Save Me - Lisa Scottoline [98]
“I knew that,” Kristen said, with a newly teary smile, and Rose gave her a good-bye hug.
“Call me if you need me. And Melly wants you to know we eat Kristenburgers.”
“They’re yummy, right?”
“Not in bulk.”
Kristen laughed. “Can I keep the picture?”
“Sure.” Rose went to the door. “I told Melly I mailed it to you, and that’s the last lie I’ll ever tell my daughter, except for Santa Claus.”
It was dark when Rose hit the street, but before she went back to the car, she walked to the beach and took off her shoes, enjoying the sensation of the cool sand as she went down to the shoreline and stood at the edge of the very continent. She still had a blister on her ankle, and the chilly wavelets rolled over her feet, healing and good. The gray foam made pale, shifting lines, one after the other all the way to the black horizon, where sea blended with sky. The stars shone bright white, encrusting heaven, and the full moon was a perfect circle, like a paper hole left by a hole-puncher in school. She breathed in the salty smells and the cool wetness of the air, standing at the intersection of summer and autumn, and at a crossroads in her life, too.
She thought of Leo, hoping she hadn’t left him behind, because she wasn’t sure where she was going. And she didn’t know what to do or think about the school fire, either. She stared into the blackness at the horizon, looking for answers, knowing a line was surely out there, but she couldn’t see it. Still, she looked hard and tried to find it, and she found herself thinking of Kurt Rehgard. He was gone, and she didn’t know where he was going, either. Or where her mother had gone, or her father.
She thought about death, and life starting anew, in Kristen. And she thought about the place between life and death, where Amanda slept, waiting to wake up, or not. She said a silent prayer for her, and realized that Thomas Pelal had been there, too, in her mind. She had kept him alive, in death, for so long, and it was time to let him go. She realized that letting someone go was setting them free. So she set him free, letting his spirit soar over the great churning sea and up, up, up into the heavens.
The wind blew her hair back from her face, and she breathed in deeply, inhaling one lungful after another, letting it energize and renew her. She kept an eye on the horizon, or where she thought it was, and understood that not everything that existed could be seen. Not every border was clear. She kept thinking of Kurt and the fire, sensing that something still seemed out of whack. She didn’t know the answers, and she didn’t even know the questions, but they were out there.
As surely as earth met heaven.
Chapter Fifty-three
Back at the cabin, Rose sat over her laptop at the farm table, watching videotapes of the school fire. She’d done it before in her darkest moments, but now she had a new purpose. She was looking for something that could give her a clue about what had happened last Friday at school. She took a sip of fresh coffee, but didn’t need the caffeine to keep going, though it was after midnight. Melly and John were sleeping over at the Vaughns’, which was their babysitting routine when she and Leo were out past ten o’clock.
She hit PLAY on the most recent link, which was the thirty-fourth new viewer video. She was amazed at how many more there were, from cell phones, flip cams, iPods, and videocameras, made in a world where everybody filmed everything that happened around them, even as it happened, becoming observers in their own lives.
She was having a similar sensation as she watched the video, visualizing herself out of her own body, hunched over the laptop. The only light fixture was the lamp over her head, casting a cone of brightness onto her crown, like Dumbledore’s peaked hat. She couldn’t help projecting outward into the dim cabin and through its walls to the dark night, its blackness obliterating the outlines of the cabin roofs and the jagged tops of the tall