Moved almost as deeply as she had been when she was first given the knowledge of the afterlife, in the room at the orphanage, Rose withdraws her hand from the photo of Nina Carpenter and sits silently for a while, humbled. Then she takes her own Nina into her arms and holds the girl tightly and rocks her, neither capable of speaking nor in need of words.
Now that this special girl’s power is being reborn, Rose knows what they must do, where they must start their work. She does not want to risk going to Lisa Peccatone again. She doesn’t believe that her old friend knowingly betrayed her, but she suspects that through Lisa’s link to the Post—and through the Post to Horton Nellor—the people at Project 99 learned of her presence on Flight 353. While Rose and Nina are believed dead, they need to take advantage of their ghostly status to operate as long as possible without drawing the attention of their enemies. First, Rose asks the girl to give the great gift of eternal truth to each of the friends who has sheltered them during these eleven months in their emotional wilderness. Then they will contact the husbands and wives and parents and children of those who perished on Flight 353, bringing them both the received knowledge of immortality and visions of their loved ones at the blue interface. With luck, they will spread their message so widely by the time they are discovered that it cannot be contained.
Rose intends to start with Joe Carpenter, but she can’t locate him. His co-workers at the Post have lost track of him. He has sold the house in Studio City. He has no listed phone. They say he is a broken man. He has gone away to die.
She must begin the work elsewhere.
Because the Post published photographs of only a fraction of the Southern California victims and because she has no easy way to gather photos of the many others, Rose decides not to use portraits, after all. Instead, she tracks down their burial places through published funeral-service notices, and she takes snapshots of their graves. It seems fitting that the imbued image should be of a headstone, that these grim memorials of bronze and granite should become doorways through which the recipients of the pictures will learn that Death is not mighty and dreadful, that beyond this bitter phase, Death himself dies.
High in the wind-churned mountains, with waves of moon-silvered conifers casting sprays of needles onto the roadway, still more than twenty miles from Big Bear Lake, Rose Tucker spoke so softly that she could barely be heard over the racing engine and the hum of the tyres: “Joe, will you hold my hand?”
He could not look at her, would not look at her, dared not even glance at her for a second, because he was overcome by the childish superstition that she would be all right, perfectly fine, as long as he didn’t visually confirm the terrible truth that he heard in her voice. But he looked. She was so small, slumped in her seat, leaning against the door, the back of her head against the window, as small to his eyes as 21-21 must have appeared to her when she had fled Virginia with the girl at her side. Even in the faint glow from the instrument panel, her huge and expressive eyes were again as compelling as they had been when he’d first met her in the graveyard, full of compassion and kindness—and a strange glimmering joy that scared him.
His voice was shakier than hers. “It’s not far now.”
“Too far,” she whispered. “Just hold my hand.”
“Oh, shit.”
“It’s all right, Joe.”
The shoulder of the highway widened to a scenic rest area. He stopped the car before a vista of darkness: the hard night sky, the icy disc of a moon that seemed to shed cold instead of light, and a vast blackness of trees and rocks and canyons descending. He released his seat belt, leaned across the console, and took her hand. Her grip was weak.
“She needs you, Joe.”
“I’m nobody’s hero, Rose. I’m nothing.”
“You need to hide her… hide her away…”