Faye only glimpsed Cully for an instant, walking across the grounds of the Gershwin Annex. So he wasn’t in his palatial suite.
She set out after him, but the conference attendees were on break and it was hard to make her way through the crowd. If she didn’t hustle, she was going to be outrun by an old man, and she was damned if she’d let that happen.
Cully was fumbling with a pack of cigarettes, which was normal for him when he was outdoors. The strange thing was that he was leaning forward a bit, which was not ordinary for a movie star with perfect posture. Dodging a cluster of gossipers, she got a better look at him and saw that the forward lean was compensating for a backpack, which seemed even less in keeping with Cully’s public persona. Why was Cully carrying a backpack?
And why was he wearing a black T-shirt? This wouldn’t have been notable for anybody else, except for the fact that Cully had been wearing a sport coat and collared shirt when she met him and on every occasion when she’d seen him since. Musing on his wardrobe took her to his pants. He was wearing jeans, which in no way fit his carefully cultivated casual-but-not-too-casual image.
A movie star was letting himself be seen wearing jeans and carrying a backpack. Where was he going and what was in that pack?
A nervous-looking woman approached, and when Faye tried to step around her, the woman put her hand on her shoulder and said, “I hear Cully Mantooth is a relative of yours. I’ve always loved him in the movies. Can you tell me what he’s really like?”
Ignoring her went against everything Faye’s mother had taught her about how to treat people, but there was a time when using good manners was the wrong thing to do. Faye shook off the hand, bolted to the left, and ignored the nice lady asking questions.
And now Cully was out of sight.
She stood in the space between the hotel’s two towers, knowing that he must be somewhere near. Spinning in a circle, she searched for an older man who looked like he wasn’t quite comfortable in his casual clothes.
Other people walked past, blocking her view, and she dodged and weaved between them. He wasn’t to her right, between her and the street that the Tower Annex faced. She didn’t see him straight ahead, entering the other tower. Scanning the sidewalk to her left, she found Cully walking away, his long black-and-silver ponytail swinging free of the dun-brown pack on his back. A flash of white on the bottom of his foot told her that he was wearing sneakers, meaning that his clothes were out of character from neck to sole.
These clothes were so far from his everyday image that Faye thought he must have shopped specifically for them. Cully must have had a reason to go out and buy some down-market clothing, and he’d done it in a hurry. He was heading for a place where he needed to be comfortable, to move freely, to get dirty. Cully was going to a place where he needed shoes with traction. She ran after him, wondering what on earth was in the backpack.
The first time he looked back over his shoulder, she was sure that he’d seen her, but no. He kept moving forward without turning to ask why she was following him. She ducked behind a dumpster at the rear of the North Tower, pressing herself close to its warm metal sides as she watched him walk.
A few fat raindrops fell, leaving star-shaped wet marks on the pavement beneath Faye’s feet. Cully looked back again, but her hiding place did its job and he didn’t see that he was being followed. He turned left and she watched to see where he would go next. Cully obviously didn’t want to be followed and this made her sure that following him was the right thing to do.
He was moving fast, maybe because he was in a hurry and maybe just because the rain was starting to come down harder. When she gauged that he was far enough away, she eased out from behind the dumpster.
At that moment, Cully was moving surreptitiously around the corner of the building next door to the South Tower, a nondescript Depression-era storefront building. When Faye reached the corner, she paused to flatten herself against its bricks. Taking a quick peek around the corner, she saw a blind alley that ran between the building where she stood and a still-shabbier building made of concrete blocks ending at a brick wall.
The alley was a problem. Faye couldn’t follow Cully, because the alleyway was as devoid of hiding spots as a wind tunnel, so she was trapped where she stood. She wished hard for her binoculars.
Far down the alley, Cully stepped behind a lean-to shed that projected from the back of the concrete building. It was so small that Cully’s entire head and one of his shoulders was visible above the sloping roof. He reached down and did something with his hands. It looked to Faye like he was manipulating something small, mechanical, and balky, like a lock or a latch that was rusted shut. Making it work was a strain for him—Faye could tell by the tension in his shoulders—but he must have accomplished whatever it was he had set out to do, because he stood up straight again. Shaking the tension out of his neck, he reached into his backpack again. A flicker of light on his face told her that he had flicked on a flashlight.
Next, Cully took a deep breath and bent down so low that Faye couldn’t see him over the shed’s low roof. He disappeared and, though she waited for more than a full minute for him to stand back up, he never did.
* * *
Joe was one of those men who truly enjoyed the company of women. He sought their opinions and he laughed at their jokes. He also enjoyed the company of older people, which was only to be expected of a man who loved fishing, gardening, flintknapping, cooking, and hunting, all of them activities that were usually learned through the patient instruction of an elder. Therefore, when Joe saw that Carson had brought his mother to the conference, he headed straight for Alba, who greeted him with a hello hug.
Then two more people charged up from behind him, also intent on hugging Alba.
“Ben McGilveray!” she cried. “And Gloria! It has been just eons. Do you know Joe Wolf Mantooth?”
Four eyes swiveled toward Joe. He felt his lifelong shyness with strangers kick in, but he’d learned to cover it. He shook their hands and said he was pleased to make their acquaintance but they kept looking at him. He really would have preferred that they go back to looking at their old friend Alba. After a long moment that Joe spent wearing an awkward smile, Gloria said, “Mantooth? Do you know Cully Mantooth? Because we’re looking for him.”
“Do you know Cully?” Carson asked. “I’m the conference organizer. I can find him for you. I don’t know where he is right now, but I’ll see him eventually.”
When they said they’d never actually met him, Joe watched his old buddy shift into protect-the-celebrity mode. “I can’t get you face time with him. If I did, everybody would expect it. But you’re welcome to come to his talk tomorrow night.”
Ben and Gloria leaned their heads together and whispered for a moment. Then Ben said, “We’ll do that, but there will be a lot of people there and we might not get a chance to speak to him personally. Will you give him this?”
Gloria pulled a sealed envelope out of her purse and held it out. It was the kind of envelope that came with stationery or a birthday card, a squat and almost square rectangle, and it was yellow.
Carson hesitated. Given what had just happened, Joe figured he was trying to decide if the slim, flat envelope could possibly hold a bomb. He eyeballed Gloria and Ben, but he must have decided they were safe, because he took the envelope.
“Thank you,” Ben said. “This means a lot.” He turned to Joe and said, “It’s very nice to meet you. We’ll see you again tonight, because we wouldn’t miss your flintknapping demonstration. And we’ll be at Mr. Mantooth’s concert tomorrow night, too.” And then they took their leave and walked away.
Alba turned her attention to Joe. “It’s so good to see you. Maybe you can help me with this weird scavenger hunt of Carson’s.”
Joe raised his eyebrows at his old friend, but Carson said nothing to explain his mother’s comment.
Alba waved her phone at Joe and said, “First, he made me look at pictures of some people who I’m sure are very nice but I don’t know them. Now we’re wandering around the hotel looking for people with dark hair, which is a lot of people. Oh, and we’re also looking for an Agent Liu. And an Agent Goldsby.”
“This sounds like one of Faye’s wild goose chases,” Joe said.
Carson still didn’t answer him, so Joe knew that he was right.
“I wouldn’t doubt that your wife is involved, Joe,” Alba said. “All her wild goose chases are for a good reason, so I guess I’ll keep humoring my son,” Alba said. “Where is Faye, anyway? We’ve been all over the grounds and all through the public areas of both towers but we haven’t seen her.”
Joe hadn’t seen Faye in hours, not since he finished his talk that morning, but he had figured she was chumming around with the FBI. Now she had moved on to involving Carson and Alba in some kind of skullduggery and that worried him. He decided it was time to lay eyes on his wife. He said goodbye to his friends, then found a quiet spot to loiter while he texted Faye.
He got no answer, which worried him. Even without her real phone, Faye would have taken the time to text him back with the dinosaur of a loaner phone she’d gotten from the repair shop. True, Faye was capable of being so focused on a task that she didn’t hear the phone buzzing in her purse, but she was more than a little rattled by the bombing and by Stacy’s disappearance. She had been so rattled that she asked for an extra goodbye kiss that morning. For Faye, that was clingy behavior. It was weird that she wasn’t answering him.
Joe thought it seemed like a good time to wander around the Gershwin’s Tower Annex and try to find his wife.
* * *
Faye made her way down the alleyway, alternately attracted to and frightened by the lean-to where Cully had disappeared. Every time she took a step, it seemed like her foot banged on the pavement with a sound that echoed off the alley walls. Her breathing sounded almost as loud, and so did the heartbeat that sounded in her ears.
A drizzle of rain dampened her hair and it was only getting worse. The pavement under her feet, greasy with a century of engine exhaust and oil leaks, worried her. If she needed to run, she might slip and fall.
Why was she afraid that Cully might hear her? She had started out looking for him, so she could ask him questions about Angela, and the pictures that she’d wanted to show him still rustled in her back pocket. But then she’d seen him walk away in his weirdly practical clothes and somehow this meant that she didn’t want him to know she was behind him? That made no sense. Why the change?
The answer was that her goal had changed. Now she wanted to know where Cully was going and, based on his skulking movements, she was pretty sure he wouldn’t tell her. To get that answer, she needed to trail him until he reached his mysterious destination. This need for secrecy made sense, but her fear didn’t. Cully had never been anything but kind to her.
She supposed the fear had kicked in when she saw his stealth. She was trailing a man who was obviously protecting a secret. Cully himself might or might not be a danger to her, but Faye knew from hard experience that secrets could be dangerous indeed.