Shuttered Sky

He couldn’t pull his eyes from her urn, and wondered if there might be some unholy magic yet in those ashes. “Some funeral homes have more integrity than others. But I give you my personal assurance that Tory has been respectfully cared for, and I regret any further suffering this mix-up may have caused.” He waited for her to accept the exchange, but she still held firmly onto the ceramic urn.

“So where are the papers?” she asked.

“Which papers?”

“The ones I have to sign—the ones that state I won’t sue for gross negligence.”

Martin released a quick impatient breath, then regretted it. He tried to regain a sullen semblance of empathy. “You don’t have to sign anything, Ms. Smythe.”

“Why not?” She looked up from her urn to face him again. There was more than grief in her eyes now—more than bitterness. He could sense distrust coming into focus.

“I was only instructed to bring you your daughter’s ashes. If you have any legal issues, you’ll have to take them up with my employer.”

“I thought you told me over the phone that you were a partner, not an employee.”

“Ms. Smythe, do you want your daughter’s ashes or not?”

She responded by putting her ceramic urn back down into the box, and pushing it under her seat. “It’s funny, Mr. D’Angelo, but at my daughter’s cremation, I didn’t see you there.”

Martin could feel his lies begin to fold in on one another, and he struggled to maintain the facade. “We’re a large mortuary.”

“Another funny thing was how her body was identified,” she con­tinued. “Her bracelet. Her father gave it to her when she was very little—when she still went by his name. The bracelet said ‘Vicki Sanders.’ With so many bodies turning up along the banks of the river, no one gave her name a second thought—and when they contacted me, I wasn’t about to tell them who she really was—not with the way her name was plastered all over the news. But you just called her Tory, Mr. D’Angelo. You knew who she was.”

“Perhaps I should just keep your daughter’s remains, and leave you with a stranger’s,” he said, clinging to his story one final time.

“Do you think I’m stupid, Mr. D’Angelo? You’re a reporter, aren’t you? Either that or just one more nut.”

Martin smiled and took a long look at this woman. He admired smart women. He had married one. And this smart woman’s daughter had been an accomplice in his wife’s murder.

“Are there even ashes in your urn,” she asked in disgust, “or did you just fill it with sand?”

Well, thought Martin, there were times for diplomacy, and times for action. “Coffee grounds actually.” He stood without warning and swung the brass urn, connecting with the woman’s cheek. She grunted with the blow, and took a breath about to scream. He swung it again as her scream let loose, rattling the stained glass windows in the cav­ernous space. The second blow caught her forehead and knocked her to the ground. The lid flew off, sending a spray of earthen-smelling coffee grounds in the air. He came down on top of her as she struggled, pinning her. “This is a house of God, Ms. Smythe,” he reminded her, shouting above her screams. “And I am his messenger.” Then he brought the dented urn high above his head. “When you don’t kill the messenger, sometimes the messenger kills you.” He brought the edge of the urn down upon her head again in a final killing blow. Then he reached under the pew, and pulled out the white ceramic urn, slipping it into his carrying case. When he stood, there was some­one behind him.

“My God! What have you done?”

The priest stood in the aisle behind him, mouth agape, and drip­ping scrub brush still in hand. Martin found himself laughing at the absurdity of the question. “The Lord’s work,” he answered. “Isn’t it obvious?” He pushed his way past, and strode down the aisle. At the back of the church, he rinsed the blood from his hands in a marble bowl of holy water, then grabbed his shoes at the door.

17. Caution To The Wind

Drew had always known that Tory was dead. He had been there—he had been the only witness close enough to see her and Michael huddling together in the doorway on the face of the dam as it crumbled around them. There wasn’t a day when Drew didn’t think about it—didn’t dream about it. He would relive it, trying desperately to change the outcome, but it never changed. They died, he survived. Even with a broken collar bone, he had made it to safety, but was unable to help Michael and Tory in their final moments.

Survivor’s guilt—isn’t that what they called it? It became the fuel of all his track victories, personal successes, and personal failures. So, yes, he knew that they were dead, but there was a strange solace in the fact that their bodies had not been found—as if they had been raptured away from a mere mortal demise.

But then they found Michael, or what remained of him after so many months, mysteriously deposited in the desert miles away from the disaster. And now, to find out that Tory was never missing at all—that she was just one of the dead, cremated and sent home a year ago . . . To Drew there was something ignoble about it. Obscene. Such an ordinary end to her extraordinary life.

There was no direct flight from Barstow to Miami. There was no direct flight from Barstow to anywhere. They managed to take a puddle-jumper to Phoenix, as Winston refused to have anything to do with the closer city of Las Vegas. From Phoenix, they got seats on an American flight to Miami, by way of Dallas.

“So what do we do when we get there?” Drew asked Winston as they waited to board in Phoenix.

“How the hell should I know?” was Winston’s response.

“Well, you’re always the one with all the answers.”

“This isn’t Jeopardy!”

“Naah,” said Drew. “They already have the answers. Can’t win Jeopardy unless you know the questions.”

“I’m working on that, too.”

Before boarding, Drew took out his cell phone and made the dreaded call home. “I’m taking off for a few days,” he told his parents. “Drug run to Columbia,” he joked. “I’ll be back by Tuesday. Wednes­day tops.” But when his mother pressed him as to what was really going on, he told her he had to take care of “old business.”

He could practically hear his mother’s knuckles pop as she wrung her hands. They both knew that “old business” meant something to do with the Shards—and his five unnatural friends were not discussed in their home.

When he had returned home last October, crushed shoulder and all, it had taken his parents months to be convinced that he hadn’t been brainwashed by a cult. His parents were among the few, the proud, the rational, who refused to accept the bludgeoning of magic the Shards had inflicted on the fragile world. What made it even harder for them to wrap their minds around was that their son was an integral part of it. After all, he still went to school, still wise-cracked, still had bed-hair in the morning—he was still their son. How could someone who cavorted with gods still be their son? To his parents, denying the Shards was the only way they could keep him. So he never discussed with them his weeks at Hearst castle, the cyclone, his death, his res­urrection, the theft and recovery of his soul.

And so on the rare occasions that Drew invoked the “old business” clause, his parents gave him a wide berth, as a matter of self-preservation.

On the line, he could hear his mother talking to his father in hushed tones. “Does he have enough money?” he heard his father say—quite a change from his father’s standard threat to shut down his credit card. But even if he did, it didn’t matter. He was eighteen now, presider over, if not master of, his own choices, with enough money of his own to do as he pleased.

They didn’t press, they didn’t try to talk him out of going. He was both relieved and disappointed.

“Do something for me, Ma,” he asked before he got off the phone. “Unpack, will ya’?” He could imagine his mother still sitting there amidst the storage boxes, still seeking and believing a sensible expla­nation as to why she was so compelled to box and order her life. She agreed noncommittally, and Drew hung up, pondering the phone long after the connection had severed.

* * *

Drew found the American terminal in Dallas to be like one of those nightmares where you keep running but