Breaking her connection, Elissa hurried to open the door. “Calm down, Mom. I’m on the phone.”
Her mother gazed at her with both sheepishness and relief. Slipping the cellular phone into her purse, Elissa kissed her mother’s pale cheek, scooped up her overnight bag and descended the stairs. “Are you sure you don’t mind taking care of Cody?”
Two steps behind her, her mother replied, “Of course we don’t mind. We love keeping Cody.”
“We’ll bring him to visit you,” promised her father. She kissed his cheek as she passed him in the foyer. “I’m sure you won’t be away from home long,” he said reassuringly.
She forced a weak smile, palmed the car keys she had slipped into her pocket and strode directly out of the door. As she passed her parents’ car, she saw Cody in his car seat. She longed to kiss him goodbye, but knew she couldn’t risk it. Her parents were convinced she needed to be saved from herself, and they’d stop at nothing to protect her. Tough love, she’d heard it called—although this time, their toughness was somewhat misguided.
Hadn’t she practiced “tough love” on Jesse, sending him away for his own good? Had she been similarly misguided?
“Wait a minute, honey, we’re taking my car,” her father called from the porch as she headed for her own vehicle.
“We’d only have to come back for mine,” she said as she slipped in behind the wheel.
Her father hurried to the driver’s window, which she obligingly rolled down. “I’d prefer that you ride with me, Elissa. It’s not safe for you to drive right now.”
She started up the engine. “I’m fine, Dad. And there’s something I have to do before I go to the hospital.”
“Elissa!” He gripped the window’s edge and walked along as she slowly pulled forward.
Her parents’ car blocked her from behind; she’d have to drive onto the grass to reach the road....
“Stop this car right now,” her father shouted.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t.” She caught his gaze and held it. “Trust me, Dad. Please. You always have before. Don’t stop when I need your faith the most.” Swallowing a tightness in her throat, she cut the wheel and drove onto the grass. Her father let go of the window’s edge and stared at her. “I’ll call you,” she promised.
“Elissa!” cried her mother from the porch, “if you don’t come with us right now, we’ll...we’ll start court proceedings. We’ll take custody of Cody!”
She slowed her car as she turned onto the paved road. They’d take Cody from her? It was a mother’s fear talking...fear for her daughter, for her grandson. Would she actually carry out the threat? If her parents were truly convinced that she posed a danger, she knew they would.
How could she risk losing her baby? She’d already lost her reputation, her career as a counselor, and Jesse, the love of her life. Now she stood to lose Cody, too.
But how could she not follow up on every lead that might take her to Jesse? She wasn’t sure how, where or if she’d find him, but this compelling urgency pushed her to look for him—she now felt sure of that much.
If by some miracle she found him, her parents would have to acknowledge that she was acting on more than an insane impulse. Once they realized she wasn’t crazy, they’d happily return Cody to her.
But what if she was wrong? What if this sudden need to investigate Jesse’s death was nothing more than desperately wishful thinking? Her parents then would have even more grounds to believe she’d lost her mind. “She flew to Asia to look for a dead soldier,” they’d tell the psychiatrists. By that time, they’d have found corroborating testimony from others. Like Suzanne, Jesse’s housekeeper, who could say, “She thought she was talking to Jesse, but I didn’t see anyone.” And Dean, who would launch into his lie about how she’d attacked him with the letter opener....
She brought her car to a halt a few yards down the road. Should she go? Should she stay? Her soul cried out for guidance.
Believe in me, Elissa, Jesse had begged. Believe in me.
Uttering a silent prayer for forgiveness in the event that she was wrong, Elissa clenched her jaw, shifted into gear and pressed the gas pedal steadily to the floor.
13
HE WASN’T GOING TO HELP her. She’d come all this way—twenty hours in the air, a mad dash to make connections, exhausted sleep in cramped seats and an endless bus ride with chattering locals and their livestock—only to have Colonel Atkinson stare at her from beneath his woolly, copper-colored brows and mutter, “No sense wasting your time and ours, Ms. Sinclair,. Captain Garrett is dead.”
Elissa leaned forward in a chair beside the colonel’s desk. “All I’m asking is to see where the plane went down.”
He frowned, his gaze direct, impersonal and alive with an intelligence that had undoubtedly earned him his rank. He was a bear of a man—broad and commanding—and his gruff voice sounded like a growl. “It’s a jungle out there. Dangerous. Just what do you hope to find?”
“I’m not sure. I—” She shut her eyes briefly, gathered her courage and countered with a question. “Exactly how much of Jesse’s remains were actually found?”
The colonel’s lips thinned with impatience. He clearly considered her question a waste of his time. “The plane crashed into a mountainside, Ms. Sinclair. I don’t like to be crude, but everyone in that plane was blown to bits. The biggest body part we found was a hip connected to a thigh.”
She suspected he was being deliberately shocking. Forcing her into comprehension. She repeated her question with forced composure, “How much of his body was found?”
“I’d have to check with forensics, and even then, I—”
“Please, Colonel. You have to admit that Jesse wasn’t like most people. He moved objects with his thoughts and bent metal with his mind. You know he did that, don’t you?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“Then, why is it so hard to believe that he contacted me telepathically?”
His frown took on a different quality—a reflective one. “You still think he appeared to you?”
“I know he did. He said he heard people talking after the plane crashed. Maybe someone found him and took him in.” Something else Jesse had told her surfaced in her memory, but she hesitated to mention it. It may have meant nothing; a figment of delirium. Telling it now might weaken her credibility even more. Then again, Jesse had considered it important enough to relate to her. “There was something else he said, although it didn’t make much sense to me.”
“What was it?”
“After the plane crash, he heard you talking to him.”
“Me? Impossible. I was here the entire time.”
“He thought you said, ‘I’ll eat green grits for you.”’
All color drained from the colonel’s face. He couldn’t have looked more stunned if Jesse himself had appeared. Slowly he turned away and opened his bottom desk drawer.
Elissa’s eyes widened as he drew out a gun.
“See this, Ms. Sinclair?” he mumbled, examining the weapon. “This gun won’t fire. It’s workings are jammed.” He glanced up at her. “Jesse was a tough young private when I first heard about his so-called ‘powers.’ I called him over to me during target practice and told him he was full of bull. He saluted me and said, ‘Yes, sir.’ I told him to quit the magic shows—this wasn’t a kid’s party and he wasn’t a clown.” A brief smile bent the colonel’s mouth. “The longer I kept at him, the warmer the gun grew in my hand, until it nearly branded me. I had to drop it.” Incredulity glimmered in his eyes even now. “When it cooled enough for me to shoot it, the damned thing was jammed. Permanently.”
“Excuse me, Colonel,” said Elissa, distracted by the urgency she’d held at bay these last twenty-some hours, “but what does all this have to do with the color of grits?”
He let out a laugh. “Not a damn thing. But it does have to do with the power of Jesse’s mind. When I heard about the plane crash, I took out this gun and thought about him. About the good time
s we’d had, and a bet I’d lost to him over a football game. The payoff was that I’d eat green grits, Savannah-style, every Saint Patrick’s Day.” His voice grew hoarse. “I said those words out loud after he’d died, Ms. Sinclair. I promised I’d eat green grits for him.”
After a solemn moment, he returned the gun to his drawer, picked up the phone and uttered instructions involving forensic files. A while later, he set down the receiver. “There wasn’t much of his body found—only one part. But we were able to make a positive idenfication.”
Elissa’s heartbeats slowed. “Which part was it?”
“His finger.”
“Which finger?”
“Ms. Sinclair, this morbid preoccupation with—”
“Was it his small one? His...pinkie?”
“Why, yes,” he replied in surprise. “It was.”
She pressed her lips together to stifle a cry. His pinkie finger—the only part of his body in which he’d lost feeling. “Don’t you see, Colonel? All that proves is that he lost his finger. The rest of him might still be alive.”
“I’d say that’s rather a long shot” But he picked up the phone, anyway...to arrange for a vehicle and a driver.
THE SITE OF THE PLANE crash was a whole day’s drive from the base. Colonel Atkinson himself accompanied Elissa, along with a driver who spoke the language well enough to translate. They drove on rutted roads canopied by dense, tropical vegetation, questioning ragged farmers and their families who toiled beneath the hot Asian sun, most wearing large straw hats and working in fields, some clustered around thatched-roofed huts. The colonel showed a picture of Jesse he’d taken from his files, and each time, Elissa prayed for a spark of recognition. That spark never came.
Near evening, they checked into a hotel, which necessitated another long drive. The colonel promised they’d continue tomorrow.
Early the next day they set out in determined silence. Elissa’s urgency had progressed to full-blown obsession. If not for the colonel’s insistence, she would have foregone eating and sleeping. Again, their quest proved fruitless.
“I’m sorry, Me. Sinclair,” he said as they returned to the hotel that second night. “We’ve covered every village near the crash site. An injured man couldn’t have wandered any farther.” His voice cracked with disappointment. “I can’t justify the time or expense of another day’s search.”
Exhausted, frustrated, yet driven by a relentless need, Elissa spent half the night pacing in her hotel room. “Jesse,” she whispered aloud, “am I wrong to be searching for you? Have you moved on to your ever-after?” She waited in the darkness, yearning for a response that didn’t come.
But as she fell wearily into bed, she remembered something else he had told her. The people he’d heard talking after the crash had used the word dakrah. He’d said it meant “dying.” “It’s a word I learned on an undercover mission two years ago, when I worked in an Asian vil lage.”
Could the term be unique to that area—a localism? She hadn’t mentioned it to the colonel because it hadn’t seemed important But what if it could pinpoint a region?
She approached the colonel the next morning. He hadn’t heard the word dakrah before, and neither had his driver. “We have to find out where they use that word,” she insisted.
“Ms. Sinclair,” the colonel said with a deep weariness, “just because Jesse heard those people talking after the crash doesn’t mean that they were physically with him. He heard me, and I was hundreds of miles away. It was probably another psychic thing....”
“He learned that word when he was on an undercover mission in an Asian village two years ago. You’d know where he worked then, wouldn’t you?”
“Even if I did, I wouldn’t be at liberty to tell you.”
“Is it anywhere near the crash site?”
He raised his eyes to the ceiling as if praying for the patience to deal with her. “Do you understand the meaning of undercover, Ms. Sinclair? Covert? Top secret, maybe?”
“If you won’t help me, Colonel, I’ll contact the embassy, universities, language experts, investigative reporters—anyone who could help me pinpoint where the word dakrah is used. Then I’ll hire a guide to take me there.”
“You’ll get yourself killed,” he growled, his neck turning a dull red, “and compromise security in the process.”
“I’ll try my best not to.”
He stared hard at her for a long while. “You never say die, do you.”
“I did once,” she whispered through a tightened throat. “I won’t make that mistake again”
Later that day, Colonel Atkinson checked Jesse’s files and located the village where he’d worked undercover two years ago. It lay just beyond where they had searched.
He then ordered a background check on one Elissa Sinclair. When it came back clean, he reached a decision that ran contrary to his usual prudence—mostly because he knew this particular woman would make his job a living hell if he didn’t. He took her to that village.
“This place has been a hotbed of military unrest for the past decade,” he warned as their jeep made its way down the muddy road of the village with its thatched huts and sloping farms surrounded by wooded mountain peaks. “Soldiers of any kind won’t be welcomed here.”
Not a comforting thought, reflected Elissa, considering they were riding in a military vehicle driven by a fully armed, uniformed soldier in the presence of his commanding offcer.
“If Jesse isn’t here—and I seriously doubt he its,” he muttered, “these people won’t know that he was a U.S. soldier. He worked here posing as a civilian volunteer. It would be damaging to our cause and dangerous for any current or future deployments to advertise the fact that we planted a spy here. We’re not going to flash his picture around. The only one I have shows him in uniform. We’re simply going to ask the villagers if they know anything about an injured American. We’ll say your husband is missing, and that the embassy sent me to help you look for him. One thing is very important, Elissa. Let me do all the talking.”
She nodded, her hope riding high in her throat. The driver stopped to begin his questioning, and she noticed the villagers’ reluctance to approach. She heard him use the word dakrah, and they nodded in apparent understanding. Then they shook their heads and backed away.
“But he has to be here,” she said, her hands balled into tight fists in her lap. “He has to be.”
They stopped at each hut along the winding mud road. Villagers trailed them, watching with suspicious eyes. No one, it seemed, had seen or heard about a man found injured.
But as the afternoon grew late and the driver questioned the family at the last home in the village, Elissa gave in to desperation. Shouldering her way past the driver, she begged the ragged farmer, “Please, please try to remember if you’ve heard anything about an injured stranger. He’s tall, with dark hair. His little finger is missing.” She held up her hand and waggled her pinkie finger.
From the blank gazes of the farmer and his family, she knew her pleading was useless—they probably didn’t understand a word—but she couldn’t bring herself to stop. “He was hurt in an accident. He might be dying. Dakrah...”
“They can’t help us,” the colonel interrupted, coming up behind her and taking her arm. “Let’s go, Elissa ”
Stricken, she stared at him as if he’d condemned her to death. In a way, he had. He was taking away all hope....
“Ay-lees-a?” echoed an elderly woman from the family hovering behind the fawner. “You...Ay-lees-a?”
Startled, she replied, “Yes, I’m Elissa.”
The woman’s mouth opened wider, and her wrinkled hand came up to cover it. She then whispered something fast and fierce to a younger woman. The farmer muttered in angry disapproval, and a muted argument broke out among them.
Elissa exchanged a puzzled glance with the colonel and his driver. Why should her name cause bickering?
The elderly woman finally broke away from the huddle, and despite the farmer’s tig
ht-lipped glare, she ventured closer, her graying head held high. There was no mistaking her for anything other than the matriarch of the family. “You stay,” she ordered. “GIs go.”
The farmer uttered some oath and threw his hands up. The colonel barked, “What? We can’t leave her here!”
The driver snorted a contemptuous, “No can do.”
Elissa spoke only to the old woman, whose eyes were fixed on hers. “Do you know something about an injured man?”
“No.” She shook her head and pointed toward the road that led down the mountain. “GIs go. You stay.”
After a bewildered moment, Elissa turned to the colonel. “Please do as she asks.”
“I can’t leave you here! Who knows why she wants you to stay?” Quietly, he muttered, “Some folks have mighty odd customs. You might end up married to one of her grandsons.”
“Or held hostage,” warned the driver beneath his breath.
“I’ll stay. Or—” she deliberated “—I could always retum later, on my own....”
Tight-lipped with disapproval that matched the farmer’s, the colonel handed her a radio. “If I don’t hear from you within one hour, wall be back to find you.”
“Thank you.” A sheen of gratitude blurred her vi sion.
He shook his head. “Never thought I’d say this to any woman, but you’re a damned good match for Jesse.” Brushing past the driver, he climbed into the jeep. The soldier reluctantly slid behind the wheel.
The small mob of villagers, who had been watching from a distance, gazed in stony silence at the military vehicle as it drove down the muddy road. The moment the jeep was out of sight, the old woman snatched the radio from Elissa. “Me keep.” Tucking it into the folds of her long, loose dress, she hobbled across the grass onto the muddy road.
Swallowing her trepidation, Elissa followed.
The hike down the narrow path that wound through dense, tropical growth was not a long one, but altogether unnerving as she dodged a snake-laden limb, crashed through spiderwebs and listened to the hum, buzz and hiss of unseen wildlife.
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