Shadowkiller (30 page)

The next—and last—time she'd lifted the lid was just a few days after the first; on that occasion, she encountered not the dreaded spiders, but the horrible stench of rotting flesh. When she closed the lid again that day, she never expected to come back here and open it again.

But this has to be done. Only then will it be over at last. Only then will she be free.

This time, as she leans over the hole, Carrie smells nothing but damp dirt, sees nothing but shadows. But that doesn't mean they aren't there—nocturnal creatures, down in that dank hole, lurking, waiting . . .

Waiting.

“Don't worry . . .” Her whisper is all but lost on the hot prairie breeze rustling the tall grass around her. “I'll be back tonight—and she'll be with me.”

Chapter Fourteen

“M
ommy, are we in Nebraska yet?” Madison asks—yet again—from the backseat of the SUV.

She's been repeating that question for hours, ever since they stopped for lunch just over the Iowa border. Allison gives her the same answer every time.

“Almost, sweetie.”

This time, though, she actually means it. According to the dashboard GPS, Iowa is about to fall behind them, and Nebraska lies just a few miles ahead.

“How many more hours, Mommy?”

“Not hours now. Just minutes. About ten. Maybe fifteen with this traffic.”

“But when we cross into Nebraska, we'll still have almost four hundred miles to go,” Hudson pipes up. “Right, Mommy?”

“Noooo!” Madison wails.

Allison sighs. She'll just have to remind her middle child, once again, that they're having fun. Maybe if she says it often enough, she'll believe it, too.

It hasn't really been a horrible drive today, though. Not like yesterday, with all that rain. Today was just long, and the scenery has been a monotonous stretch of farmland, with very few landmarks and not even a cloud in the blue sky to conjure those old memories that had livened up yesterday's trip.

“Noooo! Mommy!”

Allison realizes, when she turns to reprimand Maddy for whining, that J.J. has a fistful of her long hair.

“He's hurting me!”

“It's your own fault.” Hudson doesn't even look up from her Atlas. “You should keep your head out of reach, like I do.”

“I
can't
keep it out of reach. My neck is too short and his arms are too long!”

Under other circumstances, that remark might have struck Mack, at least, as amusing. But he's been grumpy behind the wheel the last few hours, and barks, “Guys, please be quiet! This is a car, not a carnival!”

“But he's hurting me! J.J.! Ouch! No!”

“Noooooo!” J.J. shouts gleefully, and holds tighter.

Mack clenches the wheel. “Shh! I'm trying to drive, here.”

“J.J., stop that!” Allison hisses, trying to reach his little fists.

Mack darts a glance into the rearview mirror, then the driver's-side mirror, and the rearview again. “Allie, can I get over? I need to get over.”

She turns her head and sees a tractor-trailer alongside them. “No!”

“No!” J.J. echoes again. “No, no, no, nooooo!”

Mack swerves back into the right lane. “Dammit!”

“Mack! Watch the language! All we need is a cursing baby.”

“All we need is to miss the turn,” he shoots back, “and end up in South Dakota. I need to merge into that lane. Why the heck is there so much traffic?”

“It's rush hour!”

“It's Council Bluffs!”

“Rush hour happens everywhere,” Hudson comments, adjusting her map. “Um, you're supposed to be way over there, Daddy!”

“I know that!”

“He knows that!”

“That's where the Missouri River is. We can't cross it if we don't go that way. Do you think someday we can cross all the rivers in America?”

Neither Mack nor Allison answers her.

“There are a quarter of a million rivers,” she goes on, courtesy of the fact Mack finally looked up for her this morning. “How long would it take to cross them all?”

Stifling a sigh, Allison consults the GPS, checking to see where they'll end up if Mack misses the exit. Not in South Dakota. Not yet, anyway—it's almost a hundred miles from here.

“Mommy! Help!” Madison whimpers, and J.J. tightens his grip on her hair, babbling happily.

“Hold still, Maddy, you're making it worse by trying to pull away.” Keeping an eye on the traffic, Allison reaches back again to disentangle her son's sticky fingers from her daughter's hair.

This time, she frees the strands. “Okay, sweetie, go ahead, move over.”

“What? Now?” Mack starts to pull into the left lane.

A horn blasts and he swerves again with a curse, narrowly missing a passing car.

“What are you doing?” Allison asks, shaken.

“You told me to move!”

“I told
Maddy
to move.”

“I thought you were talking to me.”

“I said sweetie!”

“You call me sweetie sometimes!”

“Since when?”

Not since this morning, that's for sure. She's been too preoccupied, most of the day, to do much talking at all.

Mack asked her, after they stopped for breakfast, why she'd been so quiet. “Are you still mad because I had to call the office?”

“What? No. I'm just . . . tired.”

He bought that. Who wasn't tired at this point?

But the truth was, she was wondering whether Tamara Connolly Pratt had yet seen the e-mail she spontaneously sent this morning before they left the hotel.

She kept it straightforward.

I'm looking for an old friend, Tammy Connolly, who lived in Centerfield, Nebraska, in the 1980s. If you're her, I'll be staying at the Cornhusker in Lincoln tonight, and I know it's short notice, but I'd love to catch up.

She provided her cell phone number and signed it simply
Allison Taylor MacKenna.
She was about to reread it, thinking she might want to edit it—or delete it—when Mack came back into the room, putting his BlackBerry back into his pocket.

“I'm glad that's over. Ready to go?”

“Yes.” The e-mail zinged into cyberspace.

Her first thought after she impulsively hit send was that she might regret it. But so far, she hasn't. In fact, she's been hoping for a response. So far, there's been nothing. Her iPhone is set to vibrate whenever an e-mail comes in, but maybe she missed something. The signal has been fading in and out as they made their way across Iowa, and she hasn't looked in a while. Now that they're in a city, she should—

“Daddy, you have to move over
now
! This is your last chance!” Hudson shouts from the backseat, checking the signage and her map.

With a curse, Mack looks into the rearview mirror and turns his head briefly to check behind them. He jerks the wheel, pulling into the left lane and cutting off a pickup truck whose driver honks loudly.

“Great job, Daddy!” Hudson shouts.

“Yeah, great job, Daddy.” Shaking her head, Allison presses her hand against her pounding heart. “I think it's my turn to drive again.”

“You did enough driving today. Just relax.”

“I'll try.” She pulls her iPhone out of her pocket and presses the button to light up the screen. Sure enough, there's a new e-mail waiting for her. It must have come in while they were between cell tower coverage in rural Iowa.

“Look! Look at the sign!” Hudson bounces excitedly.

Allison glances up to see a smattering of tall buildings just ahead. Omaha.

“I didn't know Nebraska was the home of Arbor Day!” Hudson exclaims, reading the big green welcome sign that begins: “NEBRASKA . . . THE GOOD LIFE
.
” “I didn't even know there were any trees here. Mommy said there weren't any.”

“I said there weren't
many
,” Allison corrects her.

“I see some right there. And over there, too. How many trees do you think there are? Can you look it up, Mommy?”

“Sure . . . in a minute.” Allison opens her mailbox.

Hi, Allison! Yep, it's me, Tammy Connolly. I can't believe you found me after all these years! I would love to catch up when you get to Lincoln, just the two of us. My cell phone number is 605–555–3424. Text me when you get to town and I'll give you directions to my house. I work until 9 so I hope that's not too late.

Allison bites her lip nervously, then gives a decisive nod.

It's not too late at all
, she types, and means it with all her heart.

A
t ten minutes to six, LaJuanda makes her way along a rutted, overgrown lane adjacent to the pier. A patch of white sand and turquoise sea lies at the far end, the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, marking the spot where she'll meet Jonas at the Clucking Parrot.

An afternoon spent trying to find someone who might have either known Jane Deere or seen Molly Temple had yielded nothing at all. The locals were far too busy tending to the crowds of cruise passengers to bother with her. LaJuanda finally gave up and spent some time back in her room, futilely checking the Internet for a glimmer or glance of the elusive female bartender.

Now, as the lush greenery falls away, she steps into a beachfront clearing marked by a crudely painted plywood sign that reads “Clucking Parrot.”

The locals-frequented restaurant—described on a travel Web site as “great food, if you can get past the no-frills atmosphere”—appears to be little more than an open-air hut beside a cluster of picnic tables on the sand, set off by bare bulbs strung between palm trees. No-frills is an understatement. Beneath the hut's tin roof, a hefty island woman with thick coils of braids wreathing her round dark face stirs a bubbling cast-iron pot over an open flame. A couple of children squat near her bare feet, peeling huge shrimp and tossing them into a dented metal pail.

The woman greets LaJuanda with a wave and an unintelligible but cheerful phrase that was most likely an invitation to seat herself. She does, settling on the bench closest to the water, with her back to the sea so that she can keep an eye on the path, waiting for Jonas.

A bottled beer seems the safest beverage choice, and she orders one from the oldest child, who, in lieu of handing her a menu, gestures at a handwritten whiteboard propped against the trunk of a coconut palm.

She's keeping one eye on the path while reading through the choices—most of which consist of fresh fish and jerked meat—when a shadow falls across her table. Turning, she sees a tall man whose head is completely shaved, with skin the color of undiluted coffee.

“Are you Jonas?” she asks, wondering how he managed to come up behind her when the crescent of beach is secluded by dense jungle and rock formations. Then she sees the small boat anchored just off the shore.

He doesn't answer her query, just sits across from her. Immediately, the boy who brought LaJuanda's beer materializes with a plastic cup filled with ice and amber liquid. He hands it silently to the man, who nods, sips, and motions for the boy to go away.

Opting not to pull out her pad and pen, LaJuanda gets right down to business. “What can you tell me about Jane Deere?”

“Why do you want to know?”

She weighs the wisdom of telling him about her suspicions, and decides she has nothing to lose. “I'm investigating a murder, and I think she was involved.”

Jonas doesn't so much as raise an eyebrow. “And so you know that is not her real name.”

“Jane Deere?” Of course she'd figured as much. “What was her real name?”

He shrugs, and she realizes she'll have to try another tactic. She's prepared to offer to pay him for information—the Temples have set up a fairly modest fund to be used toward her efforts—but something tells her that might not be necessary if she takes the right approach. The fact that he's here at all makes her think he might have his own reasons for wanting to see this so-called Jane Deere dragged out of the shadows.

“Do you
know
her real name?” LaJuanda asks.

“I know many things about her. Much more than
you
know.”

Yeah—no kidding.

Then he adds, “Much more than she wanted anyone to know.”

Now we're getting somewhere
, LaJuanda thinks. “When did you meet her, Mr. Jonas?”

“Before she even arrived on Saint Antony. I was the one who brought her here.”

Startled, she can't keep the questions from flying out. “What? How? From where?”

“Florida. By boat.”

There are countless other questions she wants to ask in response to that bit of information. Seeing the wariness in his black eyes, she settles on the one that seems least likely to shutter them. “Why did she come here?”

“Why do most people come here? To get away from it all.” He is clearly parodying the trite phrase used on so many of the island's resort brochures.

“She wanted to hide here. Okay. When was this?”

“September 15, 2001.”

LaJuanda
does
raise an eyebrow. “You know the exact date?”

“Of course.”

She angles her head, and then it hits her. September 2001. Just a few days after . . .

“Was she involved in terrorism?” LaJuanda asks, wondering if she just stumbled across something that had global implications.

“No. Not at all. Not that.”

“Are you sure? How do you know? What do you know about her?”

“I know that she worked in the World Trade Center and that she made it out. I know that she left New York that day and came to Florida.”

New York. September 2001.
LaJuanda's thoughts are spinning. “She told you all that?”

“She told me lies. I found the truth later.”

“How?”

“I saw her picture in the newspaper. Hundreds of pictures . . . thousands. Almost three thousand.”

Almost three thousand people had died on September 11 in New York.

“All those faces. I looked for hers because I guessed it would be there, and sure enough, it was.”

“Do you mean . . .” LaJuanda clears her throat. “Was she listed as one of the victims in the World Trade Center attack?”

Jonas nods.

“Why didn't she tell anyone she'd lived?”

“Because she didn't want anyone to know.”

“What was her real name?”

It's precisely the same question she asked him just minutes ago.

Only this time, he answers it.

“Carrie Robinson MacKenna.”

T
he Cornhusker Hotel is every bit as elegant as Allison imagined when she was a girl, and the king-sized bed in the suite couldn't be more inviting—even with the girls jumping on it in their summer pajamas.