Relieved of the obligation to ask, first, the fateful question about his younger daughter, Joe found his voice. “I was there at the house in Hancock Park with the Delmanns… and Lisa.”
Her eyes widened in alarm. “You don’t mean… when it happened?”
“Yes.”
Her small hand tightened on his. “You saw?”
He nodded. “They killed themselves. Such terrible… such violence, madness.”
“Not madness. Not suicide. Murder. But how in the name of God did you survive?”
“I ran.”
“While they were still being killed?”
“Charlie and Georgine were already dead. Lisa was still burning.”
“So she wasn’t dead yet when you ran?”
“No. Still on her feet and burning but not screaming, just quietly quietly burning.”
“Then you got out just in time. A miracle of your own.”
“How, Rose? How was it done to them?”
Lowering her gaze from his eyes to their entwined hands, she didn’t answer Joe’s question. More to herself than to him, she said, “I thought this was the way to begin the work—by bringing the news to the families who’d lost loved ones on that airliner. But because of me… all this blood.”
“You really were aboard Flight 353?” he asked.
She met his eyes again. “Economy class. Row sixteen, seat B, one away from the window.”
The truth was in her voice as sure as rain and sunshine are in a green blade of grass.
Joe said, “You really walked away from the crash unharmed.”
“Untouched,” she said softly, emphasizing the miraculousness of her escape.
“And you weren’t alone.”
“Who told you?”
“Not the Delmanns. Not anyone else you’ve spoken with. They have all kept faith with you, held tight to whatever secrets you’ve told them. How I found out goes all the way back to that night. Do you remember Jeff and Mercy Ealing?”
A faint smile floated across her mouth and away as she said, “The Loose Change Ranch.”
“I was there early this afternoon,” he said.
“They’re nice people.”
“A lovely quiet life.”
“And you’re a good reporter.”
“When the assignment matters to me.”
Her eyes were midnight-dark but luminous lakes, and Joe could not tell whether the secrets sunk in them would drown or buoy him.
She said, “I’m so sorry about all the people on that plane. Sorry they went before their time. So sorry for their families… for you.”
“You didn’t realize that you were putting them in jeopardy—did you?”
“God, no.”
“Then you’ve no guilt.”
“I feel it, though.”
“Tell me, Rose. Please. I’ve come a long, long way around to hear it. Tell me what you’ve told the others.”
“But they’re killing everyone I tell. Not just the Delmanns but others, half a dozen others.”
“I don’t care about the danger.”
“But I care. Because now I do know the jeopardy I’m putting you in, and I’ve got to consider it.”
“No jeopardy. None whatsoever. I’m dead anyway,” he said. “Unless what you have to tell me is something that gives me a life again.”
“You’re a good man. In all the years you have left, you can contribute so much to this screwed up world.”
“Not in my condition.”
Her eyes, those lakes, were sorrow given substance. Suddenly they scared him so profoundly that he wanted to look away from them—but could not.
Their conversation had given him time to approach the question from which at first he’d cringed, and now he knew that he must ask it before he lost his courage again. “Rose… Where is my daughter, Nina?”
Rose Tucker hesitated. Finally, with her free hand, she reached into an inner pocket of her navy-blue blazer and withdrew a Polaroid photograph.
Joe could see that it was a picture of the flush-set headstone with the bronze plaque bearing the names of his wife and daughters—one of those she had taken the previous day.
With a squeeze of encouragement, she let go of his hand and pressed the photograph into it.
Staring at the Polaroid, he said, “She’s not here. Not in the ground. Michelle and Chrissie, yes. But not Nina.”
Almost in a whisper, she said, “Open your heart, Joe. Open your heart and your mind—and what do you see?”
At last she was bringing to him the transforming gift that she had brought to Nora Vadance, to the Delmanns, and to others.