He listened to her breathing. It took several seconds before she spoke.
“Where did this happen? And who did she kill?”
“No, no,” Mark said. “It’s going to be an exchange of information, Ms. Deschaine. Not a gift.”
He expected her to balk. Instead, she said, “Are you in Daytona now?”
“Yes.”
“I can make it in four hours. Maybe less, depending on traffic.”
It was a long haul from Boca Raton to Daytona Beach, and her willingness to make the drive rather than continue to haggle with him on the phone told him just how intense her interest in Janell Cole was.
“I’ll be here,” Mark said. “But be prepared to trade intel, Ms. Deschaine. I’m not giving any away.”
19
Jay and Sabrina had talked about having a baby. In the months just before Tim’s death, they’d spoken of it often. Jay was perhaps more enthusiastic about the prospect than Sabrina had been. She saw the reality of it in a different way than he did. Time she needed to devote to her business would vanish with the ring of the phone and the report of an outage, Jay heading out the door and leaving her a single parent. Why rush into that? They had time. She’d said that over and over again, reminding him of their youth, of the expansive horizon ahead. Plenty of time.
That was before they went to the closed-casket funeral for her brother.
Time changed that day. Time changed in a hurry as she stood in the receiving line that was not so far removed from the receiving line of her wedding and accepted condolences instead of congratulations, a large photo of her grinning, adolescent-humored brother at her side. His remains just below.
She’d never seen the way he’d looked at the end. She’d asked, but Jay refused to speak of it. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing you pushed. Not with someone who did the same work, certainly. However he had looked-and it had to be terrible, she knew that-it would have been more than a horror for Jay. It would have been a possible future.
They had stopped speaking of the baby then. A topic once omnipresent in their lives gone in a flash, just like the uncle the child would never know. There was the unspoken but absolutely shared knowledge of how easily it could have been Jay, Sabrina left a young widow and, if they’d had a baby, a single mother.
She wondered, in private moments, if that was the reality she’d considered the whole time, if the funeral she hadn’t allowed herself to envision for fear of making it real was not her brother’s but her husband’s. And so her business and their youth became the most convenient reason, but not the real one. Single-parent nights were one thing, and she’d had no trouble voicing that concern. Single-parent life, though? To tell him of that would have been so much harder. You’ll make a mistake someday. Just like Tim. It will happen, and to pretend otherwise is selfish, Jay.
But he’d come down from the lines, had taken that foreman’s job in Red Lodge. Why hadn’t they spoken of the child again then?
Time again, that was why. The endless supply of time. They had time to get settled in Red Lodge, they had time to put distance between themselves and the tragedy, time for everything.
Then a man with a pistol entered their home.
Time changed again.
She wondered, if she ever saw Jay again, what would be said about bringing a child into this world. A world that had sent her brother to an early grave and brought Garland Webb into their new home.
You’re imagining he’s still alive. What if you’re all that’s left? What if this is the end?
Her brother had been unmarried and childless. Plenty of time for him too. He’d been dead for six months. If Sabrina never left here, that was the end of it. Their parents had been only children, and they’d been dead before they reached forty. Their son had already joined them. Their daughter sat in shackles in the mountains.
She pulled feathers from the dead chickens and piled them beside her, not looking at the birds as she worked. Her fingertips were sore and raw. She suspected Eli hoped for more disgust from her, hoped to find her cowering in revulsion, maybe even vomiting from the smell of the charred flesh, from the fading warmth of the bodies.
Should have picked a dog, asshole, she thought as she jerked another feather free. If you knew me even a little bit, you’d have done that to a dog. Then you might have gotten the reaction you wanted. But a chicken? Please.
Eli wouldn’t have a dog, though. Not up here where his particular brand of obedience was required. You had to earn obedience from a dog. From the chickens and Garland Webb and apparently from Violet, it came easier.
But there was more to Violet than he knew. Sabrina was sure of that. Violet’s obedience with him, which was more disgusting to Sabrina than anything else she’d seen in this place, also seemed questionable. Ironically, this revelation had come in the moment she hit Sabrina in the face with the flashlight. In that instant, she’d been nothing like the demurring follower she appeared to be in Eli’s presence, and she was not to be taken lightly. He took her lightly-dismissed her entirely, even-and Sabrina wondered about that. What was the great hold he had on her? How had it been achieved?
Violet was older than he was by a decade at least, maybe much more. She had a past without him, and Sabrina wondered what was in it. Who was in it. There were some things about the situation that made a perverse level of sense. Garland Webb and Eli, for example, were clearly predators, the type of people you knew were out there in the world but just never expected to cross paths with.
Violet was a different matter entirely.
There was a metallic clink as a key found the lock on the front door and then it opened and filled the room with daylight and Violet stood there with her strange smile, cheerful as a New England B and B hostess.
“I’ve got something to make you more comfortable,” she said.
It was a sleeping pad, a Therm-a-Rest like people took on backpacking trips. It was surprisingly comfortable, and Sabrina adjusted herself onto it without breaking her pace on plucking duty, watching Violet instead of the birds.
“Why don’t you see the truth of this?” Sabrina said.
The older woman blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“I’ve been kidnapped. I am chained to a wall. You know this is evil. I can tell that. I can tell it because you are not evil.”
“Please, dear. Just be patient. If you’ll just listen to Eli, you’ll learn that-”
“Eli is insane,” Sabrina said. “I already know it. Why don’t you?”
“Dear…” Violet sighed and shook her head in the manner of someone dealing with an impossible rube. “It’s so much larger than what you understand.”
“It’s evil,” Sabrina repeated. “And you’re not.”
Violet dismissed her with a wave of her hand and turned to go. Sabrina didn’t want that; she wanted to engage her, and so she asked a bizarre question, born of her own muddled thoughts.
“Do you have children?”
Violet stopped short. She didn’t turn. “Why do you ask that?”
“I don’t have any,” Sabrina said, plucking another feather. Her right index finger was bleeding now. “I was never sure I wanted any. Some days, yes. Others…my God, things can go badly for children in this world. I was an orphan. Did you know that?”
“I did not.” She still had not turned. But she hadn’t left either.
“Sure was. So I know exactly how bad it can go. But my husband and I talked about it. If things had gone differently, I might have had a baby by now. Would you still be so comfortable with all this if that were true? If you knew a child had been left behind? Is there a point where you’d look at this and admit that it was evil? What if the chicken had been a child, Violet? What if that had been a baby reaching for that fence? Would you still admire Eli?”