Sealed with a promise (23 page)

  “But wholesale vasectomies? Isn’t that Draconian?”

  “I’m not proposing
killing
boys or even hurting them. It’s a simple out-patient procedure performed under local anesthetic.”

  Her wide blue eyes were guileless, but he was beginning to recognize the smile lurking at the corners of her mouth.

  “And you look so harmless.” He stroked his knuckles against the underside of her chin. The breeze was stronger now that they were nearer the river. It lifted shiny silvery strands of her hair. A strand blew across her face, so he carefully hooked it with a forefinger and tucked it behind her ear.

  When they resumed their steps along the shell-embedded sidewalk, they were hand in hand, like lovers. “You said you believe Calhoun is your father,” Emmie spoke, returning to the previous topic. “You’re not sure?”

  “My mother told me he was, and for years she waited for him to come back. But you had to know my mother.

  She was imaginative. She lived in a dream world most of the time. Her relationship with Calhoun could have been her imagination.”

  “Imagination? Thirty years ago, why would she pick
him
to fantasize about? He wasn’t well-known then.”

  “Calhoun hasn’t always lived in North Carolina. His father and grandfather were from Alabama. The family is known there-sort of the local aristocracy. I know you don’t believe in a Southern aristocracy, but the people there did. You should have seen the house they lived in.”

  “The one that looks like the country club.”

  Do- Lord had forgotten he had told her that, but she remembered the minute detail and unerringly put it together with what he was telling her.

  “So your mother said Teague Calhoun is your father, but her word isn’t trustworthy. Do you have any other evidence?”

  “When I was sixteen I went into a public library endowed by the Calhoun family. I saw a large portrait of the library’s benefactor, Calhoun’s father.”

  He had gone in mainly to get warm. The Trans Am he drove had a rebuilt motor and good tires, but the heater hadn’t worked since before he bought it. He had a couple more bootleg deliveries to make and an hour to kill before he could make them. A library was a great place to hang out. Spending an idle hour there wouldn’t put him on the “watch” list of the police the way hanging around a gas station would. Besides, anytime he had an hour to spare, he’d rather satisfy his reading mania.

  Once he had been limited by the range of a bicycle, but after he had a car, he could travel further to make his deliveries. His route that day had taken him to a neighboring county and a library he’d never been in before.

  Built circa 1950, the library was a squat, ugly red brick homage to utilitarian architecture. On the inside it was hushed and stuffy, but warm enough to make his cold, red fingers sting. And filled with the wonderful dusty mustiness of a thousand books in one place. His wet sneakers squeaked on the gray vinyl floor as he made his way to the periodicals.

  The life- size portrait hung on the back wall of the periodical room. The man in it, clad in a dark suit with the wide lapels of a bygone era, was a few years older than Caleb, and had dark blond hair and blue eyes. Other than that, he looked just like Caleb.

  “I had stopped believing my mother a long time before. I knew he wasn’t going to come for us. We were on our own, and he wouldn’t be proud if I made good grades. I figured that Teague Calhoun was just part of the fantasy she’d constructed-the way she made up our name.”

  “Wait a minute.” Emmie craned her neck to look into his face. “She made up your last name?”

  “Yep. She said it was French, meaning ‘with honor or praiseworthy.’ I couldn’t have my father’s last name like other kids did, but my birth was honorable just the same.”

  “That’s really creative. Did you encounter a lot of teasing about being illegitimate from the other kids?”

  “Not a lot. I wasn’t the only one in the trailer park.”

  “And you grew up poor.” Emmie was checking her assumptions and assembling data.

  “Movie stars notwithstanding, children of unmarried mothers generally do,” Caleb answered with dry understatement.

  “And she named you Caleb, after the Israelite spy in Exodus who was allowed to reach the Promised Land, although the older generation was not. They would die in the Wilderness.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I’m the child of missionaries, remember? And the grandchild of the president of the women’s society of our church. I was fed Bible stories with my cereal.”

  Emmie was silent for a while. Do-Lord had already told her more than he revealed to most, and he’d seen how much information she could extract from a few facts. He didn’t think she’d let the subject drop though, and her next question proved it. “So when you saw the portrait of what would be your grandfather, you realized your mother’s stories might be true. What did you do?”

  “Well, I was in a library. What would you do?”

  Emmie’s eyes lit with scholarly fervor. “Research!”

  “I read old newspapers-anything a Calhoun did was newsworthy in that county-and learned Teague Calhoun had settled in North Carolina after attending the university here.”

  “Did you want to meet him?”

  This was the part he had to be careful with. Emmie had already demonstrated she remembered and made inferences from everything he said. She didn’t seem to like Calhoun much, but he was an old family friend, close enough to be called “Uncle Teague.” She wouldn’t want to be part of bringing Calhoun down.

  “My mother died not long after that. I was on my own then. I got out of there, and I didn’t look back.”

  “How did your mother die?”

  “Myocarditis.”

  Emmie made a sympathetic sound. “You were so young, and she must have been young too.”

  “Thirty- four. She was seventeen when I was born.”

  They were both silent for a minute, contemplating a life cut short, a boy-man cut adrift.

  “I’d see something about Calhoun in the news every now and then. I’d be a little curious. But the life of a SEAL is intense, all-absorbing.”

  “And then you met him face-to-face in Afghanistan.”

  Did she forget nothing?

  “Face- to-face would be stretching it. He was 225 yards away. I could see him, but I’m pretty sure he never saw me.”

  “And now you’re curious. Do you want him to acknowledge the relationship?”

  “I got along without him my entire life. I don’t need him now. And like I said, if it became public knowledge, it wouldn’t do either of us any good.”

  “The media would have a field day. I understand why it would be disastrous for the senator-the conservative, family values candidate with an illegitimate son, whom he abandoned. And-oh, my goodness-
your
picture would be splashed from one side of the globe to the other! You wouldn’t be able to-what do you call it-operate.”

  “SEALs whose identities have been splashed all over the media are not much use in a covert operation,” he told her with dry understatement. In fact, he might as well pin a target on his back. SEALs went to some lengths to maintain the psychological advantage of seeming invisible and invulnerable. As a result, terrorist organizations all over the world would love to claim the coup of assassinating one. “Spin doctors might be able to save Calhoun’s career, but mine would be over.”

  Emmie nodded and then fell silent. While she thought over what he had said, he kept his breathing slow and regular, despite the tightness in his diaphragm. Whether he had said enough or too much he couldn’t tell. The tall, limestone Calhoun house, with it’s imposing semicircular porch upheld by soaring two-story pillars, came into view. The streets around it were, as Emmie had predicted, clogged with parked cars.

  She tugged on the hand she still held and turned her wide blue eyes to him. “When Moses sent Caleb to Canaan to spy, the Israelites needed to know if it was a land flowing with milk and honey, or if the stories of its abundance were fabricated. Maybe it wasn’t the Promised Land. Maybe, as some said, they didn’t need it. They’d gotten along without it for forty years. You, Caleb, don’t know whether your mother’s stories about Calhoun and his Promised Land were
her
imagination.” She squeezed his hand. “Let’s go find out.”

  Satisfaction burned hot and deep in Do-Lord’s chest as he gazed around the wide entry hall of the imposing three-story mansion overlooking the Cape Fear River.

  He was in.

  At the base of the tall steps leading to the imposing, tan-colored limestone mansion, a man whose cheap polyester jacket shouted rent-a-cop had taken the card and checked their names against a list. And then he and Emmie had waited in front of the wide front door with its ornately etched glass side panels and large Christmas wreath until another blue-polyester flunky, at some signal from within, had ushered them inside. Somebody here was serious about crowd control.

  “Well,” Emmie had whispered with heavy irony, echoing his thought, “I guess we know we’re being admitted into the presence of a Very Important Person.”

  Inside the wide red-carpeted entry hall, a discreet velvet rope just like those in museums denied access to the staircase, while even more discreet cameras tucked into the coffered ceiling provided the real security. He’d already noted motion sensors on every downstairs window-but not those upstairs. It was amazing how many people assumed that just because windows were twenty feet off the ground, they couldn’t be entered.

  A minion with a fringe of gray hair surrounding a shiny pink pate, this one better dressed than the rent-a-cops, nodded to Emmie as if he knew her, then shepherded him and Emmie into the line of people waiting to enter the large reception room separated from the entry by more tall white columns.

  The long reception room, which couldn’t be mistaken for a living room, despite the groups of sofas and coffee tables, ran the entire south wing of the house. A grand piano set in the center of the room almost looked small. At one end Senator Calhoun and his wife stood in front of a large fireplace banked with poinsettias to greet their guests and have photos made with them.

  “Whoever designed this place had no problem mixing styles of architecture,” Emmie observed as she pointed to white columns bordering a small alcove where a coatrack had been placed. “See, these are Ionic, but those are Corinthian.”

  Do- Lord flicked a glance at the columns, then went back to studying the layout of the rooms visible on either side of the hall. This was his purpose. To have a look-see at how the house was arranged and scope out the security. On the north side of the hall he could see a small yellow parlor that looked out on the front of the house and behind it a paneled dining room with a table that would seat sixteen easily. He mentally placed them on the floor plan he was creating in his mind. Other rooms, not accessible to the public, must lie beyond them.

  He was having trouble concentrating on his intelligence gathering though. There were too many people too close to him and Emmie. Too many stood between them and any exit. Too many places a shooter could be hiding. A shooter at the top of the stairs that half-encircled the hall in three easy flights would be invisible and could kill everyone in one burst of automatic fire.

  Emmie saw architecture, and he saw sniper hides. Do-Lord recognized his state as hypervigilance, common to combat veterans returning from deployment, where the enemy could be anyone, anywhere, and the most ordinary moments could erupt in smoke and screams and spattered blood. He’d been in the crowded lobby of a hotel once, flirting with a pretty woman while waiting in line to check in when a terrorist had driven a truck through the plate glass doors of the entrance. Only seconds before, there had been a busy low-keyed babble overlaid by music from a piano- just like now.

  Do- Lord caught Emmie looking at him out of the corner of her eye again. He was aware he hadn’t responded to the last few topics she’d thrown out, and she’d fallen silent-as silent as he was. He wasn’t having a flashback, not the classic kind. He was completely aware that he was
here
in the senator’s house, the pretty girl beside him was Emmie, and there probably was no danger.

  Still, he had to get Emmie out of here. He could look after himself. If he was by himself he would handle any threat, but keeping Emmie safe in a crowd this dense was practically impossible.

  Guests were being allowed into the reception room in groups of four or five, and then herded into the line to shake the great man’s hand. To hell with that. When the flunkie’s attention was on a group to be escorted, he looped an arm over Emmie’s shoulders. He guided her through the people bunched together in the entry hall and into the reception room. He didn’t stop until they were at the back of the room near the long Palladian windows that opened onto a covered veranda.

  With a wall at his back and the windows providing easy egress, he felt marginally better. He wanted Emmie where he could get her out.

  “What’s going on?” Intelligence, curiosity, and something that looked like concern made Emmie’s wide blue gaze even more direct than usual. “I thought you wanted to see Teague Calhoun. Why did you take us out of the line?”

  He wanted to tell her the truth. All of it. Already she knew more about him than anyone-even his best friend. The thorough background checks required for his security clearance hadn’t turned up any of what he had told her. There was something about her-a cleanness, an innocence.

  “I don’t like to be in the middle of crowds,” he said.

  “Do you have claustrophobia?”

  “No.” He might have said more, but hypervigilance made him more conscious of movement in his peripheral vision. A flicker of something out the window caught his attention.