Two If by Sea (51 page)

“And you had no indication?” Harry said, slicing the dill bread with the precision of a diamond cutter.

“None at all. And we had a sonogram, because she was so big. We were frightened there might be . . . anything. A tumor. She's a big animal, fourteen hundred pounds, eighteen hands tall. The vet only saw the one baby and said, it's all good.” Frank sighed. “I can't believe Glory Bee carried two babies for eleven months. A horse isn't made to carry twins, thirty, forty pounds each. And then I thought she'd go berserk. But no, she was cleaning them off and nuzzling them, right away.”

“Tired, though.”

“We're going to have to bottle-feed them part of the time. The vet's bringing the things now. She did beautifully.”

“The horse or the vet?”

“Both. But it was hard. Glory Bee will lose too much flesh trying to nourish both of them. We've got to make sure she takes it easy.”

Frank knew he was talking way too much and way too fast, entirely unlike his quotidian self, but he could not believe the magnitude of the morning. He was the only cop he'd ever known who had never seen a birth, animal or human. It was some compensation for Glory Bee's own promising career cut short. He knew he was babbling, but thought he might levitate with euphoria.

“Who's with her?”

“Patrick, the fellow who . . . well, you know Patrick . . . but he had to follow the vet back to get supplies. Claudia's there now, but I need to get back. It's a workday for her. Cheese sandwich with onion. Jesus. I'm tired. I already said that. I sound like Ernest Hemingway.”

“He lives here?”

“No, Harry. He's dead.”

“What will you call them? The babies?”

Frank sat down in the red chair that Harry kept near the door and bent over to tie his boots. He'd forgotten to do that before he left. “Well, we didn't plan. We knew that the one, the little girl, would be Patrick's. He decided to call her Gloria in Excelsis.”

“Is that sacrilege?”

“No,” Frank said. “Not without the ‘Deo' on it.” He took a bite and complimented Harry on the sandwich. Then he went on: “And the male, my son Colin chose All Saints for his name. It's All Saints today, after all, isn't it? November first? Last night was Halloween. The boys went out with their grandmother in the pony cart around about to get treats and they came home and went to bed. Then, a couple of hours later, I went to check on Glory Bee and she was in labor, so I turned the boys out into their Muck Boots.” Harry had made a second sandwich, which he handed to Frank, who ate it in three bites, leaning against the counter. “I should have a pound of this cheese, Harry, too. And a gallon of milk. You were right about that bread. Is there a loaf? Any oranges? We won't have any time today to go to the market. The boys will sleep until noon.”

Harry raised his eyebrows. He was eighty but proud to say that he never looked a day over seventy-six, and flirted so strenuously with Hope that she finally told him she was secretly engaged to the widowed pastor. “What about school? That won't do.”

“Just this one day. They were up all night, too. They'll want to watch the foals, and they should. It's part of their lives. The vet says to keep checking to make sure they're not jaundiced or weak.”

“School of life.”

“Sure. See you, Harry.”

Harry wrung out a hot cloth and began painstakingly to clean his slicer. Just as the bells signaled the door about to close behind Frank, Harry said quietly, “A fellow asked last week was there a Yank living around here now.”

Frank stopped.

“What did you say?”

“I told him yes. There was an American with his wife. A writer working on another book about the Brontës, a novel this one, because Christ knows the world needs yet one more book about those three. Twenty times as many books written about them as they ever wrote themselves.”

“You're too hard, Harry. People are fascinated by those women, all alone out here, nothing but sheep and Yorkshire rednecks and their old dad for company, writing about love as well as anybody ever did, even if they never knew too much about it personally. If anybody ever does.” Exhaling deeply, Frank said, “Well, thank you, Harry.”

“How's the lad?”

“Ian or Colin?”

“The little one Claudia brought to see to our Rosie.”

“He's very well. How is Rosie?”

“She'll never be a genius, Frank. You know that. But she's right as rain now. Happy at her school. Happy at home when she's home. Helping her mother. Doesn't ever run off.” It was a relief to hear. After Harry's older daughters married, Rose terrified her parents by running away repeatedly, getting drunk in pubs—where it was quite legal to serve her—but most horribly, appearing naked in the doorway when the food suppliers arrived. When Harry's patient wife tried to bring her in, Rose socked her mother in the belly. “You know she lives at school now, there five days a week. She likes a boy who's . . . like her. Nice lad. Drives a car.” Harry added, “And our Flora's husband. He's found a job. Laid off the pot.”

Frank turned back into the store, reaching for his pocket. “That's good. I'm worn out, Harry. I just realized I was walking out of here without paying you.”

“Those are on the house, Frank.”

“Don't be silly. I just stood here and ate six pounds' worth of expensive cheese and bought another pound of it.”

“And my girl Flora can pay her light bill now. It's all a great wheel, isn't it?”

“Well,” Frank said.

The sun had risen higher, teasing out the wedges of fog in the dales while Frank was stuffing himself with the sandwiches that now literally distended his gut. He was, in fact, getting a gut. There in the cobbled street of Stead, before he climbed into the Rover, Frank vowed never to drive the car or ride one of the horses this mile or so to the pub or the little shops, ever again.

He would walk everywhere, the way an Englishman should.

Colin had never stopped lecturing him: farm work was not exercise. Frank dug up a boulder and shoved it into a wall, and then sat for ten minutes admiring the view. A city cop by choice, a farmer by birth, he had never, until he came to Stone Pastures, really felt the soil. It used to be something to be brushed off. Now he ran his hands over the contours of rocks as though they were skulls from an archaeological dig, and smelled the tang of the dirt rubbed between his fingers. The view still enthralled Frank. Down below, somewhere, there were plenty of sooty cities. But high up, the sheep, the provenance of this excellent cheese, wandered up lanes where once the only carts had wooden wheels. The old Rover that had belonged to Tura's father still attacked the steep prows of those hills with geriatric vigor. Most of the time, Frank still drove the Tenacity truck. And most of the time, he drove. Gravely, Colin encouraged Frank to consider his heart. “Even you could do yoga or something, Dad. Lots of old people do.”

As he said this, he poked Frank gently above the belt. Patrick—who ate his weight in bacon rolls and puddings every day and still went a hundred and five pounds—stumbled off laughing. Colin's small legs, slightly bowed, were now strapped with tiers of muscle, his back straight as a seam. Each afternoon, he set out alone up those sheep tracks, running for an hour before he came home, drenched and depleted. It was Claudia who told Frank to get Colin a good cell phone in a shockproof case and stock it with endless loops of music—both so that he could find solace in the music and so that he was always instantly ready to dial 411 if he should turn an ankle . . . or meet a stranger.

Frank let a shiver pass over him as he threw the packages into the backseat and pulled open his door. Then he stopped. A fox was crossing the road not ten feet in front of the Rover, and after her trotted three sleek kits. No one wanted a fox in a neighborhood filled with chicken coops. But he wasn't going to disturb her fairytale progress this morning.

As he slipped into the front seat and pulled on the door, Frank heard a sound, nearly simultaneous, like an echo of the clapping shut of the car door. He twisted in his seat.

“Hello, Frank. Quite a morning,” Louis said.

W
HEN HE COULD BREATHE,
Frank said, “Are you Louis?”

“I suppose it doesn't matter. I'll never see you again. People call me that sometimes. But let's not waste precious moments.” The man wore an immaculate long-sleeved white shirt with a raised stripe in the same material under a navy blazer with dull silver buttons. The nails on his gun hand were clean and buffed, and his scent was of nothing. Louis said, “Let's make a plan. Here's how I see it. You can stall so that I shoot you, and no one will recognize that sound because this silencer is absolutely state-of-the-art, and I will still go back to the farm and take Ian. Or you can go back with me and make it all easier. You can keep the other kid. I don't want him.”

Of course, Louis would not want Colin. Colin would be a liability.

Although Ian couldn't answer Colin with his mind, there would be some kind of sensitivity that would bind them telepathically, and who knew how much Colin would be able to do when he was older? He might grow up to be a GPS straight to Ian, and Louis knew that Frank would never stop searching for them.

“There's nothing on earth you can do to make me give Ian to you.”

“I can kill your wife also.”

“Why?” Frank asked. “That just creates more havoc. More ways people could see you. Patrick's there now. So is my mother. And the vet. Will you kill everyone?”

“No, they aren't there now.” Louis tapped Frank's skull, not gently, with the muzzle of the Colt. “Your mother is at church, the nice one, miles from here, and Patrick is keeping company with the daughter of the fellow who sells horse chow or whatever it is you buy. He stopped there on the way home from the vet's.”

“He'll be back any moment. I told him to be.”

“He won't. Don't you think we plan things, Frank? Don't you think my good friend makes webs of all you do, and buy, and all the places you go, and for how long, and your taxes and your inheritances and your medical bills? When the older boy came to the United States, we knew what plane he was on, of course. We knew that the hatchet-faced sister wasn't really just visiting, she was leaving religious life forever. Even you didn't know that. She'd made job inquiries. She'd written letters. Do you think those things are really private to anyone who can really use that vast net of information out there?”

“Some things are.”

“No things are, Frank. Not if someone is paying attention. That is an illusion. Privacy is an illusion. The professor has paid attention for many months to bring us to this exact moment.”

“Who's the professor?”

“Your transfer of the farm, to Claudia and then to Patrick Walsh, it was not effective, but it was quaint—”

“Who is the professor?”

“Shut up. Now, Patrick left quite a little while after you did, hoping to have a short visit with the girl and return before you missed him, but we've timed him, and you don't start to notice his absence, ever, until at least an hour or so after you get home. We don't need anywhere near an hour.”

“How long have you known we were here?”

Louis shook his head tolerantly. “You must know that I knew you were here before you came, Frank. We saw every move you made. We encouraged you.”

“Why? Why did you wait?”

“Don't you see how much easier this is? How much more private? Out of your comfort zone, away from all your usual support systems? You don't even have your phone with you. You'd have to think twice to recall the number for emergency services. You're not a stupid man, only a foolish one.” Louis sighed, and turned his expensive watch so that the band sat directly on the most prominent bone of his wrist. Louis's wrists were delicate, almost childlike. “I do like things to be easy. Your being so happy and so busy didn't do me any harm. Lots of activity with the horses, and how odd that Prospero was lamed, huh? Lots of romance, lots of fun with the boys, all good distractions. The old Frank Mercy would have noticed certain things a long time ago. He would have noticed people who didn't belong where they were, from day one. Right down to this day. The old Frank Mercy would have locked the car, right here in this quaint little road.”

“Police cars lock on their own,” Frank said, stuttering before he could stop himself. “Some do now.”

“Yes, of course,” Louis said. “And I should give you proper credit, Frank. You did foil us. A number of times.”

“If you think I'm going to drive you to my house to kill my wife . . .”

“Yes, your wife. You asked why. Why would I kill your wife? I don't really want to, and not because I think she's great, and not because I think I would be caught. I've seen the British police in action. No, it's because it would upset Ian. It would make it harder for me if he's distraught. I want him to think he's just coming with me for a short time to do one important thing, and then coming straight back. He can't tell if you're lying. That's not part of his makeup.”

“How do you know?”

“I do know, but also, you will reassure him.” Louis paused. “If I must, though, if time starts getting short, I will kill her. You know that.” He let the gun burrow into the hair at the base of Frank's skull. “Now, let me tell you about the people who really are at your farm. There are two friends I know quite well, and they have radios in their pockets to match the one I have right here.” Louis tapped the pocket of his navy blazer. “It's a little James Bond. I admit that! But there is no decent cell-phone signal up here. So all those things you might be thinking of doing, like crashing the car and hoping you'll knock me senseless, or driving through the window of one of those stores to get attention, or rolling out on the ground, don't even bother. Really don't. The minute I touch my pocket, your wife's head is blown up by one of my friends. Both boys will see it.”