First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [134]
"Alli, where are you going?" he whispered at the receding figure. "I want you to go back to your room, lock the door till I come for you."
But either she was too far away or chose to ignore his warning, because she went down the stairs. Cursing under his breath, he hurried after her. A strange form of peacefulness came over him as he followed the slip of a shadow down the hallway, through the dining room and kitchen. Off the kitchen was a pantry that Gus had used for a storeroom and a half bath situated between the kitchen and the mudroom.
The mudroom was a space that was never used, either by Gus or by Jack. It seemed the oldest part of the house mostly because of its chronic disuse. It hadn't been painted for years. There were cobwebs in the corners with the desiccated corpses of unidentifiable insects who'd met their end in their sticky strands. An old chair rail hung half off the wall, and an old-fashioned wooden hat rack leaned drowsily in one corner. The floor was constructed of ancient slate tiles, eighteen inches on a side. Many were cracked, some fractured entirely. One or two were missing.
As Jack crossed the kitchen, he could see Alli unlock the back door, disappear outside. Jack followed her. At once, he was engulfed by the odors of rotting wood, roots, and the mineral tang of damp stone. He pushed through into a deeper darkness as he moved into a patch of the forested area behind the house.
"Alli," he said softly. "Alli, enough. Where are you?"
The tangle of branches, dense even in the dead of winter, kept the city at bay. The sky, grayish pink like old skin, was intermittently swept away by the wind. Rain seeped down, bouncing off twigs and vines, taking erratic pinball paths. Save for this, all was still. And yet there was the sense of something stirring, as if the wild area itself were alive with a single will, had turned that will to a specific intent.
Jack, his anxiety rising, peered through the rain, through the Medusa's hair of the thicket. It was impossible to know which way she'd gone, or even why she would lead him here. In and out of faint lozenges of city light he went, turning this way and that, searching, until he seemed to be in a maze of mirrors, where he kept coming upon his own reflection.
He was certain he hadn't dreamt that whisper, certain that Alli had been standing in his doorway. After all, who else could it have been? Then, the fine hairs on his forearms stirred, because he heard the voice again.
"Dad . . ."
DENNIS PAULL, climbing the open stairs of the Starlight Motel in Maryland, was nearing the end of another grueling day. Part of it had been taken up by a meeting with Calla Myers's parents. He could, of course, have had one of his assistants meet them, but he was not one for delegating difficult assignments. Calla Myers had been killed on his watch. There was no excuse for her death; its dark stain would be etched on his soul forever, to take its place alongside many other similar tattoos. But somehow this one seemed darker, deeper, more shameful, because she was a civilian. She hadn't put herself in harm's way as the two Secret Service agents had. That she'd been murdered in precisely the same way as the agents was no longer a mystery to him.
Paull had no illusions about going to heaven, but since he believed in neither heaven nor hell, it didn't really matter. What concerned him was the here and now. He had conjured up all the right phrases of sympathy for the Myerses. He had even sat with them afterwards, while the mother wept and the father held her blindly, even after he'd run out of words of brittle solace. He tried not to think about his own wife, his two sons, tried not to wonder how he would react if someone came to him with unthinkable news. He'd had a brother who'd died in the Horn of Africa in the service of his country. Even Paull hadn't known the details of his mission. Nor