Keeping Watch (24 page)

“Jim, I would like nothing better than to stay with you, even take you with me, but if I stayed here or you came there, we wouldn't last a month before all kinds of alarm flags went up. As the son of Rachel's sick sister from Houston, you're safe here. If a grown man suddenly appears with a boy who looks nothing like him, people ask questions. Neither of us can afford that. And I think you can see why.”

He saw in Jamie's eyes that the boy did indeed see, the wistful regret and the acceptance.

“Can we at least—” the boy started to say, and then he broke off, startled, to crane his neck upward, searching the sky.

A small plane circled lazily back and forth on the horizon, the distant drone of its engines rising and falling through the still morning air. It was too far away to see its details, but Allen assumed it was a crop duster, surveying the country before it dropped down to spray a field. Jamie, however, seemed about to bolt for cover, or faint dead away. Allen was seized by a weird double vision of himself, both back in Vietnam, and yanking Lisa to safety from the beat of a chopper's blades.

“What's the matter?” Allen grabbed the shoulder of the white-faced, trembling creature cowering against his legs. “Whoa, Jamie, what is it? That's just a crop duster. They use them around here to spray the fields. What's wrong with it?”

Jamie couldn't tear his eyes from the distant object, buzzing in the full blue sky. “It looks . . . it's the same color as Father's plane.”

“How do you know? I can barely tell it's a plane.”

The boy's eyes slitted in concentration, every muscle taut; then as abruptly as it had come, the tension dropped out of him. “No, it's different. The wings, they're, like, stubby.” He stepped away from Allen and shot him a look of embarrassment. “Sorry. I guess talking about him, and then hearing the plane made me think . . . It was one of the last things we did, him and me, the night before Alice picked me up. We went out to the airport to get something he'd forgotten, and he let me go on board and sit behind the wheel while he was talking to some friends. It's a really nice little Cessna. He lets me . . . he used to let me take the controls sometimes, when we were up high. I really wanted to go up that afternoon—I mean, I thought we were going to, since there we were at the airport and all, but Father said he was really busy and that we couldn't. Pissed me off. But anyway, that up there's not his plane.”

“What were you about to say to me?” Allen asked, offering a distraction. “ ‘Can we at least,' you were saying.”

“Oh, nothing. I was just wondering if maybe I could write you a letter sometimes. You know, paper, pen.”

Allen hesitated, torn between the potential for exposure and the boy's obvious need to cling to him, trying to leave his own desires out of the equation. Finally he said, “I'd like that a lot. I think that if Rachel agrees, maybe once or twice a year we could risk your sending me a card.” A boy could never have too many male mentors, Allen told himself, and refused to hear his mind adding,
And a man can never have too many adopted sons.

Back at the farmhouse, Rachel was putting lunch on the table. Jamie responded little to the family's conversation, but Allen thought it was more his habitual shyness than because his rescuer was abandoning him. When the table was cleared, Allen got out the cheap paper and pen he'd brought for the purpose, both bought in Miami, and had Jamie write his runaway letter to his father. Not that the man would be appeased by it—indeed, Allen thought it would make him angrier than the outright theft of the child would—but it was a means of distracting the police, who were sure to be closely involved.

Allen went upstairs to fetch his things, followed by Rachel. While he packed, he told her what Jamie had said on their walk, the boy's startling reaction to the crop duster, his conviction of his father's omnipotence, and his doubts about the summer ahead. Rachel nodded at each piece of information. Allen went on.

“Two more things, and then I'll stop telling you your business. First is, Jim wants to correspond with me. I should have asked you first, I know, but it seemed important to him, so I told him that a card once or twice a year wouldn't be too much of a risk. You'll have to read them to make sure he's not accidentally giving anything away, and then send them through Alice.”

“I shouldn't think that's a problem,” Rachel said. “He's young enough, you'll probably soon fade into the role of some mythic being. A knight errant.”

“In a dented Ford pickup.”

“Of course, when he gets older, he may want to see you, so he can see how much was real and how much he imagined.”

“When he gets older, we won't have to worry so much about his father.”

“What was the other thing?”

“The other . . . ? Oh yeah. I remembered something else that happened on our drive here. Jim spotted a man walking one of those Jack Russell terriers, you know, little white shorthair with brown spots, and he talked about it solidly for the next ten miles. I know you already have a dog, but if you and Pete are ever thinking about getting another, you might look around for one like that.”

“Allen, you're the most softhearted scoundrel I've ever met,” Rachel told him.

“He's a good kid,” he retorted, then undermined it by adding, “basically. Although some of the things he says make me nervous. The glorification of violence has already started, and the equation of power with right. And it concerns me, how quickly he's able to shift off one emotion and seize on another that might be more useful at the moment. Another year of that man's regimen, the boy would've been lost for good.”

“Instead of which, he's been found for good.”

He looked at her placid face and felt a twinge of concern. “Rachel, this is a boy with more problems than three solid meals a day are going to solve.”

“Allen, give me a little credit. We'll give him three solid meals, and along with that, the solid concern of a loving family. He needs to learn trust. After that, self-respect.”

“Just be careful. He's . . .” Allen found that he'd been on the edge of telling her,
He's like a loaded weapon,
and was not sure where that image came from. “He's shut down emotionally, but there's a lot of resentment stored in there. He's had a shitload of trauma and he's in a precarious state. Don't let yourself forget that a kid on the edge can strike out.”

“Allen, remember who you're talking to? I've worked with multiple personalities, written papers on dissociation. I may look like Betty Crocker, but I know what I'm doing.”

“I know. I'm just not sure that what he needs isn't a bit more intensive than you're set up for, here.”

Rachel sat down in the window seat. “Allen, have you ever read Stephen King?”

He was startled into a laugh by the question. “My lord, Rachel, don't tell me that you have?”

“I read everything my kids bring into the house. How else do I know what's going on with them? Well, a couple of years ago Pete Junior had one of King's books, a story about a disease that wipes out most of the population and polarizes the remainder into good and evil. There's this one scene that has stayed with me. I forget the details—something about, the hero has joined up with a woman and an emotionally damaged boy, and they have to siphon some gasoline from an underground tank. The man has the tubing, but he needs one of the others to hold up the heavy lid for him. And he chooses the boy, who to that point has shown not only a general instability but a specific dislike for the hero. The man inserts his fingers under the heavy metal lid, the boy holds it open, and then all three of them become intensely aware that if the boy lets go, the man loses his fingers. The man doesn't snatch his hands back, doesn't ask the woman to come and help, he just looks into the boy's eyes and gets on with the job. It's a wonderful scene, which could only have been written by a parent who knows what it is like to put yourself every day at the whim of a child. Yes, there are kids out there who are beyond the reach of trust; I've met some of them, they're terribly sad and quite terrifying and I wouldn't allow them within shouting distance of my family. Jim isn't one of them, Allen. You got him to us in time.”

Allen gave an involuntary glance at the woman's ten vulnerable fingers, folded together in the lap of her cotton apron. “Just so you keep your eyes open, especially at first,” he said.

“Stop worrying and go live your life, you wonderful man. Give your lady friend my respects.”

Allen jerked around from the bag he was zipping shut. “I never said anything about . . .”

“You didn't need to. We girls can tell.”

“I didn't know Mormons encouraged psychics,” he said, then picked up his bag and hugged her, hard.

At the farmhouse door, Jamie shook Allen's hand in a good-bye, his face calm, his dark eyes unreadable.

Those eyes followed Allen across portions of five states as he meandered his indirect way across the northern part of the country to Seattle, and home.

Chapter 21

On the first Saturday of June, Allen left the camper truck in the airport parking garage, crossed over to the terminal, and caught a shuttle into Seattle. He walked up to the docks a scant five minutes before the boat left for the islands, and found that Ed not only had received Allen's message but was waiting for him in Friday Harbor. Jimmy and Jimi—Buffett and Hendrix—accompanied the
Orca Queen
over the water. Rae must have heard the racket when they were a mile away, because she was on the beach with her hands shading her eyes from the afternoon sun when they rounded the point into the cove; when she saw who was on deck, she flung out her hand to wave, then ran down the path to meet him.

Neither she nor Allen invited Ed to stay for dinner.

That evening, they sat at the end of the point to watch the sun set. Rae leaned her back against Allen; he rested his chin on her shoulder, breathing in her fragrances of lemon, sweat, and sawdust.

“What have you been working on?” he asked her.

“It's a surprise.”

He tightened his arms around her, nipping at her neck with his teeth. “We have ways of making you talk,” he warned.

“A bed,” she told him.

“What, no more mattress on the floor? How can I call myself a hippie if I sleep in a bed?”

“When did you ever call yourself a hippie?”

“You have a point.”

“Are you really finished?” she asked, so abruptly that he knew it had been riding her mind.

“I am. I told Alice that I would think about coming back on what you might call the board of directors, if they had either a board or directors. But I didn't even promise that. I'm afraid you're stuck with me underfoot. How about you? Don't you have to be away this summer?”

“A couple of weeks in July when the book comes out, I'm holding workshops in Pennsylvania and Santa Fe. And then there's Japan the end of August. Have you thought any more about coming with me?”

“I might. I was there in sixty-eight, but I never got out of Tokyo.”

“You'd like it. Of course, you're welcome to come along to the July workshops as well.”

“Massage your aching shoulders at night and comb the glue out of your hair?”

She laughed. “Or you and Ed could do your Baja trip. Would July be too awful there?”

“Hot but not unbearable.”

With the unspoken agreements, Rae nestled her back more fully into his embrace, and his body responded with an amiable discomfort. He nudged his hips forward against her, and she laughed, deep down in her throat, a sound like the purr of a big cat. His arms pulled her to him.
Think of it,
he told himself, not for the first time,
a man has to reach retirement age before he falls in love.

Not the least part of his pleasure was knowing the happiness it brought to Rae as well. The real reason, he suspected, that Rae Newborn, world-renowned woodworker and three-times would-be suicide, was flying around the world so much was to prove to herself that she could. She originally had come to these islands to rebuild her life, following great loss and a catastrophic mental breakdown. She seemed, at last, to be succeeding.

Which was—although Allen would do nothing that might make her suspect it—another reason that he had to get out of the kidnap business. Maybe the most valid reason of all. As Allen saw it, if a man became involved with an emotionally fragile woman, if he allowed her to lean on him even a little, then he had no right to threaten her tenuous stability by putting his own freedom and safety at risk. Rae had lost a husband and child already; losing Allen to a prison sentence might sink her for good. For the present, she needed him more than the children did. He had spent twenty-six years helping others; now, he was here.

They sat wrapped up in each other as the sky flared through its spectrum from fluorescent orange to indigo blue. When the light was nothing but a blue glow in the west, they rose and went back to the house.

For the next two months, Allen set about the creation of a new life. The island, Sanctuary—Folly—was the last piece of solid land before the international border, with neither neighbor nor electricity. In the past, the house that Rae's hands built had hidden Allen from the world's view. Now, there was no longer a reason for him to be invisible.

The week after he came home, Allen made an overnight trip to Seattle to fetch the pickup from the airport parking lot. He cleaned it out, ran it through a car wash, and sold the camper top to one place and the truck itself to a used car dealer. Back at his apartment, he sorted out some clothes and drove out of town a ways to fetch an order of woodworking supplies for Rae. Then he spent the afternoon putting together the documents of Jamie O'Connell's case, making printouts of the boy's original emails and burning CDs of the recordings, ending with a photocopy of the boy's letter to his father and Allen's own report on Jamie's state of mind. He went out to the local mail service and sent one set to Alice, stashing the other in his own storage locker. Back in the quiet apartment that evening, he gloated at the empty fax machine and the dark computer, then picked up the phone.

The number hadn't changed since they were kids, when the prefix had been an abbreviated word instead of three numbers. It rang twice, and then his brother's voice said, “Hello.” It was a man's voice, filled with years and authority. Allen had forgotten; for a moment, he couldn't think of anything to say.

“Who is it?” Jerry asked, half-irritated, half-suspicious: He was, after all, a cop. Allen felt a sudden urge to hang up, lest his brother find out everything he'd been doing all these years, and be faced with the necessity of arresting him. Jerry would do it, too.

“Hi, Jer,” he forced himself to say. “It's Allen.”

Now it was Jerry who went silent. Allen couldn't even imagine what was going through his brother's mind; the last time he'd called home had been four years before, when he'd been in a desolate state after hearing that one of his rescues had gone back to her husband, and that within the week, she and her child were dead. Allen of course had been unable to tell his brother why his mood was so grim, and he knew Jerry suspected he was back on drugs or booze; the conversation had not been a success.

“You probably thought I was dead,” he told the silent receiver.

“I wondered.”

Well, at least Jerry hadn't hung up on him. “No, I'm fine. Really well, in fact. Jerry, I'm thinking of moving back to the islands.” Not, he was careful to say, “coming home”—he couldn't see living with Jerry again, even if he could bear to live under the same roof as their father, and he didn't want to give Jerry the impression that the threat existed.

“When?”

“Soon,” he said. He didn't quite know how to tell Jerry that he had already moved back, that he was, in fact, living with a woman whom Jerry had at one time shown considerable interest in. Take it slowly, give him one idea at a time to chew on. Some things, like Allen's work and the fact that he'd been using the Sanctuary cave under Jerry's nose for years, might have to be passed over entirely. “I have a place in Seattle right now. Any chance you might be coming to the mainland, we could have a beer, or dinner?”

The offer of neutral ground went down well. “I don't have a lot of free time,” Jerry's voice told him. “You know how crazy summer is—but I do have a meeting there on Tuesday. That any good?”

The relief of his brother's acceptance was so huge, it kept him from responding.

Jerry took his silence as something other than relief. “Doesn't have to be then, why don't you give me a call when—”

“Tuesday'd be great. Will you have time for dinner?”

“So long as I catch the last ferry out. Where and when?”

Allen started to say the name of his favorite place, then choked back the words. Better to go somewhere they didn't know him than to risk troubling his brother with the fact that he'd been in the area for years. “How about I ask around, let you know?”

“Fine. Call me back and leave me a message, here or at the office.”

“I'll do that,” Allen said, although something in Jerry's voice told him that his younger brother suspected he wouldn't call. “How's Dad?”

“He's Dad. What can I say?” Long ago, Jerry had gone through a period of resenting mightily the chronic adolescence of their unreconstructed hippie father, his multiple wives (each one younger and blonder than the last), and his benign neglect of his two sons. The old man still went his blithe way, certain that the world loved him, knowing that his many sisters would stand in and do parental duty for him.
John's just hopeless
was the family's oft-repeated verdict, but now Jerry seemed more willing to accept the affection with which the rest of the clan said the phrase, and leave behind the condemnation. In fact, that was what he did now: “He's just hopeless. You want to know where he and Number Six are?”

“Six? What happened to Five?” The woman whom the whole family called Five had been a thirty-year-old barefoot but extremely successful pot grower from northern California, who the last time Allen had heard was supporting Hopeless John in the style, and in the high-grade cannabis, to which he was accustomed.

“Well, she sort of got herself arrested. And before you ask, no, I didn't have anything to do with it. She divorced him so the lawyers couldn't get ahold of what money he has left, and he's now living in a solar-powered underground house in New Mexico. You know, where the cactus grow?”

Ah,
thought Allen.
Cactus; as in Carlos Castaneda; cactus as in peyote buttons.
“He is truly hopeless,” he told his brother. Shared knowledge of the eighty-year-old hippie they called Dad broke the ice, and they exchanged inconsequentials for a while before Jerry said he had to go. Allen hung up, content with the beginning.

There was one more piece of business to take care of before he could leave the city. He booted up his computer and sent a short encrypted email, and later that night went to one of their meeting places for a talk with Alice. She nodded once at his brief explanation of why he could not continue to stick his neck out for her, then nodded again when he told her that
if
he was satisfied that he could be thoroughly insulated legally, he
might
be willing to talk about becoming a scout for the organization, with an eye to expanding their havens overseas. All the ifs and caveats he attached to his agreement seemed to trouble her not at all—assuming that she even heard them—and she merely nodded a third time when he told her that she would have to wait until October to talk further. An outsider would have thought her unconcerned about whether he took the job on or not, but Allen knew her well enough to suspect that she was, very secretly, pleased.

He retreated home to Folly the next day, his own man for the first time in his life.

Dinner with Jerry the following Tuesday was surprisingly warm and easy, and afterward, Allen came back to the islands publicly. His first time out was an effort; walking openly and undisguised down the streets of Friday Harbor after twenty years of avoiding just that, he felt like some underground creature violently jerked into the light of day. He kept wanting to obscure his face with one hand, or buy a hat with a wide brim. The first half-dozen times old friends and schoolmates did a double take, followed by exclamations of astonishment and the inevitable “Where on earth have you
been
?” questions, he had to stifle the urge to break and run. By July, the urge was still there, but was fueled less by panic than by the agonizing boredom of answering the same questions over and over again. Allen Carmichael could be a person again; retirement had a lot going for it.

Before Rae went away for her July workshops, Ed took the
Orca Queen
down to Baja; Allen caught a plane an hour after Rae's left and flew down to meet him, for ten days of warm water, Mexican beer, philosophical musings, abstention from razor blades, and old-time rock and roll. The two men reluctantly pulled anchor and turned north, working their way up a thousand miles of coastline to Seattle, leaving just enough time before Rae's plane got in for Allen to shave his beard, get a haircut, and change his clothes for those that didn't stink of fish and good times.

Life was good. So good, Allen found himself bracing against the return of the dreams: In the past, letting down his guard had opened him up to the green eyes of Flores, the dripping fingers of deRosa, the shiny black visage of the lieutenant from hell. But July merged into August, and the nightmares stayed away. And when he went down one day to the cave under the island, the hideaway where he had stashed maybe a dozen families over the years, the cots and equipment were only mildly reproachful, and the stones held nothing but the sound of water.

The only thing to haunt him was the dark gaze of a twelve-year-old boy in Montana. It was difficult, walking past a phone booth in Friday, not to stop and punch in Rachel Johnson's number, a persistent urge that had never happened to him before. He was even tempted to call Alice and ask if she'd heard anything about the boy. He did not, because she would be alarmed at the sign of attachment, and rightly so: Countertransference was a dangerous thing in the business he had just left.

So he did not call Rachel, and he did not contact Alice; he did not even go onto the Internet to follow San Jose's search for the missing boy. He would cut the cord here as he had all the others, and if the cord did not wish to be cut, well, he would pretend it had been. He had a life to live; with a bit of luck, and no interference from errant knights on Fordback, Jamie would be doing the same.

For two months, Allen worked at constructing his new life. It was an unfamiliar position he found himself in, retooling his mind so that the first thought each morning was of Rae, or fishing, and not new techniques of spiriting an abused woman from her husband, or how to arrange a safe house in one of the many places across the country where they had none.