"Yes."
"You hear me, Tom?" Masterson said, and the speakerphone clicked off.
"TOM!" someone yelled, and he picked up his briefcase and ran.
44
Marta sat in the truck with her flashlight, the nautical map, and a skinny ruler she'd found in one of Christopher's tool chests. The ruler was double-edged and easy to read, even if it reeked of whatever comes off the bottom of horses' hooves. She checked the time. 4:15 in the morning. Oh no. She was running out of night. Would Christopher change the jury's vote? Could he turn the tide?
Marta squinted at the calculations she'd made in the map's margin. The numbers swam before her eyes. Her logic had gone fuzzy a half hour ago. She'd tried to calculate the yards from the coastline to the pinhole, then stopped when she realized how witless that was. She had no idea where the coastline was, with the tides and the storm and the spin of the earth's rotation and the moon in the seventh house. Her brain had melted to yogurt. Her head thundered from her wounds and the sheer effort of staying awake.
Hold on. There was another way. She could go back to Steere's home office and find the deed, which would describe the plot of land exactly. Using it, she'd be able to calculate the yards from the house to the pinhole. That could work. It had to. She set the stuff aside, twisted on the ignition, and turned the truck around toward Steere's house.
* * *
SSSHUNK! The shovel hit the first icy chunk of snow and Marta started digging. The storm had lessened but was still blowing off the sea. The surf crashed behind her. She could barely see the shovel in the light from the flashlight, stuck in the snow like a floor lamp. Digging for treasure may have been crazy, but Marta preferred to think of it as a long shot. She sensed something was under there and had to believe that her calculations, made from a reconciling of deed, blueprint, and nautical map, weren't that far off. So she'd dragged Christopher's horse manure shovel out to the middle of the beach, over dune and erosion fencing, and had begun to dig. There was no more time for geometry or numbers. There was no time for anything but action.
Marta pressed the shovel into the snow and drove it deeper with the bottom of her boot. Every muscle in her torso ached, but she had grown accustomed to the pain. She lifted the shovel, but she'd piled on too much snow in her haste and the snow slid off. Marta had shoveled snow in her childhood, but never in the dark before, or in a blizzard. By the ocean. With a man she'd killed down the beach.
Marta jabbed at the top layer of snow for a lighter load and threw it to the side successfully. The wind blew it off the nascent pile and carried it away from her hole. She went in for another load. The snow grew wetter the deeper she dug and felt heavier on the shovel. No matter, she told herself. She'd dug out three shovels of snow. Only 398,280 more to go.
SSHUNK! Marta tried not think about it. Bogosian, up the beach. Darning, his face frozen in death. Steere, and how she'd been fooled, or her other cases and clients. How she'd come to be on a beach in the middle of nowhere, attempting the impossible. She tried to convince herself she wasn't dead tired, desperate, or a fool. At least she had done one thing right in this case; she made sure those girls were safe. Carrier and DiNunzio were probably home asleep in their beds.
Marta dug deeper, but was still into snow. When would she hit sand? A foot more, two? Then how far down would the treasure be? Two feet, three? She took another scoop. Her back was as sore as her ribs. She bent from the knee and took another heap of snow. Then another ten and another ten after that.
SHUNK! Sharp pains wracked her lower back and her arms felt like they were about to fall from their sockets. She was drenched with sweat under her coat. Her neck felt clammy where snow had melted under her collar. Wetness sluiced down her face and cheeks. Still she kept digging. Marta would dig all night if she had to. She might be wrong and she might be crazy, but she would not be denied.
* * *
Marta stared at the empty hole in the purplish light of dawn. Her body sagged and her faint shadow drooped on the snow. Her hair was drenched and her face was soaked. Salt air stung her eyes, and she told herself that was why tears kept welling up in them. It was almost dawn, probably about six o'clock. Marta had run out of time. Out of luck. It had all come down, it was all coming apart.
The hole was empty. A good four feet of dark, soggy sand, with water in the bottom, like a pool for a child's sand castle. Marta had dug it out, then clawed it out. When her gloved hands slowed her, she stripped them off and used her bare hands until they were scraped raw and insensate. Nothing. There was nothing there. No treasure, no papers, no clue. No treasure chest full of incriminating evidence. It was all over. There was only emptiness.
The sky was bright now that the storm had passed. Soon the sun would climb the clouds and the world would wake up. Coffee machines would gurgle and toasters would ring. Fax machines would awaken convulsively. Computer screens would crackle to life, obeying encrypted instructions. Telephone lines were probably being repaired this very minute and roads plowed clean. The morning was a beginning to everybody else, but to Marta it seemed like the end.
The night had been dark and under its cover she had been free to move, to run. To search and dig. But dawn would bring police and questions. They would find Bogosian's body. They would want her to account for the security guards at the office. They would want answers. It was all over. Steere had won. Marta had lost. There would be no justice.
She let the shovel fall to the snow. The sky was dim, the atmosphere thin. A frigid wind whipped off the sea, a blast so cold and dry Marta imagined it could kill germs. Disinfect the world, eradicating virus, disease, pestilence. Hate, grime, blood. Murder. The surf crashed behind her like someone tapping her on the shoulder. Marta answered, turning.
The ocean glimmered, barely visible. The waves that had seemed black as india ink last night were jade green, and the sea foam was tinted ivory. Whitecaps broke on the shore, one after the other, and sea bubbles raced in all directions and vanished. In the distance Marta could see the lighthouse and a rocky jetty near Steere's beach. The sight was desolate and beautiful, and she felt like it had been scrubbed as clean and raw as she was. As if God had taken a stiff wire brush to the world.
Marta considered walking into the waves just then. Leaving the fucking shovel on the ground and strolling right in, as if she were walking into a courtroom. Taking over. Striding into the Atlantic like she owned it. Marta could do that. The waves would welcome her and take her in and suck her up, her soggy coat and her aching back and her numb fingers. She even knew the depths of the water by the shore, if indeed that was what those precisely etched numbers on the nautical map had meant.
Marta pictured herself walking in to three feet and starting to float at six feet and by fourteen feet she could tread water, just for show. By sixteen feet she'd begin to dip below the frigid waves and they'd knock her around a little, but by eighteen feet she'd have them licked like she licked everything else. After all, she was undefeated.
Marta turned for a last look at Steere's house, in the light of a new day. It was majestic and serene. She owned no house like that anywhere. Not New York, Boston, L.A., or Cape Cod. She was never home anyway. She was never anywhere. She was always in motion. Marta knew where the VIP waiting room was in any USAir hub. She could work the cruise control on a rental Taurus without asking. She kept the fax numbers of every Four Seasons Hotel in her bulky Filofax.
Marta's wet gaze lingered on Steere's house. What a thing a house was! To think that she could walk into the Atlantic without ever having owned a real, honest-to-God home! And Steere's was a nice one, worth every zero. She imagined herself as its buyer, waltzing through for the first time. The house was set so beautifully, nestled alone among the dunes. Location, location, location.