Race Against the Clock

"There is a kind of promise you keep by breaking another one. Every parent learns which one costs less."

Monday, 3:12 PM.

The Hampton Inn in Peabody had a lobby that smelled of waffles and wet carpet, and a television above the check-in desk that had been tuned, all afternoon, to the same weather map.

It was not a map anymore. It was a bruise. A spiral of purple and red and a shocking white-hot pink that the meteorologist, a young man with an unsteady voice, kept calling historic. Along the bottom of the screen a banner crawled. COASTAL FLOOD WARNING. WIND ADVISORY. ALL NON-ESSENTIAL TRAVEL DISCOURAGED. A snowplow had gone off the road in Saugus. A pier in Revere had been swallowed.

Lauren sat in an armchair in the corner of room 214 with her hands on her knees, and watched the rain streak the window.

Across the room, on the edge of the other bed, sat Trooper Dana Ruiz.

She was perhaps thirty, a broad capable woman with dark hair pulled back in a bun and a pistol on her hip. She had introduced herself politely and then spent two hours doing the crossword in a folded newspaper, with the stubborn good manners of a person who has been told to guard a bomb and has decided not to mention it. She had offered Lauren tea twice. She had offered a sandwich once. She had not asked a single question.

"Almost done," Ruiz said now, brightly, not looking up. "Seven letters. 'To await with dread.'"

Lauren said, "Anticipate."

"That's ten."

"Then I don't know."

Ruiz smiled and wrote something in. Lauren looked at the clock on the nightstand.

3:14.

In the pocket of her coat, folded in quarters, the photograph of the saw blade pressed against her ribs. In the other, wrapped around her fingers, was the little silver gull. She had taken it from the shelf at home on Saturday, without deciding to. It was cold and light, the wing worn smooth by a month of her thumb.

At 3:20 she took the phone out of her pocket and wrote a text with one hand, very quickly, her thumb barely moving.

Danny. Rowley. I'm going to be there at 5. Hendricks says 6:30 and I can't wait 90 minutes. Don't tell him. Come as fast as you can. I'm sorry.

She sent it.

At 3:22 the answer came, a single word.

No.

Then, almost at once:

Captain, DO NOT

Then another:

I'm on my way.

Lauren shut her eyes.

"I'm going to wash my face," she said, standing. "I'll be a minute."

"Sure." Ruiz was still bent over the crossword. "Take your time."

She went into the bathroom and ran the water cold. She did not wash her face. She stood with her hands on the sink and looked at the woman in the mirror, a gaunt, hollow-eyed stranger with gray in her hair and a coat that hung from her shoulders, and she said, silently, to that woman: You are about to do the thing you would arrest a man for.

The woman in the mirror said nothing.

You are about to do the one thing you have told a thousand mothers not to do.

She turned off the tap. She opened the little frosted window above the toilet, which gave onto a service lot at the back of the building, and she looked down at the rain-darkened rooftop of a delivery van, eight feet below.

It was a long time since she had been an athlete.

She went through it feet-first, and the cold hit her like a slap.

Monday, 3:48 PM.

The sedan took three tries to start.

She sat behind the wheel with the heater roaring and the wipers going at full speed and still could not see. The windshield was a smear of silver and gray. The streetlights had come on at three-thirty, premature and pale, like candles in a church. Water ran down Newburyport Turnpike in sheets, over the curbs and into the storm drains, and the drains gagged.

She pulled out onto the road.

Her phone rang on the dashboard before she had gone a hundred yards. Calloway. She let it ring four times. Then she pressed the button.

"Turn around."

"Ruth—"

"I just had a call from Trooper Ruiz. She's in the bathroom of 214 with the window open, looking at an empty van roof, trying to decide whether to call Hendricks or throw herself out of it." Calloway's voice was very low and very even, which was how Lauren knew the rage in it. "Turn around, Lauren. You're driving into the worst storm in forty years to an abandoned building, alone, with a gun and a photograph."

"I know."

"You know. You know exactly. And you are doing it anyway."

"Yes."

A silence. In the background, a door shut and a phone began to ring and was silenced.

"If it's a trap," Calloway said, "and it is, you understand that, he gave you the address on a plate, there is no version of this where you walk out alive without help—"

"Then send help."

"What?"

"Send it," said Lauren. Her voice cracked. "Send everything. Every unit, every car, every volunteer, every cop who owes you a favor. I'm not asking you to stop me. I'm asking you to make it so I'm not alone when I get there. Please. Ruth. I've never asked you for anything."

"That's a lie."

"I've never asked you for anything this big."

The windshield wipers beat twice. Beyond the glass, the world was a bright gray blur.

"Reyes already left," Calloway said at last, flatly. "He's forty minutes behind you. The Bureau's team is ninety. The sheriff's cars are stuck on Route 1 behind a jackknifed truck." Her breath came shaky. "I can have two state police units at the end of that road by quarter past five. They've been told to hold position. I will tell them otherwise the moment you call."

"I'll call."

"You'd better."

"Ruth."

"What?"

"If I don't—" Lauren swallowed. "If I don't come out. The gull is in my coat pocket. It's the one I bought her on the pier at Cape Cod when she was twelve. Give it back to her. Tell her I never put it down."

The line was silent for a very long moment.

"You come out," Calloway said, and her voice broke on the second word. "You hear me? You bring that girl home, and you come out, and then I am going to personally have you reprimanded until you're ninety."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Go."

The call ended.

Monday, 4:05 PM.

The second call came from a number she did not know, and she knew who it was before she picked up.

"Captain Vance." Hendricks was shouting over a roar of engine and wind. She could picture him in the back of some black Suburban, one hand braced against the roof, rubbing at his knuckle. "I have a trooper hanging out of a bathroom window in Peabody and I am telling you, as a federal officer, that you are making the single worst decision of your life."

"Probably."

"You're also going to get yourself killed. You'll get the girl killed. If he's inside that building with her, and you walk in on him, a man like that—"

"A man like that," said Lauren, "wanted me to walk in."

A pause. She heard him breathing.

"That's what scares me," Hendricks said at last, much more quietly. "That it's what he wants."

"Then you'd better hurry."

She hung up, and the road swallowed the sound.

Monday, 4:21 PM.

The storm had a voice.

It began as a low sound in the roof of the car, a wide soft roar like a train passing in the distance, and as she drove north along the coast it deepened into something she could feel in her teeth. Wind hit the sedan from the east in long, hard, punching gusts, and each time the whole car rocked on its springs. The sleet had started at four. It came out of the dark in streaming silver lines, ticking on the glass, freezing in a rime along the wipers, until the blades dragged and shrieked.

She drove with both hands on the wheel and her chin almost touching it.

Route 1A ran along the edge of the marsh. On her right, where there should have been fields, there was only a flat black gleaming waste, with the sea coming in across it in slow, heavy, dragging sheets. Fence posts stood up in the water like the ribs of drowned animals. A mailbox leaned and fell as she passed.

At Ipswich, a tree was down.

It lay across both lanes: a huge old maple, torn up by the roots, its branches reaching out like hands, its leaves still red. Someone had left a pair of flares, which guttered in the wet. A line of cars was stopped behind it, their hazard lights flashing in unison, orange, orange, orange, in the gloom.

Lauren braked. She sat with the engine running and looked at it.

She had eleven miles to go and ten minutes before the light began to fail. The next road west was a back road that skirted the marsh. It would add twenty minutes, in this weather. She did not have twenty minutes.

She put the car in reverse.

She backed up a hundred yards, bounced across the shoulder and over a drainage ditch with a bang that she felt in her spine, and swung onto a gravel track between two stone walls. The tires slewed. The headlights lit a tunnel of dripping oaks. The wind pulled at the car as if it were trying to take a child from a mother's hand.

Slow, she told herself. Slow. If you flip it, you flip her.

She slowed.

A mile, two. Water on the road, a foot deep, black and shining. She drove through it at a crawl and felt the engine shudder. Past a farmhouse with a lit window and a dog on the porch. Past a graveyard with a white fence, in which every stone leaned a little toward the sea. Past a church.

Her phone buzzed. Reyes.

Passing Ipswich. Road closed. Taking the back way. 35 min. HOLD ON.

She did not answer. She could not take a hand from the wheel.

In the pocket of her coat, the little silver gull pressed cold against her hip.

So you always find your way home, Chloe had said, aged twelve, on a pier at Cape Cod, in the wind, with sunburn on her nose.

Lauren's eyes were burning. She blinked, and the road swam, and steadied.

"Hold on," she said aloud to the dark. "Sweetheart, hold on."

Monday, 4:47 PM.

The oaks began on her left.

She knew them before she saw them. A line of them, black and enormous, running along a stone wall, their wet branches meeting overhead in an arch, and between their trunks, glimpsed in the headlights for a moment, a mailbox. A rusted tin one on a leaning post.

She slowed to a walking pace.

HADLEY, said the letters, stamped into the metal. Half the paint had flaked away. H-A-D-L-E-Y. 1019.

Beyond it a gravel drive ran off into the dark, between two crumbling brick pillars, and across the drive, hanging open on one hinge, there was a chain-link gate.

It was the gate from the photograph.

She stopped.

For a moment she just sat there, with the engine idling and the wipers beating, looking at it. Her chest felt strange, as if something in it had come loose and was rolling. She was aware of the whole roaring night around her, of the sea and the wind and the black massed trees, and of a silence inside the car that was altogether another thing.

She turned off the headlights.

The darkness came down all at once. Then, slowly, her eyes began to open to it, and she saw the shape of the drive, a pale ribbon between two black walls, and at the far end of it, perhaps four hundred yards away, rising out of the rain like the hull of a ship, a vast low shadow with a roof like a broken wing.

The mill.

She switched off the engine. She sat for another ten seconds with her hand on the key.

Then she pulled the Glock from its holster and dropped the magazine into her palm, thumbed the top round, seated it again. Fifteen. A spare in the pocket. She had never in her life fired at a man in anger. She had spent fifteen years prepared to do it and had hoped, every day, not to learn what it was.

She pushed open the door.

The wind took it from her hand and flung it wide. The rain came in like a thrown bucket. She pulled up her collar, slung the flashlight through her belt, and stepped out into the storm.

She walked up the drive in the dark, with the gravel crunching and the gun held low along her leg, and the sound of her own breath loud in her ears. The air was thick with pine. Old pine, resin and sap and the sweet, dry, dusty smell of sawn timber, soaked and baked and soaked again for thirty years. It came down the drive to meet her, enormous and tender. It smelled like a child's treehouse. It smelled like Christmas.

He said you could smell the pine from the road, she thought.

At the end of the drive, at the edge of a field of broken concrete, she stopped.

The mill rose before her, three stories of black planks, its tall windows gone, its roof open to the sky in a hundred places. The wind howled through it with a long, low, bell-like note. A rusted conveyor ran up one side like a spine. Against the sky she could see the skylights, jagged rows of black, broken teeth.

And in one of them, high up on the western slope of the roof, there was a light.

It was warm. It was amber, the color of weak tea, the color of honey held to a window. It glowed steadily in the dark, in the shape of a square, and as she stared she saw it brighten, and flicker, and steady again. A lamp. A single lamp, lit inside, so that its glow rose through the broken glass and laid itself over the wet slates like the last of an evening sun.

There was no sun. There would be no sun tonight. But somebody had wanted the light.

He's made his own.

Her knees shook. She locked them. She raised the Glock and brought it up in both hands, and stood in the rain, in the roar, breathing, with her daughter somewhere beneath her feet and a window of false gold burning in the sky.

She took out her phone. Her thumb found Reyes's name. She typed:

Here. Lamp in the skylight. He's lit it for me. Going in.

She pressed send, and watched it go.

Then she put the phone in her pocket, and started across the field of broken stone.