Esperanza (27 page)

“Shit.” She selected another strip.
I remember brujos, greenhouses, Ed, Manuel, Illika, Juanito. I remember Tess.

She read another and another. Some slips held only a single word. Others held several sentences. All were snapshots of what Ian had been remembering while he’d been here. She admired his fierce tenacity, true to the lightning-bolt shape of his body as he’d slept.

She shoved the Band-Aid container down inside her bag and turned to join Ray and the doctor. Keith stood in the doorway, hands planted firmly against the frame, blocking her way.

“What’re you doing?” He cocked his head to the left and the left corner of his mouth swung upward. “It looks to me like you’re snooping. Ian told me about you. About what you’re like. You’re his ex. Except that’s not really who you are, is it.”

Dominica craned her neck, trying to see into the room beyond him. But Keith was tall, with broad shoulders, and blocked most of her view. “Hey, Ray,” she called.

“Oh, they stepped out into the hall. To talk privately. Dr. Parcell is concerned because your friend is a lawyer. The doc hates lawyers. I hate doctors,
lawyers, just about everyone. I especially hate phonies. I think you’re a phony. You’re not Ian’s ex-wife. You’re”—his bright blue eyes narrowed—“something else.”

So. A crazy could sense her.

He took a step toward her, his right hand now balled into a fist that he ground against the palm of his left hand. “I think you’re one of those hungry ghosts he told me about. The Hungry Ghosts of Hope, that’s what he called you.” He slapped his fist against his palm now and took another step toward her. “You’re Dominica. He told me that, too.”

Don’t fuck with me, Keith the paranoid schizoid.

“Those pieces of paper you found in the Band-Aid can? He forgot to take them. Didn’t find a chance to come back to his room for his things, I guess.”
Slap, grind,
went his fist. He moved closer. “I saw you reading them. That’s wrong, to read what’s private.”

Dominica moved left, trying to get past him, but his right arm shot out, blocking her way. “Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred bucks, Hungry Ghost of Hope.” Keith grinned.

“You’re not being very polite, Keith. Let me by.”

“You’re not being very forthright, ma’am, so stay the fuck back.”

He was pissing her off. “You know about Tess?”

“Sure, I know about her.” He pointed at the back of the toilet, where it fit into the floor. “I know about those, too. There’s seventeen of them.”

Her eyes followed his finger to the targeted spot, where she saw something stuck to the back of the toilet. “What’re they for?”

“He used strips to count the days or pill cycles when he pretended to swallow his meds and didn’t. I started doing that, too.” His grin widened, the most singularly horrid smile she had ever seen, revealing teeth screaming for a good dentist, a smile that said,
Gotcha, you’re fucked.

Then he lunged for her, swinging his fists. Dominica sprang out of Louise and into Keith the wacko. The abruptness of it shocked her more than it did him. Compared to Louise, Keith’s body was a garbage dump, a heaving, stinking mass of confusion, sickness, addictions. The drugs he had been fed the last three years acted on her like concrete poured over a leaf. She couldn’t figure out how his body worked, so she couldn’t fit herself into it in such a way that enabled her to breathe. His heart beat, but not for her. The body jerked and fought and tripped over its own feet and then it was falling and Dominica fell with it, fell as Louise Ritter Bell screamed and shrieked and stumbled back into the room and out of sight.

She was moments away from dying inside of Keith, dying the way only a
brujo
could die within a body it had seized. Annihilation, extinction, obliteration.
Gone,
no matter how you looked at it. She thrust an imaginary fist deeply into Keith’s brain, and in the few seconds before he began to bleed out, she leaped again, back into Louise.

This time Louise fought and Dominica was weak and couldn’t gain control of Louise’s body. She rolled across the floor of the room, Dominica jumped out of her, then Louise slammed into the wall and went still. Dominica thrust her essence into Louise’s motionless body, the ultimate invasion. She was lifting up on her elbows when Ray and Dr. Parcell ran into the room. Ray took one look at all the blood pooling under Keith’s body, running across the floor, and slapped his hands over his nose and mouth.

“He . . . he attacked me,” she stammered.

Ray made a beeline toward her. Louise was one of his best clients, so he did all the right things, arrived at all the right conclusions, and when the local cops showed up, he made it clear that Dr. Parcell was at fault for allowing her to be alone in the room of a mental patient. And that was what made it into the Minneapolis newspapers the next day, compassionate activist attacked by mental patient, who suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died.

As one day melted into the next, Ian chopped wood and took long walks in the woods. He ate simple foods and drank gallons of water to flush the drugs from his body. He began to reclaim his spirit.

But in his darker hours, he obsessed about everything—his sanity, the career he was forfeiting, the life he would be leaving behind. The only thing he didn’t obsess about was Luke and Casey. He continued to feel only relief and gratitude that they had found each other.

Luke had returned several days ago with supplies and news that the cops had visited him twice, questioning him about where he’d taken Ian. Luke had stuck to his story, that his father, armed with a knife, had forced him to drive him to the train station. Casey’s name had not come up. Apparently the matter was as closed for Luke as it was for Ian. He just wanted to move forward, to Berkeley, where he would look for Sara Wells, his final confirmation.

From what he recalled, her last contact with family would be a call to her sister on May 16, 1969. He needed to see her, to know she was real—and, therefore, that all the rest of it was real, too, that he wasn’t in a psych unit somewhere, hallucinating all of this.

Which was why he now was en route to town in the cabin’s rusted old Renault. He intended to buy his ticket to California, via Duluth. Luke was due back to the cabin this evening and could drive him to the airport.

Ian turned onto yet another bumpy dirt road. The afternoon light feathered through the pines, creating strange, erratic shadow patterns in front of him. He felt a sudden urgency to get into town and back to the cabin before dark. It would be too easy to lose his way in these woods once the sun went down.

He emerged from the final stretch of pines, onto pavement and the main road through Hibbing. Named after its founder, a German iron ore prospector, the town was built on the rich iron ore of the Mesabi Iron Range. At its height in the early 1900s, it had a population of more than twenty thousand. Today, it hardly qualified as a bustling metropolis, but had a comfortable, friendly feel to it. Maybe a bit too friendly and comfortable, he thought, and was glad he looked like no one his ex-wife or anyone else would recognize. He had lost fifteen pounds in the last few months, was bearded, and wore a baseball cap, jeans, and a denim jacket and boots, not the kind of clothing that Louise associated with him. If anything, he looked like some backwoods Paul Bunyan.

He drove slowly up the main street, scanning the buildings for the travel agency he remembered. The glorious weather had lured people outside. They strolled the wide sidewalks, shopped, enjoyed late lunches beneath the trees. Ordinary life, he thought, and wasn’t surprised that it no longer appealed to him. All he wanted to do was get the hell out of here to the next leg of his journey.

He nosed the Renault into a small parking lot and joined the flow of pedestrians. He felt uneasy among people, though, and was grateful to step inside the travel agency. Colorful posters of far-flung locales covered the walls. Rio, London, Istanbul. Only one woman was inside, a redhead in her early forties, he guessed, with a sprinkling of freckles across her pale cheeks. She reminded him of Casey.

She sat behind a desk strewn with travel brochures and booklets of flight schedules. “Afternoon,” she said cheerfully. “What can I help you with, sir?”

He claimed a chair in front of her desk. “I’d like to book a flight for tomorrow from Duluth to San Francisco.”

“We can certainly do that.” She picked up one of the booklets, paged through it. “Ah, let’s see here.” She ran her fingernail up and down pages.

Ian remembered Tess telling him that in 2008, you could book your own
flights through the Internet. Had that made travel agents and their agencies obsolete?

“There’s a flight at eleven tomorrow morning from Duluth to San Francisco by way of Chicago.”

“Perfect.”

“How will you be paying for this, sir?”

“Cash.”

“And your name?”

He used his mother’s maiden name. “Ian Hawk.”

According to Tess, air travel in 2008 was a bureaucratic nightmare. To even board a flight, the name on your ticket had to match the name on your I.D., you could be pulled out of line at random and body-searched, you couldn’t have more than three ounces of certain kinds of liquids in your carry-on luggage. You also had to take off your shoes for some reason, but maybe she was kidding about that. He hoped so. From the little she had told him about air travel—and life—in her time, it sounded like the Bill of Rights had been shredded. He knew there were other rules and regulations, all of which had come about as a result of something that occurred in September 2001, but those rules were the only ones he remembered. So even though his time lacked the Internet, cell phones, laptops, Wi-Fi, and all the other technological wonders of the world forty years from now, some aspects about 1968 were vastly preferable.

As the travel agent booked his flight, a
feeling
burned across the pit of his stomach like a tongue of fire. He stood suddenly and strode over to the picture window. Outside, shadows lengthened against the road, there seemed to be more pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Commuters headed home, couples on their way to movies.

On the other side of the road, a large group gathered outside a television repair shop. Even as he stood there, the group swelled until it spilled off the curb and spread to the store windows on either side. People began to break off from the group, some of them shouting and waving others over.

“What’s going on out there?” the travel agent asked.

“I don’t know. They seem to be watching something on television. Do you have a TV?”

“Not in here. But I’ve got your ticket ready, Mr. Hawk.”

“Great.” He returned to the desk, she handed him the ticket and his change. “Thanks so much.”

“You bet. Happy flying.”

The burning sensation in his stomach abruptly worsened, he gasped, his vision blurred, and he nearly doubled over in pain. It didn’t last long, twenty seconds at the most. But when his vision cleared, he saw Charlie Livingston in the back hallway, where the restrooms were. He gestured urgently toward the rear exit. “Get out of here now, Ian. King is dead.”

King. What king? What the hell was Charlie talking about?

He hurried over to the picture window, where a black BMW pulled up to the curb across the street, slightly behind the gathering crowd on the other side of the road. Louise and her attorney, Ray Garthe, got out.

Except it wasn’t Louise. Ian sensed the
bruja
inside of her, and if
he
could sense
her,
then she might be able to sense him, too. A state police car drew up behind them, a cop got out and joined them.

Louise gestured toward the crowd now gathered around the window, Garthe threw his arms out at his sides, as if in exasperation, and Ian turned to ask the travel agent if he could use the restroom. Just then, a teenage girl hurried in.

“Hey, you know what happened, Mom?” The girl rubbed her hands together to warm them. “Martin Luther King was assassinated.”

It’s true, it’s all true. King, dead.

There was no hysteria in the girl’s voice, no sadness, no regret, zero grasp of the implications. But, then, why should there be? Hibbing was predominately white, blue-collar. To them, King was just one of those rabble-rousing black dudes. He figured the reaction of his ex-wife would be pretty much the same—if she was cognizant of anything.

When mother and daughter went over to the window, Ian hastened away from them, to the back of the store where he’d seen Charlie, and out a rear door into an alley. He broke into a run, shoes slapping the cobblestones, and at the end of the alley turned right toward the main street, head down, mind racing, seizing and discarding options.

He paused at the end of the block, noting that the number of the curious and the puzzled had swelled. No blacks in the crowd, no one sobbing or protesting, but no one cheering, either. Just curiosity. Ian turned away from them and headed quickly toward the parking lot where he’d left the Renault.

Fortunately, the crowd was concentrated much farther down the main street, so he was able to drive out of the lot without running into an obstacle of cars or people. He took the first side street he reached and wended his way through several blue-collar neighborhoods, struggling to maintain the
speed limit. His fear ratcheted upward another notch. Since a
brujo
had gotten to Louise, had one taken Luke, too? He had to be sure. But how?