‘Excuse me for interrupting,’ Dylan said, ‘but do the words dead man’s trail mean anything to you?’
Smiling uncertainly but as though prepared to be delighted, the woman glanced at her companion. ‘What’s this, Tom?’
Tom shrugged. ‘A setup for some joke, I guess, but it’s not my joke, I swear.’
Turning her attention to Dylan once more, the woman said, ‘Dead Man’s Trail is a desert back road ‘tween here and San Simon. Just dirt and tire-snapped rattlesnakes. It’s where me and Tom first met.’
‘Lynette was changing a flat tire when I saw her,’ Tom said. ‘Helped her tighten the lugs, and the next thing I knew, she used some hoodoo or other to make me propose marriage.’
Smiling affectionately at Tom, Lynette said, ‘I cast a spell on you, all right, but the purpose was to turn you into a warty toad and make you hop away forever. And here you are instead. That’ll teach me not to slack off on my spellcastin’ practice.’
On the table, two small gifts, as yet unwrapped, and a bottle of wine indicated a special evening. Although Lynette’s simple dress appeared inexpensive, the care with which she had done her makeup and brushed her hair suggested she’d worn her best. The aging Pontiac in the parking lot further supported the conclusion that an evening as fancy as this must be a rare treat for them.
‘Anniversary?’ Dylan asked, relying on deduction rather than on clairvoyance.
‘As if you didn’t already know,’ said Lynette. ‘Our third. Now who put you up to this, and what’s next?’
Surprise froze her smile when Dylan briefly touched the stem of her wineglass to reacquaint himself with her psychic imprint.
He felt again the unique trace that had been on the passenger’s door of the Pontiac, and in his mind another connection occurred with the ca-chunk of coupling railroad cars. ‘I believe your mother told you that she was adopted, told you as much as she knew.’
The mention of her mother thawed Lynette’s smile. ‘Yes.’
‘Which was nothing more than her adopted parents knew – that she’d been given up by a couple somewhere in Wyoming.’
‘Wyoming. That’s right.’
Dylan said, ‘She tried to find her real parents, but she didn’t have enough money or time to keep at it.’
‘You knew my mother?’
Fully dissolve a heavy concentration of sugar in an ordinary bowl of water, suspend a string in this mixture, and in the morning you will find that rock-sugar crystals have formed upon the string. Dylan seemed to have lowered a long mental string into some pool of psychic energy, and the facts of Lynette’s life crystallized on it much faster than sugar would separate from water.
‘She died two years ago this August,’ he continued.
‘The cancer took her,’ Tom confirmed.
Lynette said, ‘Forty-eight is too young to go.’
Repulsed by the continued invasion of this young woman’s heart, but unable to restrain himself, Dylan felt her still-sharp anguish at the loss of her beloved mother, and he read her secrets as they crystallized on his mental string: ‘The night your mom died, the next-to-last thing she said to you was, “Lynnie, someday you should go lookin’ for your roots. Finish what I started. We can better figure where we’re goin’ if we know where we come from.”‘
Astonished that he could be privy to the exact words her mother had spoken, Lynette began to rise, but at once sat down, reached for her wine, perhaps remembered that he had put his fingers to the stem of the glass, and left the drink untouched. ‘Who… who are you?’
‘There in the hospital, the night she died, the last thing she ever said to you was… “Lynnie, I hope this won’t count against me wherever I’m goin’ from here, but as much as I love God, I love you more.”‘
By reciting those words, he wielded an emotional sledgehammer. When he saw Lynette’s tears, he was appalled that he had broken her pretty anniversary mood and had knocked her into memories unsuitable for celebration.
Yet he knew why he’d swung so hard. He had needed to establish his bona fides before introducing Ben Tanner, ensuring that Lynette and the old man would more immediately connect, thereby allowing Dylan to finish his work and to slip away as quickly as possible.