“You always have a joke, so you do, but that little one in the playpen is no joke. She needs a dad and mother.”
“It’s just another case,” Michael assured the nanny. “It’s not as if we’re hunting vampires.”
Carson wanted to pick up Scout and hold her tight, but the baby was sound asleep. She and Michael stood at the playpen for a moment, gazing down at their child, torn by the thought of leaving her. Scout farted in her sleep.
Arnie continued working the dough, and Carson could see that her brother didn’t want a good-bye hug or kiss. Barely repressed tears stood in his eyes and he was determined not to spill them.
“Take care of Scout” was all she said to him, and he nodded.
Putting a hand on Mary Margaret’s arm, Carson kissed her cheek and said, “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Biting her lower lip, Mary Margaret searched Carson ’s eyes for a moment, and then she said, “This is something different, isn’t it, lass?”
“Just a little job for an old friend,” she assured the nanny.
“You don’t lie any better than my daughters back in the day when they dared try to deceive me.”
“Maybe not. But I wouldn’t make a good nun.”
In the back hall with Michael, before they picked up their luggage, she leaned against him, put her arms around him, her head on his chest. He held her tight.
After a moment, she said, “Scout farted in her sleep.”
“I heard.”
“It was so cute.”
“It was,” he agreed. “It was really cute.”
Carson said nothing more, and clearly he understood that she didn’t need any reassuring words, that she needed only to hold him and to be held and to get past the pain of leaving.
They knew when the moment came to go; they broke the embrace simultaneously. They picked up their bags and went into the garage.
Deucalion had already opened the tailgate of the Jeep Grand Cherokee. He waited by the open driver’s door.
They loaded their bags in the back. Michael closed the tailgate, and Carson said to Deucalion, “I’ll drive.”
“Not this time,” he said.
“I always drive.”
“She does,” Michael said. “She always drives.”
Deucalion got in behind the wheel and pulled his door shut.
“Monsters,” Michael said. “What can you do? They all have attitude.” He got in the backseat.
Carson settled for riding shotgun. Deucalion was huge in the driver’s seat beside her.
He drove out of the garage, lowered the roll-down door by remote control, and turned left into the street.
“Where’s the private terminal? Where do we get the airplane?” Carson asked.
“You’ll see.”
“I’m surprised you’re okay being out like this, in daylight.”
“The side windows are tinted. In the Jeep, I’m not that easy to see. Besides, this is San Francisco, I don’t look that strange.”
After a couple of blocks, she said, “Do you always drive below the speed limit?”
In the backseat, Michael said, “Here we go.”
“Don’t be impatient,” Deucalion advised her.
“I’m not impatient. I’m just not used to riding with a two-hundred-year-old senior citizen who wears his pants under his armpits and thinks twenty miles an hour is reckless speed.”
“I don’t wear my pants under my armpits, and I’m just trying to find the correct moment to turn.”
“It’s hard to tell under that long black coat. Don’t you know where you’re going? We’ve got a navigation system. I could switch it on.”
“Is she always like this in a car?” Deucalion asked Michael.
“Like what?” Michael asked warily.
“Unpleasant.”
“If she’s driving, she’s not unpleasant,” Michael said. “If she can put the pedal to the floor, take corners on two wheels, and weave around other cars like a bobsled taking slalom turns, she’s not only gracious, she’s as bubbly as champagne.”
“Do you want me to put an address in the navigator?” Carson persisted. “What’s the address?”
Looking left to right, right to left, back and forth as he slowly cruised the street, Deucalion said, “So it’s important to you to be behind the wheel, to control your fate. And on a subconscious level, perhaps you equate speed-or at least being in motion-with safety.”
“I realize you’re old enough to have known Sigmund Freud,” she said, “but I consider his entire life’s work to be claptrap, so save the analysis.”
“I’m just looking for a junction. Ah… here it is ahead, and we’re going to need a little speed, no less than fifty- seven miles an hour, no more than fifty-nine.”
The Jeep shot forward. They raced to the end of the block, he hung a right so sharp they bounced onto the curb and off, and when they came out of the turn, San Francisco was gone.
They were on a rural road flanked by golden meadows. Beyond the fields to their right were forested foothills. Farther away, majestic mountains rubbed their stegosaurian backs against iron-gray clouds that looked harder than the granite peaks.
“ Montana,” Deucalion said, and stopped on the shoulder of the highway. “Would you like to drive now, Carson?”
She seemed unable to exhale.
In the backseat, Michael said, “An intuitive understanding of the quantum nature of the universe.”
Deucalion apparently thought his words explained the miraculous transition when he said, “At the most fundamental level of structure, Montana is as close to San Francisco as the first page of a notebook is close to the twentieth.”
Carson said, “Yeah, sure, I’ll drive.”
When she got out of the Jeep, she needed to lean against it for a moment because the tremors in her legs and a weakness in her knees made her unsteady.
She took slow deep breaths. The cool air was the cleanest she had ever breathed. It seemed to purge from her the weariness of a night spent conducting surveillance, and the stress of the showdown with Chang.
Twenty yards to the north, a herd of elk grazed in a meadow, scores of them. The bulls looked as if they must weigh a thousand pounds or more. They were adorned with massive racks of antlers, elaborate four-foot-high crowns that gave them a regal bearing. The past summer’s newborns were growing but were still recognizably calves, and each stayed near its mother.
Scout and Arnie were nearly a thousand miles away by air, yet they were as close to her as these calves were to their mothers, not just close in her heart but also in fact. Without Deucalion, Carson could not be at their side in a single step or with one revolution of the Jeep Cherokee’s wheels, yet she took comfort from the thought that the farthest place on a map was in some strange way as near as the house next door. The layered mysteries of this world were proof that her life and her actions mattered, for mystery was the mother of meaning.
The driver’s door opened, and Deucalion got out of the Cherokee. Across the roof of the vehicle, he said, “I entered Erika’s address in the navigator for you. She’s no more than five minutes west of here. Rainbow Falls is only a few miles farther.”
He opened the left rear door of the Jeep and settled in the backseat as Michael opened the right rear door and got out.
Carson went around the front of the vehicle and claimed the driver’s seat, pulling the door shut behind her.
Michael took his customary position in the front passenger seat. He said, “Better.”
“Of course,” Carson said.
“You know, it’s funny, I didn’t sleep all night, yet suddenly I feel fresh and awake.”
