Strangers (64 page)

Ginger said, “You mean the Army had the highway closed off five or ten minutes before the ‘accidental’ toxic spill even happened?”

“Yeah. Unless we’re wrong about the time of the sunset.”

They checked the weather column in the July 6 edition of the
Sentinel.
It painted a more than adequate portrait of that fateful day. The high temperature had been expected to hit ninety degrees, with an overnight low of sixty-four. Humidity between twenty and twenty-five percent. Clear skies. Light to variable winds. And sunset at seven-thirty-one.

“Twilight’s short out here,” Dom said. “Fifteen minutes, tops. Figure full darkness at seven-forty-five. Now, even if we’re wrong to think it was half an hour after nightfall that trouble hit, even if it came just fifteen minutes after dark, the Army
still
had its roadblocks up first.”

“So they knew what was coming,” Ginger said.

“But they couldn’t stop it from happening.”

“Which means it must’ve been some process, some series of events, that they initiated and then were unable to control.”

“Maybe,” Dom said. “But maybe not. Maybe they weren’t really at fault. Until we know more, we’re just speculating. No point to it.”

Ginger turned the page of the
Sentinel
’s edition for Wednesday, July 11, which they were currently examining, and her gasp of surprise directed Dom’s attention to a head-and-shoulders photograph of a man in an Army officer’s uniform and cap. Although Colonel Leland Falkirk had appeared in neither Dom’s nor Ginger’s dreams last night, they both recognized him at once because of the description that Ernie and Ned had supplied from their nightmares: dark hair graying at the temples, eyes
with an eerie translucency, a beakish nose, thin lips, a face of flat hard planes and sharp angles.

Dom read the caption under the picture:
Colonel Leland Falkirk, commanding officer of the company of DERO troops manning the quarantine line, has been an elusive target for reporters. This first photograph was obtained by
Sentinel
photographer, Greg Lunde. Caught by surprise, Falkirk was angry about being photographed. His answers to the few questions asked of him were even shorter than the standard “no comment.”

Dom might have smiled at the quiet humor in the last sentence of the caption, but Falkirk’s stony visage chilled him. He instantly recognized the face not only because of Ernie’s and Ned’s description, but because he had seen it before, the summer before last. Furthermore, there was a ferocity in that hawklike countenance and in those predatory eyes that was dismaying; this man routinely got what he wanted. To be at his mercy was a frightening prospect.

Staring at the photograph of Falkirk, Ginger softly said,
“Kayn aynhoreh.”
Aware of Dom’s puzzlement, she said, “That’s Yiddish, too.
Kayn aynhoreh.
It’s an expression that’s used to…to ward off the evil eye. Somehow, it seemed appropriate.”

Dom studied the photograph, half mesmerized by it.

After a moment, he said, “Yes. Quite appropriate.”

Colonel Falkirk’s sharply chiseled face and cold pale eyes were so striking that it seemed as if he were alive within this photograph, as if he were returning their scrutiny.

•

While Dom and Ginger were examining the back-issue files at the Elko
Sentinel,
Ernie and Faye Block were working in the office of the Tranquility Motel, trying to contact the people whose names were on the guest list for July 6, two summers ago, but who had thus far been unreachable. They were behind the check-in counter, sitting opposite each other at the oak desk, which had kneeholes on both sides. A pot of coffee stood within reach on an electric warming-plate.

Ernie composed a telegram to Gerald Salcoe, the man who had rented two rooms for his family on July 6, the summer before last, and who was unreachable by phone because his number in Monterey, California, was unlisted. Meanwhile, Faye went back through last year’s guest book, day by day, looking for the most recent entry for Cal Sharkle, the trucker who had stayed with them on that July 6. Yesterday, Dom had tried the telephone number Cal had printed in the guest registry that night, but it had
been disconnected. The hope was that a more recent entry would provide his new address and phone number.

As they performed their separate tasks, Ernie was reminded of countless other times throughout their thirty-one years of marriage when they had sat facing each other at a desk or, more often, at a kitchen table. In one apartment or another, in one house or another, at one end of the world or another, from Quantico to Pendleton to Singapore, nearly everywhere the Marines sent him, the two of them had spent long evenings at a kitchen table, working or dreaming or worrying or happily planning together, often late into the night. Ernie was suddenly filled with poignant echoes of those thousands of huddled conferences and shared labors. How very fortunate he had been to find and marry Faye. Their lives were so inextricably linked that they might as well have been a single creature. If Colonel Falkirk or others resorted to murder to terminate this investigation, if anything happened to Faye, then Ernie hoped he would die, too, simultaneously.

He finished composing the telegram to Gerald Salcoe, called it in to Western Union, and requested immediate delivery—all the while warmed by a love that was strong enough to make their dangerous situation seem less threatening than it really was.

Faye found five occasions during the past year when Cal Sharkle had stayed overnight, and in every case he had listed the same Evanston, Illinois, address and phone number that he had entered in the registry for July 6 of the previous year. Apparently, he had not moved, after all. Yet, when they dialed this number, they obtained the recording that Dom had gotten yesterday, informing them that the telephone had been disconnected and that no new Evanston listing existed.

On the chance that Cal had moved out of Evanston into the “Windy City” itself, Faye dialed Area Code 312 Information and asked if there was a number for Calvin Sharkle in Chicago. There was not. Using a map of Illinois, she and Ernie placed calls to Information in the Chicago suburbs: Whiting, Hammond, Calumet City, Markham, Downer’s Grove, Oak Park, Oakbrook, Elmhurst, Des Plaines, Rolling Meadows, Arlington Heights, Skokie, Wilmette, Glencoe.…No luck. Either Cal Sharkle had moved out of the Chicago area, or had dropped off the face of the earth.

•

While Faye and Ernie worked in the first-floor office, Ned and Sandy Sarver were already preparing dinner in the kitchen upstairs. This evening, after Brendan Cronin arrived from Chicago, after Jorja Monatella
and her little girl flew in from Vegas, there would be nine for dinner, and Ned did not want to leave preparations until the last minute. Yesterday, when all six of them joined forces to prepare and serve the evening meal, Ginger Weiss had observed that the occasion was almost like a family holiday gathering; and indeed, they felt an extraordinary closeness though they hardly knew one another. With the idea that reinforcement of their special affection and camaraderie might give them strength to face whatever lay ahead of them, Ned and Sandy had decided that tonight’s meal ought to be like a Thanksgiving feast. Therefore, they were preparing a sixteen-pound turkey, pecan stuffing, scalloped potatoes, baked corn, carrots with tarragon, pepper slaw, pumpkin pie, and made-from-scratch crescent rolls.

As they chopped celery, diced onions, cubed bread, and grated cabbage, Ned occasionally wondered if what they were cooking was not only a family feast but also the last hearty meal of the condemned. Each time that morbid thought rose, he chased it away by pausing to watch Sandy as she worked. She smiled almost constantly, and sometimes softly hummed a song. Surely, an event that had induced this radical and wonderful change in Sandy could not ultimately culminate in their deaths. Surely, they had nothing to worry about. Surely.

•

After three hours at the Elko
Sentinel,
Ginger and Dom ate a light lunch—chef’s salads—at a restaurant on Idaho Street, then returned to the Tranquility Motel at two-thirty. Faye and Ernie were still in the office, which was filled with appetizing aromas drifting down from the apartment upstairs: pumpkin, cinnamon, nutmeg, onions fried lightly in butter, the yeasty odor of baking bread dough.

“And you can’t smell the turkey yet,” Faye said. “Ned just put that in the oven half an hour ago.”

“He says dinner’s at eight.” Ernie told them, “but I suspect the odors’ll drive us mad and force us to storm the kitchen before then.”

Faye said, “Learn anything at the
Sentinel
?”

Before Ginger could tell them what she and Dom had uncovered, the front door of the motel office opened, and a slightly pudgy man entered in a burst of cold whirling wind. He had hurried from his car without bothering to put on a topcoat; although he wore gray slacks, a dark blue blazer, a light blue sweater, and an ordinary white shirt, rather than a black suit and Roman collar, his identity was not for a moment in doubt. He was the auburn-haired, green-eyed, round-faced young priest in the Polaroid snapshot that the unknown correspondent had sent to Dom.

“Father Cronin,” Ginger said.

She was as immediately and powerfully drawn to him as she’d been to Dominick Corvaisis. With the priest as with Dom, Ginger sensed a shared experience even more shattering than the one which she had shared with the Blocks and Sarvers. Within The Event that they had all witnessed that Friday in July, there had been a Second Event experienced by only some of them. Although it was a frightfully improper way to greet a man who was a virtual stranger
and
a priest, Ginger rushed to Father Cronin and threw her arms around him.

But apologies were not required, for Father Cronin evidently sensed the same thing she did. Without hesitation, he returned her hug, and for a moment they clung to each other, not as if they were strangers but brother and sister greeting each other after a long separation.

Then Ginger stepped back as Dom said, “Father Cronin,” and came forward to embrace the priest.

“There’s no need to call me ‘Father.’ At the moment I neither want nor deserve to be considered a priest. Please just call me Brendan.”

Ernie shouted upstairs to Ned and Sandy, then followed Faye out from behind the check-in counter. Brendan shook Ernie’s hand and embraced Faye, obviously feeling great affection for them, though not a closeness as powerful and inexplicable as the tremendous emotional magnetism that pulled him toward Dom and Ginger. When Ned and Sandy came downstairs, he greeted them the same as he had Ernie and Faye.

Just as Ginger had done last night, Brendan said, “I have a truly wonderful sense of…being among family. You all feel it, don’t you? As if we’ve shared the most important moments of our lives…went through something that’ll always make us different from everyone else.”

In spite of his insistence that he did not deserve the deference accorded a priest, Brendan Cronin had a profoundly spiritual air about him. His somewhat pudgy face, sparkling eyes, and broad warm smile conveyed joy; and he moved among them, touched them, and spoke with an ebullience that was infectious and that somehow lifted Ginger’s soul.

Brendan said, “What I feel in this room only reassures me that I’ve made the right decision in coming. I’m
meant
to be with you. Something will happen here that’ll transform us, that’s already begun to transform us. Do you feel it? Do you
feel
it?”

The priest’s soft voice sent a pleasant shiver up Ginger’s spine, filled her with an indescribable sense of wonder reminiscent of what she’d felt the first time that, as a medical student, she had stood in an operating room and had seen a patient’s thorax held open by surgical retractors to reveal the pulsing, mysterious complexity of the human heart in all its crimson grandeur.

“Called,” Brendan said. The softly spoken word echoed eerily around the room. “All of us. Called back to this place.”

“Look,”
Dom said, packing a paragraph of amazement into that one syllable, raising his arms and holding his hands out to show them the red rings of swollen flesh that had appeared in his palms.

Surprised, Brendan raised his hands, which were also branded by the strange stigmata. As the men faced each other, the air thickened with unknown power. Yesterday, on the telephone, Father Wycazik had told Dom that Brendan was relatively certain no religious element was involved in the miraculous cures and other events that had recently transformed the young priest’s life. Yet the motel office seemed, to Ginger, to be filled with a force that, if not supernatural, was certainly beyond the ken of any man or woman.

“Called,” Brendan said again.

Ginger was gripped by breathless expectancy. She looked at Ernie, who stood behind Faye with his hands on her shoulders, and both their faces were full of tremulous suspense. Ned and Sandy, who were by the rack of postcards, holding hands, were wide-eyed.

Ginger felt the flesh prickling on the back of her neck. She thought,
Something’s going to happen,
and even as the thought took form, something did.

Every lamp in the motel office was aglow in deference to Ernie’s uneasiness in the presence of deep shadows, but abruptly the place was even brighter than it had been. A milky-white light filled the room, springing magically from molecules of air. It shimmered on all sides but rained mostly from overhead, a silvery mist of luminosity. She realized this was the same light that featured in her unremembered lunar dreams. She turned in a circle, looking around and up through spangled curtains of brilliant yet soft radiance, not in search of the source but with the hope of remembering her dreams and, ultimately, the events of that long-lost summer night that had inspired the dreams.

Ginger saw Sandy reach into the glowing air with one hand, as if to grasp a fistful of the miraculous light. A tentative smile pulled at Ned’s mouth. Faye smiled, too, and Ernie’s expression of childlike wonder was almost laughably out of place on his ruggedly hewn face.

“The moon,” Ernie said.