanted to go, but Sharon had dug in her heels, wouldn’t listen to either him or Emma. She wanted her daughter to have the kind of education she herself had always dreamed of getting, but never had.
Nina said, “I feel I should warn you that if Hugh Garner got wind of our roles in his task force, he’d find some way to discredit us with the powers that be, so that even the president-elect couldn’t save us. That’s what a political animal would do.”
“I don’t concern myself with politics,” Jack said, his mind still engaged by Emma.
“I’m with you on that, but you’d better give it some attention now.” Without her coat Nina shivered against the advancing chill of evening. “Hugh Garner is a political animal, par excellence.”
Jack took off his coat, but before he had a chance to sling it across her shoulders, Nina shook her head.
“Alli’s life is beyond adversarial parties, beyond politics altogether.”
“I suppose it would be,” Nina said dryly, “in another universe.”
Nina looked around at the thick stand of old oaks, gnarled into fantastic shapes, the sly shadows moving in and out beneath the cathedraled branches. “This place reminds me of something. I almost expect the devil to come bounding through the trees.”
“Why d’you say that?”
Nina shrugged. “Ever since childhood, I’ve expected dreadful things to happen that I can’t escape.”
Jack inclined his head. “It’s only the path the students take into the heart of the trees.”
“Who knows what goes on here?”
They picked their way through the failing light into the clotted shadows of a dense copse of trees. The heavy rain had thickened the underbrush considerably, made the ground springy, in places almost marshy, impeding or slowing their progress. A moment later, ducking around a low-hanging tree limb, they burst out into a tiny clearing. The last rays of slanted sunlight turned the copse’s heart a reddish gold, as if they had stumbled upon a coppersmith’s workshop. An immodest west wind molded Nina’s skirt to her well-muscled thighs, provoked eerie sounds from the interweaving of branches that spread weblike all around them.
At the base of a tree, where the root flare rose up just above the ground, was a mound of freshly dug earth.
“What have we here?”
She followed Jack as he knelt beside the mound of earth. Scooping the earth aside revealed a recently dug hole. Jack pulled out an odd-shaped item six or seven inches on a side wrapped in oilskin.
Nina’s mouth opened. “What the hell—?”
Carefully, Jack brushed off the dirt and skeletal leaves that had adhered to the oilskin, peeled back the moist covering, revealed inch by inch what was inside.
Pale, almost opalescent flesh appeared to bleed in the ruddy sunset light. It was a hand, smallish, delicate of fingers, ringed, nails blunt-cut like a boy’s. Nevertheless, it was the hand of a young girl—a young girl who had been immersed in water, judging by the deeply wrinkled flesh of the fingertips.
Nina looked at Jack, said, “Dear God, is it Alli Carson’s?”
Without touching the hand, Jack scrutinized the gold-and-platinum ring on the pale, cold third finger.
“This is Alli’s ring,” he said. “I recognize it.” He pointed. “Also, look at the nails, no polish or clear lacquer. Alli’s nails are square-cut, like a boy’s.”
“God in heaven,” Nina said. “She’s been drowned.”