“She hasn’t been your sister-in-law for eighteen years, but you’re willing to put yourself on the line for her?”
“Why not? You think Rose turned into a vampire when Louis, the fool, divorced her? She’s been the same sweet lady ever I met her. I love her like a sister. Now she’s waitin’, Curious Joe.”
“One more thing. Earlier, when you told me these people don’t know who they’re dealing with… You didn’t say—‘We’re Baptists?’”
“That’s exactly what I did say. ‘Tough’ and ‘Baptists’ don’t go together in your head—is that it?”
“Well—”
“Mama and Daddy stood up to the Klan down in Mississippi when the Klan had a whole lot more teeth than they do now, and so did my Grandma and Grandpap before them, and they never let fear weigh ’em down. When I was a little girl, we went through hurricanes off the Gulf of Mexico and Delta floods and encephalitis epidemics and poor times when we didn’t know where tomorrow’s food was comin’ from, but we rode it out and still sung loud in the choir every Sunday. Maybe the United States Marines are some tougher than your average Southern black Baptist, Joe, but not by much.”
“Rose is a lucky woman with a friend like you.”
“I’m the lucky one,” said Mahalia. “She lifts me up—now more than ever. Go on, Joe. And stay down there with her till we close this place and figure a way we can slip you two out. I’ll come for you when it’s time.”
“Be ready for trouble long before that,” he warned her.
“Go.”
Joe let the doors slide shut.
The elevator descended.
2
Here, now, at last and alone, at the far end of the long room was Dr. Rose Marie Tucker in one of four folding chairs at a scarred work table, leaning forward, forearms on the table, hands clasped, waiting and silent, her eyes solemn and full of tenderness, this diminutive survivor, keeper of secrets that Joe had been desperate to learn but from which he suddenly shied.
Some of the recessed-can fixtures in the ceiling contained dead bulbs, and the live ones were haphazardly angled, so the floor that he slowly crossed was mottled with light and shadow as if it were an underwater realm. His own shadow preceded him, then fell behind, but again preceded him, flowed here into a pool of gloom and vanished like a soul into oblivion, only to swim into view three steps later. He felt as though he were a condemned man submerged in the concrete depths of an inescapable prison, on a long death-row walk toward lethal punishment—yet simultaneously he believed in the possibility of clemency and rebirth. As he approached the revelation that had lifted Georgine and Charlie Delmann from despair to euphoria, as he drew nearer the truth about Nina, his mind churned with conflicting currents, and hope like schools of bright koi darted through his internal darkness.
Against the left-hand wall were boxes of restaurant provisions, primarily paper towels for the restrooms, candles for the tables, and janitorial supplies purchased in bulk. The right-hand wall, which faced the beach and the ocean beyond, featured two doors and a series of large windows, but the coast was not visible because the glass was protected by metal Rolladen security shutters. The banquet room felt like a bunker.
He pulled out a chair and sat across the table from Rose.
As in the cemetery the previous day, this woman radiated such extraordinary charismatic power that her petite stature was a source of continual surprise. She seemed more physically imposing than Joe—yet her wrists were as dainty as those of a twelve-year-old girl. Her magnetic eyes held him, touched him, and some knowledge in them humbled him in a way that no man twice his size could have humbled him—yet her features appeared so fragile, her throat so slender, her shoulders so delicate that she should have seemed as vulnerable as a child.
Joe reached across the table toward her.
She gripped his hand.
Dread fought with hope for his voice, and while the battle raged, he could not speak to ask about Nina.
More solemn now than she had been in the cemetery, Rose said, “It’s all going so badly. They’re killing everyone I talk to. They’ll stop at nothing.”