Kirk Russell - Shell Games

“I’m not going to have my team stand down.”

“Then, if you find a boat, don’t do anything except call me.”

“We’re going to come up with a list of boats.”

“And we’ll work together. Here, I brought you another one of these.” Douglas fished a telelocator out of his pocket. “Don’t lose this one.”

He watched Douglas drive away and then turned to Katherine. She’d been here when he’d gotten home and he figured the FBI must have called her, must have alerted her though he hadn’t asked. Now he talked to her about his fears for Petersen, his sense of loss and responsibility, the terribleness of having her taken this way. She touched his face, her fingers cool and smooth. She said he ought to get some rest, but what he did after she left was lay out how the team was going to check all vessels over sixty feet. Had to be at least that big, he thought, or at least they’d work from that point. He’d have to get Baird to lend wardens. He took a call from Stuart Petersen, and the conversation was very hard, Stuart saying repeatedly that they had to try to contact the kidnappers, go out to the media in a new way, that the FBI was stonewalling. Marquez could feel Stuart’s hope dying. After he hung up he closed his eyes, thought back over each thing he could remember from last night.

Somewhere in the late afternoon he fell asleep, waking at dusk with a blanket over him and hearing Katherine and Maria talking, taking comfort from the murmur of their voices before closing his eyes again. An hour later he rose and walked into the kitchen. Maria was there alone, her mother was in the shower.

“What’s going on, Maria?”

“I’m making dinner tonight.” Maria hugged him. “I’m really glad you’re back.”

“Count me out on dinner,” he said.

“Oh, you have to eat or you’ll lose weight.”

“I lost too much weight once. I wouldn’t want to do that again.”

“Maybe there’s a message there for me.”

He smiled at her sarcasm. You were only young and self-centered a particular way once and then life showed you otherwise. But he had a lot of tolerance for that. He hadn’t been that fun to talk to as a kid, himself. “How much weight did you lose?” she asked.

“About thirty-five pounds. Some people on my undercover team were killed and I had a hard time with it. I felt guilty and unworthy, and there was suspicion thrown my way because I’d been the only one who’d made it. And I didn’t handle that very well, couldn’t handle my integrity being questioned. It made me very bitter and angry and I had to walk it off in the mountains and when I did, I didn’t eat enough.”

He told her more. He told her of a moment of change, of self-awareness that had happened to him, a dawn on San Francisco Bay, watching the sunrise from a boat. The light on the water had been particularly beautiful, like a thousand prisms reflecting that morn-ing. Hoping he wasn’t sounding too corny, he tried to tell Maria how he’d realized what he loved and what mattered and what it meant to embrace the positive.

But he could see that Maria had lost more weight. When they ate dinner an hour later, she cut a couple of small slivers off a chicken leg and counted out the string beans she put on her plate. She finished and asked to be excused.

“Mom, will you clean up since I made dinner?”

“Sure.”

“Is it okay if I do my homework with the TV on?”

“Don’t turn it on too loud.”

She turned the TV on before going down the hall toward her room and Katherine got up quickly from the table. She walked over to the edge of the kitchen wall where she could see Maria’s bathroom. When Katherine went around the corner he figured Maria was in the bathroom and knew Katherine was listening. A few minutes later, Katherine was back.

“This is her routine now.”

“Let me try to talk with her again tonight.”

“She’s going to tell you she’s got to do her homework and right after that she’ll say she’s too tired to talk and has to go to bed. John, I know you can’t possibly think about this right now. Was there any news at all today? Did they find anything in the caves?”

“No, but we’re going back tomorrow.”

At a little after 11:00 Maria came out of her room. Marquez was out on the deck with Katherine. Maria waved a hand good-night from the deck door and Katherine coaxed her out and hugged her, then stepped around her, leaving Maria with him. As she left, Maria said sharply, almost bitchily, “What was that about?”

“She loves you.”

“She shouldn’t try to control me then.”

“You’re the one in control.”

“Tell her that.”

“I haven’t said much to you about it yet, have I?”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to start tonight?”

“Why don’t you sit with me a few minutes?” She sat on the picnic bench and wouldn’t look directly at him. “If we didn’t say anything, we wouldn’t be worth anything as parents. I told you the mess I got myself in. I let things go too far, sometimes. Maybe you’re a little like that, too.”

“Oh, so now we’re alike.”

“We might have that in common. You ate and then went straight to the bathroom, right?”

“So you’re accusing me, too?”

“I’m asking you.”

“Why would I want to throw up?”

“Maybe you want to control your body, because maybe the rest of your life doesn’t feel like it’s under control.” She didn’t give a sign one way or the other. “Mine feels that way right now, too. What’s going on in your life?”

Maria deflected the question. “Mom says you shouldn’t be leaving tomorrow and should do what the FBI says.”

“Then I wouldn’t be in control.” That got the slightly crooked shy smile that was hers only, that was there when he’d met her when she was four. “But that’s not really it, either, Maria. Sue Petersen is missing and I have to do everything I can to try to find her. I stayed here today and shouldn’t have.”

“Mom says she might already be dead.”

“She might be, but if she’s alive she’s got to believe I’m look-ing for her.”

“Well, mom is always wrong.”

“She’s not wrong about you.” He paused a beat. “I know you, Maria, the lying has got to be making you feel lousy. You’ve got a problem here and you’ve got to face it, and if anyone has the will and the strength to do that, it’s you.”

Maria didn’t answer but something was happening. He saw her shoulders shaking and tears starting in her eyes. When she looked up the tears were streaming down her face and she cried silently, then shook her head, sobbing, confessing something he couldn’t make out initially. Her voice wavered, talking now about problems with her friends, feeling like an outcast, people ignoring her, calling her a freak behind her back.

“You don’t look like a freak.”

“Everybody says I do.”

“You don’t. You were bringing your weight down and maybe it got a little away from you and went further than you hoped. It’s the kind of mistake I would make.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

“The thing about friends is you only have a few true ones in a lifetime, and I wouldn’t sweat the rest. If I hadn’t been there last night, then I wouldn’t have been Petersen’s true friend.”

“I don’t have any friends.”

“Talk to me, talk to your mom, start there. We’re your friends. She’s all over you because she loves you, but she’ll back off when she sees you turn it around.”

“I mean at school.”

“You’re beautiful and bright, Maria. You’ve got it all going your way and you’re going to have to use that great will of yours to work this problem out. That’s what got you into this and that’s what’s going to get you out. But first you’ve got to try to figure out where it started.”