The Dead Sea Deception (64 page)

She went home.

She had a home to go back to.

It was a room, in which her father waited. She told him the story of where she’d been and what she’d done, although she knew he didn’t understand. She didn’t understand his story, either, come to that. The best you could do was bear witness and to listen whenever the chance came up.

Someone else waited, too, in another room, not too far away. There was dirty talk, and afterwards, some other things for which talk wasn’t necessary.

‘I always, always, always thought you were straight,’ Kennedy murmured, into Izzy’s ear.

‘Hell, no,’ Izzy giggled. ‘Not since I was fifteen.’

‘But you talk the talk so well …’

Izzy straddled her and smiled – for Kennedy alone – a smile that would melt platinum and open the legs of an angel. ‘Oh, the talk’s universal, hon. It’s the walk that counts.’

He went home. It was still empty.

But the emptiness felt different now. He knew that his wife had died loving him, thinking of him. That she hadn’t wanted to leave him, and couldn’t imagine a life without him, any more than he’d been able to build one without her.

He knew that his children were alive, somewhere in the world, and that they were happy.

He felt that his solitude was a shrine, in which he kept the holiest of things: his memories of their brief time together as a family, which nobody else alive now remembered.

Because he lived, it was all true. Because he remembered, they were with him.

Next to that, what else mattered?

‘Letter for you, Web. Got the Queen’s head on it, so I reckon it’s from England. Who’d you know in England?’

Connie handed the letter across the desk to Sheriff Gayle, and then hovered around with the air of someone who still has something else to do and is about to do it real soon.

‘Thanks, Connie,’ Gayle said.

‘Oh, you’re welcome,’ she told him. But he didn’t make any move to open the letter, and in fact put it aside with a negligent air, so eventually Connie had to retire defeated.

When she was gone, Gayle took the envelope up again, shivved it open with his little finger and took out the letter. It was from Heather Kennedy. He’d guessed that already because she was the only Brit he’d ever met.

Dear Web,

I’m so sorry I wasn’t able to make Eileen’s funeral. The truth is, I got out of Mexico by the skin of my teeth, and I had this worry that if I came back to Arizona, they might not let me go again. I know the original charges were dropped, but then there was all that damage Tillman did when he busted me loose, and some more stuff in Mexico that was even crazier.

That’s why I’m writing, really. I feel like you’ve got a right to know how it all turned out. You lost more than I did in this thing, and it’s not a loss that can ever be made good, so this – the story – is all I can give you. That and my thanks, truly heartfelt, for everything you did for me.

Gayle read on, for the best part of an hour. He only stopped when Connie brought him coffee and did some more hovering. Once he’d waited her out again, he took up where he’d left off.

It was crazy, just as Kennedy said it was. It was an easy secret to keep because nobody would ever believe it. Maybe that was the best thing they had going for them, these Judas guys: they were so damned preposterous, folks could stumble right across them and then talk themselves out of it again. Couldn’t have happened: too stupid, too wild, too ridiculous to have happened.

But what a story it would have made, for Moggs! How she would have given it gold paint, and shiny chrome, and wings and fins and flourishes.

It was only when he got to the end, to the last page, that he saw how it really was. He changed his mind about a lot of things then. It wasn’t an easy secret to keep at all: not for Kennedy anyway, who knew this Tillman guy and owed him her life and all. And Moggs wouldn’t ever have got to tell the story like it was because she just wasn’t anywhere near cruel enough.

I went back to Gassan’s translation,
Kennedy wrote
, and got caught up on some of the fine detail. It made a lot more sense once I’d seen that place for myself. The children of the Kelim keep the names they were given at birth, so long as those names were chosen by the mother. If the father chose, the kids are christened again by the people.

I think with Rebecca’s children, Brand just wanted to wash away as much of their past as possible. There was nothing wrong with the names they already had, but he gave them new ones anyway. And I knew what the names were. The woman who almost killed us both, up in Santa Claus, told me as she was dying.

Grace, the girl, became Tabe.

The boys – Ezei and Cephas – died at Dovecote.

Gayle folded up the letter and put it in his desk drawer. Then he thought better of it and put it through the office shredder. Then he had an even better idea and used Anstruther’s lighter to burn the confetti-like strands of it until there was nothing left.

Watching through the glass from the outer office, Connie contemplated with longing a good piece of gossip that she’d never get her hands on.