Chapter LXIV
CHAPTER LXIV
Seeley had been following news reports of the previous night’s events in Loudoun County when his phone beeped, indicating that persons unknown had entered the Madison workshop without first deactivating the alarm, the keypad for which was concealed behind a sliding wood panel by the door. Mertie Udine had been by Seeley’s side for so long that she would never have set off the alarm accidentally, and she rarely had cause to enter the workshop. If someone else had done so, Udine would immediately have been in touch with Seeley because her cell phone would have received the same notification. The procedure had been in place for years.
When Udine didn’t call, Seeley sent a coded message to her secure phone. He gave it five minutes, and when Udine still hadn’t responded, Seeley reached out for assistance. While the Nashville property had cameras in place, the system was relatively primitive, linked to a hard drive in a bedroom closet: another demonstration of Seeley’s reluctance to live any aspect of his life online. But Seeley’s IT expert—the same young man recently responsible for supporting The Tennessean by buying two copies—had gained access to the Blink cameras on two nearby houses, one of them directly opposite Seeley’s own.
“What do you have?” Seeley asked him.
“Two men approaching from the street. The door is opened. The men enter. They exit from the back twenty-eight minutes later and head east. One looks to be in his thirties, the other twice as old. No vehicle that I can see.”
“Isolate as clear an image as you can, then fax it,” said Seeley.
“Doing it now.”
The fax came through shortly after. The younger man was unknown to Seeley, but the other’s face was familiar: Aldo Bern.
Seeley went to the farmhouse’s guest bedroom. La Senora was sitting on the side of the bed, staring out at the trees beyond. The bed had not been slept in, just as the adjoining bathroom had not been used, nor had his guest consumed any of the food in the kitchen. He had witnessed her drink some water, but so little that it must barely have moistened her mouth.
“I think we ought to leave,” said Seeley.
They had driven through the night from Virginia to Blountville, after which Seeley had gone to bed for a few hours. He was somewhat refreshed but not so much so that he wanted to get in a car again so soon. Harry Acrement was in Manassas, preparing for the move against Devin Vaughn. Seeley had persuaded la Senora that it would be wiser if they retreated to Blountville in the interim, just in case they had tripped a wire in Virginia. The woman had consented, if reluctantly; she wanted to be closer to the third child, not farther away.
From the bed, la Senora stared at him. Even after the time he’d spent with her and the devastation they’d visited on others together, he still found being the focus of her attention deeply unsettling. Hers was an inhuman regard.
“Why?”
The word was barely a whisper. Had the house not been so quiet, he might have missed it entirely.
“There’s been a break-in at my workshop,” said Seeley, “and Miss Udine isn’t answering her phone.” He felt sorrow rise like bile, but swallowed it down. “The security of the Madison office has been compromised, which means this property may also be at risk.”
“From the ones who took my children?”
“By those they’ve sent after us, yes.”
“Then we will wait for them,” she said in her slow, accented English, which seemed to improve with each day. “We will find out what they know.”
She turned away from Seeley, back to the light, signaling an end to the discussion. She liked the sun, even at this time of year. She relished it as one who had been deprived of it for too long: a prisoner, maybe, or—
A corpse.
The thought had been lurking at the back of Seeley’s mind for a while, but this was the first time he’d acknowledged it. The idea made no sense, of course: la Senora walked and talked—well, not so much the latter, though certainly the former—but she didn’t seek much rest or sustenance and there was a dryness to her tegument, a hint of desiccation. She rustled when she moved, like dead leaves brushing against one another.
Blas Urrea had advised Seeley that he was to be guided by the woman in all matters relating to the children, but Seeley hadn’t survived this long by surrendering authority and judgment to another.
“I have my methods, just as you do yours,” he said. “If enemies come, they should discover only an empty house. Outright confrontation would be better avoided.”
What happened next would haunt Seeley’s dreams. He caught a blur of motion, like the leap of a predatory insect or spider. One moment, la Senora was seated, the next, she was inches from him, so close that he could glimpse the staining at the exposed roots of her teeth and inspect for himself the reddish purple of her gums. He noticed for the first time that the teeth, which he had taken to be gapped and uneven, were regularly spaced but filed down almost to points. Her eyeballs were yellowed and without visible blood vessels, so they might have been made of glass, and her pupils, which he had thought to be a deep brown, now looked closer to red. Her skin had the texture of paper crumpled and unfolded before being pasted over a skull. Seeley felt breath on his face, but only barely. It smelled musty, like a room that had not been opened in many years.
La Senora’s hand caressed his cheek—once, twice—before freezing. She glanced down at the gun in Seeley’s hand, its muzzle a hairsbreadth from her belly. It was a little two-shot Bond Arms Roughneck .357 Mag that never left his person. Seeley had only ever fired it once in self-defense. He’d been shocked by the mess it made.
“Old habit,” said Seeley. “Comes without thinking. Now, back away.”
She tilted her head, reassessing him, but gave no sign of being frightened by the gun.
“Remember who you work for,” she said.
“I can’t work for anyone if I’m dead.”
“Why not? I can.”
Seeley waited for her to smile. She didn’t.
“You have an odd sense of humor,” he told her.
“I have no sense of humor at all,” she replied.
“We’ll soon have that in common, because mine is rapidly running out. I’ll tell you once more: back away.”
“Your weapon won’t do any good,” she said. “It’s been tried before.”
Seeley cocked the hammer on the Roughneck.
“Not like this,” he said, “and not by me.”
Slowly, La Senora retreated until she came to a standstill against the bedroom wall. She wore the same dress she’d had on since her arrival: a shapeless shift of tan linen, buttoned down the front and falling to her shins. Over it was a green wool cardigan, hand-knitted. Her plain brown sandals had been set aside, and her feet were bare. The toes curled in on themselves, as if from lengthy constriction. She touched the fingers of her right hand to her groin.
“Do you want to see where they came from?” she asked. “My children, all my children?”
There was nothing lascivious about the gesture or the offer. She might have been asking him if he wished to look at a photograph of her in the cradle.
“I do not.”
“I think you should. I think you need to understand.”
La Senora began unfastening the buttons of the dress. Seeley tried to tell her to stop, but no words would come, just as he could not make himself look away. She had fixed him with her eyes as assuredly as she had silenced him. When all the buttons were undone, she put a hand to each side of the dress and exposed herself to him. A scar ran from her vulva to just below her neck, as though she had been opened from her groin to where her breasts formerly were, even if all that remained of them was a second scar running perpendicular to the first, carving a cross in her flesh. The incisions, though partly open, were completely dry.
Seeley found his tongue.
“My god.”
“If you wish,” said la Senora.