The Hiding Place (16 page)

“It has crossed my mind, but I haven’t brought it up yet. Tara could move her business for a while, I guess, though I have no right to ask her without having something more than mothering Claire in mind. But I’ve got to admit, she’s much better with the child than I am. Neither of us would like to leave this area—I’m a Coloradan at heart—but a stint to train more tracker dogs would be doing my duty to my country. I just don’t want that to conflict with my duty to my niece.”

“I’ve got two young kids,” Garrett put in, buttering a roll. “The Carolinas make for great living. Families are in and out of Bragg all the time. They stay a few years, leave their house, move back to their home bases—you know what I mean. We could facilitate your finding housing for three instead of two.”

“Tara loves Claire very much, but it would still be a lot to ask.”

“I’ve people who could show her the ropes there, introduce your little girl and Tara to schools, shopping centers,” Garrett went on. “More trail dogs are needed fast, not just the bomb sniffers we’ve had for years. Training them on site in the mountains must have been tough, but we wanted to try it, and you are a mountain man.”

“There was a cost,” Nick said, frowning. “Too damn steep a price. Both KIAs were young, good men.”

“Ambushes are a big part of this war,” Radcliff said. “No one blamed you.”

“
I
blamed me!”

Both men stopped eating. “Frankly,” Radcliffe said, leaning across the table toward Nick and speaking in a low, soothing voice, “that’s one thing I wanted to ascertain—how you felt about that loss. You’re also dealing with family losses. Two family members died when you weren’t there—two comrades when you were right there. Nick, I know you turned down counseling after the debriefing. Is this still affecting your day-to-day? Listen to me. The D-boys don’t blame you. They blame themselves for not giving you more training, just like I bet you’re down on yourself because those dogs weren’t quite ready.”

As if they were a tag team, Garrett jumped in. “You know the D-boys pride themselves on making things happen. And they bravely face the fact that the price of failure can be death. They accept that.”

“Yeah, when
they
screw up, but not when it’s someone else’s failure.”

“Nick,” Radcliffe said, his voice calm but strong, “that was a tough day. All of you were without sleep except for field naps in a kill zone we didn’t know was there. Guys with one hell of a lot more combat training than you came home with PTSD.”

Post-traumatic stress disorder, Nick thought. The scourge of the modern army in terrorist times, a mental disorder Nick refused to accept as his own diagnosis. After all, he wasn’t a soldier. He’d been there to train dogs, not kill the enemy. He’d carried a gun only in self-defense. And he’d come home intact, at least physically.

Realizing he was slumping, Nick forced himself to sit up straight again. For the first time, he felt back in military mode, though he’d always acknowledged the gap between him and the others. “Sir, the dog turned the wrong way, evidently following some cross-scent. I suspected it, but I let him go a little ways with the men following, because I was going to use it as an example of what not to do. And then the RPG hit and all hell broke loose. After that, I did okay, as long as we could see the enemy. But when they were just lurking out there, it really made me nuts.”

“I know. Believe me, I know,” Radcliffe said.

“You were doing your duty, man,” Garrett added. “And that’s all any of us can do. So, can we rely on you to at least consider training more dogs? It’s a chance to train them completely before they’re sent over this time.”

Nick sat back in his chair. He hadn’t touched his salad and here came their server with the steaks. “To tell the truth, though I know you can’t swing it,” he told them, “the dogs would be better off being trained in this area with the mountains, though we’d never approximate the heat or dust—or danger.”

“Here’s my card,” Radcliffe said, as a sixteen-ounce T-bone steak and smothered baked potato were set in front of him. He extended a business card across the table to Nick. “Those phone numbers will get me day or night if you want to talk—hopefully, so you can tell me to set you up at Fort Bragg ASAP. Also,” he went on, as Nick took the card and two other plates with big steaks appeared, “I want you to know that some very powerful people appreciate your work and are willing to almost double your salary if you will move east to train the dogs for us.”

Nick stared at Radcliffe. If he agreed to their offer, he could help compensate Tara for the move, if she’d go.

“Is my benefactor on the Fort Bragg staff or someone in D.C.?” he asked.

“I’m not at liberty to say. Let’s just leave it at this—a powerful and patriotic American knows the best interests of others can be in his best interest, too.”

Tara parked her truck but didn’t get out right away. For some reason, she was extremely reluctant—scared, actually—about getting out and walking up to the house. Yet there was nothing to fear from Jim Manning, the longtime head caretaker of the extensive grounds of the Mountain Manor Clinic and, according to Elin Johansen, now the caretaker of the Lohan estate in Kerr Gulch. Tara wasn’t sure why she didn’t just park in front of his house, but she had the strangest feeling she was being watched, and not just at home. If someone was following her car, she didn’t want to get anyone else, like Jim, in trouble.

She tried to throw off the déjà vu feeling of unease that clung to her like a wet, cold sheet. She was relieved that Claire had been happy to stay at her friend Charlee’s house after school and that Charlee’s mom, Heather, had been such a good friend. Nick had phoned Tara before his business lunch, but not since. If he got home before her, he could read the note she’d left on Beamer’s collar and go get Claire. All that planning felt as if they were parents trying to keep up with their child’s schedule. She was going to feel doubly devastated when he took Claire and left.

She finally convinced herself to approach Jim’s house. After all, he’d been kind and considerate when she was recovering at the clinic. He’d made certain that nearby snowy paths were cleared for her first forays outside on a walker and then a cane; he’d given her little nature talks to get her brain cells working again. And there were the early purple columbines that had appeared at her cabin door from time to time. Jim was about sixty, but had a boyish face. A childhood accident of some sort had given him a permanent limp, but he got around on a golf cart to oversee the planting, weeding, raking and cutting in the woodsy atmosphere of the clinic. He’d never married—he was married to his work of taming the wilds, Veronica had once said.

Claire hoped he was home. She recalled he went to work at the clinic at first light. Just after lunch he usually went home to tend his own yard, then returned to work until sunset. She hoped she was hitting his schedule about right. As she walked to his driveway, then up toward the small stone house, she saw his truck was there.

His small yard took her breath away, for it was planted with mountain wildflowers of every kind: bluebonnets and lupine, Aspen daisies, and an array of others she couldn’t name. The place reminded her that Veronica once said Jim created paintings like those by Claude Monet, but alive and “fraught with fragrance.”

Tara didn’t even have to knock. As she lifted her fist, the door opened as if by magic.

“Ms. Kinsale, what a surprise!” Jim extended his hand for a hearty shake. His leathery face crinkled into a web of lines as he smiled, showing uneven teeth. “Do you have something for me to take Mrs. Lohan? She’s back at the clinic and restricted,” he added, lowering his voice as if someone would hear.

“Actually, I wanted to ask you something else. I heard she’s been readmitted. Have you seen her?”

“No, ma’am, but then, I didn’t see hide nor hair of you either, for months. If you want me to landscape something, the Lohans got me pretty booked up. Been loyal to them for years, and they treat me great. Now, where’s my manners? Come on inside. Got a few minutes till I head back. You know me, set in my ways.”

Tara stepped inside a tiny, flagstone foyer. The living-dining area was filled with old furniture and flowers, crocks of them. She could see, through a double sliding glass door, that the backyard fell steeply away.

“Want to look out back?” he asked her and led the way.

His back deck was on tall stilts above rock gardens and a profusion of flowers running riot in what she’d call an English garden. It was so late in the growing season that most of them looked leggy. He walked her down the stairs. Bright bushes with flame-red leaves grew under and around the deck.

“They get good morning sun here,” he told her.

“It’s beautiful, Jim, all of it. You certainly have the touch. How kind you were to me when I was recovering. That moved me deeply.”

“You had a hard time of it, in more ways than one,” he said, not looking at her but off into the distance, down the steep spill of flowers to the road below. “Glad to help. Glad to help any Lohan.”

“Which I’m not any longer, but you could help me now. I’m going to level with you about why I’m here. Can I ask you first if you actually saw me anytime during my coma, from late May of 2004 through April of 2005?”

“Saw you?” he said, shifting from one foot to the other. “Naw, I’m not medical staff.”

“I realize that, but you’re everywhere on the clinic grounds. A glimpse through a window, an overheard conversation…Jim, I know this might sound a bit off the wall, but a doctor has informed me I was pregnant when I began my coma—that I must have had a baby while I was comatose. Did you hear or see anything that might make you think that could be true?”

Wide-eyed, he looked at her before his gaze darted away again. He wiped his palms on his jeans. “Word of that would have gotten out for sure,” he said, shaking his head. “Can’t be.”

“So you never even caught a glimpse of me?”

“Only that night late in February in all the snow, when you got out.”

“I got out? Out to where? It was early April before I really woke up from the coma. Are you sure it was February?”

“You must have come to for a while, ’cause I found you in at least four feet of snow just outside the chapel. See, Mrs. Lohan was inside playing the organ real loud. She came out with Elin Johansen. The three of us got you back to your cabin, but mostly I carried you.”

“And I—I wasn’t extremely pregnant, because you would have known.”

“I may be a lifelong bachelor, ma’am, but I would have known that. You were in just a nightgown and a robe, not even shoes. You left some bloody tracks in the snow. Your feet and legs were scratched and cut from walking through bushes or thorns, but it could have been much worse. You could have lost some toes to frostbite or froze to death.”

Tara shuddered, reaching in the dark for those memories. Icy cold—she felt icy cold right now. She stared at the flame bushes all around them, seeing instead her crimson blood in the snow. “Did I say anything?”

“I think you said you were lost. Mumbling, not making much sense. It was a while ago, but I think you said something about looking for the hiding place.”

“Hiding place? They never told me I’d been out like that,” she whispered, leaning back against the tall post that held up the deck. Her legs were still shaking. She was trying so hard to remember that her head hurt. “And I have no memory of that, even if I was walking and talking. No wonder they sedated me and weaned me off meds slowly after that. Jim, is there anything else you can tell me about any of this? Maybe an exact date?”

“Not rightly sure,” he muttered, looking down the hill. “Only that it was in the dead of winter.”

When Nick called Tara about his job offer, that further upset her, because he said they were really pushing him to accept. Tara phoned Claire, who was happily watching CDs with Charlee at her house, and told her she was going to stop to see an old friend, though that was a bit of a lie. Her former sister-in-law, Thane Lohan’s wife, Susanne, had never been much of a friend. The woman had seen her as competition for the affection and fortune of Jordan and Veronica Lohan. If the family knew that she had been pregnant and lost the child, wouldn’t Susanne want to rub it in?

Just as Tara and Laird used to, Thane’s family lived only a few blocks from the senior Lohans. Tara had called Susanne to ask if she could pop by to see the children, whom she and Thane were always willing to show off, their winning cards in the game of Lohan dynasty poker. At first, Susanne declined Tara’s offer to visit, saying that the children were at lessons of various kinds after school. She acquiesced when Tara said she’d like to come over anyway. Maybe she was testing Tara or wanted to surprise her, because Tara was certain she’d heard kids’ voices in the background. Maybe Susanne had meant they were going to their lessons, but, as Tara remembered it, mother hen Susanne always took great pride in personally delivering the children to their various destinations, including plenty of grandparent visits.

Thane Lohan’s house was only slightly larger than the house Tara had once shared with Laird. Of timber and stone, it boasted a huge rec room, a gourmet kitchen overlooking a great room and dining hall and an indoor pool pavilion. As she got out of her truck, she recalled the driveway had a snow-melt system.

Looking as striking as ever in beige linen cropped pants and a jade silk shirt, Susanne greeted her at the door with an air kiss and something approaching an air hug. “It’s so good to see you, Tara! Isn’t it sad about Mother?”

“I can’t believe she got back on anything like that after her first struggle. Was it alcohol or sedatives?”

“Big, bad Vicodin again. Thane couldn’t believe it. Come on in, then. Sorry the children aren’t here.”

As ever, walking in, they passed the two-story wall of numerous, ornately framed color photos of Lawrence, Lacey and Lindsey, all under ten years of age, formally posed, nothing casual or natural looking. Tara noted that one big picture had been taken off the wall. Its hook had been removed, but the slight discoloration on the woven wallpaper around it suggested where it had hung. Tara recalled that spot had always held the annual Lohan three-generation photo. She wondered if it had been taken down so she didn’t have to see Laird in it without her. No, that would be too thoughtful for Susanne. She’d be more likely to have it on the front door.