Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

‘Such a little angel, sleepy but not cranky at all.’

Joe flashed back to Mercy’s mention of ‘seat belts,’ plural, and to other things she had said that suddenly required a more literal interpretation than he had given them. ‘You mean Rose. Rachel had a child with her?’

‘Well, didn’t I say?’ Mercy looked puzzled, tossing the damp paper towel into a waste can.

‘We didn’t realize there was a child,’ Barbara said.

‘I told you,’ Mercy said, perplexed by their confusion. ‘Back a year ago, when the fella came around from your Board, I told him all about Rachel and the little girl, about Rachel being a witness.’

Looking at Joe, Barbara said, ‘I didn’t remember that. I guess I did well even to remember this place at all.’

Joe’s heart turned over, turned like a wheel long stilled on a rusted axle.

Unaware of the tremendous impact that her revelation had on Joe, Mercy opened the oven door to check the cookies once more.

‘How old was the girl?’ he asked.

‘Oh, about four or five,’ Mercy said.

Premonition weighed on Joe’s eyes, and when he closed them, the darkness behind his lids swarmed with possibilities that he was terrified to consider.

‘Can you… can you describe her?’

Mercy said, ‘She was just a little slip of a doll of a thing. Cute as a button — but then they’re all pretty darn cute at that age, aren’t they?’

When Joe opened his eyes, Barbara was staring at him, and her eyes brimmed with pity for him. She said, ‘Careful, Joe. It can’t lead where you hope.’

Mercy placed the hot baking sheet full of finished cookies on a second wire rack.

Joe said, ‘What colon was her hair?’

‘She was a little blonde.’

He was moving around the table before he realized that he had risen from his chair.

Having picked up a spatula, Mercy was scooping the cookies off the cooler of the two baking sheets, transferring them to a large platter.

Joe went to her side. ‘Mercy, what colour were this little girl’s eyes?’

‘Can’t say I remember.’

‘Try.’

‘Blue, I guess,’ she said, sliding the spatula under another cookie.

‘You guess?’

‘Well, she was blond.’

He surprised her by taking the spatula from her and putting it aside on the counter. ‘Look at me, Mercy. This is important.’

From the table, Barbara warned him again. ‘Easy, Joe. Easy.’

He knew that he should heed her warning. Indifference was his only defence. Indifference was his friend and his consolation. Hope is a bird that always flies, the light that always dies, a stone that crushes when it can’t be carried any farther. Yet with a recklessness that frightened him, he felt himself shouldering that stone, stepping into the light, reaching toward those white wings.

‘Mercy,’ he said, ‘not all blondes have blue eyes, do they?’ Face to face with him, captured by his intensity, Mercy Ealing said, ‘Well… I guess they don’t.’

‘Some have green eyes, don’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘If you think about it, I’m sure you’ve even seen blondes with brown eyes.’

‘Not many.’

‘But some,’ he said.

Premonition swelled in him again. His heart was a Bucking horse now, iron-shod hooves kicking the stall boards of his ribs.

‘This little girl,’ he said, ‘are you sure she had blue eyes?’

‘No. Not sure at all.’

‘Could her eyes have been grey?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Think. Try to remember.’

Mercy’s eyes swam out of focus as memory pulled her vision to the past, but after a moment, she shook her head. ‘I can’t say they were grey, either.’

‘Look at my eyes, Mercy.’ She was looking. He said, ‘They’re grey.’ ‘Yes.’

‘An unusual shade of grey.’ ‘Yes.’

‘With just the faintest touch of violet to them.’

‘I see it,’ she said.

‘Could this girl. Mercy, could this child have had eyes like mine?’

She appeared to know what answer he needed to hear, even if she could not guess why. Being a good-hearted woman, she wanted to please him. At last, however, she said, ‘I don’t really know. I can’t say for sure.’

A sinking sensation overcame Joe, but his heart continued to knock hard enough to shake him.

Keeping his voice calm, he said, ‘Picture the girl’s face.’ He put his hands on Mercy’s shoulders. ‘Close your eyes and try to see her again.’

She closed her eyes.

‘On her left cheek,' Joe said. ‘Beside her earlobe. Only an inch in from her earlobe. A small mole.’

Mercy’s eyes twitched behind her smooth lids as she struggled to burnish her memory.

‘It’s more of a beauty mark than a mole,’ Joe said. ‘Not raised but flat. Roughly the shape of a crescent moon.’

After a long hesitation, she said, ‘She might have had a mark like that, but I can’t remember.’

‘Her smile. A little lopsided, a little crooked, turned up at the left corner of her mouth.’

‘She didn’t smile that I remember. She was so sleepy. and a little dazed. Sweet but withdrawn.’

Joe could not think of another distinguishing feature that might jar Mercy Ealing’s memory. He could have regaled her for hours with stories about his daughter’s grace, about her charm, about her humour and the musical quality of her laughter. He could have spoken at length of her beauty: the smooth sweep of her forehead, the coppery gold of her eyebrows and lashes, the pertness of her nose, her shell-like ears, the combination of fragility and stubborn strength in her face that sometimes made his heart ache when he watched her sleeping, the inquisitiveness and unmistakable intelligence that informed her every expression. Those were subjective impressions, however, and no matter how detailed such descriptions were, they could not lead Mercy to the answers that he had hoped to get from her.

He took his hands from her shoulders.

She opened her eyes.

Joe picked up the spatula he had taken from her. He put it down again. He didn’t know what he was doing.

She said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay. I was hoping… I thought… I don’t know. I’m not sure what I was thinking.’

Self-deceit was a suit that didn’t fit him well, and even as he lied to Mercy Ealing, he stood naked to himself, excruciatingly aware of what he had been hoping, thinking. He’d been in a fit of searching behaviour again, not chasing anyone into a convenience store this time, not stalking an imagined Michelle through a mall or department store, not rushing to a schoolyard fence for a closer glimpse of a Chrissie who was not Chrissie after all, but heart-deep in searching behaviour nonetheless. The coincidence of this mystery child sharing his lost daughter’s age and hair colour had been all that he needed to send him racing pell-mell once more in pursuit of false hope.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mercy said, clearly sensing the precipitous downward spiral of his mood. ‘Her eyes, the mole, the smile. just don’t ring a bell. But I remember her name. Rachel called her Nina.’

Behind Joe, at the table, Barbara got up so fast that she knocked over her chair.

At the corner of the back porch, the water falling through the downspout produced a gargle of phantom voices, eager and quarrelsome, guttural and whispery, spitting out questions in unknown tongues.

Joe’s legs felt rubbery. He leaned with both hands on the wet railing. Rain blew under the porch eaves, spattering his face.

In answer to his question, Barbara pointed toward the low hills and the woods to the southwest. ‘The crash site was that way.’

‘How far?’