On the down side, she would be in the open as she approached. There wasn’t much tree coverage here. She could see groves of trees in the distance, but in the immediate area the trees had been cleared. Evidently this had been working farmland at one point. She noticed barbed wire fencing along both sides of the driveway. Perhaps livestock had been run here as well.
She smiled to herself. Here I am, a kid from suburban Chicago, paying attention to things like barbed wire fences way out in the country. Just another way in which she’d come millions of miles away from the person she used to be.
She kept the SIG in her right hand, pointed at the ground, watching her path carefully, not wanting to step in a hole and twist her ankle. Something buzzed near her face. She waved away a dragonfly.
The trail began to incline slightly upward. Faith’s pulse quickened. She moved a little faster, almost at a jog, as if an unseen hand were tugging on her shirt, urging her forward.
A few trees were grouped to her right now, just outside the fence. She moved toward them, hugging them closely. The trail flattened out again and she saw the house.
It was completely ordinary, neither a hovel nor a mansion. She’d seen many houses just like it as she’d driven through rural Oklahoma over the last few years.
She emerged from the trees. The first thing that caught her attention was a rusting real estate sign staked to the ground in front of the house, just outside the fence that surrounded its small front yard. That it had a fence around it was unusual. Most farm and ranch homes in this part of the country didn’t have front yards per se. Perhaps a family with very young children had lived here at some point, and put in the fence to keep the little ones from wandering away.
Faith thought of a two-year-old toddler, going with his mother to the bank. Anger flared in her again.
She approached from the north side. Everything was quiet. There was no movement. No cars sat in the clearing before the fence. While the white house wasn’t in obvious disrepair, it didn’t look inhabited, either.
She moved closer, eyes darting everywhere, up, down, all sides, taking in everything. She passed in front of the gate. There were tire tracks in the red dirt, at a logical place where a car would have parked. Next to them was a second set of tracks.
Someone had been here, and recently. It had rained within the last couple of days, which meant the tracks were fairly new or the rain would have washed them away.
The house was listed for sale. It wasn’t inconceivable that the realtor had shown it in the last day or two. That would explain the two sets of tires. A mundane, ordinary explanation. No Coalition. No potential terrorists.
Faith opened the gate-it squeaked-and started toward the house. There was no sidewalk, only a trail of bricks flush with the ground. She took slow, deliberate steps, concentrating on both her own breathing and her surroundings, achieving that eerie sense of disconnectedness she often felt when her senses were on high alert.
A strong wind gust came up from the south, to her left. Above her, something crashed.
Faith whirled, placing her SIG in the two-handed firing stance.
She slowly let out a breath. The unlatched screen door had been standing open, and it had slammed in the breeze. She carefully put the SIG into the pocket of her windbreaker and started up the steps.
The second one creaked. She felt a loose board shift under her foot. A bird called from somewhere near. A blue jay or a cardinal, she thought, though she could never keep the two straight. This part of the country was filled with them.
Faith blinked. An empty Michelob can sat on the porch railing, the lettering on the can faded as if it had been in the sun for a long time. A Tostitos bag with a few chips trailing out of it blew across the porch in front of her like some kind of latter-day tumbleweed. An open package of Trojan condoms sat on the lip of one of the front windows.
The window was dusty. She drew a line in the dust with her index finger, then rubbed a circle, feeling the grit under her palm. She peered through the circle.
The front room was totally empty.
There was no furniture whatsoever. The wood floor looked as dusty as the window.
“I’ll be damned,” she whispered, unaware she’d spoken aloud.
According to Daryn and Sean, thirteen people had been living in this house scarcely more than a week ago. Could the Coalition have cleared out any sign of them in that amount of time, leaving no trace?
Of course, but to clear out furniture, there would have to be a lot of coming and going, trucks filled with the items being moved. Would a group like Daryn had described want the townspeople of Mulhall to see them moving things around? She doubted it. News traveled fast in small towns, and the people of Mulhall would have had to notice such an operation.
The other answer was that Daryn and Sean were both lying.
Faith’s throat tightened. She blinked as another burst of wind stirred up more of the dust on the porch.
She pulled on the screen door that had slammed a few minutes earlier. The frame door behind it was ajar. She took the SIG out of her pocket again, then pushed on the door and stepped over the threshold, her eyes immediately seeking out the trouble spots, the corners.
Nothing.
She sniffed the interior of the front room. It just smelled musty, with an underlying odor of cigarette smoke. That meant nothing-she knew smoke could linger in a room for months or even years.
She made a quick circuit of the downstairs. No appliances in the kitchen, empty cabinets and drawers. The wallpaper, which looked like it had come straight from the 1970s, was peeling. She stepped onto the back deck. Nothing.
Inside again, she decided to check the upstairs just for the sake of thoroughness. There was a single bathroom, the mirrored door to the medicine cabinet standing open. A nickel and a dime sat on the dirty sink.
She poked through bedrooms. There were several small ones and an empty linen closet. One of the windows in the front bedroom was broken. A good-size rock sat on the floor underneath the the window, surrounded by glass.
Faith shook her head. It was all too surreal. She didn’t understand the power this woman Daryn had over her brother, but somehow she convinced him to lie to Faith about all of this.
Sean wasn’t stupid. Troubled, maybe, but not stupid. He should have known Faith would investigate, that she wouldn’t just open her arms give Daryn McDermott a new life in Department Thirty because he asked her to. Two criteria had to be met to gain serious consideration for protection: that the person had committed a crime serious enough to warrant either prosecution and or retribution from others involved in the crime; and that the person possessed information deemed to be of vital national interest.
Daryn McDermott’s crime seemed to be conspiracy to commit an act of terror. But her “information”-the list of banks the Coalition was allegedly going to strike-hadn’t panned out. Daryn certainly seemed frightened of Franklin Sanborn, but other than Faith’s vague sense of knowing the name, there was no evidence that there was a Franklin Sanborn.
She’d come to the end of the hall, to the last little bedroom. Sean had said he and Daryn and the girl Britt had slept together in this room. There was a large gash in the wood of the door. The doorknob was missing.
Faith ducked her head inside. There was a large pile of blankets in the corner farthest from the window.
“Hmm,” she said, and took a couple of steps into the room.
With the toe of her sneaker, she pulled off the top blanket, SIG at the ready. More blankets, all ripped, the lining coming out of them. One was a quilt done in a beautiful Dutch-doll pattern that looked like someone’s grandmother had made it by hand. But it was filthy and the edges were torn. Three layers down, she found a few bottles of water, some packages of cheese and crackers, some stiff French fries in a yellow Wendy’s carton. A threadbare paperback copy of the Gospel of John, with a stain of something that smelled like excrement, was at the bottom.