Shadowkiller (29 page)

“One moment.” There's a click, and after a few moments, a man comes on the line. “Yes?”

“Mr. Jonas, my name is LaJuanda Estrada and I'm here from Miami, looking for a friend.”

“Yes.”

“Crispin said you might be able to help me.”

“Yes,” he says once again, and she can tell by his tone that Crispin told him to expect her call.

“Can we meet and discuss this?”

“Later. I am doing shore excursions today. I will be busy until after the ships go out.”

She arranges to meet him at six o'clock at the Clucking Parrot, a local restaurant near the pier.

Between now and then, she decides, she'll head into town and see if she can talk to the locals who work around the pier when the cruise ships are in port. With luck, someone will remember seeing Molly Temple or be able to tell her something more about the enigmatic—perhaps deliberately so—Jane Deere.

T
he hot Dakota wind stirs the tall prairie grasses, tickling Carrie's bare legs as she walks the vast, flat acreage, looking for the well.

It's around here someplace, she's sure . . . but
around here
isn't good enough.

She wants to see the exact site. Now.
Needs
to see it. Needs to make sure everything is as it should be, needs to prepare for tonight—and she doesn't have much time.

She tried once before to find it, right before she moved to New York. But the section of land—her father's land, officially listed as abandoned property after failing to sell years ago at a foreclosure auction—was blanketed in a foot of December snow that day and more was falling: an inch an hour, probably more. Bitter gusts enveloped Carrie in swirling white so that she couldn't see more than a few feet ahead of her.

Shades of things to come: smoke and dust from fallen towers . . .

Funny how the pattern seems destined to repeat itself in her life.

Nine years ago this week, the surrounding prairie was changed forever in an eerie echo of what had happened in New York on September 11. Here, the destruction also—quite literally—dropped out of the clear blue sky on a warm summer Tuesday, when a record sixty-seven twisters touched down in this part of the state.

A little ways down Highway 14, an entire town, Manchester, was wiped off the map, never to be rebuilt.

Just like this farm . . . and good riddance to it.

No lives were lost here on the Great Plains on Tornado Tuesday, as the press called it, but all things relative, the physical toll seems as apocalyptic as what had happened in Manhattan.

When Carrie later read about it from her far-flung tropical island, her initial reaction—aside from a general sense of detachment—was to welcome the news as she had the fallen towers: yet another cosmic coincidence. It was almost as though some higher power were determined to help her erase every trace of her existence in both South Dakota and New York.

Then, with growing uneasiness, she remembered the level of destruction a powerful tornado could wreak out here on the Great Plains: flattening homes, uprooting trees, even disturbing the earth. An F4 or F5 storm like the one that had passed over this acreage was capable of scouring the ground a few feet deep, possibly unearthing . . .

But surely she'd have heard about it if
that
had happened.

How? It's not as though anyone around here would have any idea whatever happened to her after she left. For all they know, she's as dead as her parents are.

So, no, they wouldn't come looking for her if something had been unearthed on the farm. The media would have jumped on it, though—wouldn't they?

Just to be sure, she did a search on her laptop last night, plugging in every possible word and phrase she could think of. Plenty of hits concerning dinosaur bones that had been found in South Dakota—but nothing about human remains.

That was good news enough to allow Carrie to come out here today as planned. If she honestly believed anything had been found here, she'd never have dared to set foot on the property—or even in this part of the state—again now. She'd have convinced herself that it was best to leave well enough alone.

You never seem to do that though, do you?
an inner voice scolds.
You're always compelled to go looking for trouble, aren't you?

Not really. Not today. Today, she's just making sure that trouble stays buried in the past where it belongs. As for yesterday . . .

She thinks of Imogene Peters. For someone who had been such a pushy big mouth on the plane just hours earlier, she had basically gone down without a fight.

Just like Mrs. Ogden had all those summers ago back in her fourth floor apartment on Hudson Street—the one Carrie and Mack would soon be able to rent, because its elderly tenant had fallen and hit her head . . .

With a little help, Carrie remembers with a smile.

But Mrs. Ogden had never known what hit her. Getting rid of her had been a basic necessity. Carrie had simply slipped into her apartment through a fire escape window on the first warm May night, given the old bat a hard shove, and watched her head hit the bathroom tile. It didn't crack open, as she'd hoped—just hit hard, and when Carrie felt for a pulse a minute or two later, there was none.

It was much more gratifying to see all that blood gushing over Imogene Peters's white bathrobe with its fancy hotel emblem. Even so, Carrie slipped out of her apartment late Saturday night still feeling vaguely dissatisfied.

Too many years have passed since she's allowed herself to vent her pent-up frustration. She doesn't regret for one second having taken out some of it on Imogene Peters. But it hadn't been nearly enough.

She has to stay strong. She's come too far to lose control now and throw it all away.

Oh, really? Then what about Nebraska? And Allison?
If you're not going there to stir things up, then what are you planning to do? Give her a hug and wish her well?

The disapproving voice in her head sounds very much like Daddy's, and Carrie instinctively walks more quickly through the prairie grass, wanting to outrun it.

The sun is high overhead, its scorching heat penetrating her scalp.

She wishes it were raining, as it had been yesterday, throughout the entire midsection of the country.

When she was growing up here, she'd watch the western horizon for funnel clouds, the way Daddy had taught her. She never spotted one, but Arthur, the kindly farmhand, did on occasion. Then he'd hustle Carrie and her mother to the storm cellar.

The summer after Arthur died, the summer she was sixteen, she stopped watching the sky. She didn't care if a tornado came along. In fact, she wished it would happen—wished a big black funnel cloud would sweep across the prairie and kill her, along with the child she was carrying.

It belonged to the man her father hired to keep an eye on things after Arthur was gone. He had greasy graying hair and a pock-marked face and he smelled like sweat.

He didn't stick around for very long—just a few weeks. But that was long enough for him to rape Carrie.

Telling her mother was out of the question. They didn't really talk much. Carrie had always been a daddy's girl—even though Daddy was hardly ever around anymore.

If he had been, Carrie thought, the hired man would never have raped her.

Summer turned to fall, and Carrie waited for her father to come home. Her waistline grew thicker and she knew why, but it was too horrific to admit, even to herself. When her father came home, she'd tell him, and he'd help her get rid of it.

October turned to November and he didn't come home; he didn't even call. He was on the road, same as always, her mother said.

“Are you getting a divorce?” Carrie asked her, and her mother denied it.

It was just the two of them, day after day, all alone. The sky was always bleak and the wind blew rain and snow. Carrie was convinced that her father was staying away because he didn't want to see her mother, and Carrie hated her for it.

If he didn't come soon, it was going to be too late to get rid of the pregnancy. She was growing bigger every day, so big that one day, her mother noticed.

“You're pregnant!” she shrieked. “You're pregnant and it's
his
. Oh my God, I should have known. I should have known . . .”

Carrie didn't understand, at first, what she was saying; what she was thinking. Then it hit her: her mother thought Daddy—her own father—had gotten her pregnant.

White-hot anger swept over her. How could anyone believe that her father was capable of such an ugly thing? How could her mother accuse him—accuse
her
—

Even now, rage slips in when she remembers what happened that day. She wipes sweat from her forehead and tells herself that her mother had deserved what had happened to her.

Carrie walks on, wishing she'd thought to wear a hat and sunglasses. If only there was a shady spot somewhere in the six hundred and forty acres she has to comb until she finds the well. Squinting into the harsh glare, she searches the empty landscape for some kind of landmark; something that might help her identify the spot.

There is none. The vortex that roared through the property on that Tuesday morning almost a decade ago destroyed everything in its path, just the way she'd imagined, just the way she'd longed for, when she was sixteen. It's all gone now: the house, the shed, the century-old stand of cottonwood trees . . .

Even the long road that led from the highway to the house, which had never been more than parallel dirt ruts, has vanished, overgrown and filled in. This landscape she once knew so well, having spent the first eighteen years of her life here, has been reduced to nothing but swaying grasses in shades of green and gold, dotted with purple and yellow wildflowers, stretching clear out to the blue horizon in every direction.

It was so different on that frigid afternoon when she last visited here, in the final days of the last millennium, and her old life.

There were landmarks then—the road, the trees. Even the house was still standing, albeit long abandoned, much too far off the beaten path for anyone to care or notice.

She had come on impulse that December day, needing one last look before she left the heartland forever—or so she had promised herself. She hadn't been back since she was just sixteen, having fled to Minnesota and then Chicago, losing herself in the bustle of big cities where anonymity wrapped around her like a warm blanket.

She had tried for almost fourteen years to forget what had happened. When she finally realized that she never would, she looked for Allison and managed to trace her as far as New York City.

And so it began: the homework. Planning and preparation. She liked that. She still does.

When she was finally ready to move east, she rented a car and drove hundreds of miles west across the frozen prairie.

Alone in a blizzard on this desolate rural landscape, well aware that her life was hanging in the balance, she had searched for hours.

What would you have done that day if you'd found what you were looking for? Fallen to your knees and kissed the snowy ground? Left something behind to mark the spot?

Ultimately, she gave up, though not because she was afraid, or discouraged. Not, either, because she was cold and hungry. It was because a fresh start lay before her, full of promise. On the cusp of a new millennium, the whole world seemed to be tying up loose ends, looking ahead not just with trepidation but with anticipation, ready to begin anew.

What had happened years earlier on this barren spot might eventually come to matter even less, Carrie hoped, when she found her way to New York . . .

To Allison.

Even then, she didn't know what she would do when she found her.
If
she found her. She only knew that she had to try. On that stormy day, the prospect of her upcoming mission snuffed out her desire to see this one through.

Now New York lies behind her—for the second time in thirteen years. Now she knows exactly where to find Allison—when she's ready.

This time, when we come face-to-face, she's going to know exactly who I am. At the very least, she's going to apologize for taking what should have been mine. At the very, very least.

Chances are, though, that it will go much further. Chances are that Carrie will have the pleasure of hearing Allison begging for her life.

But I won't listen to her. Why should I? She wouldn't listen to me when I tried to tell her—

Whoa—is that it?

Carrie halts and stares. Right there, just a few feet away from her left shoe, is a slightly sunken, sparse patch of grass. She steps closer, pushes the grass aside, and sees a sliver of the weathered wooden plank lid of the old well.

She smiles.

So. It's still covered, after all these years; after countless storms, including the tornado that had torn apart the buildings and trees surrounding it.

She backtracks patiently to the rental car to get the shovel she bought—using cash, of course—at a big chain hardware store somewhere between Mankato and the South Dakota state line. Her other purchases—rope, duct tape, and a small wheelbarrow—are in the trunk. For now. The shovel wouldn't fit, so she laid it across the backseat.

Back at the well site, the sun beats down on her as she digs away chunks of grass and sod. Finally, the entire square of wood is exposed. She pokes at the edge, wedging the tip of the shovel farther and farther beneath the rim until it lifts from the crumbly earth. Pushing the wooden handle like a lever, she pries the lid off at last, flipping it over onto the grass beside the gaping hole.

The first time she'd lifted the cover on her own, without Daddy, she'd braced herself for the black widow spiders who lived beneath it to come crawling out. She'd quickly dumped her cargo, hearing it land with a thud in the soil eight feet below, remembering what her father had told her about filling it in. There was a law now about old wells in South Dakota—they had to be properly sealed.