A Darker Place (50 page)

She sat on her narrow bed with the covers pulled up to her chest, and she wrote. It began as a straightforward report like any of those she had submitted to Glen in the past, detailed and analytical, complete with maps and diagrams, but within a page or two it began to get away from her. Speculations began to intrude: Her personal reactions became a necessary part of the explanations. There was, in truth, very little about this case that was straightforward, and the attempt to reduce it to analysis
and point out the logical progress of her thoughts only served to make the lack of logic more obvious and her own position more tenuous, even desperate. As she wrote, she was aware of how personal she was becoming, how she was revealing not her competence as a trained investigator, but her feelings—claustrophobia and grinding anxiety, the upwelling of fears and memories, the sensation of impotence.
(What is the female equivalent of impotence, Glen?
she found herself writing.
Hysteria? Well, I am both impotent and hysterical.)
What she wrote was like nothing she had ever given Glen before, presenting details of her self and her life that she had never given anyone, not since Aaron had died, but here she was, her hand shaping letters that described just what Abby’s face had looked like in death and how that vision kept intruding itself on her current choices and decisions. Even while she wrote, she was appalled at the intimacy of the document, fully aware that Glen would have no choice but to set it before countless others, but unable to stop herself from writing. The sensation of open communication was a lifeline to sanity, the words a catharsis that reached down to her bones. She told herself that she would destroy it when she finished, that she could write a second, expurgated version for Glen, but she knew she would not.

Lights-out came and an officious passerby tapped at her door, so she turned out her lamp and opened the curtains to write by the light of the compound floodlights. She wrote until she had it all down, up to the point of what she planned to do next, and as she was thinking about that she fell asleep.

She woke some hours later, her diary jabbing her cheek and the floodlight shining in her eyes. Her bladder was also protesting at the number of cups of tea she had drunk, so she removed the chair from under the doorknob
and went down the hall to use the toilet and brush her teeth. When she got back to her room, she saw the diary lying openly on the pillow, and she closed the door and cautiously tore out the incriminating pages. The only place she could think to hide them was inside the sole of her Chinese slippers; she folded the pages over and over and pushed the long rectangle in between the cloth lining and the sole. Not ideal, but as a temporary hiding place, as good as she could do.

She put her head back onto the pillow, and was asleep.

Ana’s day began two hours later, long before the birds had begun their dawn chorus, when her bedroom door was flung open and a man’s voice began talking at her. She went from deep sleep to heart-pounding panic in a split second, whirling around in the tangling covers and bruising her elbow on the wall before she was upright and blinking at the door. It was Jonas.

“What?” she croaked.

“What is wrong with you? I said I’m not going to need you during the day, I’m working on some calculations, but I may want you tonight. Be available. Listen for my call. You know how to get there?”

She sat up more fully, scratched her scalp to encourage brain activity, and said, her sarcasm half swallowed up by a yawn, “I think I can find it again, Jonas.”

He stepped back and was gone. After a minute she climbed out of bed and closed the door. The sarcasm that she had let slip was not a good sign, but she was, after all, fast asleep, and it was annoying to be credited with barely enough brains to walk downstairs to the Bear’s den.

Her eyes went to the diary on the bedside table. After a moment, she took it up and turned to a clean page.

She tore out the page and folded it up, and was beginning to slip it into the shoe, when she paused to run a hand over the rubbery skin of her face, then smoothed out the page and took up her pen again.

She smiled as she folded the page into the slipper. As she set off in the direction of the early-morning coffeepot, she detoured to take her revenge on Jonas’s followers by yanking the pull chain on the antique and incredibly noisy toilet.

She spent the morning happily and mindlessly scrubbing floors, and after lunch joined Jason and two other American students for a brief but productive meeting with Dov and one of the other teachers. Jason, blasé as he had been, found it difficult to take his eyes off the lumpy sack she had brought into the room.

After the meeting they gathered up Dulcie from the kindergarten room (where she sat listening carefully to a wildly chattering friend), and Ana led them out through the kitchen and across the yard to a flat, paved area that was used to park the farm tractor during the rainy season. She had spent the hour before breakfast sweeping away the dirt and hanging up a circle she wove from a roll of baling wire. Jason stood with his hands on his hips, puzzling out the odd markings, and when he turned and Ana bounced the ball off the rough concrete and into his hands, a look of pure, uncontained pleasure lit up his face. He dribbled the ball a few times to get the feel of the surface, then circled around, took three fast steps, and shot it neatly through the lopsided hoop.

“I thought they didn’t play basketball here,” he said.

“Does that look like a regulation hoop? They don’t—well, not many of them. I brought the ball with me.”

That stopped him short. “You brought the ball in your—oh. Duh. You let the air out first.”

“I thought I was going to have to blow it up with my mouth like a balloon. Sara found me an old pump in the tool shed.”

So she and Jason and little Dulcie played basketball, undisturbed and undistracted by the adults and children who came to investigate the odd noises. She blocked him, he dodged her, and Dulcie ran after them both, shrieking in joy. Twice Jason lifted his sister up so she could dunk the ball down through the makeshift and increasingly asymmetrical hoop. The third time Dulcie dunked it, the hoop came down. Dulcie felt terrible, but Jason only laughed.

Ana retrieved the mashed hoop. “I think this design needs some work,” she said, putting it into the sack with the ball. “But now, I want to take you two for a walk.”

She took a smaller sack out of the lumpy one, threaded the handles up over her shoulder, plunked obedient hats on all three heads, and led the two children down the road to the east of the house. The sparkling air was rich with the fragrances of mint (from Dulcie, whose class had worked in the herb garden) and roses, lavender and cut grass, and the clean smell of sweat from the boy at her side.

The abbey was not quite as impressive when approached from the direction of cultivated land, but it was still a place of calm loveliness, even to a six-year-old girl and a fourteen-year-old boy.

“It used to be a church,” she told them. “Four hundred years ago it was part of a monastery; you can see the outline of the walls. That lumpy ground over there was probably the monastery itself, where the monks lived and worked.”

They walked up and down, investigating the vague shapes beneath the turf, and then went into the space between the abbey walls and up to where the altar stone peeped out of the grass. There she laid out her picnic of cheese sandwiches and juice and three large and somewhat travel-worn cellophane-wrapped chocolate chip cookies that she had bought at the airport in Phoenix. She gave them each a packet of broken pieces, keeping for herself the one that had been completely pulverized.

They ate their open-air meal, and after they had finished she lay back on her elbows, watching surreptitiously as the two children explored the crumbling walls and ran their fingers over the time-softened carvings. It was a new sensation for Jason to be valued, she decided, first by Steven and now by Jonas. The approval of the two male authority figures and the complete change in setting had continued to work their magic on him. He looked younger and more nearly content than she had seen him, and it was like a knife in her heart to know that if she had anything to say in the matter, it would not last. Jonas would be revealed as a dangerous lunatic, Deirdre would go back home with her parents, Steven’s school would be smashed, and these two children, who in a few short weeks had taken control of her thoughts and her affections, would be farmed out again to the chance protection of foster homes.

And all that only if she was very lucky.

The sun grew low in the sky, and eventually she stirred and began to gather up the papers and bread crusts. “Thank you,” she told them. “I can’t remember when I had a nicer afternoon.”

“Thanks for the basketball,” Jason said. “That was cool.”

“Even though I broke the hoop,” said Dulcie.

“It can be fixed,” Ana said.

On the way back to the house Dulcie alternately
lagged behind and raced ahead. On one of these surges Ana drew a breath and let it out slowly.

“Jason,” she said, “there’s a couple of things I need you to know and then forget unless you need them. And I have to ask you not to say anything about either of them to anyone, not for, oh, maybe two or three months. It is extremely important to me that you particularly not tell Jonas what I’m about to say. I realize this isn’t fair to you, keeping a secret from someone like that, but if he or Steven found out, I could be in big trouble. I’m asking you to trust me. Will you?”

After a while he said, “Okay.”

“Promise?”

“I said I would,” he said testily.

“Thank you. Two things. If anything happens here, if there’s a raid or someone appears with a gun or we have an earthquake—no, come to think of it, they don’t have earthquakes in England. Anything major and confusing anyway, I want you to promise me you’ll grab Dulcie and get her away from the house. Take her to the abbey, or the woods. Don’t try to find me or Jonas or your friend Deirdre or anyone, just grab Dulcie and run.”

“What’s the other thing?”

She again took a deep breath and let it out. “I have a friend, an old friend, who works for the FBI. Yes I know, it seems unlikely, doesn’t it? Anyway, his name is Glen McCarthy. If you’re ever in real need of a friend yourself—years from now, even—get in touch with Glen. He owes me big. Mention my name and he’ll help you.”

Jason studied the trees for a minute. “I thought you were a friend.”

“I am, of course I am. But things happen, and I’m sometimes hard to find. With Glen, every small town in the United States has an FBI branch office, practically, and a lot of other places as well, like London in this
country. And who knows,” she added under her breath, “you might even like him.”

“Glen McCarthy and take Dulcie into the woods. And I’ll forget them both unless the roof falls in.”

“Thank you, Jason.” She stopped and turned to study his young-old face, the hawk nose and dark eyes and shorn hair. She noticed suddenly to her surprise that his was not actually a handsome face, just compelling. She reached up impulsively and rested her palm for a moment on his cheek. “I wish—” She stopped, and looked down past the crook of her elbow to see Dulcie gazing up at her.

“What are you wishing, Ana?”

Ana removed her hand and bent down to look Dulcie in the face. “I was wishing that I could take you both right this minute to an ice cream parlor I know in Portland, Oregon, where they make their own ice cream and serve it in giant bowls with paper umbrellas on top, and we’d order pizza ice cream for dinner and green pea sherbet for our vegetables and chocolate pistachio cream pie ice cream for dessert.”

Dulcie giggled.
“Pizza
ice cream? Yuck.”

“Where’s your sense of adventure?” Ana chided. “Sancho Panza would eat pizza ice cream. Even Don Quixote might.”

As they walked back to the house through the shimmering afternoon, Ana allowed herself to open up to the pleasure of their companionship and to treasure the small, glittering gift of their affection. We do not deserve to come to this thy table, Lord, she thought. The tender mercy of communion with these two may have been undeserved, fragile, and based entirely on her own deception, but it was nonetheless real, and none the less warming.

•     •     •

The sensation of comfort did not survive three steps beyond the kitchen door. The entire household appeared to be gathered there, all of them shouting at one another. Ana stopped abruptly and escorted her two countrymen back outside.