“Teen magazine…” Roberta humphs, opening the fridge for the milk. She’s pulled a quilted nylon dressing gown over her men’s flannel pajama pants and Blondie T-shirt. “Fine, but you’ve gotta help me bake replacements tomorrow.”
“I can do that.”
“I’m bummed you’re not staying the whole week.”
“Eh, summer classes.”
“Eh.”
Emma eats her cookie. Robbie pours milk into a glass and returns the carton, careful not to bang the fridge door closed. If the door bangs, it jostles the Boston fern their mother has balanced in a saucer on top of the fridge.
“You’re not gonna tell Mom and Dad about the fed guy, are you?” Robbie finally says.
“It’s not worth freaking them out.” Emma goes to the sink, takes an empty glass from the draining board, and half fills it with water. “He just wanted to ask me something.”
“New set of questions?”
“No, weirdly enough.” Emma walks to the fridge and balances on tiptoe to pour the water from the glass into the soil around the fern. “It was more like… a job interview.”
“No shit.” Robbie leans against the counter and sips her milk. “That’s different.”
“Right?”
“I still wouldn’t tell Mom and Dad. They will most definitely freak.”
Emma places the glass in the sink. “It was just a conversation. I said no.”
“Is that why you’re down in the kitchen after midnight, eating cookies?”
“Hey, you’re here with me.”
Robbie grins. “I’m providing moral support.”
Emma knows this is only partially true. Her sister developed insomnia when Emma went missing. Even two and a half years after her return, Robbie’s sleep problems have lingered. The toll hasn’t just been on Emma. For a while there, it was like the whole family needed therapy.
“I said no,” Emma repeats gently.
Robbie nods. She picks up her glass and heads toward the hall. “They flew a fed guy from Virginia to speak with you? Can’t fault them for effort.”
“He drove.” Emma picks at the crumbs from her cookie. “He drove from Virginia, he didn’t fly.”
“Man, that’s a drive.” Robbie pushes back her mass of dark hair with one hand. Emma had hair like that once. “He must’ve really wanted that conversation.”
Her sister waves, then wanders back to her room along the hall. Emma sits on her stool, staring at the cookie crumbs, the Boston fern, the pendant light above the kitchen island. Cooper drove from Virginia. Suddenly she knows what it signifies. I will go the extra mile for you, it says. I wouldn’t ask a recruit to do anything I wouldn’t do myself.
He expects her to drive back in return. He was telling her the way is open.
On Saturday morning, Emma helps Robbie bake replacement cookies and helps her mother plant seedlings—petunias, mostly—in flower boxes around the house. Then she goes to the barn, where her father is cleaning the air filter on the tractor.
“How’s it going, Emma Anne?”
She’s careful to reply without hesitation. “All good, Dad.”
“The Rabbit’s running okay? It’s probably due for a new carburetor.”
“The carburetor’s fine, Dad. The car’s holding up.”
“Glad to hear it. You wanna pass me that can of Dust-Off on the bench?”
She passes him the Dust-Off, and later, there’s a family dinner. Everything about being home is comfortable and safe. Except for the fervency of her mother’s mealtime grace blessing, it’s like the world never changed.
Hours later, when Emma’s wrenched up in bed, choking, she realizes the thin, high tinnitus in her head is not tinnitus. And it’s not just going to go away.
She changes her shirt in the dark, pads downstairs. Slips a fresh cookie from the tin and encourages herself to consider the problem from all angles.
Cooper talked about a partner, a unit. The idea of being part of a team is tempting. It’s the isolation of the thing that eats away at you: being alone on the island of the mind. The number of people who have brushed up against what she’s experienced and are still breathing, still functioning, is almost infinitesimal.
So the concept is appealing: a team of other people to bounce ideas off, to share misgivings, to share the load. But Emma has no sense of what such a team might look like.
And that horseshit about saving lives… Emma used to think she could’ve saved the others—the other girls—if only she’d run faster, gotten help quicker. But on her therapist’s suggestion she read the police report on Huxton, and she doesn’t believe that anymore. She’s wary of that response in herself now. She’s alert to guilt. Guilt doesn’t help anybody.
So it’s not guilt tugging at her with tiny hooks, she tells herself, but rather the idea of the research. New information is the key. If she could play a part in gathering that information, if they could spot these guys more accurately, find them more quickly… then yes, other potential victims might be spared.
Emma sits under the pendant light for some time. Then she uses the phone in the kitchen, with the long curly cord. The call picks up after two rings.
“Cooper.” His voice is raspy but he sounds alert.
“I’m in.”
“Miss Lewis?”
“I’m in,” she says. “I’ll join the project, the unit, whatever it’s called. But I won’t join the bureau. I want to go back to OSU once the interviews are done.”
She hangs up, not waiting for his reply. Immediately, she feels a sensation like her soul is flying out of her chest.
Only when she catches sight of the digital clock on the microwave does she realize it’s three thirty in the morning.
CHAPTER THREE
After some initial fretting, Emma wears jeans and a white T-shirt and running shoes for her first visit to Quantico, because that’s what she’ll feel normal in.
There are lots of oak and maple trees around the parking area on the base. She slows her car for runners, training groups of guys in black gym shorts and regulation gray sweatshirts. It’s been three days since she herself ran, and she feels it like a twitch in her thighs and the balls of her feet.
Once she’s parked, she sits in the car thinking about Robbie’s parting hug, and going through the instruction notes from the second phone call with Cooper. MPs at checkpoints have your name. Park outside Jefferson. Ask at the desk for Behavioral Science. Yesterday she drove six and a half hours to reach Virginia, and she’s still not sure she really wants to be here. She stares at the buildings until the heat gathering between the windshield and the dash forces her out.
The Jefferson building is much cooler. Lots of people in khakis and dark polo shirts in the foyer. The man at the desk directs her to a bank of elevators, and the basement offices.
The basement, she thinks. Of course it has to be in the goddamn basement.
The elevator door opens onto low ceilings with concrete coffers, pipes for heating, pipes for air-conditioning, cable chases. The corridors are disconcertingly similar and anonymous. Lots of white and gray cinder block, fluorescent lighting, like a nuclear bunker or a morgue.