Time of Departure (22 page)

“You stalked me!” I slammed the photo album against his chest. A few loose photos fell out and fluttered to the floor. “What do they mean, Marc?”

“Claire, I—”

“Did you take these pictures?”

After a beat, he replied, “Yes.”

“Explain them to me!”

A second passed, then another.

“I … I can't.”

“You can't? You can't explain why you've been following me for my entire life?” I was shouting. “Why, Marc?
Why?
”

He didn't reply. He just looked forlorn.

“Give me my keys!”

He handed them over.

I pushed past him. He reached out.

“Don't touch me!”

I grabbed my suitcase and threw the door open so violently that it slammed into the baseboard stop and shuddered on its hinges.

As I stormed out of the apartment, Marc's sorrowful voice followed me. “Claire, I'm sorry! Soon you'll understand.”

I wasn't listening.

I took the stairs in case he'd sabotaged the elevator.

 

31

Seconds after I claimed a pair of reclining seats against the bulkhead at the rear of the near-empty passenger car, the train gave a lurch. I shoved my bag onto the overhead rack, kicked off my heels, and collapsed.

Moving imperceptibly at first, and then with slowly gathering speed, the Silver Meteor pulled away from the DeLand station and started rolling north.

I had decided against boarding at Palatka. If Marc had taken it into his head to follow me—and for all I knew, he had—that's where he would have gone. Instead, I'd driven to DeLand, the nearest station to the south. I suppose it would have been smarter to drive north, to Jacksonville, but I was in no mood for freeways and city traffic.

I reclined my seat, and for several miles I lay completely still, watching the passing landscape but seeing nothing.

On the drive down from Gainesville, I had deliberately suppressed all thought and emotion for fear of causing a traffic accident. Now that I was on the train, the compulsion to turn over in my mind, again and again, the events of the last few months was overwhelming. I reexamined every step in my relationship with Marc, every remembered nuance of conduct and conversation, searching for something—anything—to reproach myself with. I set about this task with all the masochism that accompanies the 20/20 hindsight of the betrayed; and with all the despair that came with my struggle to deny that I had just lost the only man that, against all odds, I had truly loved.

My expedition into this slough of despond kept circling back to the bottle of '83 Margaux.

That was the moment, I decided.

The moment when Marc Hastings revealed he had researched my affair with my law school instructor … an affair that had ended nearly a decade before.

That was the moment, I decided, when I should have walked away.

But I still could not penetrate the reason, the motive—the sickness!—that had driven this man to single me out as a child and stalk me for half a lifetime.

Why?

It had to be connected somehow to the missing girls, but I couldn't fathom how. A horrifying question niggled on the margins of my consciousness.

What if Marc was the killer?

The thought made me feel physically ill. But it couldn't be right. The police files I'd studied clearly showed he was working and on shift when some of the abductions had taken place. I forced the suspicion from my mind.

While I was wrestling with all this, something registered in my peripheral vision.

It was just a slight movement, but for some reason it triggered that old situational awareness ganglion in my brain. It brought me back to the here and now and made me aware of a woman who was seated a few rows in front of me.

She had twisted in her seat, and she was staring directly at me.

She appeared to be in her fifties, maybe early sixties, a bit heavy in the face but still quite attractive. My first thought was—as Geiger had put it—“another dissatisfied customer.” But I had no recollection of ever seeing her face at a courtroom defense table.

When my eyes locked on hers, the woman paled and turned away. I noticed her shoulders hunch together, as if she had felt a cold draft. I puzzled over her behavior for a few seconds, and then closed my eyes and went back to my ruminations about Marc.

A few minutes later I sensed someone in the aisle next to me. I opened my eyes. The woman was standing there. She looked frightened.

“Can I help you?”

“Is your name Claire?”

I stiffened. “Why?”

“Is it? Is it Claire?”

“How do you know that?”

“God! You don't look a day…!” She stared at me in wonder. “It's happening!”

“What?”

“I don't understand!”

“Neither do I.” I kept my tone even. The woman was obviously a mental case. “What's the problem?”

“We've got to get off this train!”

“I don't.”

“Okay,
I've
got to get off this train!”

“Okay.” I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes. “I think there's a stop coming up.”

The woman wheeled around and hustled back up the aisle. She tugged a bag out of the overhead rack and then called back at me. “Claire!”

“Yes?”

“Thank you!”

“You're welcome.”

I didn't know what else to say.

The woman gave me a long look and then hurried up the aisle past the few other passengers, some of who had been watching her antics bemusedly. She got off the train at Palatka. A few seconds later, I spotted her on the small ground-level platform, staring at the railcar we had shared.

Then another person caught my attention. A dark-haired young woman crossed my field of view and grabbed the older woman by the arm. She appeared to speak to her in a hurried fashion. The older woman recoiled, but she didn't pull away; she just stood there, staring at the young woman's face. At first she appeared surprised, then shocked. After a brief exchange, she raised an arm and pointed at the window where I sat watching.

The train started to move. The young woman released her grip and started jogging along the platform, trying to keep pace with my window. Her eyes were big with emotion. She called out to me, but I couldn't hear what she said.

The train picked up speed and she fell behind.

Just before I lost sight of her, she dropped to her knees.

Her face had looked familiar.

Then I remembered: She was the woman who had stopped me outside the courthouse to ask directions to Starbucks.

The episode spooked me.

I got up from my seat and went searching for the lounge car. What I wanted more than anything was a drink. But as I made my way forward through the train, I felt unsettled.

Something wasn't right.

That damned sensation was back.

Something's going to happen.

I stamped down on the feeling.

You're too late! It's already happened!

*   *   *

Engineers and other science-minded people who study what some of them refer to as “the normal accident environment” often deploy technospeak phrases such as “congested complex networks,” “subsystem linkages,” and “cascading failures.” I know that because I studied some of their reports and academic papers during our office's investigation of a bleacher collapse at a college game that killed three people. But what actually happened on that evening of March 1, 2011, on that Amtrak train, on that north–south route, I will never know.

I know only what happened to me.

I reached the train's lounge car, felt for the money in my jacket pocket and found a photograph.

Correction: It was only one side of a photograph, because it had been cut in half.

It was one of those photos from an old Polaroid Land Camera … the ones that used pack film. The picture was in color, but it was badly faded. The subject was a young woman sitting at bar with a drink in front of her. She was gazing with studied intensity at someone to her right. There must have been another person in the original photograph because, close to the picture's sliced right edge, there was another drink on the bar.

I turned the photo over. There was writing on the back, done in ballpoint pen. I had seen enough of Marc's handwriting to recognize it instantly.

He had written:
Remember to tell me the truth.

I puzzled over the words.

I flipped back to the picture and studied it closely.

The woman looked like me.

The woman
was me
.

But I didn't recognize the setting … or my hairstyle … or my clothes.

That's when I felt the first jolt.

The railcar began to shudder, and the cans and bottles in the tall cooler behind the bar started rattling and smashing. There was a horrendous sound. At first it groaned, and then rumbled, and finally ramped up to an earsplitting roar, followed immediately by the shriek of tearing, twisting metal. In uncanny slow motion, the floor of the car buckled upward, tilting and twisting. The windows crazed and bulged. I threw myself to the floor just as, one by one, they exploded in a shower of glass. The car began to roll on its axis. I struggled to a kneeling position in time to see the drink cooler topple to the floor, pinning the bar attendant. The car kept rolling and I watched in horror as the giant appliance ground the screaming man's legs to boneless mush. Now desperate to counter the car's deadly roll, I tried to crawl up the opposite wall. Pain ripped through me as I smashed a shin on a heating unit. I lunged for a handhold, felt my fingers grip … slip … grip again, and then, sickeningly, claw at empty space.

I fell straight through a window and into the night.

I plunged earthward.

I had a fleeting glimpse of black water below.

I fell …

I was weirdly aware that I wasn't screaming, that I was … calm.

I fell …

Time slowed.

I fell … into silence.

And all consciousness ended.

 

LIPINSKI

 

32

When Jeff Geiger burst into Lipinski's office, his boss was hunkered over a pile of paperwork. The lieutenant looked up in annoyance at Geiger's unannounced entry.

“Got something, boss!”

Lipinski's morose expression was not exactly calculated to encourage conversation. “Better be good.”

“I think you'll like it. You know that .38 we found in Tribe's cabin?”

“Yeah.”

“The lab freed up the cylinder so they could fire it. The bullet we dug out of the floor by the trapdoor definitely came from that gun.”

“I saw that report. Old news.”

“Maybe, but this isn't. The feds traced the serial number.”

“I thought there was no record of it!”

“It was never added to their database, but one of their agents went back to basics and tracked down an old paper trail. Turns out the gun was stolen back in the '70s.” Geiger dropped a thin, dog-eared file folder on the desk in front of Lipinski. “That's the original theft report.”

Lipinski picked up the folder. “They sent us an original?”

“No. I got it from archives.”

Lipinski stared at him. “You mean
our
archives?”

Geiger smirked. “Yeah. That gun was stolen from one of our detectives. Take a look.”

Lipinski opened the file. He scanned the top page, quickly flipped through the two pages of typed and handwritten text behind it, and studied the signature on the final page. He lurched to his feet.

“We go … now!”

Geiger grinned. “Thought you'd like it.”

*   *   *

Lipinski had insisted on taking the wheel. He wove through traffic, wigwags flashing, while Geiger used the yelper to clear the heavier knots of congestion. Lipinski slid the squad car to a halt in front of the building's main entrance, and then drove it up over the curb and onto the sidewalk. The maneuver placed the front end of the car within a few feet of the front door, scaring the daylights out of an older woman who was just in the act of exiting.

Lipinski jumped out, waving his badge. “Hold that door!”

The woman stared at him as if he were a madman and stumbled backwards into the foyer. Geiger sprinted for the door in time to catch it before it clicked shut. He held it open for Lipinski and then followed him in.

“What's the matter with you?” Lipinski barked at the woman. “Didn't you hear me?”

The woman's initial expression of shock hardened into anger. “What's the matter with
me
? What about you? You could have killed me! Do you think that badge gives you the right to drive like a lunatic?” Her voice was quivering with rage. “And why do you think you can just storm into a private building? Do you have a warrant?”

“We're on police business! And, anyway, this is a public area!”

“Really? I don't recall anyone buzzing you in.”

Geiger intervened, trying to soothe. “Ma'am … we just need to find a person who lives in this building.”

“C'mon, Jeff!” Lipinski said. “We've wasted enough time here!” He strode over to the stairs and started up.

Geiger was about to follow when the woman caught his sleeve.

“What is that man's name?”

“Lieutenant Lipinski, ma'am. Gainesville PD. And I'm sorry if we frightened you.”

“You didn't frighten me, young man. He did. And you weren't rude to me. He was.”

“Geiger!” Lipinski's voice echoed down the stairwell.

“I have to go. This really is police business.”

“I'm sure it is. And I'm sure my brother will want to hear all about it.”

“Your brother?”

“Yes, Mr. Geiger. My brother is the mayor.”