Lips, sticky, not how his mother kissed. He only considered the difference in their ages whenever he tasted her makeup.
“Are we in trouble?” Bobby asked.
“No,” Val said, “not anymore.”
• • •
Val watched in the wing mirror as Rosa and Bobby walked past the young-looking detective toward the ice cream van. Behind them was Bert, his bottom swinging to and fro. She swallowed, the salty sea air forming a film in the back of her throat. Bobby had told her that his mother had planned to escape by the sea. She felt honored by the prospect of fulfilling this promise for the son they had come to share.
The detective approached, hands stuffed deep inside his pockets. He nervously ran through various ways of introducing himself as he neared the door, which seemed odd. He knew the woman better than he knew anyone, despite their never having met.
“Hello,” he said through the open door, “my name is Jimmy Samas.”
“Hello, Jimmy,” she said, “I’m Val.”
“Oh,” Detective Samas said, smiling, “I already knew that.”
She remained behind the steering wheel, but turned her legs and faced him as he stood on the ground looking up. Early sunrays hit his eyes through the windscreen, and he shielded them with a trembling hand. He noted two things, the first more important than the second. She was calm, and she was far more beautiful in the flesh.
“An awful lot of people have been looking for you, Ms. Reed,” he said.
“Please, call me Val.”
“You’re quite elusive for a lady in a giant truck.”
“But that’s all over now, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I guess it is.” He noticed that she was whispering, and presumed this was so that Joseph Sebastian Wiles in the back of the truck would not be able to hear.
“I’d like to do this calmly and at your pace, Val, if I may. Rosa and Bobby are safe with my colleagues now, so I guess that’s a very good start.”
Val looked up the hill, past the police line to the ice cream van, where the two of them were holding hands and deciding which lolly to eat.
“Okay.”
“Good.” The detective motioned toward the back of the mobile library. “Val,” he said quietly, “is there anybody in there?”
“Uh-huh,” Val said.
“Would you care to tell me who that person is?”
“That person is somebody I believe you may know to be Joseph Sebastian Wiles.”
The detective muttered something Val couldn’t hear into his radio transmitter. Back at the police line, with their target confirmed, the gathered officers trained their arms even more keenly on the back of the mobile library. Below, the waves broke with a crash that briefly distracted them both.
“I’d like to come down from here,” Val said.
“Then you may.” He held his hands out toward her, shaking and actually shaped as if clutching an olive branch.
“But first I should explain,” she said, “I need you to understand that we only intended to go for a day, not more.”
“I understand.”
“Bobby Nusku came to me. He was covered in bruises. Have you been to his home, Detective?”
Jimmy Samas thought of the size of Bobby’s father’s hands, the ugly missing digit.
“Yes,” he said, “I have.”
“Then you will have met his father. I wanted to take Bobby away, to somewhere safe, away from him. The mobile library was the only vehicle I had access to.”
“That stands to reason. But may I ask . . . why would you not come directly to the police?” Val flicked a strand of hair from her eyes.
“Because I had made a complaint to the police just a month or so before. About an attack on my daughter?” The detective guiltily remembered it now, he had seen it written in her records. “And nothing happened. I considered Bobby’s life to be in danger. I wanted to do something that would draw your attention to just how serious a matter it was.”
While she spoke the detective reevaluated the risks. The clifftop had induced vertigo in him, a spinning sickness he’d not experienced before, which made the grass around his feet seem farther away every time he glanced down at it. He wanted this to be over, but he wasn’t willing to let Val know as much. “We drove to some woods. We were going to camp there, just for a night.”
“And . . .”
“That’s where we found a man hiding. That man was Joseph Sebastian Wiles.”
“What was Wiles doing there?”
“Hiding. From you. He said that he had been put in prison for beating up another soldier.”
“That’s correct. He is a very violent, dangerous man.”
“He said that he escaped.”
“He did.”
“I hope that he didn’t harm anybody doing it. You hear terrible stories in the news all the time, of riots and prison guards being taken as hostages.”
The detective scratched behind his ear with a pen and considered an uncomfortable truth. “Actually, his escape was quite the opposite of that. Joseph Sebastian Wiles got out of military prison because of a clerical error. A case of mistaken identity. He was served with somebody else’s documents by accident and they opened the doors for him to walk straight out of there. So he did. By the time anybody realized their mistake, he’d disappeared, as quickly and simply as that.” Val fought to suppress a smile, imagining this giant walking free, tipping a nod to the warden.
“He took us,” she said, “he made us act as though we were his family, so that he might hide from you more easily.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“He scared us.”
“But did he hurt you?”
“He took us to Scotland, to his father’s. He made us parade like man and wife, as if to prove a point. The old man abandoned him, you see.”
His father? This was news to the detective, a fact he was far too ashamed to admit. He made a mental note to have Baron arrested for lying to a police officer.
“And you did?”
“Yes. But I had no choice. I’m not a kidnapper, Detective. I am frightened. I am frightened that he will harm me. I am frightened that he will harm the children.”
“You don’t need to be frightened anymore.”
“And I am frightened of what you’ll do to me, Detective. You think I’m bad, don’t you?”
“Ms. Reed, it is not for me to judge you.”
“I’m not bad, Detective. I’m not bad at all. I’m a mother. All I want is for you to assure me that Bobby Nusku will not have to go back to his father.”
“I understand, and of course, if what you claim is true, then it won’t happen. We’ll need to speak to Bobby about that.”
“Good. I want him, in time, to be able to stay with me.”
“This is a conversation for the future.”
“It’s why I locked Wiles in the back of the mobile library for you.”
“I appreciate that. With the help you’ve given us bringing him to justice, I’m sure what you’ve done can be looked upon favorably.” The detective could feel the negotiation coming to a natural end. He handed Val a tissue from his pocket.
“Thank you,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. The words were pleasant on her tongue, lingering like the taste of fine wine.
“I must ask you . . .”
“Yes?”
“Is the mobile library locked?”
“Oh yes.”
“So he can’t get out.”
“Not without the keys.”
“And where are the keys?”
“Right here, in my handbag.”
“Then if you’d step down from the cab, we can take it from here.”
“Of course, Detective . . .”
“Jimmy,” he said.
“Just let me gather my things.”
The detective turned away to light up a celebratory smoke. Negotiations by their very nature were complex, each exponentially different from the last. This one, the conclusion to a hunt that had been reported all over Europe and North America, had ended about as well as it could have.
This was his second and biggest mistake in the entire investigation. The negotiation was not finished, the investigation not complete. It wasn’t up to him to decide when the story ends, something he’d been taught on his very first day in the job—far longer ago than the smoothness of his skin suggested.
• • •
Val stroked the cab’s leatherette, closed her eyes and rested her head against the dashboard. This was her unseen goodbye to the mobile library. She picked up her handbag from the footwell. Adjusting the buckles to maximum length, she tied a loop in the strap and hooked it over the handbrake, which she pressed the small red button to unlock.
“I’m coming, Jimmy,” she said. “The mobile library is all yours.”
The detective turned in time to see Val jump from the cab, and behind her the strap of her bag snapping taut, releasing the handbrake. She shrieked, let go of the bag and scrambled toward the detective, who pulled her to a safe distance and watched in disbelief as gravity conspired with the incline of the clifftop and the slippery gloss left by morning dew on the grass. The mobile library was moving, sliding, rolling, the weight of a whale, toward the drop.
Once the front wheels went over the edge its momentum was set. The cabin tipped over the side and the gunshot snap of the axle echoed along the cliff face. The rear of the mobile library vaulted into the air. Its metal walls crumpled under their own weight. Now completely upright, this doomed structure saluted the waves, and from a distance, a mile away up on the hill from where it could still be seen, it seemed to collapse, to concertina, as it dove over the edge toward the ocean, splitting in half and releasing its cargo. Hundreds, then thousands, of books took flight, flapped and swooped, fluttered and fell, like a flock of birds dive-bombing into the sea.
The cab hit the rocks below, thundering into the ground, and the tiniest spark lit a trickle of fuel. With a deafening bang, the mobile library became a tower of fire, burning its shadow into the chalk.
Somewhere in there, thought the detective as the heat crawled through his skin and clothes, is Joseph Sebastian Wiles, an inferno claiming his remains. Somewhere in there is an ending.
• • •
Bobby and Rosa watched the flames burn, letting ice cream melt over their fingers. Charred book pages twirled through the smoke, an endless snowfall of cinders fluttering around them. And there, in the sky, a blue and yellow macaw, in free and glorious flight out to sea. They walked through the police line toward Val on the clifftop. Brother, sister, mother.