Wisconsin side. Still no breeze.
It would be another green furnace of a day.
It was mid-July, and Broker was in between relationships and houses. His own home was up in Devil’s Rock on Lake Superior, a twenty-minute drive from the Canadian border. But the house was haunted with too many memories of his marriage and especially of his five-year-old daughter, Kit. Her stuffed animals lay undisturbed where they’d dropped from her fingers when she’d visited him in May. At first he’d left the toys where they’d fallen because they were random reminders. Days passed and then weeks, and they started to look like tiny bodies at a crime scene. So he locked the house, traveled south to the Cities, and agreed to look after Milt’s place on the river north of Stillwater. He’d guided Milt on what had turned out to be an extreme canoe trip a year ago October. Now Milt, an attorney, had taken Jolene Sommer, a former client of his, to Italy to see Florence.
Broker had never been to Tuscany, but his estranged wife had received her mail there. Major Nina Pryce and their daughter had taken up residence in Lucca, a walled medieval town on the road less traveled between Pisa and Florence.
He didn’t know why Nina was there. She didn’t wear a uniform anymore. The nature of her work was classified. And then she and Kit had just disappeared.
Broker got up from the king-size bed and passed beneath a throng of African masks and Asian dragons that peered down from the walls and the post-and-beam ceiling. Milt had transformed the upper level of the river house into a bachelor heaven; the walls were decorated with his vacation booty. The master bedroom opened on the kitchen. The kitchen patio doors led to the broad deck.
So now, as on every recent morning, he padded into the kitchen and confronted the rectangular cyclops eye of the laptop on the table. The screen saver fluttered gently in the thin light; a winter scene to mock the current heat wave, snowflakes trickling down against a hillside of snow-frosted pine trees. He clicked onto the Internet icon, went into the message center, and selected GET MESSAGES.
He typed in his password: LUDDITEONE.
And got the prompt at the bottom of the screen: NO NEW MESSAGES ON SERVER.
Broker exhaled and disconnected from the Net. No communication from Nina since Kit returned to Italy in May. Not one call, e-mail, or letter. She and Kit had vanished down into a secure government rabbit hole. Broker suspected it was the culmination of a process that had started right after 9/11.
Initially, after the attack, and despite their personal issues, Nina had called regularly explaining that her duties might, and then would, make it impossible to keep Kit with her in Europe.
Fine. Broker was more than ready to take over his end of their shared child care. Then, right after Kit’s visit in May, the messages became ambiguous. Kit’s transfer to her father’s care was put off. Then communication had abruptly stopped.
Broker didn’t exactly have a lot of recourse to penetrate the silence. There was no one he could talk to about his wife’s situation. The unit that Nina had triumphantly gender-crashed herself into did not officially exist.
“Fucking Delta.” Broker swore softly.
So he drew the only conclusion he could from the silence: whatever Nina was doing at the moment, his daughter was somehow included in it.
Not knowing was worse than knowing. It has been bad enough when he admitted to Nina he had strayed with Jolene Sommer. Nina was quick to thrust back with a confession of her own weak moment with a Ranger officer.
Make that a
So this was forty-eight.
One hundred eighty pounds shrunk tight on a six-foot frame looked back at him. He was still holding his own against the sags of gravity; still hollow-cheeked, tucked in here, a dangle there. He had his love handles down to an inch of pinch. No second helpings. No dessert. His usually thick dark hair was cut high and tight, more than summer short; a monk’s vow of discipline. His eyebrows remained his defining feature, joining in a bushy line over his gray eyes. A pale white, raised centipede of stitched scar tissue crawled out of his hairline, angled down his forehead, and curled around his left temple. Two more puncture scars were less obvious on his left arm: one high on the biceps, the other just above the elbow. He wiggled his fingers and his toes to test the numbness. He’d been stabbed in the arm and had almost frozen to death, and he carried frostbitten nerve endings as a reminder. That was last year’s adventure; that’s when he met Milt and Jolene. Her husband, Hank, had saved his life,and Broker had not been able to return the favor.
Continue onward.
Broker squinted out the windows at the false dawn and figured he could work a run in before John showed up. He pulled on shorts, socks, and shoes. He went into the kitchen, filled the teakettle, set it on the stove, switched the burner to the lowest setting, and filled an electric grinder with coffee beans. Then he drank a glass of water and tied a red bandanna around his forehead for a sweat rag.
Five miles and forty minutes would bring him back to coffee water nearly at a boil. As he laced his shoes, he glanced at the Gary Larson Far Side birthday card lying on the kitchen table. It had appeared inserted inside the screen door yesterday morning. On the front there was a circus scene of a dog riding a unicycle on the high wire with a cat in its mouth and a vase balanced on its head. The dog was trying to keep a hula hoop and three juggling balls in motion.
He reread the caption:
The card was signed: Janey.
In a burlesque of his wife’s disappearance, he had bumped into an old girlfriend at the Cub grocery in town last week. Lean and tanned, Janey Hensen had dropped two dress sizes since the last time he’d seen her.
Working ten years deep undercover for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Broker had acquired reflexes, like sensing when he was being watched. And that’s what had happened in the dairy aisle at the grocery store. Reaching for the nonfat vanilla yogurt he’d felt the short hairs on the back of his neck tickle up, and he turned around and locked into Janey’s green eyes.
Janey always was good. She could make a cliche chime with laughter and irony and secrets.
And she had inclined her head forward so her tawny blond hair fell across her eyes in a sort of visual echo just in case he needed reminding how she used to look at him across a bedroom.
Sixteen years ago.
So this and that.
And fancy running into Phil Broker, who was separated from his wife and getting skinny as he closed in on fifty. And she saw that he saw she was getting skinny with a vengeance as she braced for forty.
It was typical of Janey to remember his birthday, and she would have followed him from the store to see where he was staying. He could almost visualize her waltzing up the stairs to Milt’s deck.
He told himself to get serious. Better that John had called than Janey.
So he walked down the stairs and out onto the driveway and into a humid morning the color and consistency of simmering tapioca. The toe of his running shoe caught in the trap rock, and he stumbled.
Vaguely, he wondered what John Eisenhower had for him.
But then he rallied. As he launched into his run, he lost the clumsiness and experienced a floaty moment of weightlessness and sheer bewilderment.
