The breeze died just before the clouds began to shed large pillowy flakes that spiraled in their descent, floating across the hood of the Explorer, streaming up the windshield without touching the glass, caught in the vehicle’s slipstream. Like a cold smoke, snow at first eddied across the pavement, but then it began to stick.
By the time that she reached the town of Lee Vining, Jane had to reduce speed, whereupon she needed the windshield wipers. The metronomic thump of the rubber blades and the monotone song of the tire chains hashed Rubinstein, so she switched off the music.
She pulled off the road and stopped in the parking lot of a convenience store. When she picked up the disposable phone, which was now charged, Hendrickson rose out of his self-cast spell and regarded the instrument with interest. He met her eyes as she prepared to key in the number of the burner that she’d left with Gavin and Jessie. Then he looked down at the twelve-button display.
His eyes were not the slick white of hard-boiled eggs, as in her dream. But there seemed to be an unwholesome curiosity in them, as if on some level he knew that he should still be her enemy, even if he could not act against her.
“Look away,” she said, to be sure that he wouldn’t see the number she meant to call.
Instead, he met her eyes again.
“Look away,” she repeated.
He turned his face to the window in the passenger door.
Maybe because of the remoteness of this place or because of the storm, she couldn’t get service. She would have to try later, though they were heading into even more remote territory and worse weather. She might have to delay calling until she crossed the border into Nevada and reached Carson City.
She drove back onto 395, in the wake of a highway department truck fitted with an enormous plow that skimmed the pavement. The rotating yellow beacons flung waves of light through the gray, alchemizing the falling snow into gold.
Still gazing out the side window, Hendrickson said, “They’ll find him.”
“Find who?”
There was no note of triumph or animosity in his flat voice, only a somber statement of what he believed to be fact. “They’ll find your son.”
As if she were a stringed instrument that Fate was tuning for a performance, Jane felt something tighten in her chest. “What would you know about it?”
“Not much. The boy wasn’t my primary focus. But recently…”
“Recently what?”
“They doubled the number of searchers looking for him.”
“What else? You know something else. Tell me.”
“No. Just that. Twice as many people chasing down leads.”
“They’ll never find him,” she said.
“It’s inevitable.”
Irrationally, she wanted to draw her pistol and whip the barrel across his face, but she had nothing to gain—and much to lose—by indulging that desire. There was nothing worse she could do to him than what she’d already done.
As he faced forward again, she said, “What was your primary focus?”
“Finding you.”
“How did that work out?”
After a silence, he said, “I don’t know yet.”