Purkiss stopped and stood with his hands braced on the railing, and waited.
Thirteen
Outside Charlottesville, Virginia
Monday 20 May, 9.25 pm
Nina pressed her head against the cold, grimy glass of the window. The streetlights were become fewer and further between now that the Greyhound was leaving the confines of the city and its suburbs. High above, a pale rind of moon emerged intermittently between thin clouds.
She clutched her violin to her, something she did for comfort without risking looking like a child. Nobody on the bus could be trusted, of course; but although she’d attracted a few glances on embarking, none of the other passengers seemed to be looking at her now. She’d had to wait at the station for the booking office to open at eight thirty, and every time somebody had come in she’d recoiled, the shock of fear jolting her.
She was headed for Washington.
Nina didn’t know quite what it was that her father did, hadn’t kept in touch even as far as Googling his name to find out about him; but she knew he did something in the Federal government, that he was a man of some importance and influence, and that he therefore probably worked and lived in the nation’s capital. She’d set about finding his exact location once she was there and had access to an internet café. If she’d had a cell phone, she’d have been able to start the search already and save time. But then they’d have caught her already.
She hadn’t seen her father since she was eleven. Fifteen years. His face was still clear in her mind, and she doubted he’d have changed enough to be unrecognisable. Whether he’d recognise her, a child grown into a woman, was another matter.
Nina didn’t want to sleep, but she let her eyes close and plunged into memory.
*
‘Nina, baby, where are you?’
Her mother’s voice is distant as an echo, even though it comes from upstairs. Far louder, and clearer, is the scream when it comes.
She pads to the front door and opens it. It locks once closed and can’t be opened from outside without a key, but it’s a risk she’ll take. Her mother will be there to let her back in.
The scream comes again as she lets the door swing shut, as loud and as sudden as if it’s next to her ear. She flinches, putting up her hand. Can’t her mother hear it?
The driveway is washed in moonlight ahead of her. Her dad’s car squats off to one side. Nina touches the hood: it’s warm. He hasn’t been home long.
Except he isn’t home.
At the end of the driveway she finds the electronic gate shut. She clambers over easily and drops into the dirt on the other side, scuffing her knees. It doesn’t hurt; she’s done it before.
Across the cracked tarmac of the road, beyond its own gate, the Box sits blackly. There’s a glow from it, as though a light somewhere inside is seeping through the walls.
The scream breaks loose again.
A rumble starts up from over to her right. Nina swings, terror clawing at her. A car’s coming down the road, one of the old Jeeps that’s always sitting outside the Box. The headlights are burning through the night.
Nina leaps towards the boulders at the side of the road and crouches behind them.
The Jeep slows at the gate and sits, growling, as the railed metal inches its way open. When there’s just enough room the Jeep squeezes through and stops next to the Box.
The moon’s behind the Box, not behind her, so Nina knows her head won’t be seen. She peers over the top of the boulder.
Far behind her, her mother’s voice calls her again.
Two men are jumping down from the Jeep, men in those khaki uniforms she’s always seeing around. She’s seen the men before but doesn’t know their names. One of them unhooks the door at the back of the jeep while the other one stands back, a long gun cradled in his arms.
Two other men have come out of the Box and help the first two drag a man form the back of the Jeep. He loses his balance and has to be held under his arms. Nina sees that his hands are tied behind his back. He’s making funny wet hissing noises but doesn’t talk. There’s something tied across his mouth, too.
The men in uniforms drag him across to the door of the Box. When they’re almost there he suddenly twists sideways and tries to run away. One of the men jabs the end of the gun into his back and he falls. They haul him up again and through the door.
Another scream, this one going on for ten seconds at least. Not from the new man, but from somebody else inside the Box.
Nina crawls into herself, wrapping her arms around her knees. The moon’s suddenly terribly cold, like the sun in reverse.
‘Nina?’
Nina shrieks, scrambling around the boulder and losing her footing, sprawling in the dust. Then her mother is pulling her close, her warmth and smell swallowing her, whispering and sobbing into her hair.
‘Nina, oh, baby, my God, what have you seen, what are you doing here, oh Jesus, baby…’
*
Nina jerked upright, blinked around. The bus had stopped at a light, that was all. She glanced at her watch. Ten p.m.; they’d been travelling for just under an hour. She hadn’t dozed off after all.
Her head slumped back against the seat. That wasn’t the memory she’d been looking for; but it kept returning, unbidden, and she didn’t know why. She’d see worse, far worse. But that was the first time she’d seen her mother so scared for her. Terror and guilt: it was a combination that flavoured many of her recollections of her mother.
Once more she closed her eyes, but the memory she wanted, normally so richly infused with sensory associations, didn’t come. Instead, her father’s face kept appearing, as she’d seen it the day he’d told her of her mother’s death: square, the stubble blue on his chin even though it was noon and he’d shaved that morning, his mouth soft and with the beginnings of a smile as it always was, only his eyes telling her something wasn’t right. His face had splintered, the shards scattering, as she’d absorbed his words, even though she knew now that an eleven-year-old couldn’t really grasp what death meant.
‘The storm,’ he said. ‘It took Mama away.’
At first she thought he meant like in the Wizard of Oz, that her mother was in some faraway land doing battle with witches and flying monkeys. But as he spoke, his hands barely touching her shoulders, his arms straight out in front of him as he crouched before her, she began to understand. The storm had swept across the island, across the whole country — across a good part of the Western hemisphere, she now knew — and had taken her mother with it. Their home was gone. The Box was gone — and what of the people inside it, the ones who screamed?
In the past week there’d been frantic activity on the island, boxes being carted away by the Jeepload and extensive makeshift construction work as wood and steel was hammered down as reinforcement. Nina had watched and listened, bewildered, the feeling growing in her that none of the adults actually believed what they were doing was going to work. Sure enough, three days later her father had bundled her out of bed in the middle of the night and she’d found herself on a dream journey that involved a car and a roaring, shaking plane, before she’d woken shivering and terrified in her grandmother’s bed.
Her father came to her after two days, with the news that their home was lost, and so was her mother.
*
And now, almost a decade and a half later, she was on a night bus from Charlottesville, VA to Washington D.C., fleeing men in suits who were at the same time authority figures and the murderers of her friends, in search of the only person who could help her. Her father, whose whereabouts she didn’t, if she was honest, have a clue about; who had been out of her life for more than half of it; and whom she had learned to hate.
Fourteen
Charlottesville, Virginia