Whirlwind (6 page)

10

Dallas, Texas

T
he wire service had put Kate up at the Marriott City Center.

In the elevator to her twelfth-floor room she texted her friend Heather, who was watching her daughter in Ohio.

Hi Heather, I’ll be online in 5 min if Grace is still up.

Heather responded:

She and Aubrey are up. Saw the news, it looks horrible. How are you doing?

Hanging in there.

Moments later, Kate was in her room making the connection and her tablet’s screen blossomed with her daughter’s bright face.

“Hi, Mom! I miss you!”

“Miss you, too, honey. What’re you doing up so late?”

“Aubrey and I are putting sparkly stuff on our fingernails, see?”

Grace wiggled ten little fingers in front of her face.

“I see, very pretty.”

“Mom, were there really tornadoes where you are?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“Was it like the
Wizard of Oz
and was there a flying witch?”

“No, not like the movie. It was real. It was very bad... People got hurt.”

“But you’re okay, right?”

“I’m okay, sweetie.” Kate smiled for her. “So tell me, what’s new today?”

“Aubrey and I got invited to Kayla’s birthday party. Can I go and can I wear my new flower dress? Please say yes,
pull-ease!
”

“I’ll talk to Aubrey’s mom. Are you being a good girl for me?”

“Uh-huh.”

They talked for the next thirty minutes until Grace began yawning and Kate wound things down.

“I miss you and I love you, kiddo.”

“Miss you too and love you more.” Grace puckered and kissed the screen to meet Kate’s kiss.

Talking with her daughter was balm for Kate’s heart, but the strain of the day had turned her neck and shoulders to stone. After her call with Grace, Heather told her that a woman from a collection agency had called that morning looking for a Ms. or Mrs. Kate Page.

Kate thanked her for the warning. She’d follow up on the partial payment she’d already sent electronically from Dallas.

After the call, she took a shower.

Needles of hot water soothed her tired muscles but couldn’t wash away the day’s images of walking among the dead, the dying, the injured and all that devastation.

Kate let go.

She sobbed as steam clouds rose around her, letting them pull her back through her life, back to that night when she and Vanessa, her little sister, were together with her babysitter, Mrs. Kawolski, when she’d answered the door of their creaky old house.

Mrs. Kawolski’s hand covering her mouth. The police officers filling the small kitchen, their utility belts making leathery squeaks as they cleared their throats. The policewoman giving Kate and Vanessa little stuffed bears to hold, a teddy for her, a polar bear for Vanessa.
I’m so sorry,
she said.
There was a terrible fire, I’m so very sorry, your mommy and daddy won’t be coming home. They’re with the angels now.
Mrs. Kawolski taking them both in her arms, rocking them, whispering a prayer over and over.

In the aftermath, Kate and Vanessa pinballed through a succession of homes belonging to increasingly distant relatives. Ultimately, they lived with strangers. Pretty much all Kate remembered from that part of her childhood was how she and Vanessa were forever moving.

Until the accident.

Kate and Vanessa were in the backseat of a car, driving in the mountains. Suddenly their car was flying, rolling upside down before it crashed in a river. The water rushed in. It was so cold, so dark, except for the dome light in the car as it banged against the rocky riverbed.

Everything moved in slow motion.

The windows had broken open. Kate had Vanessa’s hand; she got them both out of the car and tried to pull Vanessa to the surface with her but felt the cold numbing her fingers, felt them loosening. She was unable to hang on.

Vanessa slipped away.

Why couldn’t I hold her?

Kate was the only one who survived. She was nine years old; Vanessa was six. They never found Vanessa’s body. It may have gotten wedged in rocks, they said. Vanessa’s little white polar bear was still in the car. When they found it they gave it to Kate.

After the accident, Kate was sent to live in a never-ending chain of foster homes. Some were good, some weren’t.

As soon as she was old enough, she ran away.

She did what she could to survive. She panhandled, lied about her age and took any job she could get. She cleaned toilets, washed cars, washed dishes, landscaped, waitressed, did night shifts in an office sending out spam, she even worked as a phone sex operator. She learned about life the hard way, but she never stole, never used drugs or got drunk. She never prostituted herself.

Somehow Kate managed to follow an internal moral compass, which she believed—
no, hoped—
she’d inherited from her parents. Relatives had told her that they were honest, hardworking people. Her mom was a supermarket cashier who loved to read and kept a journal; her dad worked in a factory that made military truck parts. They were living near Washington, D.C., at the time they died in the hotel fire.

Kate never really knew them.

She had vague memories of her mother’s voice and how she smelled like roses. How the month before she died she gave Kate and Vanessa each a tiny guardian angel necklace with their names engraved. How Vanessa wanted to trade them so she wore the one with her big sister’s name on it and Kate had the angel bearing Vanessa’s name.

She still had it.

Whenever she looked at it, she’d remember how happy they all were, and how she felt so safe in her father’s big, strong hands whenever he lifted her up, and she could not forget how Vanessa’s eyes shone like stars when she laughed.

They were all ghosts to her now.

But at times, Kate would stare at the few photos she had of her with Vanessa, hugging her little polar bear she had named “Chilly,” dreaming that Vanessa might be alive somewhere. She knew it was impossible but she couldn’t help it. She kept reading news stories about people finding long-lost relatives after enduring years of pain. Those stories and the reporters who wrote them gave Kate hope and direction.

She knew deep in her heart that she needed to become a journalist, someone who helped people find the answers to the most important questions in their lives.

At age nineteen she was living on her own in Chicago, where she took night classes to finish high school.

She wrote an essay about how in her heart her sister would always be alive and that she would never stop yearning to know what really happened the night Vanessa’s little hand slipped from hers.

Did she die that night in the mountains? Or did she survive and wander off miraculously into another life?

Kate’s teacher showed it to David Yardley, an editor at the
Tribune,
telling him of Kate’s desire to be a reporter. A meeting was arranged. Astounded by Kate’s natural writing talent, and her life, David helped her with a part-time news job. She remembered him saying, “You’re like something out of a Dickens novel.”

She was forever grateful for his help.

Kate graduated from high school and worked her way through community college, which led to news reporter jobs in Syracuse, New York, for a short time before she went to California. She was still pretty green working on the crime desk at the
San Francisco Star
when she fell for a cop. It was after she got pregnant that she learned he was married.

Kate was crushed.

How could he lie to her? How could she be so stupid?

She’d confided to a reporter friend that she wanted to keep her baby but needed to leave the city. She got a job with the
Repository
in Canton, where she had Grace at age twenty-three.

Kate thrived on the paper’s crime beat where she was honored for tracking down a fugitive killer. While her work was shut out for a Pulitzer and other national prizes, she did win a regional award for journalistic investigative excellence. But the glory didn’t last.

One day after several years, Kate was called into the office of Ed Brant, her managing editor. He removed his glasses and said her job, along with a dozen others, was gone. It was a dark time for her but Kate did the best she could. She searched everywhere but news jobs were drying up.

Weeks then months passed. She waitressed while applying for public relations positions with corporations. She got one in Canton that lasted three weeks. Kate just did not fit in.

She was a reporter. Period.

Things got dire. Kate was juggling bills when she learned that Newslead, the worldwide wire service, had an opening in its Dallas bureau.

Kate’s application got her a teleconference phone interview with Chuck Laneer and Dorothea Pick in Dallas, and a human resources woman in New York. A week later, Chuck called Kate back. She’d made the short list. He invited her to a three-week internship at the bureau with two other candidates. The strongest candidate would get the full-time job at the bureau. It paid nearly double what she’d earned at the
Repository,
and came with great benefits.

Kate arranged for Grace to stay with her friend Heather Baines, whose daughter, Aubrey, went to school with Grace. It tore at Kate to leave Grace for three weeks, but she had to do it for both of them. She’d promised they’d talk on Skype every day. Kate loaded up her Chevy then made the twelve-hundred-mile drive to Dallas in just over two days. She stayed in cheap motels and ate fast food to save money.

The trip was a lonely one, and at this moment, in the shower, Kate longed to be in Ohio. She ached to be home watching a movie on the sofa with Grace, something funny, something happy, because the day’s tragedies were overwhelming.

Kate stepped from the shower, toweled off then brushed her teeth and her hair. She put on her pajamas, killed the lights then got into bed, exhausted. She reached for her phone. The screen glowed in the dark as she studied her favorite picture of Grace.

I’d die if I lost you.

Then she cued up her photo of Jenna Cooper amid the horror, searching for her baby, her words replaying,
“I had him but I let him go. Oh God, it’s my fault!”

Kate knew this anguish, this guilt. She’d felt it throughout her whole life, after she’d let Vanessa slip away in the river.

As she looked out her hotel window at the buildings and the highways twinkling in the night, she was overwhelmed with self-reproach, for Vanessa, for leaving Grace, for being in this room while people out there were enduring so much loss and pain.

Kate stared hard at her photo of Jenna Cooper.

Like you, I can only imagine what’s going through your mind.

Was her baby dead? Was he hurt, buried under debris? Did someone find him and take him to a hospital?

Kate continued looking at Jenna’s picture.

I’ll help you find the truth
.

11

Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex, Texas

T
he next morning, across the city, in Room 16 of the Dreamaway Motor Inn, the TV glowed in the predawn darkness.

The window shades were drawn, blocking the neon sign flashing Vacancy out front. The room’s air reeked of cigarettes and stale beer as Remy Toxton sat at the edge of the bed teasing her spiky red hair while watching coverage of the disaster.

Dallas stations showed the storm’s aftermath and interviews with shell-shocked survivors in neighborhoods that had been hit hard. When the report went to the flea market, Remy, still a little shaky, concentrated on it until she was satisfied that no threat had surfaced from what she’d done.

“This is going to work out for us, babe,” she said.

Mason Varno, Remy’s boyfriend, was standing shirtless in his sweatpants at the window. He’d gently moved the shade to watch the parking lot while rubbing his lips and constantly checking his cell phone for messages. They had service here. Remy threw him a look over her shoulder, loving how his muscles rippled under his prison tattoos, loving that he was her man, flaws and all.

No one was perfect. Mason didn’t talk much. He had a lot on his mind.

So did Remy.

They’d been through hell lately, but now their dreams were within their grasp. They were going to get enough money to get a place along the Oregon coast and start their new life, the real life they both deserved. It was going to happen. They were beating the odds, and now Remy believed that they could overcome anything.

Even a dead baby?

Yes. No. I don’t know.

An alarm bell went off in her skull, her brain convulsed. She held her head to keep it from splitting open and took deep breaths.

Stop thinking about that! It’s in the past! Leave it there!

Her jaw tensed as she counted backward from one hundred until she recovered.

Okay, okay.

She was all right.

Just one of her little spells.

She turned back to the TV.

We were so lucky to get out with nothing but a few scrapes.

It’s all meant to be
.

The newswoman was talking about the number of dead, missing, injured, homeless, and where tornado victims could get help. The screen showed a graphic with information and websites on locations across the Metroplex for emergency shelters providing medical services, food, water, clothing, trauma support and other aid.

This was important. Remy took notes, got her laptop and resumed checking the locations for shelters and medical help. Then she searched online news sites focusing on reports about the flea market, scanning them for one thing.

Nothing surfaced in the stream of stories until a certain picture blurred past. Remy went back to a photograph of a woman holding an empty, beat-up stroller and a child standing with her before the devastation. The cutline read: “Jenna Cooper holds her daughter, Cassie, and the empty stroller of her five-month-old son, Caleb, who is missing after a tornado destroyed the Saddle Up Center where scores of people were killed.”

The article with the picture was by Newslead, the wire service. The section on Jenna Cooper was only a few short paragraphs. Remy scrutinized every word.

Among the tragic stories emerging from the Saddle Up Center is that of Jenna Cooper, who lost her five-month-old baby, Caleb, when the tornado hit.

“I had him, but I couldn’t hold on.”

Cooper’s baby vanished in the fury along with a man and a woman, the two strangers who’d helped Cooper, her son, and daughter, Cassie, to what they believed was a safe corner of the center.

Officials have listed Caleb as missing, acknowledging that the baby could’ve been located and taken to a hospital. There is also fear that Caleb, along with the people who’d helped his mother, could be among the injured or dead still buried under debris.

“I’ll keep searching for him until I find him,” Cooper said.

Remy glared at Jenna Cooper’s picture.

That’s right, keep searching, like the fool you are. I went to that market looking for someone like you. You weren’t fit to be his mother. I’m sending him to a better place.

“Hey, are you going to do something about that?” Mason asked.

Remy had been so absorbed by her work she’d been oblivious to the crying from the far side of the room. She closed her eyes and sighed. Then she looked at her laptop.

“Mason, read this article while I take care of him.”

Massaging her temples Remy went to the area where she’d taken extra blankets, towels and sheets to fashion a crib on the floor where Caleb Cooper was stirring. He was a beautiful baby, she thought, still wearing his blue-and-white-striped romper with the tiny elephant. She blinked at the small bloodstains near the neck of the fabric. Now he was turning his little bandaged head, opening his mouth, bringing his tiny fist to it and making sucking motions.

“Hungry again?”

Remy went to the kitchenette and prepared a fresh bottle of formula. As it warmed, she thought of how things had gone at the market. It was her determination that had led her to the right baby. They’d hunted the previous nights in vain at a mall and the bus depot before Remy had considered a flea market, where right off she’d found a suitable candidate. She’d stalked the mother, talked with her, winning her trust so she could do what she had to do.

And the tornado?

It was scary. But it was a godsend.

As the winds waned after it had destroyed the Saddle Up Center, Remy saw that the mother and daughter weren’t moving. Remy was stiff and pinned under some wood, but she was okay. She took the stroller with the baby. It was hanging upside down but the baby was strapped in. Mason had a cut on his arm and a bruised left leg. She screamed at him to dig them out. The baby was bleeding. She soon tossed the stroller because it was useless in the mess. With Remy carrying the baby in her arms and Mason limping, they hurried through the wreckage, seeing bodies everywhere.

It was gruesome.

Mason stopped to check on a few. “To help,” he said, but he was taking cash and credit cards from dead people. “They ain’t going to need it,” he said. They continued on to the far end of the market and their pickup truck, hoping it was still there and still working. They found it with a broken side window, a spiderweb fracture on the upper right corner of the windshield, and the rear left quarter was crumpled, but otherwise it had survived undamaged.

Now, in the motel room, the baby’s crying was getting louder.

“Shut that kid up!” Mason barked at her from the computer.

“You shut up! What do you think I’m doing? His bottle’s not ready.”

Remy had been prepared for the baby.

Days earlier she’d bought the essentials: formula, the ready-to-use kind, rice cereal, applesauce, diapers, wipes and hair dye. But driving away from the destruction at the flea market she’d worried about the baby’s little wound on his forehead. She got Mason to stop at a drugstore for bandages and disinfectant.

Still, she had a feeling that she’d forgotten something.

Remy tested the temperature of the formula by squirting some on her wrist, then took Caleb in her arms. She had given him a bottle when they arrived yesterday afternoon. He fussed at first when she held him and rooted around for her breast, but eventually took the bottle; then another one in the night. He was a good eater, she thought, watching him suck hard, almost chomping, on the nipple.

As she held him, inhaling his sweet baby scent, a wave of hormonal emotion rolled through her, and she shuddered.

He was such a beautiful baby boy.

My baby was a boy.

Caleb nuzzled against her. Remy was growing increasingly concerned about the bump on his head from the tornado. Was it a scrape, a surface cut or something nastier? After she was done feeding and changing him, she cleaned his cut and put on a fresh bandage.

Mason was still at her laptop, reading news stories and rubbing his lips a little harder. Remy braced for what was coming. She knew his cravings, his mood swings and his irritability.

He’d made her a lot of promises about their future and struggled to keep them. Remy and Mason didn’t always see eye to eye, but deep down they were welded to the same philosophy: whatever life takes from you, you take it back.

“What’re you thinking, babe?” she asked him.

“I never thought you’d do it. You’re seriously going through with this?”

“We have to.”

He blinked hard, the way he did when he was battling not to lose it with her, especially because of all they’d endured lately. He strained to keep his temper and his voice gentle.

“We’ve got a lot at stake here, and this doesn’t help, Remy.”

“We’re running out of money. We’re running out of time. Do you see any other options? I had to do something. Besides, the article says they think we’re likely all dead. It’s perfect for us.”

“This kid is five months old. You think you can pass him off as a one-month old?”

“Yes, because it’s all meant to be. We’ll just say he’s big.”

“All right, are you going to make the call?”

“Not just yet.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve got a plan. We need to keep him a little while longer.”

“What for? If we’re going to do this, let’s move fast, get it done.”

“First, I want to have a doctor look at the bump on his head. To make sure he’s healthy, so nothing will come back on us.”

“What? Where? That could be dangerous. We’ve already got people looking for us, Remy. I think we should just get away from here, now.”

“You gotta trust me, babe. Let me play this my way. We’re going to do this—it’s going to work. Then we’ll be done running. It’ll be over and we’ll get our little place in the sun. We’ll start our new lives, our real lives, and make all of our dreams come true.”

Mason ran his hands over his stubbled face.

“Hey.” She touched his shoulder. “I’m hungry. Why don’t you go get us some breakfast, babe? Then we’ll get rolling.”

He looked at her, internally confronting their situation. Then he washed up, dressed and left.

Remy returned to Caleb, lowered herself to the floor, smiling at him.

“You’re so lucky. Yes, you are. Your mother was weak, unworthy. She couldn’t face up to her responsibilities to protect you. You’ll never have to worry about seeing her again. You’re so lucky I was there to save you from certain death in that storm. Yes, you are. Now, very soon I’m going to put you in a better place. Yes, I am. It’s all meant to be.”