The Cure (22 page)

“Yeah,” she said. “He’s a good friend.”

“Is that all he is?”

She didn’t know the answer to that question so instead she said, “I understand why Dylan couldn’t tell me about this. He said you wouldn’t let him. But I still wanna know why you didn’t say anything. Why’d you make me find out this way?”

“Do you remember your last birthday in Brazil?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“We went shopping in Mãe do Deus a few days before, remember? I bought you that box of chocolates, and you gave them all away to the kids?”

She said, “Yes,” and could not help thinking those children would have had children of their own by now, and without the excuse of onions her eyes began to well up again.

Riley said, “I carved a little wooden cross for you. I took some of that gold foil from the chocolates and used it as an inlay.”

“Why are you talkin’ about this? I don’t like to think about it.”

“I’m answering your question, Hope.”

She saw their faces, their perfect, angelic laughing faces, all of them, and Bree. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“I remember seeing that cross around your neck, when we were all dancing at the party, but I can’t remember seeing it again after that.”

She stopped her work and turned toward him, to implore him. “Can we please just change the subject?”

He remained at the window, staring out. And beyond him, through the glass she saw a rising column of black smoke in the distance. So the sirens had been fire trucks in the streets of Dublin, down at the bottom of the hill.

He said, “You wanted to know why I didn’t tell you about the cure. I’m trying to explain. I gave you that cross, and you wore it at the party, and the next time I saw it was here in Dublin, in the police station, when they pulled it out of my pocket and said it belonged to Willa Newdale.”

“What?”

“I kind of remember someone giving it to me, putting it in my hand and asking for the cure, but everything that night got all balled up and my head wasn’t working right yet—I mean, I was still pretty messed up, I’m telling you, even though I was sober—so I can’t remember for sure how it got in my pocket, Hope. I swear I can’t. But I keep thinking if I knew how it got there, where it came from, I’d understand everything.”

“I don’t . . .” She had been staring at the distant smoke above her town. She had missed what he was saying. “What was that about the police station? You had something that belonged to Willa?”

“I had something that belonged to
you
, unless you gave away that cross.”

She began to understand. She thought of the bruised and shaggy man who had reappeared with the dawn at the end of her driveway as if rising from the curvature of the frozen earth. She thought of the televised image of a silhouetted form in the back of Bill Hightower’s car, the “mystery man of Dublin,” the one who had broken into Henry’s store with all those homeless people the night a kind old woman disappeared. She said, “You’re the one Steve’s been looking for. He thinks you hurt Willa.”

“I didn’t do anything to that woman.”

There was a pleading in his eyes—he clearly did not think she would believe him—and in spite of her defenses, she crossed the kitchen to stand behind him by the window and placed her hand on his shoulder. “Oh, Riley. I know that.” He turned, and his eyes contained the same pathetic hopefulness she had just seen him give to Bree. She removed her hand. She did not want to lead him on.

He said, “Did you give that cross to Willa?”

The telephone began to ring. She did not move. Now that she understood the reason for it, Hope let the memories come. The phone rang on unanswered as she remembered Riley, shyly offering the crude little trinket, the finest kind of gift he could manage under the circumstances, and more than enough to swell her heart with adoration. She remembered The People, coming to their camp to lead them back, a grand procession to the meeting place in honor of her special day, a great party with slaughtered pigs and the juice of
araca-boi
, that bright yellow kind of guava they so loved, and memories of dancing, and endlessly exaggerated fireside stories about her four years among them told by all the old ones, and laughter at their magnificent lies, and children running everywhere and the thought occurring to her that surely there was something of Eden in that place. And memories of later, when the old man came alone to offer her the finest birthday gift of all, reaching up to touch the little wooden cross around her neck and saying, “I see Jesus very very much.” Her thirty-second birthday. She was forty years old now, which seemed almost as impossible as the cross somehow in Riley’s pocket in spite of so much time and distance between then and there and here and now.

Standing close beside her husband at the window in the kitchen, with smoke rising from the bed of fog that lay over Dublin down below, and the telephone still ringing, ringing, ringing, Hope asked, “Are you sure it’s the same cross?”

“Absolutely.”

“I don’t see how that’s possible. I gave it to Waytee.”

Riley shook his head, looking through the glass. “Did you . . . did you find it later?”

She knew exactly what he meant. She too looked out the window and saw the column of smoke getting thicker, rising from a hidden source beneath the settled mist down in the valley, and she knew the fire was bad, and she saw the clearing, the charred and blackened village, the long and shallow pit that she and Riley dug, and filled, and covered as their final act of ministry, and little Bree, last of all The People, bathed in blood and crying in the bushes.

“I never saw that cross again,” was all that Hope could say.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-S
IX

F
ROM THE
N
ATIONAL
G
UARD’S COMMAND AND CONTROL POSITION
, Chief Steven Novak struggled to see through the wicked thick fog blinding Dublin as nearly a full block of houses burned, some at least two hundred years old. The invisible flames roared beyond the mist, which glowed an eerie orange and yellow. Even with all three of Dublin’s fire trucks on the scene it seemed pretty obvious the fire was out of control. And in spite of all the troops hanging around with rifles, the chief saw people running in and out through the gauzy mix of fog and smoke carrying televisions, stereos, computers—anything light enough to carry. Sometimes the soldiers caught them, but most of the looters seemed to vanish in the ether. Steve Novak seethed with impotent rage.

Colonel Peterson stood on the far side of a row of haphazardly parked Humvees, surrounded by a bunch of do-nothing weekend warriors who did not have enough moxie between them to stand up to a domesticated kitten, much less this army of homeless predators that had descended on his town. Steve had just wasted five valuable minutes trying to get the colonel to authorize deadly force, but the man insisted it was not necessary. Homes that had been in families for eight generations were being burned to the ground, and it was not necessary. Innocent people were making frantic choices about whether to save photo albums or the family Bible as they fled the fire, only to have their belongings ripped from their hands by phantoms who emerged from out of nowhere and disappeared into the fog again. Meanwhile, this so-called soldier insisted it was not necessary for his men to fire their weapons. Steve had asked the coward if someone must get murdered right out there in the middle of the street before he started shooting. The colonel—a dentist under normal circumstances—had suggested Steve should be more professional and remain calm.

With a puff of wind the fog parted for a moment across from Steve’s position, and he caught a glimpse of old man Summerset standing on his front steps holding a shotgun at something like port arms while burning cinders fell around him and his two grown sons doused the shingles on his roof with water from a pair of garden hoses. The chief crossed the street.

Yelling above the roar of the nearby inferno he said, “Mr. Summerset, did ya see how this got started?”

“Ayuh,” called the old man, his clear blue eyes on the mayhem down the street. “Was a bunch a them bums from away. Them drunks.”

“Did ya see ‘em set the fire?”

“Naw, but I seen ‘em just before they did it.”

“Where were they?”

With the shotgun the old man pointed toward the far side of the street. Steve looked that way but all he saw was an iridescent flickering in the mist.

Mr. Summerset said, “Over at the apartment behind ol’ lady Harding’s place, where that new fella lives. Mad as hornets, they was. Standin’ all ‘round her garage. Yellin’. Wanted that fella ta come out pretty bad so’s they could clean his clock, seemed ta me like.”

“Did they get their hands on him?”

“Dunno. Mebbe. I went in ta get my gun.”

“Who’s this fella you’re talkin’ ‘bout?”

“Dunno his name. New fella, like I said. Works over at Sadie’s.”

One of the old man’s sons overheard the conversation and called out, “It’s Mr. Keep, Chief. Mayor’s ex lives over there.”

Steve frowned. “What would they want with him?”

“Ain’t you seen the news this mornin’? He’s the one invented that medicine for drunks, got everyone so riled up ‘bout the price an’ all.”

“Riley Keep?”

“Ayuh. Somebody suin’ him, I guess. Say he stole the medicine from ‘em. Say his wife did too from what I hear.”

Riley Keep. The chief visualized the man, who had always seemed like a pretty good egg to him. Kind of quiet. Maybe a little nervous. Steve was used to that. For some reason a lot of solid citizens got nervous around the police. But now that he thought about it, there
was
something a little different about the man. Steve always had the feeling they had met before. And if it was true what old man Summerset’s boy said about Riley and the cure . . . Steve thought about the homeless fella he had interrogated the night Willa Newdale disappeared, and in his mind he compared the eyes and nose and upper cheeks, and suddenly he felt like an idiot.

Then he thought about a news report that named Riley
and
Hope. If there was a mob after Riley because of that story and if the story also mentioned Hope Keep, chances were they’d go after her next.

He turned without a word to hustle back toward his Explorer. He considered calling for backup, but that fool of a colonel needed all the help he could get, so Steve didn’t want to pull his guys away from the area, especially not when he could be at Mayor Keep’s house in under five minutes. Besides, remembering the way Riley Keep had stonewalled him in his own interrogation room and then hidden in plain sight right there in Dublin all this time, Steve decided he would see to that particular fella himself.

He almost had his truck in sight when a high pitched scream drew his attention to the side yard of a house on his left. Squinting through the fog he saw a cluster of gray shapes. He heard the scream again and changed direction, heading off that way. Getting closer, he could just make out a woman struggling with a pair of men. He unsnapped his holster, drew his side arm, and ran straight at them, calling, “Stop! Police!”

Before he could reach them, a ghostly figure came around the far corner of the house and charged into the attackers. The men released the woman, who dropped like a rag doll to the grass. They turned on her rescuer, punching him and kicking him, but the man landed a few good hits himself, and when Steve shouted again, much closer this time, the two assailants turned and ran.

When Steve finally reached the woman, the attackers were nearly to the back corner of one of the nearby houses. He knelt beside her.

“Are you all right?”

She cursed and said, “What are you waitin’ here for? Go get ‘em!”

Steve turned to the man who had tried to rescue her. He was a stranger, obviously one of the homeless, with a grizzled beard and filthy clothes and blood running from his nose. Steve said, “You all right?”

The homeless man looked him in the eye and said, “Yessir,” as the woman pulled her torn shirt together over her chest with both hands, screaming, “Don’t you let ‘em get away!”

“Stay with her,” said Steve.

The homeless man said, “I will.”

The chief took off running.

He rounded the corner and entered the backyard of the house on the right. Through the drifting smoke and fog he saw one of the assailants attempting to scale a six foot wooden fence on the far side of a swing set, with the other right behind him. He called, “Police! Stop or I’ll shoot!”

Neither of them paused. Steve fired a warning shot into the soft ground a few feet away from his own position. Still, the men kept going. He took aim through the mist at the one on the fence and squeezed off a round. The suspect fell back to the ground, where he gripped his upper thigh and writhed in pain. The other man froze in place, throwing up his hands. Shouting commands as he ran to them, Steve had both men frisked for weapons and handcuffed to each other within three minutes. He removed the wounded man’s belt and wrapped it around his thigh, cinching it as tightly as he could. Only then did he bother with his handheld radio. “Dave. Dave.”

“Ayuh” came the answer.

“What’s your twenty?”

“Over here on the north side of the fire.”

“Good. I need ya ta get up ta the mayor’s place. I think the arson suspects might be headin’ that way.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Just get up there, Dave. I’ll be right behind ya.”

“Ten four.”

“And Dave? I need someone to pick up a pair of two sixty-one suspects over here behind the green house on the, uh, the south side of Maxwell. Jen Whittaker’s place, I think. Eleven forty-one on one of the suspects and the victim.”

“Ten four.” There was a short pause. Steve knew Dave was ordering a couple of officers to his location to pick up the prisoners and calling for a pair of ambulances, one for the man with a bullet in his leg and one for the woman back between the houses. Dave came back on and said, “Roberts and Brown will be at your twenty in three or four. What’s your situation?”

“Had to fire my weapon but I’m okay. Get goin’ on the other thing.”

“Ten four.”

True to Dave’s word, Roberts and Brown came running around the corner of the closest house with their weapons drawn. Steve quickly apprised the uniformed patrolmen of the situation, sending Brown to look after the victim and leaving Roberts with the suspects. Then he sprinted toward his truck.

The massive fire crackled and howled around him as he ran. Human screams echoed from he knew not where. He passed a family gathered into a tight little cluster in the middle of the street, hugging each other tightly as they stared at their burning home. Soldiers chased wraith-like men and women in and out of sight through the misty air. Hot cinders rained down everywhere. Steve thanked God for the firefighters standing foursquare in the midst of the chaos, their hoses snaked across lawns and pavement as they calmly sent water arcing up through the fog to fall onto the raging flames on every side. It was as if Dublin bore the curse of Sodom and Gomorrah. In nearly forty years as a peace officer, it was the worst thing he had ever seen. It was the first time he had ever shot anyone, the first time he had even fired his weapon in the line of duty, and as he ran through the living hell of Dublin, Maine, Chief Steve Novak decided he should take time to reload.