“What time?” -That’s the only snag. I can’t permit Danny to do any of this until after hours, because he can’t deliver my personal car on state time.” I was opening a bottle of Chardonnay.
“Shit,” Lucy impatiently said. “So I won’t have transportation tomorrow, either?”
“I’m afraid neither of us will,” I said.
“And what are you going to do, then?”
I handed her a glass of wine. “I’ll be going into my office and probably spending a lot of time on the phone.
Anything you might be able to do at the field office here?”
She shrugged. “I know a couple people who went through the Academy with me.”
At the very least she could find another agent to take her to the gym so she could work off her ugly mood, I started to say, but held my tongue.
“I don’t want wine.” She set the glass down on the bar.
“I think I’ll just drink beer for a while.”
“Why are you so angry?”
“I’m not angry.” She got a Beck’s Light out of the small refrigerator and popped off the cap.
“Do you want to sit down?”
“No,” she said. “By the way, I’ve got the Book, so don’t get alarmed when you don’t find it in your briefcase.”
“What do you mean, you have it?” I looked uneasily at her.
“I was reading it while you were out talking to Mrs. Eddings.” She took a swallow of beer. “I thought it would be a good idea to go over it again in case there’s something we didn’t notice.”
“I think you’ve looked at it quite enough,” I flatly said.
“in fact, I think all of us have.”
“There’s a lot of Old Testament-type stuff in there. I mean, it’s not like it’s satanic, really.”
I watched her in silence as I wondered what was really going on in that incredibly complicated brain.
“I actually find it rather interesting, and believe it has power only if you allow it to have power. I don’t allow it, so it doesn’t bother me,” she was saying.
I set down my glass. “Well, something certainly is.”
“Only thing bothering me is I’m stranded and tired. So guess I’ll just go to bed,” she said. “I hope you sleep well.”
But I did not. Instead, I sat before the fire worrying about her, for I probably knew my niece better than anyone did.
Perhaps she and Janet had simply had a fight and repairs would be made in the morning, or maybe she really did have too much to do, and not being able to return to Charlottesville was more of a problem than I knew.
I turned the fire off and checked the burglar alarm one more time to make certain it was armed, then I walked back to my bedroom and shut the door. Still, I could not sleep, so I sat up in lamplight listening to the weather as I studied the journal that had been printed by Eddings’ fax machine.
There were eighteen numbers dialed over the past two weeks, and all of them were curious and suggestive that he certainly had been home at least some of the time and doing something in his office.
What also struck me right away was that if he had worked at home, I would have expected numerous transmissions to the AP office downtown. But this was not the case. Since mid-December, he had faxed his office only twice, at least from the machine we had found at his house.
This was simple enough to determine because he had entered a speed dial label for the wire service’s fax number, so “AP DESK” appeared in the journal’s identification column, along with less obvious labels like -NVSE,”DRMS,”
“CPT” and “LM.” Three of those numbers had Tidewater, Central and Northern Virginia area codes and exchanges, while the area code for DRMS was Memphis, Tennessee.
I tried to sleep but information drifted past my eyes and questions spoke because I could not shut them off. I wondered who Eddings had been contacting in these different places, or if it mattered. But what I could not get away from was where he had died. I could still see his body suspended in that murky river, tethered by a useless hose caught on a rusting screw. I could feel his stiffness as I held him in my arms and swam him up with me. I had known before I had ever reached the surface that he had been dead many hours.