The Timer Game (26 page)

Something terrible to him. To them all.

“What? Having a dad isn’t important? You of all people know that’s not true.”

That stung and she looked away. “Can we do this later? We don’t have time.”

He wasn’t ready to let it go. “How did you explain it? All the birthdays I never sent anything. Christmas. She must have been miserable.”

“I told her you were dead.”

“
What?”

“I couldn’t deal with it.”

“You couldn’t? It’s always about you.”

Something low and venomous came into her voice. “They stoned her to death. Did you know that? Sister Mary Clare.”

She would not cry. She would not let him see her cry. She could see the shock on his face. He hadn’t known. All these years, she’d been so sure.

“Oh, my God.”

“Mac.” Pain in her voice. And caution.

“I came back late, it’s true, but I came back, just the way I said. The clinic had been burned to the ground. Nobody would talk to me and when I got death threats, I pulled out. I went stateside, looking for you. You’d disappeared. You never showed up at Cedars-Sinai. I got so I checked death notices and finally I had to believe that you’d died there in the village.”

“I didn’t want you to find me. My phone’s in my maternal grandmother’s last name.” She added, “It took everything I had just to get through it.”

“Through what, Grace? What happened there?”

She shook her head and turned away. Two kids on bikes barreled into the parking lot.

“That’s supposed to work? A head shake, looking out the window?”

“I can’t, Mac.”

“You’re going to have to.”

“No! I don’t!” she lashed out. “If we don’t get her back, he will kill her, Mac, by midnight tonight. These damn timers, these clues. I don’t know where he’s taking me except north away from San Diego and I don’t know why.”

Her voice cracked and she yanked her hand back when he tried to touch it.

She checked her watch again. She opened the car door and scooped up the Walkmans, positioning her cell on the seat. “If my cell rings, don’t answer.”

“I can help, Grace. You have to let me help.”

“I’ll be right back.” She snatched up the Walkmans and unlocked her car door noisily, and this was the tricky part, she pressed
Play
on both Walkmans simultaneously. She realized she was holding her breath. She waited until both Walkmans kicked in: stereo sounds of somebody sliding into a car, sitting down. She left one Walkman on her seat in her car, slammed the door closed, and sat again in Mac’s car closing the door, the second Walkman in her lap.

Paper bag rustling sounds filled the car. As far as the Spikeman knew, Grace had come back into her car, slammed the door shut, and was starting to eat. In Mac’s car, the cell phone the Spikeman had given her started to ring.

“Quiet. Don’t say a word. Don’t even breathe.”

Mac nodded. She picked up her phone, clicked it on. “Yes.” The car was filled with a symphony of eating sounds, lips smacking, bags ripping.

“Drive-through and then stopping for a potty break? Terror give you the squitters?”

She could feel Mac start to shift in his seat and she held up a warning finger.

On the CD, somebody chewed noisily. “I’m having breakfast in the car,” Grace said into the phone. “You mind?”

“I can hear.” His voice was biting.

Relief shot through her. It was working. Grace said, “How’s Katie?”

The Spikeman hesitated a beat too long. “Sleeping. You’re running behind, Grace, and that’s not acceptable. There’s a schedule to keep and you’re ruining it. You don’t want to do that.”

She closed her eyes. “I got the timer. I need help understanding.”

“Very true. Many things happen on journeys.”

Journeys. Okay, so it was directions. Had to be. She examined the timer. She was to drive north on 405. North on the 5.

“They’re directions, right?”

He was silent.

“I want to know she’s okay. My daughter.” She’d almost slipped. Almost said
our
. Mac was looking at her, face strained. “Put her on.”

He broke the connection. Grace put the cell down slowly. The sounds of eating coming from the Walkman were obscenely loud in the silent car, but it marked the time they had left. A little under a minute.

“He’s got audio bugs,” Mac said. “And a GPS. That’s why you had us park together.”

She nodded. “So it would look like I’m still in my car when I’m sitting here in yours. Could you Google someone on your BlackBerry?”

“You can have it.” He pulled it out and handed to her. She shook her head.

“Your BlackBerry’s got a GPS in it; it emits a pulse. We can’t risk having him pick that up and figure out we’re working together. I think the most we can do is use it for a quick fifteen-second search. Before I forget…”

She pulled a wad of yellow-lined pages from her pocket.

“It’s all there. What I need you to do. Right now can you turn on your BlackBerry and Google Fred and DeeDee Winger? Where he’s working now. Where they live.”

She checked her watch. She had maybe thirty seconds left.

His fingers clicked across the BlackBerry keypad. “Too many Wingers. Nothing.” He turned it off.

“It’s okay, I’ll find them. Any idea what SR is?” She was looking at the timer.

He studied it. “
State route
. Should be marked on the highway. How will I contact you?”

“Can’t. I’ll call you when I can.” She scooped up her cell and the Walkman.

He looked at her, his eyes sad. “For God’s sake, Grace, tell me what happened.”

She pushed open the door. “It’s all written down. Everything I need.”

“Damn it, Grace, if I’m going to be blamed for something, at least tell me what the hell I did. You told me to go, remember? You told me to chase the story.”

“Would it have made any difference if I’d asked you to stay?”

It hung there, the question. The answer.

She started to get out and he reached for her and pulled her into his arms, a hard hand on her back, one in her hair, his breath sweet and warm. She smelled his familiar scent, a deep male scent of loam and musk, emanating from some private solitary place deep inside. “We’ll get her back,” he said.

There was a moment when they almost kissed, and then the moment passed and he released her and she fled into the hot California air.

Chapter 29

All Hallows’ Eve, 8:47 a.m.

She was crying as she pulled out of the lot and she had to be very careful on the road, trying to find the 405 to take her north. Her shoulders shook silently, but occasionally a great braying sob would escape and she’d clamp her fist in her mouth and bite down hard.

On her shelf in the box in the closet was a yellowed news article, the creases white with age. It didn’t matter; she knew the article cold.

DOCTOR OF THE HEART

Dateline:
San Cristobal Verapaz, Guatemala

by Mac McGuire
AP WIRE SERVICE

She’d been there two weeks performing surgery under the most primitive of circumstances, overwhelmed with the need and the poverty and the sheer numbers lining up for aid, some having walked for days carrying loved ones too ill to be moved, trying in her spare moments to train some of the older orphans who lived in a single room at the clinic.

Tired, and happier than she’d ever been in her life.

Then a bus with a piano incongruously strapped to its roof like a dead horse rumbled into the square and braked to a dusty stop.

It’s a four-hour bus ride from Guatemala City, past roadside stands with paint-blistered signs selling Pepsi and Orange Crush, but a lifetime away for one 27 year-old American pediatric heart surgeon.

The bus had climbed through an explosion of green coffee fields and pine forests. Mist fogged the air; the locals called it
chipichipi
, a pulsing dew that made the bus seem as if it were suspended in a fevered dream.

That’s how it had felt, when she’d seen him.

There was a lake near the clinic on the edge of the village and Grace was wading through reeds, holding her skirt bunched around her hips. It was melting hot and she’d piled her black hair high, not realizing she was being observed as passengers piled out in a torrent of good-natured sweaty shoving. Grace lifted her gauze skirt in two wings, her high fanny cupped. She sank into the lake.

The water bubbled. She rose, smoothing back her hair, and turned. And out he stepped, tall and rumpled blond amid the dark-skinned small Indians, a pack on his shoulder and a hungry gleam in his eye. In that instant, Cristina, the doe-eyed teenage assistant, began screaming in the clinic and Grace ran from the water, dripping wet, and darted into the tin-roofed building.

Dr. Grace Descanso completed a joint residency in pediatrics and thoracic surgery in December.

And celebrated by coming here. A sweat-soaked, mosquito-netted, dilapidated shed, where she’s spending two months working with some of the world’s most needy.

He told her he’d flown into Guatemala City and had climbed onto the first bus that was leaving, not concerned about where it was headed, just happy to be on the road, and she envied his spontaneity, and how he’d always known he’d wanted to be a writer, was a writer, could go anywhere and be anything, reinvent himself at will in a million different ways.

Disappear, if that’s what it took.

And come back to life whenever he wanted.

That’s what she wanted, yearned for, that kind of spontaneity. She’d had to be so controlled her entire life; it was her only defense against the chaos of living with Lottie and trying to protect her younger brother, Andy. And now here was a man, loose, funny, his mind greedy for information, wanting everything, wanting her
.
Two hours into the ride, he’d heard about Sister Mary Clare and the miracle doctor helping her. And yes, he’d added, tilting his head back and narrowing his green eyes. He’d heard she was gorgeous.

Looking almost as young as some of her patients, with expressive intelligence in her brown eyes and glossy black hair to her shoulders, Descanso looked over the makeshift OR with its IV lines and sparkling surgical instruments sterilized in water pumped by hand.

“Come on, don’t make me sound like some saint,” Dr. Descanso said. “Sister Mary Clare’s the one who’s here. I’m just helping out.”

The nun shook her gray head. “I do simple things, test for malaria and TB, teach basic hygiene, but Grace…” She stopped and shook her head again.

Sister Mary Clare runs the basic first aid station here, along with an orphanage for kids whose parents have been killed in the aftermath of a decades-old civil war, still bursting into flame in remote villages far from the watchful eye of organized government. The aging nun sent a request back to her home parish in San Diego for Band-Aids and simple medicines.

And got Grace.

Mac had followed her into the clinic and threaded his way through a waiting room crammed with suffering. They watched him go down the hall toward the sounds of a child screaming, their eyes dark and silent. Nobody spoke.

In the two weeks she’s been here, Dr. Descanso has saved a 30-year-old woman from bleeding to death after the stillbirth of her fourteenth child; repaired a hernia the size of a watermelon in a man bent over from a lifetime of heavy lifting; and helped a five-year-old boy take his first steps after resetting a bone from an old break that had permanently twisted the boy’s ankle so it pointed backward.

The air inside the makeshift OR was hazy in the heat. A mother was holding down a child shivering in shock, her right arm almost severed from an accidental machete wound. The child had been running, the mother was explaining in Potomki, when she tripped and fell, extending her small arms to break the fall. Grace was moving fluidly, washing up over a makeshift sink, listening as Sister stood in jeans and a wimple and translated, coaxing her young assistant Cristina to apply pressure to staunch the bleeding, and rapidly assembling everything she’d need.

Grace glanced up and they locked eyes. Mac looked a little pale. “If you’re going to stand there, help,” she snapped. “Wash up first.”

He was unreliable, he told her that right from the start. Couldn’t be counted on. His work drew him, even as he slid into doctoring that week, working next to her, sleeves rolled up. At night, they wandered streets and she felt a faint rustling of dark suspicion directed at foreigners—especially those who drew blood and comforted children. They were outsiders, and everyone knew it.

It made her afraid, not only for herself, but for him. Afraid for the times he’d disappear, telling her it was best for her if she didn’t know where he’d gone, or whom he was seeing. She’d spotted him once in the town’s only café, hunched over a guttering candle, talking earnestly to a dark-skinned man she didn’t recognize.

There were stories everywhere, and he actively sought them, making plans to join scientists doing DNA testing on the bone shards of
desaparecidos,
plotting a trek through the Cerro Cahui reserve to study endangered wetland Peten crocodiles, and the darkest, most violent story of them all, whispered reports of organs snatched from children and sold on the black market.

But the things he didn’t talk about were balanced by the things he shared, stories she sensed he’d told no one, stories he’d saved up, stories for her.

He’d grown up in the mountains of Colorado in a place called Bergen Park, five miles from Evergreen, and had ridden a bus to school every day of his life until he could finally afford his first rattletrap car. He’d had the perfect childhood, he’d told her, until the day his younger sister fell through the ice in Evergreen Lake and drowned.

And then things had pretty much gone to hell, but he was okay. His dad had left and then come back, and his mother was dazed with grief and lost to him and his brother, but he played football and his dad still came to all his games. His mother, too, both of them sitting together on the cold, windy bench, crowding in on his younger brother as if they were emperor penguins protecting their chick, as the Cubs dashed onto the field to the roaring cheers of the crowd. So. University of Colorado at Boulder and some lost years writing a novel that never went anywhere, a stint embedded in Afghanistan, a graduate degree from Columbia School of Journalism, and no despair, really, except for that thing about his sister.