He tried to get in touch with various soft leads. Trevor Donovan had only briefly known Jeff Halcomb when living in San Francisco. He had since been the leader of a peaceful protest group called California Change. As it turned out, California Change had disbanded in the mid-eighties and its members had scattered along the western coast. There was no contact information for Trevor, no trail to follow.
Susanna Clausen-King, a wayward traveler who had been quoted in an article about Halcomb after his arrest, was even more of a ghost. As far as the Internet was concerned, she never existed, and even if she had, Lucas doubted she’d have been able to give him anything useful. It seemed that back in Jeff’s San Francisco days, he had still had a head on his shoulders. Or maybe that had been his game plan all along—play it cool, be charming. Reel in the kids and get heavy after they were good and committed.
What did surprise Lucas was the ringing of his phone. He nearly jumped out of his skin before snatching his cell off his desk and accepting the call. It was Mark.
“Um, hi?” Mark sounded unsure. “Are you alive out there? What the hell, man?”
Lucas pinched his eyebrows together, the bridge of his nose forming a deep-grooved V. “What?” He shook his head, as though Mark could see his confusion.
“What?” Mark asked. “What do you mean what?”
Lucas was baffled. He leaned back in his seat and stared at the door of his study, perplexed. “Let’s start over,” he said. “Hello, Mark. How’ve you been?”
Mark didn’t respond for a long while. Lucas could hear him breathing on the other end of the line, as though drowning in his own dose of mystification. Finally, he spoke. “Well, fuck. Hi, Lou! I’ve been great, except for the fact that you haven’t been answering your phone or returning my calls for like over a week.”
“What?” Lucas leaned forward, pulled his phone away from his ear to look at the screen. Had he missed calls? He hadn’t heard his phone ring in days, but it was possible. Service was flaky out here. Half the time he was running on a single measly bar, and his phone wasn’t the best. But over a week? “Wait, what are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about why the hell haven’t you called? I’ve left you like a dozen voice mails. This was my last try before getting in the car and driving my ass out there to make sure you haven’t . . .” He stalled. “Jesus, what’s going on? Is everything all right?”
But Lucas was hardly listening. He glanced at his phone again. Over a week? That was impossible. He’d lost track of time before, but this was beyond just forgetting the day of the week. Something about the date glowing on his cell’s LCD tripped a fuzzy thought inside his head. It was a familiar feeling, like walking into a room only to realize he didn’t know why he was there. That strange, disorienting sensation promised that he was forgetting something he swore he’d never let slip his mind. A birthday? An anniversary? Christ, had he promised to take Jeanie somewhere again?
“Lou?”
Logic told him he should have been as worried as Mark was. If he really had lost all that time, he needed to get himself to a doctor. Because how could it have been possible? Maybe something in his head had snapped. And yet, that date kept nagging at him. So I lost a week, so what? I’ve been busy. Working. That’s what I came up here for.
“Lucas.” Mark was growing impatient, but it was Lucas who was pushed over the edge by Mark’s agitation.
“Hey, man, why don’t you mind your own business?”
A long, drawn-out pause, then: “Excuse me?”
“You heard me,” Lucas said, gripping the phone tighter to his ear. “Why don’t you let me do what I came here to do?”
“Lou . . .”
“You know that every time you call me, you’re screwing up my rhythm?” he asked. “You know that every goddamn time you make this phone ring, I’m pulled out of my groove?”
Nothing.
“So, thanks for calling, Mark. Really, thanks. But maybe next time realize that if I’m not returning your voice mails or calling you back it’s because I’ve got more pressing shit to do than sit around and explain myself to you. Maybe that would be a good idea.”
Lucas ended the call before he could register what he’d just done. He’d never spoken to Mark that way in his life, never. There was a distant, nagging voice at the back of his mind that assured him that what had just happened wasn’t right, that there was something very off about the conversation that had just taken place. And perhaps he would have dwelled on that fact for longer than he did had it not been for that glowing, seemingly leering date on his phone.
What the hell am I forgetting?
He had never been good with keeping track of time. Even as a college student, the hardest question on the test was the month, day, and year. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to remember the significance of a day that was nearly over. Unless it could wait until tomorrow.
That was when it hit him.
He fumbled through the small mountain of paperwork that had accumulated on his desk, searching for a photocopy of Halcomb’s letter he knew was hidden there. He eventually found it, a date circled in red Sharpie. He had two days.
It was Jeff’s deadline.
Forty-eight hours left. That was it.
Holy shit.
His incessant calls to the prison for his interview had blurred together.
Jesus, what’s going on? Is everything all right?
Endless hours sitting in front of the computer had stealthily peeled the calendar pages away.
. . . for like over a week.
He couldn’t look away from the photocopy in his hand. He stared at the numbers circled in red, checked it against his phone, double-checked it against the date on the bottom right-hand corner of his laptop screen. But the date refused to change. Mark was right. It had been long, too damn long.
That tiny, fading voice of logic managed to whisper: How can you simply lose over a week of your life, Lou?
But the louder, more incessant voice of obsession drowned it out. Because somehow, inexplicably, Lucas only had a couple of days left to see the man who had compelled him to move to Pier Pointe; otherwise, Jeff would no longer be willing to talk, if he was ever willing at all.
Halcomb had shut him out. Betrayed him. Threatened Lucas’s project by refusing to see him. He had backed out on a deal that Lucas upheld without so much as a bat of an eye. The knowledge that he had somehow run out of time made him feel sick. But it was more than losing time—it was an assurance that, despite all his efforts, his career might now be over. His marriage sure as hell seemed to be. He was going to lose his kid, the girl that meant everything to him, and yet he still managed to see her for no more than what seemed like a few minutes a day. When was the last time I saw her, anyway? He had been too busy scrambling for a solution. This was Jeff Halcomb’s fault. He had put Lucas out.
His fingertips tingled. His entire body buzzed with nauseous anxiety. Mad butterflies smashed into his organs, desperate to beat their way through muscle and skin.
His attention wavered to one of Echo’s loaned photographs. In it, Jeffrey Halcomb was alone. He sat cross-legged on what appeared to be a bed of pine needles. There were trees at Jeff’s back. He was cupping something in his hands, too out of focus to make out; possibly a baby bird or squirrel. But it made no difference; his smile was too disarming to focus on the contents of his palms. Jeffrey Halcomb had, in his heyday, been what any woman would have considered beautiful. Dark waves of hair stopped just beyond his shoulders. His face was long and angular, strikingly attractive—a face that drew in runaways, eyes that promised a better future filled with acceptance and understanding. But goddamn, it was that smile that won them over. Something about it radiated peace and love and all the stuff an angry kid leaving their home life behind would want. Jeffrey Halcomb looked positively radiant, a hippie transplant stuck in the early eighties.