She was crossing toward him, and they stopped in the middle of the street, each taken aback by the sudden appearance of the other. She stared, uncertain. At first. But then he smiled.
What he had wanted to say was: “You did it. You found me. You’re amazing.” Instead, he simply smiled. It was a smile of recognition, of friendship even. And with the smile, she knew.
Gaddy Rhodes drew her gun, fumbling for the safety, eyes stinging as the sand raked across the street. “Don’t move!”
“Agent Rhodes. How very wonderful to see you.”
“Fuck you! On the ground, now. Hands behind your head.”
“Oh, but we both know that’s not going to happen.”
Even as he spoke, the wind and the sand were erasing him, a disappearing act unfolding right in front of her. The wind from all directions.
“Now! On the ground!” He had almost vanished by this point, his smile the last to go, was now only an outline, and barely that. Center mass, two to the core, one to the head.
She fired twice, rapid succession, felt the gun kick back like a thunderclap, the sound of it quickly swallowed by the storm. Sand scouring the air. Eyes watering, she moved forward, one step carefully in front of the other, arms locked, gun raised. But she was lost, and he was gone.
In the hotel room above the street, Thomas Rafferty thought he heard something, probably just a screen door or an unsecured shutter thumping, nothing more.
Just 100 years ago today, the Aborigines of this part of the world must have seen—to them—a novel and awe-inspiring sight: the approach of two strange monsters, one from the west and another from the east. The arrival of the first ships. What marvels would follow!
—From a Report on the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of Australia, 1890
* * *
TAMSIN GREENE, DRAPED IN A lazy bed in an art deco room in New Zealand, was watching him pack. “Even if you get to the Outback, even if you track her down, even if she gives you what you want, what then?”
Raff thought about this. “I suppose then I would be done.”
“Done? Till when?”
“Till forever.”
“Forever’s a long time.”
The dust storm had enveloped her Land Rover now, the blacktop barely visible in front of her, high beams on to no avail, when—past the turnoff and careening into view—a figure appeared on the road, buffeted by the wind. Tamsin swerved, braked hard, slid to a stop on the side of the highway, rolled back to wave him over.
He climbed inside, a small man in a suit. He looked shaken and disoriented.
“Thank you,” he rasped.
“Are you lost?” she asked.
“I am. I was.”
“Well,” she said brightly. “I found you!” She put the Land Rover into gear, pulled back onto the sand-swept surface. “You okay?”
He checked the front of his chest, up and down, smiled. “I am.” He seemed genuinely surprised. “I am indeed.”
Tamsin passed him a bottle of water. “You look familiar,” she said. “Have we met?”
“The wrong man, I’m afraid. I have that kind of face, you see.” It was a face that was hardly there. A silhouette that seemed familiar, but silhouettes always do. It would have taken a flash of Tamsin’s camera for her to recognize him.
He looked at the highway hurtling toward them. “Can I ask where are you going?”
“Alice Springs,” she said.
“In the middle of a storm?”
“I’m looking for a friend. I just wanted to let him know where I am.”
“He’s in Alice?”
“Last I heard. That’s where he was heading, anyway. And you? Where would you like me to drop you off?”
“The airport would be nice.”
“Won’t be any flights in this.”
“I don’t mind. I can wait.”
He had a small medal of some sort tightly wrapped around his fist.
“Saint Christopher?” she asked.
“Not quite. But close enough.”
PART SIX BOLDER SHEEP: LEGEND OF THE THREE-LEGGED TOAD
FAYTHER WAS ASLEEP IN HIS threadbare chair again, the graph papers and hand-drawn diagrams open on his lap, mouth agape, eyes shuttered and dreaming. Sun hardly up, and already snoring. A cardigan, tight across his belly and haphazardly buttoned.
His funeral suit hung on the doorway. Poor Dr. Rowley—that was his Christian name now, after the tragic accident—fished out of the drink. Tragic, that. Poor Rowley had been given a proper burial with all farms present, both the Corriedales and the Perendales, past schisms put aside momentarily. His widowed wife, oddly subdued, and Fayther afterward, walking the edge of the escarpment where the veterinarian had plunged to his death. Fayther, pacing it out as he plotted new safety measures to prevent future tragedies of this sort, which the local council would reject based on cost and the fact that “there’s only the two of you alone up there, anyway,” and what was Dr. Rowley doing tramping about on the edge of a cliff to begin with? Should have known better. Perhaps a sheep had startled him, a rogue sheep, a bolder sheep, and Fayther feeling vaguely guilty, but also a little thrilled because maybe it was starting, maybe the sheep were on the move, and now Catherine was pulling on her gumboots, her jolly, jolly gumboots, stepping through the screen door while her father dozed.
Catherine, with a plastic bucket in each hand, sorting out the proper scientific blend of feed pellets, feeling bad for fudging the numbers (again), promising herself that she would do better, would enter the data properly this time, and still the sheep had not escaped as they were supposed to, were happy enough just being sheep.
On the plains below: Christchurch, still wounded.
She’d gone down to the city, had walked among the rusted girders and crumbling brick facades, where the buildings were cordoned off, engineers and architects in hard hats standing under empty skies, projecting blueprints of their own onto the city, carving out a new Christchurch in their minds. The front of the cathedral had completely fallen away. Birds in the rafters. Holes in the roof. Christchurch had become a city of scaffolding. Container cars had been brought in as temporary shops, gap fillers as they were known. A city of gaps. And still the Avon flowed through, a braided river where currents crossed like fingers in prayer.
The city barely seemed real. The haze of smoke that had once hung above had been replaced by the dust of reconstruction and demolition. Walls falling, intentionally this time. Distant thuds, scarcely audible.
At Erewhon Farm, a strong wind was blowing. She struggled with her poorly balanced buckets, stopping several times to put them down. A constant avalanche of waves was breaking, unseen in the cove below, and out there, beyond the sea: Somewhere Else. On the far side of nowhere, Catherine Anne Butler was feeding her father’s sheep.
She picked up the buckets one final time, awkward-walked them across the yard. And when she entered the musty interior—barn doors open, as always, like an invitation declined—she sensed right away that something was wrong. The other day, a lamb had gamboled off and Catherine had tracked it across the moor-like heights, even as her father shouted, “Katie, no! It has escaped. Let it run free!” But it hadn’t “escaped”; it was lost, mewling pitiably on a precarious nook of land, missing its mom, and Catherine having to inch out to lob a rope around it and bring it back. The rest of the flock had been both agitated and relieved when the lamb was returned, but today—today was different. The sheep, deathly quiet, had wedged themselves into the far end of the pen, and she knew. She knew.
Softly, Catherine put the buckets down on the straw-strewn cement. Urine and wet bales. Darkness in the corner.
“Hello?” she hazarded.
The darkness answered. “Hello, Catherine.”
As her eyes adjusted, he emerged, first as a silhouette, then as something resembling a man.
“You’re back!” she cried, and for a moment, she forgot to be afraid. This must be what it’s like when a friend returns. Sh
e had always wondered. But, of course, he wasn’t a friend. Not exactly.
“I am, indeed. Back from the dead, as it were. Thanks to you, Catherine.”
“Did you kill Dr. Rowley?”
He crossed over to her, voice calm, eyes unblinking.
“Catherine…”
“Did you?”
He sighed. “Dr. Rowley brought about his own demise.”
“But—was it you who…?”
“He made his choice. That’s all life is, Catherine, a series of choices.”
She swallowed. “Why are you here? Why did you come back?” She wanted him to say something like “I missed you,” but that wasn’t what the cards held.
“Unfinished business, Catherine. A ledger that needs reconciling.” There was sorrow in his smile, and he said, “You would think, as one gets older, that one’s sense of the sentimental would have settled, that you’d finally see the bottom of the pond—but no. In a single moment, the silt is stirred up again, turbid and murky and sad.”
“Are you going to hurt me?”
“Catherine, you know who I am.”
“I don’t—I really don’t. I don’t know anything. You can ask my teachers. I’m always forgetting stuff. I would forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on. It’s true, it’s what they say, ‘Catherine, you would forget your head if it wasn’t screwed on,’ so even if you told me your name, I probably forgot it, honestly.”
“You know that I’m from Belfast. You know I have a brother in Montreal, a niece named Brynne, a son who died in the war.”
“But I don’t even know which war. Really, I won’t tell anyone, I promise. I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. I don’t have any friends to tell, just my dad, and he doesn’t listen.”
He could see her perfectly, the young girl walking beside the road, head down, hugging her books. Lives lived at the end of the world. “Come closer, Catherine.”
Trying to be brave. “My dad, he would be really sad if anything…” Fayther, finding her awkward body, having to fish her out of the cove as well. “It would break his heart, his heart would be broken, it really would, and I wouldn’t even be there to pat him on the back and say everything will be okay.”
“Come closer. Hold out your hand.”
“Please,” she said. “Don’t.” But even as she said this, she held out her palm, trembling, eyes closed, trying to squeeze back the tears.
A voice, whispering reassurances. “Don’t be afraid. Be strong.”
And he placed, not death, but something else, something small and cold in her palm. When she opened her eyes, a jade figurine.
“A Chinese god, the three-legged toad,” he said. “It’s an emblem of the unattainable. Everything we yearn for, everything we search for but cannot find, it is all of it contained in those three letters: TLT. Such stuff as dreams are made of. Keep it with you, Catherine. It will protect you and, if you wish, you may sell it someday. I daresay it is worth more than you might imagine. There are very few good people in this world, Catherine. You are one of them.”
The small man walked away and didn’t look back, but stood, framed in the light of the open barn. He seemed to hesitate, just for a moment, looked one way, then the other, as though considering which direction he might take, as though, just for a moment, he too was lost.
It was only much later that she came upon it, nested in a mound of straw, in the spot where she had first nursed him back to health: a bottle with a note inside. He had written: What the world needs is bolder sheep.
GADDY RHODES
SHE DUG A HOLE IN the sand and buried the Beretta, and it was never found, but it wasn’t like anyone was looking for it. After the winds had died and the dust had settled, Gaddy had searched the streets, but there was no body, only drifts in the earth and a nagging doubt, one she couldn’t shake herself free of: Had she fired to miss? She’d had him dead to rights. Center mass, point-blank range practically. How could she possibly have missed? Or—and here the doubts grew septic—perhaps she hadn’t missed at all. Perhaps the bullet had passed right through him, like he was made of smoke.
Perhaps.
A long flight to LAX, then on to LaGuardia, another taxi and a sparsely furnished apartment waiting when she got back. Our Lady of the Cubicles, adrift amid the file folders and the mission statements, the towers of paper leaning into each other for support. A dried tea bag in her mug. A scattering of pens and paper clips. The ghosts of memos past. No one had noticed she was gone. Tired, defeated. Stuck on a sandbar. The serpent in her liquor bottle was looking more opaque than ever, marble-eyed and murky, with jaws distended, a formaldehyde strike that never came. Had she fired to miss? And that was when she noticed the envelope.
It was waiting in her tray. Standard manila, 8½ by 11. No return address. A lump in the middle. Gaddy slit it open. Empty, except for… She tilted the envelope, dropped the contents into her hand—and froze. It was a wedding ring.
And before Gaddy looked, she knew. She knew that on the inside, hidden like a secret, would be an inscription only she would know about: GR + ML 4 VR, and now she was running, down the corridors, cubicles blurring, past the elevators to the reception, demanding, out of breath, frantic, “When? When did it arrive? How long ago? The envelope. When!” and the woman at the desk stammering, “I dunno, this morning, maybe?” Not maybe. When? “This morning. Definitely this morning.” Who? “A courier. Just a— Just a regular courier. His instructions were to make sure it was on your desk before you returned, that’s all. Where were you anyway?”
Behind reception, through the glass, she saw it: a gap in the skyline.
Gaddy at the window. “The cranes. They’re gone.”
“Cranes?”
“The Commonwealth Inn.”
“Oh, they tore that down.”
“But all of that machinery.”
Underground tank pulled up, workers sifting through the rubble… A massive operation, to what end?
“You didn’t hear? The company went bankrupt. Shut it down. It’s just a parking lot now. Huge scandal, apparently. It was in the papers. Why?”
The voice of Syd, her fraudulent, flatulent therapist, clued out and writing it all down: “Maybe that’s why you’re obsessed with finding things.”
“Not finding, retrieving.”
“Sorry?”
“Nothing.” Tearing out the hotel’s underground tanks, sifting through all of that rubble. Dazed and elated, and no longer alone, she walked down the aisle, back to her cubicle, with her lost ring in hand.
MAYBE ZERO
WHEN CATHERINE THE GREAT CAME out the next morning, the sheep were gone. She almost didn’t notice. Catherine in her gumboots, shoveling in the food pellets, recording the mix of nutrients, walking across to the barn, entering an unforeseen emptiness.
She stopped.
Had she forgotten to bring them in last night? Of course she hadn’t. They were simply… gone. All of ’em. Every single one. She began to look around, then stopped, and laughed. As if they’d be hiding in the loft or behind the barn door! No. They were gone, they were all gone, the entire flock.
Catherine ran, stumbling in her boots back to the house, roused Fayther from his morning nap, told him the news, the news, the good news! And he hurried out after her, pulling on his jacket, eyes joyous and wide, and him laughing and her too, and Fayther turning, turning, pirouetting, crying, “Katie, we’ve done it, we’ve done it! They’re out there, in the world! We’ve reset the clock to zero,” and maybe zero was the best they could hope for, and now she was spinning too, and they were free, were free of the sheep, were free of the notions and hopes that had pinned them to this farm.
Beyond Erewhon, on a corrugated sea that was open and endless, a low flat-bottomed boat rose and fell. A barge, cramped and wet with mud bespattered, it smelled enticingly of damp wool and ovine urine. Bleats and baying, and a small man in a suit standing on the prow looking down at his ruminant cargo, thinking, Now, then. What am I going to do with all these
sheep?
RIVER STONE
A HOSPITAL IN NAHA, AFTER the biopsy. “You will need someone to drive you home.” Having no wife, Detective Gushiken had called his partner and they sat now in silence, waiting for the results.
“Strange, isn’t it?” said Gushiken. “The second tomb.”
“The dead foreigner?”
“Mm. Why the second tomb? Nothing was disturbed.” Just some dog tags gone missing.
But then the doctor stepped into the room, and Gushiken’s world shifted forever and the dog tags fell over the side of the coral cliffs above the castle, fell and were forgotten.
Six months later, Kawaishi would stand, almost the only guest, as Detective Gushiken’s body was interred in a turtleback tomb with rites and rituals that Kawaishi didn’t understand in a language he couldn’t speak and, unexpectedly, both to himself and the noro priestesses attending, he would suddenly sob. But that was still far away, and today he sat with his partner in silence, the two of them as immobile and dignified as stones in a river.
DRAGONS, LOST AND FOUND
SENIOR POLICE INSPECTOR SHIMADA, Hateruma Island Substation, Okinawa Division, was rummaging around in the lost and found, looking for a bicycle key—his bicycle key—when Tamura-san from the ferry port stepped in, closing the door behind him, bobbing his head in the approximation of a bow.
“Foreigners,” he said. “Down by the dock.”
“And?”
“They’re camping in the grass.”
“So?”
“It isn’t right, is it? They shouldn’t be there, right? What if they step on a habu or something?”
Unstated between them was the presence of another foreigner, the one with the missing face. How many weeks had that been, and already it was slipping into the realm of a half-remembered dream?
The Finder Page 32
