Foundation (22 page)

“
They know her all right. ‘She’s so fine a girl,’ that’s their exact words. According to them, Alveraz would never take the car without their consent. Either they’re right or she has bamboozled them nicely.”

Trumaine shook his head and swore, it was another miss.

“
What about you?” asked Firrell, solicitous.

Trumaine grunted, still half mad with him.

“
Benedict and I had a long chat. I’m happy to know you like to keep him well informed about my own business,” he said nastily.

Firrell didn’t like the remark too well.

“
Hell, you sore at me for that? What’s left since they shut down Credence for good? Twenty hours now? We’re getting nowhere, Chris. You know why you found me already up? It wasn’t you who rolled me out of my bed, the guys at the
TSA
did. They call me about every two hours now. Day, night—it’s all the same for them. They called me half an hour ago. Guess what? They have just threatened to give this number—my personal number—to all the people who have relatives aboard the Hibiscus. You can just imagine!”

He took a deep breath to let his arterial pressure set. “I’m damn sorry if I told Benedict about Maia, Chris. I’m friends with you and everything, but I’ll do anything if it helps you or him get an inch closer to catch the cursed mole.” He nodded to himself—there, he had said it. He looked sullen and he was.

“
All right, Grant. All right ...”

“
What are you going to do now?”

“
Why, follow Benedict’s infallible plan. I’m going in the chamber again and then I’ll go in again, and then again. I don’t know what the hell he thinks I’m going to find, but I’ll do it—I’ll go in.”

“
At least you get some sleep,” said Firrell with one last yawn.

Trumaine groaned and disconnected him. He stared at the monitor as the image dissolved again to obsidian-black.

Trumaine marched toward the turnstiles with a sort of deep revulsion. He didn’t know what it was like to be in the real feed, he didn’t want to know and probably he would never know. But there was one thing he knew: going in and out of the empty feed was driving him crazy. He hated every moment he spent in the chamber and if he had realized before that catching the crawler meant digging deep into his best forgotten past, he would have never accepted Firrell’s offer in the first place.

As he strode on, he watched the turnstiles open with a creepy hiss every time a believer approached. They looked like the gaping jaws of Hades, he thought.

Trumaine wondered what was in store for him next; what point of his past the feed would have disclosed for him, what hardly healed wound would hurt and bleed again ...

As he stood in front of the plastic slab that was the turnstile door, it slid open. It took him a good dose of will to walk past it. A few steps more, and he was on the other side.

“
I thought I just saw you come out, Detective,” said a sneering voice to his right.

It was the gate guard, of course. He had approached Trumaine from the side, welcoming him with a wink.

“
Caron, my old friend,” said the detective.

But the man didn’t get it.

Trumaine slunk away with the sneer of the guard in his pocket.

At last, he arrived at his couch, the much dreaded couch
144
. It would always be there, for him—what a comfortable thought.

He sat then, with a scowl, he lay down.

The black one-eyed snake of metal rose from the abyss of the chamber and bit into the aluminum flesh of the couch, lifting it. It carried it back to the blackness where it had come from, and Trumaine rode with it.

Chapter Sixteen

The bedroom was silent.

It was awash with the light that came in through the blinds ajar of a French window.

Discarded clothes—trousers, socks and a couple of shirts—lay scattered between a dresser and the wooden floor. A man slept in the unmade bed; he had a long stubble growing on his chin and on his hollowed cheeks, and his hair looked oily and unkempt.

Soft, approaching footsteps resounded in the room.

A woman’s hand reached out to the man’s shoulder, awakening him.

Trumaine wiped the drowsiness from his face with the palm of his hand, then acknowledged Starshanna with a nod.

“
You want some coffee?” she asked.

Without saying anything, he took the cup she offered him and drank some, lost in thought.

She sat next to him, studying him for a while.

“
Always that dream?”

Trumaine nodded his head.

“
Stop torturing yourself, Chris. It wasn’t your fault,” she said in a whisper.

As if Trumaine had just heard the familiar voice of someone he once knew, he peered up from behind the wall he had raised against the world.

“
No?” he asked.

“
No ...”

Trumaine let out a raucous sound that could either be a chuckle or a scoff and twisted his lips in a crooked, embittered smile.

“
I’m a cop. I’m supposed to have a heightened sense of danger. How couldn’t I see it coming? I should have forbidden her to go, it wasn’t the day to take a swim.”

Starshanna sighed. For the millionth time that month, she started all over again.

“
Maia has taken from both of us, she was stubborn and a little crazy. Do you think she would have listened to you? She wouldn’t.”

“
I should have drained the channel, filled it with dirt.” Trumaine was talking to himself more than to Starshanna.

“
She would have found another way to go out after the dolphin.”

Starshanna put her hand over Trumaine’s arm, as if the physical contact could bridge the gap that had suddenly opened between them.

“
Then I should have killed him. Allowing that beast around here was the worst idea I’ve ever had.”

Starshanna smiled sadly. She knew he didn’t really mean it, she knew he loved the dolphin and what it represented at least as much as Maia did.

“
She was born to the water, it was her life. You could never take it away from her, it would have killed her all the same.”

Trumaine took his head in his hands, as if he didn’t want to listen to Starshanna’s words.

“
She knew when it was risky; all the same, she decided to push it to the limit. Isn’t that what everybody, at some point in their life, does? See if they can take that one little step just a bit further? See if they can succeed?”

“
For Christ’s sake, Shanna ... she was only twelve.”

“
She’s always been precocious. Maybe it’s the water she swam in that made her that way, or being with Arthur, I don’t know. But you must accept it—it was just a horrible accident.”

There was a moment of silence.

Trumaine shook his head in his hands. Again, Starshanna reached out for him, trying to comfort him but, this time, Trumaine reacted to the touch as if her hand had bitten him—he stood with a snort and left the bedroom.

She watched him go, anguished and pained.

Starshanna had listened to the horrible news of Maia’s death with shock. At first, she couldn’t believe it then, after a long while, she had told herself that Maia was just like any other girl and that she wasn’t immune to death—accidents could happen.

She had taken the next shuttle bound to Earth and had joined Trumaine for the funeral rites. She had stayed on for a couple of months. At the beginning, Maia’s death seemed to have drawn them together then, bit by bit, a wall had started to grow between them and never stopped. Soon, Trumaine didn’t even acknowledge his wife anymore. In his eyes, she had turned from the woman he loved to just another object to be found in the house, like a chair, the bed, the blinds of the French windows.

She never held him responsible for what had happened, never ever blamed him once for that; she knew it all came down to an unfortunate accident. It could have happened to anybody: only, this time, fate had chosen them.

While Starshanna, after a time of perfectly understandable grieving, was more prone to accept Maia’s death and to move on eventually, Trumaine couldn’t.

He kept going over it in his mind, thinking and rummaging about that cursed day. His rational mind could only think of the things he ought to have done—but didn’t—to save her. It kept firing accusations at him: if he was more vigil, if he had watched over her more carefully, if he had really been the father Maia deserved.

Trumaine thought he had come to a point in his life where chance had no place; everything could be planned and decided beforehand, and reality would have submitted docilely.

Discovering that he had been wrong all the time hurt badly and he couldn’t come to terms with it.

From the deckchair in the patio where he sat, trying to run away from Starshanna’s forgiveness and love, his thoughts drifted away once again. He could never forget how many times he and Starshanna had wondered about what Maia would have been when she had grown into an adult. Well, she never did.

“
Life is a beautiful dream.
” Wasn’t that what Starshanna used to tell him?

Trumaine wondered what was left of that dream.

It was still the main bedroom. Even more clothes had piled up on the dresser, the bed, and on the floor—they were all Trumaine’s.

When Starshanna had picked them up, trying to put some order in the room, Trumaine had shouted at her, stopping her and forbidding her to touch them ever again. He didn’t need order, he told her; order had been the misplaced trust of his whole life, order had betrayed him. He didn’t need to depend on order anymore from now on ...

A designer suitcase lay open on the bed, now.

A woman’s shirt flew into it, followed by a sweater, a pair of trousers, a dress—

Starshanna wiped away the tears falling from her eyes as she kept packing her things.

Trumaine poked his head through the door, leaning against it, painfully aware that something between them had finally broken.

“
Going already? I thought you had another week.”

“
What’s the point of staying?”

“
Look, I’m sorry ... I—”

She turned suddenly, her eyes flushed. “No. I’m leaving,” she said.

He straightened up. “Is it all finished, then?”

She stopped for a moment, burying her eyes in Trumaine’s.

“
It’s up to you. I still love you but, right now, there’s no place inside you for anything else that isn’t pain and sorrow and regret. You have no place for me, Chris.”

She stifled the mounting sobs and kept on packing.

“
What am I gonna do, Star?”

“
Forget the past, Chris. Live in the present, let go of your guilt. Tell me that you will and I’ll come back, I promise.”

That was one last chance she was offering him; if only he had apologized, if only he had admitted to her he had been foolish. It wasn’t his fault, it had been an accident ...

But he didn’t say anything.

Starshanna nodded her head—so, that was it. She steadied herself, gathered her luggage, then pecked him on the cheek and shuffled out of the room.

Trumaine listened to her steps as she walked into the living room, as she opened the entrance door and slammed it behind her. He listened to the sudden buzz of an electric engine, as it started and grew, bringing Starshanna away from the house.