The Searcher (14 page)

H
OLLY
C
ORONADO FELT LIKE SHE WAS FLOATING AND LOOKING DOWN AT
herself, putting one foot in front of the other, her black dress torn, her feet and hands blistered and bleeding. She had buried Jim and fulfilled the promise she had made to him. Now all she wanted was to be home and curl up in the bed they had shared: fall into a numbed sleep, wrapped in the fading scent of him that still clung to the sheets. She never wanted to face the pain of another day.

The rain made it heavy going, soaking her clothes and weighing her down and making it hard to see too far ahead. She had been thinking a lot lately about the time when she and Jim had first gotten together, looking back at the start of their relationship from the bleak vantage point of its end, torturing herself with thoughts of whether Jim would still be alive if they had done things differently. But the truth was that, for Jim, all roads led here. The town had a peculiar hold on him, always had done from way before she even met him, and now it would never let him go.

The first time she told him she loved him he had gone quiet and sat her down, looking so serious and sad she'd thought he was going
to tell her he was already married or something. Instead he had told her about this place, the town, and how it was like a family to him. He'd told her how it had cared for him when he was a baby, clothed him, fed him, educated him, impressed good Christian moral values on him, nursed him whenever he fell sick, even provided a scholarship for him to go to college.

He'd also told her that the town, his family, was in trouble, that it was struggling to survive and he felt he could help. That was why he was studying trust law, not so he could get a fancy job in a big-city law firm and get rich, but so he could help the town get back on its feet. He said he'd made a promise to himself that when he graduated, he would return there and run for public office and spend his life in the service of the town, and that, though he loved her more than he had ever thought it possible to love another person, if she didn't want that, if she wanted to go off and be a big-city lawyer, then he would understand and she should not waste any more time on him.

He had cried when he'd told her all this, a big bear of a guy holding her hands and talking with the kind of pain only love can bring, so selfless and loyal and noble. How could any girl turn away from a guy like that? Not her, that was for sure.

So when they both graduated, him top of his class and with several big firms dangling six-figure salaries in front of him, he had kept his promise and turned them all down and come back here to try to save the town that had raised him. And now he was dead and she felt like a piece of her had been torn out and replaced with a jagged block of ice. His future was gone and so was hers. She couldn't see a way through it. To top it all, she was broke too.

Broke and broken.

Fancy educations were expensive. Jim had gotten a scholarship from the town, but it hadn't covered much. They had both graduated
with student debt and gone even deeper while Jim ran for sheriff. When he got elected they thought the tide was about to turn, but he hadn't taken office before he died. No salary. No widow's pension. The house was rented and she couldn't afford to keep it—not that she wanted to. But she had nowhere else to go. Her parents were dead. She had no brothers or sisters. She had nothing. Jim had been her everything. She'd felt like a better person when she was with him. Even colors had seemed brighter. Now the world was gray and black and ugly.

The rain was torrential now, hammering the ground and throwing up mist that washed the heat from the air and the dust of the grave from her hands and clothes. Rivers gurgled down gutters and into storm drains that fed into the main run-off channel running out of town toward where the flames had been replaced by clouds of steam. So much for the town burning to the ground.

She had to leave here, get away from all the ugliness and pain. She had been thinking about that a lot too. How she might do it. How she
would
do it.

She'd prepared everything the night before. Jim had always been a troubled sleeper and she had hunted through the house for his various stashes of sleeping pills. Jim had his own minicloset in the bathroom where he kept his “man stuff” and going through it had felt like a small betrayal, like she was trespassing on something private. He was everywhere inside: in the old Gillette razor he had used since college, in the few strands of hair trapped in his hairbrush, in the half-empty bottle of cologne. She had sprayed it in the air then walked through it as if she was stepping through the ghost of him.

She found three bottles in total of Ambien and emptied them out onto the granite countertops in the kitchen. A search online had proved mostly unhelpful, her question “How many sleeping pills will
prove fatal?” directing her to sleep forums and links to suicide help lines. The closest she had gotten to real information was a post from a nurse who said an adult would need to take at least fifty. She had sixty-three and figured, with her slight frame, that it should be enough, but she crushed them inside a freezer bag to make sure she didn't lose any, the jagged edges piercing the plastic and leaving small traces of white powder on the granite. She had also noted the warnings on the label not to take the pills with alcohol and had taken a bottle of Glenfiddich single malt from the cabinet and placed it by her bed. She planned to dissolve the powder in a large Scotch, drink it straight down, then lie back and drift away on a pleasant whiskey haze. All she had to do was get home.

She forced herself on through the hammering rain, one foot in front of the other, until her house appeared in the mist up ahead. She reached her driveway and almost staggered up it, forcing her legs to walk the last few feet home. Her car was tucked right up at the top of the drive to make room for Jim's and she felt the absence of him come crashing down when she thought of how his car would never be parked there again. It made her feel sick, really sick, and she grabbed at the wooden rail, leaning heavily on it for support until the nausea passed. Then she hauled herself up the steps and onto her wide, covered porch. There was a couch to the right of the door and she was so wrung out and bone-deep exhausted she felt like lying down on it and resting a minute. If her dress hadn't been so wet she might have done just that, but she felt wretched and chilled and there were no blankets to warm her and, besides, she had a job to do. So she continued, heaving the screen door open and twisting the handle of the front door her urban-girl heart still got a kick out of never having to lock.

She pushed it open, stepped into the sanctuary of her home—and stopped dead when she saw what was inside.

T
HE RAIN DRUMMED ON THE ROOF OF THE CRUISER AS THEY PULLED AWAY
from the billboard and headed back into town and Holly Coronado's house. Morgan was driving—he had insisted, though Solomon would have been happier to walk, even with the rain. He kept the window wide open as a compromise, the rain blowing in through it as they drove along. They headed up Main Street, past the rain-glossed storefronts and all the closed stores.

“I guess it's going to put a big dent in your tourist income, this fire,” Solomon said.

Morgan nodded. “Guess so.”

“Must be a worry, town this size.”

“Money's always a worry, but we do okay.”

“How?”

Morgan sighed, as though talking was a burden. “Are you genuinely interested or just passing the time?”

“I'm interested.”

“Okay, so we got the airfield, that brings in more than tourist dollars, what with the storage fees we get from the military and salvage
money too. We also got a number of long-standing civic trusts in place that keep things running and the bills paid. We're all right, don't you worry about that.”

“I'm not worried. I don't live here.”

They turned off Main Street and started heading toward the piles of discarded rubble from mining. Beyond them Solomon could see the airfield, lines and lines of parked aircraft sitting wing to wing, their engines and windows wrapped in some kind of white protective covering to keep out the dust. There were hundreds of them, thousands: military, commercial, old, new, their various shapes prompting names and information to riffle through his mind as well as a question. “The plane that crashed, what kind was it?”

“It was a Beechcraft, AT-7. You know planes, Mr. Creed?”

He pictured a compact, single-winged plane with two big engine cowls and a wide twin-finned tail. “Advanced training version of the Model 18,” Solomon said. “Used to train navigators in World War Two.”

Morgan smiled and shook his head. “For a man with no memory, you sure seem to know a lot of stuff.” He pulled his phone from his pocket. “This model was a real beaut. Reconditioned Pratt and Whitney, brand-new hydraulic systems and electrics, the whole nine yards. Here”—he showed him a picture—“ain't she something?”

Solomon studied the screen. It matched the image his mind had already conjured up, but there was one crucial difference. The plane that crashed had
shone
. Apart from its serial number, the fuselage had been stripped of all paint or markings and polished until the aluminum shone like chrome, or . . .

“. . . Mirrors.”

“What's that?”

“It looks like it's made of mirrors.”

“They call it brightwork, no paint, just a real high polish on the aluminum then a clear lacquer to seal it. Cuts down on drag. Damn shame we lost it. Was looking forward to flying it myself.”

Solomon thought back to the mirror in the church and the momentary illusion he had experienced that his reflection was not his own and the mirror was in fact a doorway with someone else standing on the other side of it. He looked at the picture of the plane, taken on a desert runway, so highly polished it reflected the land and sky.

“Maybe that's how I got here.”

“You think you
were
on that plane now?”

“No, I meant . . .” He shook his head, his thoughts incomplete and tricky to explain. He changed the subject. “You a pilot, Chief Morgan?”

“Me? Oh yeah. I guess if you live by the sea, everyone's a sailor, right? Here everyone's a pilot. I was in the Air Reserve, 944th Fighter Wing. Ground crew. Some of the F-16s I maintained are now parked out there in the Boneyard—that's what we call the storage part of the airfield. We get a lot of old planes coming through here. Some for repair, some for storage. Climate here is dry as it gets, means metal don't corrode much, and the desert is caliche—you know what that is?”

“Calcium carbonate. Like a naturally occurring cement.”

“Exactly. Means the planes can sit right out there on the ground without the need to build concrete parking areas. We got whole squadrons of B-52s been standing out there twenty years with not so much as a crack in the ground. Damn shame. Birds like that should be in the air, not sitting on the ground gathering dust.”

“How come they're here?”

“Timing, I guess. The main copper seam ran out at about the same time the Second World War was ending. The military needed some
where to store all the war surplus and the town needed to find new jobs. It was Bill Cassidy's idea to expand the airfield, Ernie's—the present mayor's—grandfather.”

“Jack Cassidy's son?”

“Grandson.”

“Quite a dynasty.”

“That's for sure.”

“And it's all coming to an end.”

Morgan turned slightly in his seat. “How do you mean?”

“Mayor Cassidy has no children.”

“Oh. Right.”

Morgan got quiet and Solomon stared out at the town slipping by: souvenir stores, an empty parking lot, a livery yard with blood red barns and a sign promising D
ESERT
T
REKKING AND
S
TAGECOACH
R
IDES UP TO THE
H
ISTORIC
C
EMETERY
. There was a corral spread out back from the road, horses huddled inside it against the weather. Then the mine slipped into view, the spill piles rising up in graveled mountains behind a high fence topped with razor wire. The rain ran in fresh rivulets down their sides, thrumming on the roofs of empty-looking buildings and forming puddles around a closed gate with a sign saying D
ANGER.
K
EEP
O
UT.
W
ORKING
M
INE.

“I thought the mine gave out at the end of the Second World War?”

Morgan glanced over at the sign. “It did. We opened her up again 'bout five years back. New methods of extraction.”

“But all the buildings look deserted.”

“Most of them are. The new operation is much less labor intensive.”

He turned off the road and accelerated away from the mine and into a maze of neat residential streets. The farther they rose up the hill
and away from the mine, the nicer the houses became, their gardens wide and deep and opening out on to the desert beyond. American flags flew on poles in front of most of them, some Arizona state flags too—thirteen rays of red and yellow radiating from a copper star with a band of blue beneath. Solomon watched them flapping wetly in the rain, his mind automatically decoding the symbolism:

Blue the color of liberty.

Copper for the state's main industry.

Thirteen original colonies of the United States.

Red and yellow for the Spanish flag carried here by conquistadors like Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, namesake of the woman he was on his way to see.

“This is us,” Morgan said, turning into a drive and pulling to a stop behind a small car. “Now remember, this lady just lost her husband.”

Solomon gazed up at the perfect-looking house—white picket fence, rocker on the porch, gray-painted weatherboards. “I only want to see if she knows me,” he said, then stepped out of the car and into the rain, glad to be outside and feel the ground beneath his feet again.

Morgan turned off the engine and followed him out, fixing his hat to protect him from the rain. “Let me go first,” he said, hurrying over to the covered porch. “She might not be in, or she might not want to—” He turned at the sound of the screen door banging open and stopped when he saw the woman step through it, dress torn, eyes blazing, shotgun in her hands pointing straight at him.