The Big Dark Sky (21)
“As soon as you’re there.” Pocketing the phone that Wendy had returned to him, he said, “Ms. Sharp, this is as urgent as urgent gets. You can be found by your phone. You can be destroyed right here, right now, with your daughter and with me, if maybe your name has come to the top of the list. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not die today.”
She plucked her purse off the bench and retrieved her phone from it. “Destroyed how?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
If they wanted her dead, they wouldn’t have come after her like this. The very complexity of his story seemed to verify it.
“What do I do with my phone?”
“Leave it on the bench. One of my associates will hammer it.”
“This is batshit crazy,” she said.
“It absolutely is,” he agreed.
She hesitated to relinquish the phone, and he said, “Wendy, have you ever heard of Carl Jung, or the word synchronicity?”
“No.”
“Jung’s theories have a lot in common with what science—quantum mechanics—reveals about the nature of reality.”
“Like that helps,” she said, still clutching her phone.
“Incredible coincidences are more common than we think. They’re part of the weave of the world. Effect can come before cause.”
“I’m a waitress, you know. Dessert doesn’t come before the entrée.”
He smiled. “The famous British actress Beatrice Lillie was once onstage in Ontario, Canada, performing in No?l Coward’s This Year of Grace, the entire cast lined up to one side of her. She was singing “Britannia Rules the Waves,” when she mistakenly began to sing the second verse twice, before moving to the third. She realized what she was doing but had to carry forward with it. The cast froze in place instead of moving to center stage—which was when the biggest and heaviest arc light fell from above, onto the very spot where they should have been standing. They were saved from serious injury, perhaps even death.”
She found him hypnotic, and she said, “You’re spooking me.”
“The opposite of my intention. The incident could be seen as a mere coincidence—or as an indication that Ms. Lillie would lead a long and charmed life. She died sixty years later, at the age of ninety-four. Now remember that house in Georgia that I said is waiting for you? By the merest chance, Wendy, the street number is eight one one—the month and day Cricket was born. And the number of the street is the same as the year she was born. Do you think that might be meaningful? Positive synchronicity?”
“You’re a little weird.”
“Yes, I am aware.”
“But in a good way,” she said, putting her iPhone on the bench as he had requested. She and Cricket went away with him.
13
In Santa Fe, as the one-gallon pot of aromatic vegetable soup cooled on the drainboard beside the sink, Joanna Chase slid the pan of lasagna into the oven. She’d already made a small salad, which chilled in the refrigerator. Now she poured a glass of cabernet and moved through the house, again marveling that she had unconsciously re-created the decor—the very feeling—of the house at Rustling Willows.
In her bedroom, above the bed, a chunky wood shelf called a repisa held Pueblo pottery as well as carved bultos of San Antonio of Padua and Santa Librada and San Rafael. The iron-and-brass bed was graced with a museum-quality spread—white with simple flower-motif embroidery—crafted in the 1990s by the much-admired weaver Teresa Archuleta-Sagel.
Over the years, Joanna had dated several men, but she’d shared this bed with only two. Neither relationship lasted. These days, too many educated men shaped themselves into what they believed modern women wanted, as if all women wanted precisely the same thing, and in so shaping became emotional and intellectual marionettes; worst of all, they believed in their sincerity. In fact, they were styling themselves according to the dictates of a relatively small cadre of pundits and influencers who wanted not equality but control. Joanna found such men to be dull and weak and unreliable. Her father had been one whose every word and deed comported with what the most manphobic prestigious magazines said that a man should think and do, and she did not want a man like that. She’d loved her father, but something about him had seemed practiced—even calculated—so that even as a child she’d not been quite sure if his affection was real or deliberated and rehearsed.
From the top shelf in the back of the walk-in closet, Joanna retrieved a plastic container as big as four shoeboxes. She carried it and her half-finished glass of wine to the kitchen, put them on the table, settled into a chair, and removed the snap-on lid from the container.
The photographs were from a time when people still used cameras instead of smartphones to take family pictures. The box was three-quarters full of snapshots. She thought there had once been more than these, but perhaps she was mistaken. She hadn’t looked at them in years. The photos were loose, unorganized, and she began to order them according to subject and, as best as she could determine, date.
The pictures included several of her granddad, whom she barely remembered, a white-haired man with a walrus mustache. Her father and mother. Joanna herself. Various ranch hands. Numerous horses. Auntie Kat from when she visited once. Here were Hector Alvarez, the ranch manager who served under her granddad, when Rustling Willows was a cattle operation, and then under Father when the focus shifted to breeding quarter horses for racing and show-worthy thoroughbreds. Hector alone but also with his wife, Annalisa. Annalisa alone and sometimes with Joanna or with Joanna’s mother. Pictures of Joanna and her mother in swimsuits, on the shore of Lake Sapphire, or bundled up for sledding on a day of driving snow. Birthday parties and celebrations around a Christmas tree. Hundreds of photos. Joanna took an hour and a half to study them, remember the moments that they captured, and organize them in piles—and at the end, she had found not one picture of Jimmy Two Eyes.