Dark Rivers of the Heart (59 page)

Rocky remained with Ellie after Spencer went forward to oversee the crew again. She was too intensely focused on learning as much as she could about Mama’s capabilities to be able to pet the pooch or even talk at him a little. His unrewarded company seemed to be a touching and welcome indication that he had come to trust and approve of her.

She might as well have smashed the VDT and spent the time giving the dog a good scratch behind the ears, because before she was able to accomplish anything, the data on the video display vanished and was replaced by a blue field. A question flashed at her in red letters against the blue:
WHO GOES THERE
?

This development was no surprise. She had expected to be cut off long before she could do any damage to Mama. The system was designed with elaborate redundancies, protections against hacker penetrations, and virus vaccines. Finding a route into Mama’s deep program-management level, where major destruction could be wrought, would require not merely hours of diligent probing but days. Ellie had been fortunate to have the time necessary to take out Earthguard, for she could never have achieved such total control of the satellite without Mama’s assistance. To attempt not merely to use Mama but to bloody her nose had been overreaching. Nevertheless, doomed as the effort was, Ellie had been obliged to try.

When she had no answer for the red-letter question, the screen went blank and changed from blue to gray. It looked dead. She knew there was no point in trying to reacquire Mama.

She unplugged the computer, put it in the aisle beside her seat, and reached for the dog. He wiggled to her, lashing his tail. As she bent forward to pet him, she noticed a manila envelope on the deck, half under her seat.

After petting and scratching the pooch for a minute or two, Ellie retrieved the envelope from under the seat. It contained four photographs.

She recognized Spencer in spite of how very young he was in the snapshots. Although the man was visible in the boy, he had lost more than youth since the days when those pictures had been taken. More than innocence. More than the effervescent spirit that seemed evident in the smile and body language of the child. Life also had stolen an ineffable quality from him, and the loss was no less apparent for being inexpressible.

Ellie studied the woman’s face in the two pictures that showed her with Spencer, and was convinced that they were mother and son. If appearances didn’t deceive—and in this instance she sensed that they did not—Spencer’s mother had been gentle, kind, soft-spoken, with a girlish sense of fun.

In a third photo, the mother was younger than in the two with Spencer, perhaps twenty, standing alone in front of a tree laden with white flowers. She appeared to be radiantly innocent, not naive but unspoiled and without cynicism. Maybe Ellie was reading too much into a photo, but she perceived in Spencer’s mother a vulnerability so poignant that suddenly tears welled in her eyes.

Squinting, biting her lower lip, determined not to weep, she was at last forced to wipe her eyes with the heel of her hand. She wasn’t moved solely by Spencer’s loss. Staring at the woman in the summer dress, she thought of her own mother, taken from her so brutally.

Ellie stood on the shore of a warm sea of memories, but she couldn’t bathe in the comfort of them. Every wave of recollection, regardless of how innocent it seemed, broke on the same dark beach. Her mother’s face, in every recaptured moment of the past, was as it had been in death: bloodied, bullet-shattered, with a fixed gaze so full of horror that it seemed as if, at the penultimate moment, the dear woman had glimpsed what lay beyond this world and had seen only a cold, vast emptiness.

Shivering, Ellie turned her eyes away from the snapshot to the starboard porthole beside her seat. The blue sky was as forbidding as an icy sea, and close beneath the low-flying craft passed a meaningless blur of rock, vegetation, and human endeavor.

When she was certain that she was in control of her emotions, Ellie looked again at the woman in the summer dress—and then at the final of the four photographs. She had noted aspects of the mother in the son, but she saw a much greater resemblance between Spencer and the shadow-shrouded man in the fourth picture. She knew this had to be his father, even though she didn’t recognize the infamous artist.

The resemblance, however, was limited to the dark hair, darker eyes, the shape of the chin, and a few other features. In Spencer’s face, there was none of the arrogance and potential for cruelty that made his father appear to be so cold and forbidding.

Or perhaps she saw those things in Steven Ackblom only because she knew that she was gazing at a monster. If she had come upon the photo without reason to suspect who the man was—or if she had met him in life, at a party or on the street—she might have seen nothing about him that made him more ominous than Spencer or other men.

Ellie was immediately sorry that such a thought had occurred to her, for it encouraged her to wonder if the kind, good man she saw in Spencer was an illusion or, at best, only part of the truth. She realized, somewhat to her surprise, that she did not want to doubt Spencer Grant. Instead, she was eager to believe in him, as she had not believed in anything or anyone for a long time.

If I was blind, if I’d never seen your face, I already know you well enough that you could still break my heart.

Those words had been so sincere, such an uncalculated revelation of his feelings and his vulnerability, that she had been left briefly speechless. Yet she hadn’t possessed the courage to give him any reason to believe that she might be capable of reciprocating his feelings for her.

Danny had been dead only fourteen months, and that was, by her standards, far too short a time to grieve. To touch another man this soon, to care, to love—that seemed to be a betrayal of the man whom she had
first
loved and whom she would still love, to the exclusion of all others, were he alive.

On the other hand, fourteen months of loneliness was, by any measure, an eternity.

To be honest with herself, she had to admit that her reticence sprang from more than a concern about the propriety or impropriety of a fourteen-month period of mourning. As fine and loving as Danny had been, he never would have found it possible to bare his heart as directly or as completely as Spencer had done repeatedly since she’d driven him out of that dry wash in the desert. Danny had not been unromantic, but he had expressed his feelings less directly, with thoughtful gifts and kindnesses, rather than with words, as if to say “I love you” would have been to cast a curse upon their relationship. She was unaccustomed to the rough poetry of a man like Spencer, when he spoke from his heart, and she was not sure what she thought of it.

That was a lie. She liked it. More than liked it. In her hardened heart, she was surprised to find a tender place that wasn’t merely responsive to Spencer’s forthright expressions of love but that longed for more. That longing was like the profound thirst of a desert traveler, and she now realized it was a thirst that had been in need of slaking all her life.

She was reluctant to respond to Spencer not primarily because she might have grieved too short a time for Danny but because she sensed that the first love of her life might eventually prove not to be the greatest. Finding the capacity to love again seemed like a betrayal of Danny. But it was far worse—cruel rejection—to love another
more
than she had loved her murdered husband.

Perhaps that would never happen. If she opened herself to this still mysterious man, perhaps she would ultimately discover that the room he occupied in her heart would never be as large or warm as the one in which Danny had lived and would always live.

In carrying her loyalty to Danny’s memory so far, she supposed that she was allowing honest sentiment to degenerate into a sugary pudding of sentimentality. Surely no one was born to love but once and never again, even if fate carried that first love to an early grave. If creation operated on rules that stern, God had built a cold, bleak universe. Surely love—and all emotions—were in one regard like muscles: growing stronger with exercise, withering when not used. Loving Danny might have given her the emotional strength, in the wake of his passing, to love Spencer more.

And to be fair to Danny, he had been raised by a soulless father—and a brittle, socialite mother—in whose icy embrace he’d learned to be self-contained and guarded. He had given her all that he could give, and she had been fortunate and happy in his arms. So happy, in fact, that suddenly she could no longer imagine going through the rest of her life without seeking, from someone else, the gift that Danny had been the first to give her.

How many women had ever affected a man so strongly that he had, after one evening of conversation, given up a comfortable existence and put his life in extreme jeopardy to be with her? She was more than merely mystified and flattered by Spencer’s commitment. She felt special, foolish, girlish, reckless. She was reluctantly enchanted.

Frowning, she studied Steven Ackblom’s photograph again.

She knew that Spencer’s commitment to her—and all that he had done to find her—might be seen as less the result of love than of obsession. In the son of a savage serial killer, any sign of obsession might reasonably be viewed as a cause for alarm, as a reflection of the father’s madness.

Ellie returned all four photographs to the envelope. She closed it with its small metal clasp.

She believed Spencer was, in all ways that mattered,
not
his father’s son. He was no more dangerous to her than was Mr. Rocky Dog. For three nights in the desert, as she had listened to him murmuring in delirium, between his periodic ascensions to a shaky state of consciousness, she had heard nothing to make her suspect that he was the bad seed of a bad seed.

In reality, even if Spencer was a danger to her, he was no match for the agency when it came to being a threat. The agency was still out there, hunting for them.

What Ellie really needed to worry about was whether she could avoid the agency’s goons long enough to discover and enjoy whatever emotional connections might evolve between her and this complex and enigmatic man. By Spencer’s own admission, he had secrets that were still unrevealed. More for his sake than hers, those secrets would have to be aired before any future they might have together could be discussed or even discerned; because until he settled his debts with the past, he would never know the peace of mind or the self-respect needed for love to flourish.

She looked out at the sky again.

They flew across Utah in their sleek black machine, strangers in their own land, putting the sun behind them, heading eastward toward the horizon from which, several hours hence, the night would come.

Harris Descoteaux showered in the gray and maroon guest bathroom of his brother’s Westwood home, but the scent of the jailhouse, which he believed he could detect on himself, was ineradicable. Jessica had packed three changes of clothes for him on Saturday, prior to being evicted from their house in Burbank. From that meager wardrobe, he selected Nikes, gray cords, and a long-sleeve, dark-green knit shirt.

When he told his wife that he was going for a walk, she wanted him to wait until the pies could be taken from the oven, so she could go with him. Darius, busy on the telephone in his study, suggested that he delay leaving for half an hour, so they could walk together. Harris sensed that they were concerned about his despondency. They felt he should not be alone.

He reassured them that he had no intention of throwing himself in front of a truck, that he needed to exercise after a weekend in a cell, and that he wanted to be alone to think. He borrowed one of Darius’s leather jackets from the foyer closet and went into the cool February morning.

The residential streets of Westwood were hilly. Within a few blocks, he realized that a weekend spent sitting in a cell actually
had
left his muscles cramped and in need of stretching.

He hadn’t been telling the truth when he had said that he wanted to be alone to think. Actually, he wanted to
stop
thinking. Ever since the assault on his house on Friday night, his mind had been spinning ceaselessly. And thinking had gotten him nowhere but into bleaker places within himself.

Even what little sleep he had gotten had been no surcease from worry, for he had dreamed about faceless men in black uniforms and shiny black jackboots. In the nightmares, they buckled Ondine, Willa, and Jessica into collars and leashes, as if dealing with dogs instead of with people, and led them away, leaving Harris alone.

As there was no escape from worry in his sleep, there was none in the company of Jessica or Darius. His brother was ceaselessly working on the case or brooding aloud about offensive and defensive legal strategies. And Jessica was—as Ondine and Willa would be, when they returned from the mall—a constant reminder that he had failed his family. None of them would say anything of that kind, of course, and he knew that the thought would never actually cross their minds. He had done nothing to earn the catastrophe that had befallen them. Yet, though he was blameless, he blamed himself. Somewhere, sometime, someplace, he’d made an enemy whose retribution was psychotically in excess of whatever offense Harris unwittingly had committed. If only he had done one thing differently, avoided one offending statement or act, perhaps none of this would have happened. Every time he thought of Jessica or his daughters, his inadvertent and unavoidable culpability seemed to be a greater sin.