Dark Dreamer (28 page)

“I’m sorry about your work.”

“Hey, me, too. And I’m sorry I talked Phoebe into spending that week in Quantico.”

“She saved a woman’s life.”

“And just think how many other victims she could help if you got her away from those morons.”

“The director feels she may be able to save thousands of lives if she could see what the terrorists are hatching. I think it’s probably worth a try, don’t you?”

“Remind me.” Frustration made Cara’s voice rise. “How much are we borrowing from the Chinese so we can run a war that puts billions of dollars straight into the pockets of companies like Halliburton while we let bin Laden get away? This is such bullshit.”

“All I can tell you is that everyone working in the field wants bin Laden and his network brought to justice.”

Some of Cara’s fury dissipated. “I believe that. And I know a lot of good people in your line of work have been shafted for telling truths no one wants to hear. Tell me honestly, am I just the suspicious type, or does it seem like maybe our leaders prefer to keep bin Laden at large because it suits their political ends?”

“I can’t speak to that.” Vernell paused for a few beats. “I’m asking you to trust me, Cara. I won’t hang you or your sister out to dry. Okay?”

“Okay. That’s good enough for me.” Cara was suddenly overcome with weariness. “Thanks for doing this.”

“No problem. Get some sleep.”

“You, too.”

Cara had spent rest of the evening vacillating over whether to call Phoebe. She could go to a pay phone, she thought. But they could trace any inward call to Phoebe’s cell. So maybe she would phone Rowe instead and ask her to pass on a message. Whatever she did, she would have to use landlines. They couldn’t trace those calls without a wiretap. Maybe she could buy prepaid cell phones and throw them in the trash after making a call, the way terrorists did.

In the end she hadn’t called anyone. Instead, she’d found a liquor store and stocked up on Grey Goose, then sat in a Starbucks feeling sorry for herself. When she returned to the hotel a kid licking an ice cream cone had run right into her, smearing her Gaultier leather jacket with frozen yogurt. No apology of course.

She said
Fuck,
and his parents asked her to mind her language in front of little Johnny. She then congratulated them on doing such a fine job of teaching their kid to be an asshole, because there weren’t enough in the world. The husband said he didn’t like her attitude. Cara shut her mouth at that point, belatedly remembering she was supposed to be inconspicuous.

All in all, it was a red-letter day.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“I brought this upon her.” Juliet knelt beside a fair-haired girl lying in the snow. “How can I ever forgive myself?”

Phoebe stared down at the inert body. The girl’s hands were bound behind her back, and her feet were tied together.

Juliet bent low and asked, “Becky, can you hear me?”

A small-boned face turned toward them. “My mother calls me, but I cannot answer.”

Juliet looked up at Phoebe. “Will you help us?”

Phoebe gazed around. They were not far from the cottage. She saw a man’s silhouette in the parlor window. “Who is that?” she asked Juliet.

“My father. This is his work.” She indicated Becky’s bound hands. “He thought she stole my pearl.”

“What can I do?” Phoebe asked, stricken.

“He wronged us,” Juliet said.

“I can’t change that.”

“The truth must be told and the great wrong undone.”

“It is too late for your father to face justice,” Phoebe said gently. “The worms had the last word.”

“And we lie lost to our own.” Juliet stood, and without a backward glance, she drifted toward the cottage.

“Wait. What do you mean?” Phoebe struggled after her. “Juliet. Wait!”

A strange paralysis claimed her. The air felt like porridge. She could not swim through it. When she looked back, all she could see was an infinite tundra of white, a never-land unblemished by form or memory. Silence seduced her, descending like a curtain between self and emotion. Unmoored from her fears and sorrows and joys, she surrendered to the void, aware only of the muted metronome of her heartbeat and the certainty that she was utterly alone.

Phoebe had no idea how much time passed before a discordant sound punctured the tranquility of her sleep and she was once more present in her skin. She opened her eyes to find a squat man with an Einstein hairdo and a yellow bow tie standing at the end of her bed.

“Good morning, Phoebe,” he said. “I trust you dreamt well.”

Phoebe had never imagined she would be so thrilled to hear that thick Russian accent. “Dr. K! How wonderful. I’m so happy.”

“This joyful reception I did not anticipate,” he replied dryly.

“What are you doing here?”

“Let us say they made me an offer I could not refuse.” He placed a box of chocolates on her pink bedspread. “And in this regard, I must report an interesting discovery. My own reactions were that of the prisoner who fears his cell but also longs for it. I was relieved. Grateful. This compels me to assume that all it will take to make my experience truly comforting is starvation and the torture of my genitals.”

Phoebe gave a small shudder. If Dr. K was making a joke, it wasn’t very funny.

He responded to her shock with an apologetic smile. “Forgive an old man’s levity, dear Ms. Golden. I spent nine years in Perm-36. It was a gulag for dissidents. Writers, human rights activists, and so forth.”

“Oh, my God. Why did they do that to you?”

“The official crime was anti-Soviet activities. You understand that could mean anything the Party did not approve of. They incarcerated a friend of mine for translating George Orwell’s books.”

“Unbelievable.”

“My wife was convicted also. She did not survive.”

“I’m so very sorry.” Phoebe was appalled that anything her own government did could remind this man even remotely of the totalitarian hell he had left behind. A wave of shame swept through her.

The doctor moved close and took her pulse, sliding a sliver of paper into her palm. Discreetly she transferred it beneath the covers, tucking it into the pocket of her nightshirt. Dr. K listened to her chest and tapped her back a few times, making a show of examining her.

After he lowered his stethoscope, Phoebe said, “Please excuse me for a moment, Doctor,” and went into the bathroom, hoping the CIA had the decency not to have cameras there as well.

She unfurled the note and read:
We must
convince them you are seeing something even if you are not.
Phoebe tore the message into pieces and flushed these down the toilet. Vernell had told her more or less the same thing, insisting that she appear to cooperate no matter how ridiculous the tests. No one wanted the CIA to think she couldn’t help. Why?

Puzzled, Phoebe returned to the bedroom. She had expected to be sent home in disgrace the minute they discovered she couldn’t spy on terrorists through telepathy. Apparently not.

“Are we going to be working together today, Doctor?” she asked.

He nodded. “With your permission, I would like to use hypnosis. We had pleasing outcomes on the last occasion.”

“Good idea.” Phoebe forced a smile. “I’ve tried to explain that I have no control over my dreams, but I don’t think they understand.”

“Do not agitate yourself. We will achieve the desired results using other methods.”

“I hope so,” Phoebe said with all the sincerity she could muster. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could help catch a terrorist?”

“There is no higher calling than one’s duty to the mother country,” the psychiatrist returned gravely.

*

“Calm down, baby.” Rowe switched the phone to her other ear as she stirred scrambled eggs. “I’m sorry I wasn’t at home.”

“Is everything all right? Is Molly okay?”

“She’s a pistol and all’s well on the home front. When are you coming back?”

“Don’t even ask.” Phoebe sounded strained. “Have you spoken with Cara?”

“Not since she went to L.A.”

Silence. Then, “Please try calling her. She hasn’t been picking up.”

“You sound worried.”

“I can’t really talk right now. I was just thinking about…everything.”

“I miss you.”

A small sound, almost a whimper. “Me, too.”

Rowe felt uneasy. Something wasn’t right. “Where are you?”

“Langley,” Phoebe said in an undertone.

“The CIA headquarters?” Rowe quit stirring the eggs and took them off the heat.

“Uh-huh.”

“Homeland Security stuff?”

“Yes.”

Understanding now why her lover couldn’t talk, Rowe asked, “Are you in any trouble?”

“No. I’m working on something important. That’s all.”

“Well, don’t worry about things here. I’m going to be staying at your place for a few days and I’ll—”

“Rowe, I have something to tell you,” Phoebe cut in. Speaking in a rapid undertone, she said, “The woman who died in the snow was Becky.”

“No. It was Juliet,” Rowe said, assuming Phoebe had the two women muddled.

“I saw her,” Phoebe insisted. “She was left in the snow with her hands and feet tied. Juliet’s father did it. He thought she stole the pearl. It’s a long story.”

“Are you sure it was Becky?” It didn’t compute.

“I know what I saw. Juliet showed her to me.”

Rowe struggled to process the information. If it was Becky who had died that night, where was Juliet? Whose body was in Juliet’s grave? Before she could ask any more questions, Phoebe said she had to go.

“Can I call you later?” Rowe asked.

“It’s better if I call you.” Phoebe’s voice was husky. “I’m sorry about this.”

“I know. Me, too. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Phoebe whispered.

Rowe held the phone to her ear for several seconds after it clicked into dull silence. The Black Hawk helicopter made more sense now. The men Phoebe had taken for trainees were obviously some type of commando unit. Whatever Phoebe’s work was, it must be much more serious than she had let on. Fear rippled along Rowe’s spine. Was her lover involved in the kind of operation the government pretended never happened? If something went wrong and Phoebe didn’t come back, would anyone tell her next of kin? Rowe had heard about black ops. Was that what Phoebe really did?

Unnerved, she dialed Cara’s cell phone and got no answer. Phoebe had sounded worried about her sister. Why? Had something happened to Cara because of Phoebe’s job?

Rowe stared down at the semicooked eggs, her appetite gone. She felt like she was standing in quicksand. What was she going to do? Combing her mind for something to latch on to before she tied herself in knots, she switched track to Juliet. Phoebe had sounded so certain about what she saw—Becky, murdered by her employer for the sake of a piece of jewelry. Could Thomas Baker have passed off a dead housemaid as his daughter to the police? Why would he have done such a thing? Had he buried Becky in his daughter’s grave?

Rowe cast her mind back to the inscription on Juliet’s gravestone:
Pray you now, forget and forgive.
Was this Baker’s weak attempt at an apology for committing a crime? Had he intended to scare the girl, only to kill her by mistake? Illogical as it seemed, Rowe found it made sense in a horrible kind of way.

“I’m a genius,” she announced.

Zoe and Jessie gazed at her like she was all that and more.

“Juliet feels responsible for what happened,” she informed her admiring audience. “That’s why she’s hanging around. She can only rest in peace if the truth comes out.”

She wondered what had happened to Juliet in the end. Had she severed all ties with her family and made a new life somewhere? In those days the shame of an illegitimate birth could compel desperate measures.

Rowe scrolled through her contact list and dialed Dwayne Schottenheimer. “Any chance you guys can get out here?”

“Uh…I think the ferry’s sailing tomorrow.”

“Good, it’s time we had that chat with the Disappointed Dancer. I think I know what happened back then.”

“Excellent,” Dwayne said. “Would it be okay if we filmed the event? We’re making a television documentary.”

“Sure. Why not.” She heard a voice in the background urge,
For fuck’s sake, ask her.

“Yeah. Also, we were wondering if you’d be willing to do an introduction. We have a script.”

“Tell me about this documentary.”

“It’s called
Hell Hath No Fury
. It’s about female ghosts. Like, why there are more of them and what it takes to lay them to rest. We’ve sold it to PBS.”

“I’ll be on TV talking about ghosts?” Her agent would wet himself. Maybe this was a blessing in disguise. Maybe they could sell her publisher the idea that there was a book tie-in and buy a few precious months for Rowe to come up with the requisite best-seller.

“Rowe?”

“I’m here,” she said.