Final Crossing: A Novel of Suspense (26 page)

He grabbed his briefcase and plane tickets and turned the light off in his office on the way out.

Luck, he thought. If only it were that easy.

• • •

It was close to midnight when he pulled into the parking lot of the Jefferson Memory Care Residence. The parking lot was silent, and only his own scuffled footsteps along the cracked asphalt indicated life. Dead of night.

He hadn’t been able to sleep. Too much on his mind. Normally he would have convinced himself that staying in bed without sleeping was at least some kind of rest, but not tonight. Tonight was different, because out of the millions of nighttime thoughts and images racing through his mind, one seized him and wouldn’t let go.

He wondered what his father was doing at that exact moment, and the image haunted him.

He pictured him in his bed (or maybe someone else’s, since the residents all wandered). He pictured a dark room and a scratchy blanket covering dry and withered skin. He pictured the Captain sleeping fitfully, his mind unable to dream when asleep and unable to see reality when awake. His father was trapped in a dark and haunting loneliness, and Jonas decided he wanted nothing more than to spend some time with his dad before leaving for Denver.

Fuck sleep, Jonas thought. I can sleep next month.

He walked through the double doors and signed in at the unattended reception desk. The daily visitation log showed the last visitor to the facility signed in over four hours earlier. No one came to visit in the middle of the night.

He suddenly wished for Anne. That she would sit with him, next to his father. But Jonas had only briefly mentioned his father’s condition to her, because as close as he and Anne had become, some things he held close to the vest. Someday, maybe.

He walked down the corridor and keyed in the code to open the first set of doors. The fluorescent lights buzzed above him as he passed through the wing on the way to the Captain’s unit. The nurse’s station at the end of the corridor was unattended and all of the resident doors were closed. His shoes squeaked on the faded linoleum floors.

Antiseptic fumes wafted past him.

At the far end of the corridor a resident’s door creaked open, and Jonas reflexively slowed. No one came out, and Jonas kept walking. He expected to see a nurse come out after checking on someone, but the door had merely opened a few inches and then remained that way.

The overhead lights seemed to buzz louder, like a swarm of insects slowly getting closer. The nurse’s station remained empty, but a crackling radio somewhere nearby was the first sign of life he’d heard.

As he passed the open door, Jonas shifted his eyes and looked inside the room. He saw only darkness, but a voice whispered to him from within.

“Come here.”

Jonas couldn’t tell if the voice was male or female, only that it was old and tired.

He stopped and looked into the darkness.

The door opened a few more inches and the light from the hallway illuminated the face of an old black man peering from around the edge.

“You got business here?”

Jonas thought the man must be at least ninety but knew dementia could age someone a decade or more. Dark, leathery jowls hung like sacks off the side of his face, as if years of obesity had rapidly succumbed to the disease’s appetite for flesh. Patches of wispy, curled hair seemed glued to his scalp; his sunken eyes belied both mischief and fear.

“I’m visiting my father,” Jonas replied in a whisper.

“Your daddy in here?” The man’s voice was sandpaper. “He’s in the north unit.”

“Ooh.” The man’s eyes widened and he looked like he was either going to laugh or scream. “That’s the
bad
place.”

Jonas turned more fully toward the man. “Why do you say that?”

The old man smiled, his yellow teeth large and obscene. “Because everywhere in here the
bad place
.” He let himself laugh though the act of it seemed to pain him. “It’s all bad, boy. All bad.” Then the smile disappeared from his face and his eyes widened. A naked, bony arm reached out from behind the door.

“I don’t know where I am,” the man said.

It wasn’t a question, just a statement of fact.

“I’m sorry,” Jonas said. He reached out and let the man grab his fingertips, something he never would have seen himself doing before the Captain took up residence at Jefferson. But he learned a lot about Alzheimer’s, and one thing was clear: despite how much of a person’s mind had been eaten away by the disease, they still responded to human touch. It was something they needed, sure as they needed food and water. Maybe needed it more.

The man gripped Jonas as if he was the singular rope thrown to a dozen drowning people. “You hear me, boy?” he said, his voice a hiss. “I
don’t know
where I am.”

“I can’t help you.”

“I didn’t
ask
for your help.”

Jonas patted the top of the man’s hand. “No, I guess you didn’t. I have to go now.”

“Go
where
?”

“To see my father.”

“He in here too?”

“North unit.”

“Ooh. That’s the—”

“Bad place. Yeah, I know.”

The man’s lips drew in a circle of surprise. “You know, do you?”

“Yes.”

The man suddenly yanked on Jonas’s hand, pulling him toward the door. Jonas couldn’t believe the strength the man still had despite the toll age and disease had taken on him. Jonas could have pulled back, but he let the man do what he wanted, because he knew that, even if just for a fleeting moment, the act gave some degree of satisfaction to him.

The smell of the man’s dinner came from his mouth in a tangy wind.

“
You...don’t...know...anything.
”

That was when Jonas forced his hand free and walked away, leaving the old man in his room, where he repeated those same words, over and over, until Jonas was finally out of earshot.

Jonas was thankful when he finally reached the north unit.

He let the wedge of light from the open door guide him inside his father’s room. The Captain was sleeping in his bed, a twin Jonas had bought when his father first moved into Jefferson. Jonas hadn’t wanted his dad sleeping in some old mattress that God-knows-who had excreted Godknows-what onto. The Captain was sleeping soundly, as was his roommate, a seventy-something Wisconsin native named

Paul who shouted birdcalls whenever the mood struck him, which was just about always.

His father’s breathing was slow and steady, and he slept flat on his back, his nostrils flaring with every exhalation. Jonas immediately felt a sense of relief. Whatever his father was dreaming, at least he was asleep. To Jonas, that made things easier.

He leaned over and kissed the Captain on his forehead. “Hi, Dad,” he whispered, hoping for a second to see his father’s bright eyes but then happy not to have woken him. Paul stirred a moment in the bed on the other side of the room and then fell back into silence.

Tonight Jonas didn’t want to talk. He just wanted to be close, and that would be enough. He pulled over a plastic chair and sat next to the bed. Jonas removed his laptop from his leather messenger bag, then powered it up to check the latest AP wire stories before his morning flight. He positioned himself so he was able to browse the Internet with his left hand while using his right to hold his father’s hand. The Captain’s fingers were cold. Jonas stroked the back of his dad’s bony hand with his thumb.

The glow of the laptop ghosted the small room as Jonas read a dozen articles about the upcoming Peace Accords. Security would be huge. Lots of protests expected. The President continued to press his message of cautious optimism, while the Israeli and Palestinian leaders seemed content to let the American President speak for everyone. For now.

It’s either going to be a success or a failure, Jonas thought. He believed it because that’s how the President and the Senator wanted it. There would be no middling compromise, no empty handshakes. There would be no status quo after the Accords, despite history’s overwhelming forces that push everything from all sides at the same time, making peace progress an almost immovable object. There would be shouting, threats, delegations walking out of meetings, walking back in, and then walking back out again. But, with luck, nerves will be just raw enough to actually allow for progress. The idea of a Palestinian state had been debated for decades, but they were closer now than ever to it becoming a reality. If the Accords succeeded, there could be a recognized state in a year, with its official capital in East Jerusalem. If the Accords failed, the Jewish settlers would continue to build in the territories while the Palestinians continued to do everything they could to stop them.

Jonas squeezed his eyes shut and wondered if there was any real possibility for sleep that night. He didn’t think so, but the morning was still far enough away to make the prospect of staying awake for the rest of the night a daunting task.

Then he got an idea.

Thinking of his recent conversation with Anne, he Googled the word
anagram
. The first entry was for an anagram server, allowing him to type in any words he wanted to see what anagrams could be made from them.

He started with his name. Jonas Osbourne.

There were almost two-thousand responses. The first one almost made him laugh out loud.

Onerous banjos.

Jesus, Jonas thought. Does Rudiger’s brain really work like this? It didn’t seem possible any human mind could calculate the hundreds or thousands of word combinations one could make from rearranging the letters of other words.

He scanned the first hundred entries on his own name and found nothing biblically significant about any of them, though his knowledge of the Bible left a lot of room for error. Then he typed in Anne’s name. Only fifty-nine results, the most interesting one being
a need uneven
.

The Captain wheezed, coughed, and gave Jonas’s hand a squeeze. The grip tightened, making Jonas think of his earlier interaction.

that’s the bad place

Jonas held on tight and typed another name into the anagram server.

Robert Sidams.

Nearly 20,000 results. Jonas scanned the most relevant.
Broader Mists
was an interesting result, but not biblical. Still, if Rudiger was going to the Peace Accords for his next victim, there had to be a significance to it. The biggest name associated with the Accords was President Calder, but Jonas highly doubted Calder would be a target—that just seemed too unlikely given the impossibility of the task. Sidams was another big name, as was Jonas himself. But no anagram made sense, if in fact that was what was necessary to Rudiger for him to select a victim. Maybe the target was someone with one of the foreign delegations?

He tried a few more names and phrases until the words on the screen did nothing but sting his eyes. The FBI had a lot of people working on the case—Jonas knew his futile latenight efforts would do nothing to help. He put the laptop to sleep and wished he could do the same for himself.

The door opened and a nurse walked in. Monique. The hallway light silhouetted the Haitian’s kinked hair, which sprung from the top of her head in tight coils. She startled when she saw Jonas.

“Oh, Mr. Osbourne,” she whispered in a thick French accent. “You scared me.”

Jonas stood and walked toward her. “Sorry, Monique. Just came here to see Dad.”

“At midnight?”

Jonas shrugged. “I was missing him.”

She nodded and smiled. “You are a good son.” Jonas remained silent.

She leaned into him. “He ate very much today. All his dinner.”

“Good,” Jonas said. The Captain finishing an entire meal was a rare event. “Maybe he’ll sleep all night.”

“Oh, yes. Definitely.” Monique slid past him and briefly checked on Paul. She went to the Captain’s bed and looked down at him before straightening the pillow beneath his head. The Captain didn’t stir.

“You look like him,” she whispered. “Same
pretty
eyes.”

“Osbourne eyes,” Jonas replied. “My grandfather had the same color.”

Monique turned to him and gazed into his eyes, as if searching for an answer. Her proximity startled Jonas, but he didn’t step away.

“Maybe,” she wondered. “Maybe you have same soul, too.”

“Soul?”

“Yes,” she said. “Same spirit.”

Jonas didn’t understand what that was supposed to mean. “Maybe,” he replied.

“You are a fighter. From war, no?”

Jonas shook his head. “I was in the Army. I wasn’t really in a war. And that was a long time ago.”

She dismissed his answer with a shake of her head. “You are a fighter. Your father. He is a fighter, too. Very, very strong.”

“Yes. He is.”

“Same soul,” she said. She seemed suddenly certain in the assessment. “Same soul.”

“Then I’m a lucky man.”

She leaned in one last time, this time so close he thought she was going to kiss him.

“Yes,” she said. “You
are
.”