“I have to go,” she said.
“Personal? Is that it, Rita? Is this a personal mission of yours? Well, I can’t afford it—”
“You owe me vacation—”
“Not now. I can’t afford your absence in any case.”
“Well.” And there it had been. “That’s too goddam bad.”
She had to go and Kaiser should have understood it, should have understood that her stubbornness rested on the rock of a matter that went back very far. Leo Tunney. When she had read the first dispatch from UPI from Thailand, the name had drawn her. It had to do with Tommy, it had to do with her own past and sense of childhood; it had to do with Tommy’s letters to her. It had to do with her brother Tommy’s death.
But how could she explain that to Kaiser?
Finally, there was nothing more to say. He had turned his back on her in the narrow, dirty office on the ninth floor of the National Press Building. He had been so angry, so unreasonable that she could not speak to him further. There was nothing to do but leave; nothing to do but continue the pursuit of Tunney and of the strands of her own past.
And of Tommy’s letters.
Rita thought of the confrontation now as she jogged steadily across the steel bridge in Clearwater Beach. The bridge soared steeply over the ship’s channel cut into the shallow waters of the Gulf; the channel gave harbor access to the shark hunters and fishing boats and pleasure craft moored there, near the causeway. She felt the rain begin, a slow and misting rain like an afterthought; she did not turn back. The rain felt cool on her skin and it refreshed her. At the far end of the bridge, the tollkeeper in his booth stared at her but she ignored him and ran on, down the main highway of Sand Key, the next island in the little chain.
The road glistened with its mix of oil and rain. There were no cars, no sounds; all the low houses were dark. She tried to think of Tommy again. She had conjured up his image in memory dozens of times since she learned that Leo Tunney had come out of the Cambodia jungle two weeks before. Always, oddly, the image was not of Tommy himself because she could scarcely remember him anymore as he had been, flesh and blood, full of voice, touch, laughter; it was always a black-and-white Tommy in a photograph, kept on the night table next to her bed. That was all right, too, she thought; both Tommys were the same man, both were real.
And then she thought of what she would do.
She made a slow, jogging half-circle in the roadway and started back down the highway that ran the length of this overdeveloped semiresidential island in the Gulf. Ahead of her — she found it hard to believe she had run so far — were the twinkling lights of the bridge and the tollbooth.
Morning was making headway in the east. All around her, the low buildings, the hotels, the cars parked in the driveways, were taking on a dingy gray cast, becoming more distinct in the gloomy light. The red eastern sky was turning gray as well as the clouds from the Gulf moved east and overwhelmed the sun. The rain came down harder.
“How’ya doin’, honey?” the tollkeeper asked as she jogged past the booth; but she did not wave back. She had been on her own for seven years and she was city-wary; she was twenty-eight years old, she had learned all the rules of a woman alone on a public street: Never wave back, never respond, never become angry, never become involved, never go too near, never seem more than a passing object. When she ran in Washington, she thought of herself as invisible, jogging along the winding streets in Bethesda, unseen by all. In a way, by thinking of herself as invisible, she became invisible.
At the bottom of the bridge, back on Clearwater Beach, she saw the car again and saw now that it was waiting for her. There was nothing she could do.
She pushed herself forward, a little faster, and a pain started in her side and filled the right side of her rib cage. She ran too fast but the pain kept up with her.
No headlights. The windshield wipers whumped, whumped slowly across the streaky glass. She could not see the driver clearly.
Rita turned into the main road, lined with high-rise hotels along the beach and low-rise hotels across the street.
The gray car growled into life and slowly began to trail her.
She was aware of it, she could even see it behind her, but she would not turn and look at it. Maybe it was just a kid, getting his kicks following a running woman; maybe it was nothing that she feared.
Her feet slapped steadily along the wet pavement. A mile to her hotel, a cheap place snug in the main shopping district of the Beach, down from the old fishing pier that jutted into the water.
At the last hotel, she veered sharply and started to run along the beach. At least the car could not follow her on the sand.
She half turned as she reached the waterline and saw the car, wipers moving slowly back and forth, sitting sadly at the far end of the parking lot. Florida plates, she thought. Rental car.
Professional paranoia, Kaiser would say.
Goddam Kaiser. He couldn’t understand it. About her. About why she had to talk to Tunney. About Tommy as he had been, a real person, not just a photograph and a memory cut into her like a brand.
Gray, gloomy clouds held down the sky. Already, at dawn, a couple of old men with metal detectors were on the white beach, moving the detectors back and forth across the sand, looking for forgotten change or watches or rings. The gulls on the beach, with their malevolent, calm eyes, watched her pass. Above, on the breeze, they careened around her in slow dives and circles, making no sounds, watching her and the old men and the sand and the sleeping hotels at the edge of the water.
The pain in her side eased as it always did and she ran under the pilings of the fishing pier. Under the steel platform, on the beach, in a green duck sleeping bag, a boy and girl cuddled for warmth against the morning chill. She slowed down as she crossed the sand toward her hotel and was walking, catching her breath, when she reached the door. She stood for a moment on the beach and looked down the narrow street that ran perpendicular to the expanse of sand. The gray car turned into the block and waited at the end of the street, near the empty cabstand. Rita’s eyes narrowed. She repeated to herself the numbers and letters on the orange-and-white Florida plates.
No sounds. The wipers on the gray car continued to work slowly back and forth. She could see the outline of the driver but not his features.
Her chin hardened and she realized she was angry again, the way she had been angry at last in her own apartment in Bethesda, after the government agents had left. Wait, Rita; do nothing.
Slowly, with a winking turn signal, the car backed into the main road and then swung around and started down the street, disappearing behind the bulk of the new Holiday Inn.
Rita stared at the empty street and felt cold; it was probably the rain next to her skin, she thought. The blue college sweatshirt clung heavily to her slender body. She realized slowly that she was soaked.
A man in a gray car, watching her.
Because of Tunney? Or just some moron, a kid, a punk, a lonely man with bad thoughts following a girl running alone down a morning beach?
Kaiser. If only she could tell Kaiser all this, she would not feel so alone. But that was all past now and there was only Leo Tunney to make sense of her movements, to make the quarrel with Kaiser at least have some purpose.
She would get to him somehow. She couldn’t let him remain silent.
He had to tell her the truth; that was all that mattered.
PART TWO
Miracles
12
It was not what anyone expected, certainly not Martin Foley.