Fault Line (34 page)

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Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Fault Line
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The lovemaking was wonderful, yes, but physical gratification alone would not have sent me looking for him. I'm not a child any more. There was a whole lot more to Jack than just hot hokey sex. But just how much more, how painfully much more, I had yet to learn.
We met on a job, or at least
he
was on the job—like I said, he's an operative with the FBI—and I was along as a volunteer. Working on a case together is a great way to get to know a guy in a hurry, although I don't recommend some of the side effects, such as having to rig up a bulletproof vest and hope no one aims for your head, but like I say, it cuts through some of the preliminaries like a chainsaw through butter.
After the case was wrapped up, we kept seeing each other. It was all very natural. Jack came along as witness when Tom got married, and I was there for Faye. And then we'd both be there at dinner, and he'd take me skiing, and everything seemed to glide along reeeeal smoooothly. Jack wore well, as my mother used to say. He's a big man, nicely framed and pleasantly muscled, the kind of guy who's fun to show off to dear old Mother even if you sometimes wish she'd put her opinions where the sun never shines. He had originally been sent to Salt Lake City on loan from the head office back East, but he was a southerner by upbringing, or at least, that was what I had come to presume about him. He was not much on offering up details about himself, or his past history. He gave short answers to leading questions. Asking, “Where did you go to high school?” got me, “Down South.” I tried a few times to pump Tom Latimer for information about him, but he said little beyond, “Jack? I don't know. But I'd trust him with my life.” So Jack was a friend for the long haul, but also a creature of the moment, and that suited me well enough that I had quit asking questions after a while.
Then one day we had been out hiking in the mountains east of Salt Lake and he sat me down on a rock next to a beautiful stream and—I'm not kidding—went down on one knee. “Em,
sweet thang,” he murmured, nuzzling my hand, “will you be my lady?”
I watched the mountain breezes play though his hair. A fish broke the surface of the nearest pool, and a woodpecker jumped from one tree to the next. “I thought I kind of was,” I replied.
Remembering this, sitting in Tom and Faye's living room, the wave of longing hit me again, so strong this time that I gasped for air. The room seemed to dissolve, and Tom and Faye looked like people outside a fish bowl staring in at me. I snapped, “How long will he be gone, Tom?”
“As I said, another week. Maybe two. Three, tops.”
I knew he was bullshitting me. He didn't know. He was just trying to mollify me. “Where'd he go?”
Tom stared out the window. “I don't know.”
“Don't know or can't say?” I knew he was holding back, and preferred to feel anger towards him for doing that than at Jack for having left me.
Tom's face darkened. “I'm out of the loop, Em. I'm retired from the Bureau, remember?”
“Yeah, but he's your pal.”
He fixed an unreadable gaze on me, said concisely, “I think that you're closer to him than I am now.”
He was twisting my words. I could feel it in the little muscles that were tensing up all over my body. I thought,
That's not fair,
but I didn't dare open my mouth and acknowledge that his words had inflicted pain. I didn't want to tell him about the craving I felt just to be near Jack, couldn't tell him about the silly fantasies I had of finding out where he was and going there to be near him. It was boring sitting around waiting for him, and waiting for him to return didn't suit my penchant for being right in the thick of the action. I kept my eyes off of Faye. She was too good at reading my mind.
But out of the corner of my eye, I saw her shift slightly on the couch. It was a subtle movement, just an odd rotation of her
hip, but something in it seemed like a signal. I turned and looked at her. The expression on her face was suddenly a little too innocent. “Tom,” she said, “I've been thinking. It's about time for a last trip before the baby comes. How about Em and I go down to Florida and visit my aunt? Get a little sunshine, and—”
Tom's eyes snapped towards her. His voice hardening into a tone of warning, he said, “It's perfectly sunny
here,
darling.”
I pounced. “Florida?”
Faye went into a cat stretch, pointing her long legs towards Tom. It arched her round, smooth belly outward, emphasizing the voluptuousness of her pregnancy. She fixed a smile on him that would melt butter in January. “Florida is lovely this time of year, no matter what anyone says. The humidity is good for the skin, and it rains almost every afternoon, breaking the heat. We could just hang out …”
Tom closed his eyes and pinched thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. “Faye, have you been listening in on my private conversations?”
She purred, “Tell her, Tom. Come on.”
Tom slammed his fist against the back of the chair. “Faye!”
I jumped in quickly lest the point of my conversation be lost in another of a long string of domestic squabbles. “Tom, you seem to have something to tell me. So tell it!”
Tom's entire person was focused on Faye, his head down like a stalking animal. Faye shrank back into the couch, no doubt wondering how her do-gooding had gone wrong for her this time. Tom spoke from between clenched teeth, his voice a hiss. “Yes, Faye, I'd like to know myself what you have to tell us. And I'd like to know exactly how you know it!”
“It was nothing, Tom! The word ‘Florida' was all I heard. Honest. You raised your voice for a moment while you had your head in the refrigerator to get him a beer, that was all.” Faye's tone waxed sarcastic. “I admit I had to strain a little to hear, but
aren't you proud of me? Doesn't that make me a good detective?”
Tom cackled viciously. “No, you are
not.
Your friend
Em
here is the detective.”
“Forensic geologist,” I interjected, still trying to knock him off his track.
Tom said, “Forensic geo-detective, Junior Woodchuck, whatever. Em, you just stay out of this. Faye, I demand to know! Have you or have you not been listening in on my private discussions?”
Faye managed to look affronted. “No. You guys were just talking—you know, having your beer before Jack took off—and I was lying down in the bedroom there minding my own business, thank you very much!” Very quickly she added, “I suppose you didn't know I was in the house.”
“We damned well did not!”
I hollered, “Is there some good reason I can't know where Jack is?”
Tom's posture stiffened, which told me that until then, he hadn't been as worked up as he'd been trying to appear. He had jumped on Faye to try to shut her up, and had continued his attack as a crude subterfuge to evade my questions. Faye seemed to have read that in him, too. She smiled brightly, a kind of girl-scout-cookie-salesperson grin meant to sell him on something he didn't want. On Faye's aristocratic face it looked downright goony. “That's all I heard you say. Honest.” She wiggled her eyebrows at him.
He wiggled his graying eyebrows back.
I shifted from trying to pry Tom open to worrying that he and Faye might at any moment dash into that bedroom and get sidetracked. I roared, “Come on, Faye! If that's all you heard Tom say, then what did
Jack
say?”
Faye looked from her husband to me doubtfully, then shrugged
her shoulders. “Well, he said he was going to Florida.”
Tom groaned.
I said, “And?”
“And something about ‘code name Dust,' and ‘don't tell Em, she'll get the wrong idea.'”
I glanced at Tom. His lips twisted wildly for a moment, then he turned and stormed out of the room. I heard the back door open and slam shut. Heard a car engine start up. Heard the sound of tires squealing on blacktop as the vehicle left the curb abruptly.
I looked at Faye. We both knew that
this
was no act.
She stared at her belly and began to cry.
I thought of going to her and trying to comfort her, but found that I could not move. I now knew where Jack was, geographically—two thousand miles east and south—but without more information, that was just a compass direction along which to apply my longing. And now, jammed right up against that emotion, I suffered a new one, infinitely worse: the first shards of fear.
 
 
The rest of the company stood looking after it, but my curiosity being stronger, I followed it, riding close by its side, and observed its licking up, in its progress, all the dust that was under its smaller part.
—Benjamin Franklin describing a dust devil (letter to Peter Collinson), August 25, 1755.
A woman stood alone on the beach, clinging to her aloneness. The wind played games with the soft tendrils of hair that grew in random curls around her face. She took off her sandals, threaded the straps through one belt loop of her rolled-up jeans, and buckled them together so that she could run with her hands free. She stepped forward and looked down, examining her footprints.
Her name was Lucy, and she had almost majored in Anthropology
in sympathy for the pre-human namesake who had long ago left tiny footprints in Africa, but Lucy had abandoned such romances of things past, telling herself that hers had become a life of the future, where few could follow her. She stood now with her own bare feet on the sands of Cape Canaveral, deep in the fastness of the Kennedy Space Center. And when the space shuttle next rose into the skies, she would rise with it, and take her first steps in space.
But that moment had not yet come, and she had first to deal with the agony of waiting through each hour and each day that hung between her and her goal. She felt eyes on her back; the eyes of the world, yes, but also other eyes, and escaping that gaze had become as much her goal as rising into space. She marked this rare moment of relative privacy by closing her eyes, so she could concentrate on the sensation of sand rubbing against her skin. It was almost like a message. But as she opened herself to this thought of pleasure, she could for an instant also perceive pain, and a bolt of it shot through her mind.
She glanced nervously over her shoulder, unable to stop herself from searching for a source for her anxiety, even though she knew it could not be there.
He might track me to my native Florida, but he can't follow me this deep into the Cape. I am safe here. Even safer in space. He can't follow me there …
She forced her face forward again, forced herself to look normal, casual, in charge of her destiny, just out for a jog on the beach. Physical training. Dedication. Her lips stiffened and her brow tightened as she thought,
I am in charge, damn it!
She closed her eyes to take this thought inward. Inhaling the salt air, she opened them again, drawing the world into a fresh register. She examined it, once again becoming the observer.
The beach stretched long and smooth down the cape, fading into the mists. She imagined it on the map in her office, the wave-sculpted beach ridge that bounded the seaward side of the barrier island, itself in turn just one section in the apron of sand that
edged the pancake-flat complex of ancient sea deposits that geographers called Florida. Waves washed the beach, grinding the cast-off shells of a hundred zillion sea creatures into sand, working and rolling each grain along an endless conveyor belt that transported them slowly along the shore, perhaps one day to be the cement in a new halo of stone.
Lucy turned her face fully into the wind. The waves were big, and thirsty. They marched in from the broad Atlantic and heaved themselves up steeper and steeper as they approached the shore, like prides of lions pacing across the veldt from Mother Africa and opening their mouths to roar as they drew near.
Lucy scanned her body for tension. Arms. Fingers still clutching, as if ready to grasp a weapon. Anxiety must still be lurking within her brain. She reminded herself that she had made it to her destination. That she was in charge.
So why can't I let go of this foolish anxiety?
Focusing her mind as she had so doggedly trained herself to do, Lucy studied one single wave as it approached, contemplated the series of circles each molecule of water described as it came, her mind's eye now replicating the diagram on wave motion that had been in her freshman geology text. The long fetch of the Atlantic wind was a comforting surety. Just physics. Sanity. All in control. It had drawn its hand across the water's surface, dragging it first into cat's paws and then into swells, forming long, sensuous troughs of water that marched across the open water.
Lions?
Better fifrican lions than a Florida panther,
she mused. Lucy forced both images out of her mind.
It's just water,
she assured herself.
H-two-O. With salt. In motion. It's all just physics.
But as she watched, the waves again became stalking lions.
Lionesses,
she insisted, still fighting for control of her thoughts, but even that thought betrayed her. Bewilderment turning to anger, she thought.
The females do the work while the males sleep, then the sons of bitches climb on board and have themselves a good fuck!

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