“Go see,” Luce suggested, her own color flaring. Nobody was a better persuader than Luce. “If they're not your parents, they'll smoke them out of here and they'll forget everything. If they are your parents, you have to go.” She held out her spit-damp palms, as did others who had formed a circle around the table, but Stella refused them all.
“I don't want to know!” she wailed. “I don't want themto know!”
4
Albert V. Bryan United States Courthouse
ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA
Senator Laura Bloch greeted Christopher Dicken in the hall outside the courtroom. Dicken was dressed in his usual excuse for business wear, brown tweed jacket and corduroy pants with a wide tie completely out of fashion. Senator Bloch was dressed in a navy blue suit and carried a small briefcase. Behind her stood a younger balding man and a lone, harried-looking middle-aged woman, both wearing suits and carrying their own briefcases.
“She's going to get off,” Bloch declared curtly. “She's painting herself as the cop on the beat who protected us all.”
Dicken was not much on punishment, and did not look forward to having to testify.
“I wonder what Gianelli would think,” Bloch added softly, staring at the benches, the lines of lawyers and witnesses waiting to be allowed into the courtroom to sit and wait until called.
The sound of Mark Augustine's cane was unmistakable. Dicken and Bloch turned to see him making his way down the hall toward the courtroom. He nodded to his attorneys, spoke to them for a few seconds, eyes turning to Dicken, then broke away and stepped gingerly toward them.
“Dr. Augustine,” Bloch said, and extended her hand.
“Senator, pleasure to see you.” Augustine smiled and shook her hand, but kept his eyes on Dicken. “Sorry duty, eh, Christopher?”
Dicken nodded. “How are you, Mark?”
“Steep learning curve for us all,” Augustine said.
Dicken nodded. He felt no triumph, only a hollow sensation of unfinished business.
Augustine pursed his lips and took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. “Two items of news,” he said. “First, I've got Sumner's chief of staff, Stan Parton, on board for a reconciliation joint session. We're going to have a select few children in the House chambers, at the president's invitation. The vice president will be there.”
“That's great,” Senator Bloch said, her eyes brightening. “Dick would have loved to hear that. When?”
“Could be months. The other news is bad.”
The last thing the group wanted was bad news. Bloch sighed and rolled her prominent eyes.
“Let's have it,” Dicken said.
“Mrs. Rhine slipped into a coma at six thirty this morning. She died at eleven fifteen.”
Dicken felt his breath hitch.
“She had been in pain for years,” Augustine said.
“A blessing, really,” Bloch said.
Dicken asked where a restroom was on this floor, then excused himself. In the echoing hollowness, he closed the door to a stall. No tears came. He did not even feel numb.
“Funny world,” he whispered, and looked up at the ceiling, as if Mrs. Rhine might be listening. “Funny old world. Wherever you are, Carla, I hope it's better.”
Then he stepped out of the stall, washed his hands, and returned to stand with Bloch and Augustine outside the courtroom.
Rachel Browning and her attorneys had arrived and now huddled in a tight cluster about twenty feet from Augustine and Bloch. Her face had become deeply lined, pale as if cast in plaster, a death mask. She nodded to the tune of the attorneys' back-and-forth. One stopped to whisper in her ear.
“I'm sorry for her,” Dicken said, vulnerable to the point of charity.
“Don't be,” Augustine primly advised. “She'd hate that.”
The court clerk opened the doors.
“Let's go, gentlemen,” Bloch said. She placed her hands on their elbows and escorted them, three abreast, into the courtroom.
5
LAKE STANNOUS, CALIFORNIA
Mitch held Kaye's hand as a group of more than twenty youths tightened its gyre around them. Morgan had been drawn aside and now stood surrounded by three young men. He held out his hands and smiled nervously, face flushed, windbreaker pulled off one shoulder. He looked surprised.
Several other adolescents and a female in her late seventies were searching Morgan's truck, looking, Mitch guessed, for communications or tracking equipment. They were all quiet and serious.
“We're trying to find a girl named Stella Nova,” Kaye repeated. The air was thick with persuasion. Mitch felt woozy and confused already, despite the nose plugs they had manufactured in the motel bathroom out of toilet paper and vanilla-scented lip balm.
An older male, also in his seventies, with ruddy cheeks and an unruly halo of reddish hair shot with gray, came through the gyre and reached to take Mitch's and Kaye's hands in his. He wore a denim jacket with brass buttons. Except for his round face and SHEVA features, he might have been an itinerant farmworker. “There was no need for you to come,” he said pressing their hands to his chest.
“We're her parents,” Kaye said, eyes pleading. “We've been looking for her for years.”
“She isn't here.” The old man's cheeks freckled in rapid patterns, unreadable, and his emerald green irises sparkled with yellow and brown. His accent was mild but Mitch could still detect a hint of eastern European. Mitch tried to think clearly, tried to resist the onslaught. Any minute now, he was certain, they would all get back in the truck and drive away, sure they had made a mistake—no matter what Morgan would tell them had happened.
For the first time, Mitch felt frightened, being among his daughter's people.
The old woman stood beside the old man and spoke a stream of over-under in another language.
“Georgian,” Kaye said to Mitch. Mitch and Kaye tried to pull their hands back, but the old man was strong and would not release them and Mitch did not want to start any kind of struggle. They stood in a tight triangle with the old man, who was no longer looking at them, but had focused on the old woman and the adolescents.
“They're your friends!” Morgan shouted, struggling against the clasping arms, his voice breaking with anger and frustration. “I wouldn't bring no enemies here, you know that. She's famous! She's been on Oprah!”
The old man let their hands go, but still the gyre of youths, red-headed, strawberry blond, sandy brunette, all colors—Mitch had never seen so many varieties of SHEVA child—stayed close and fever scented the air.
Mitch doubted he would ever enjoy chocolate again.
Kaye stammered a few words of Georgian, then asked the old couple, in English, “When did you come here? Where are you from?”
“Stella!”Mitch shouted at the buildings adjoining the turnaround.
The old man touched his finger to Mitch's lips. Mitch bent his head like a submissive dog and fell silent.
“Please,”Kaye pleaded. Mitch supported her as her legs gave way.
“Go home,” the old man said.
“Go home,” the children said in many voices, over and under, a rising, singing, all-too-convincing and reasonable murmur in the late afternoon warmth.
Mitch saw something from the corner of his eye. He raised his head and stood on tiptoes to look over the crowd. A face he knew, like Kaye's, like his mother's, moved steadily toward the gyre from the direction of the gray buildings. He tried to keep the young woman in sight through the bobbing heads and singing mouths and gold-flecked eyes. She wore a baggy pair of black pants and clogs and a white sleeveless blouse. Her shoulders were narrow, like Kaye's, and her arms were tanned to a reddish bronze, like a statue in a park. Her cheeks formed a butterfly pattern that Mitch recognized instantly, the complicated expression revealing both surprise and uncertainty, and then unwitting greeting.