Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

Maggie dimly recalled reading about the sect of white supremacists who had tried to set up a racially pure colony in the Idaho snow. ‘I’d forgotten that. How near?’

The driver pointed towards the top right of his windscreen. ‘Couple of hills that way.’

‘But round here, it’s not…’

‘Oh no. I’m not saying anything negative about the folks who live up here. They’re not all like that, no way.’

Maggie could hear a ‘but’ in his voice.

‘Except?’

He twisted his head over his shoulder. ‘All I’m saying is, people who come all the way up here – it ain’t for the nightlife. They’re trying to get away from something. Or someone.’

Maggie nodded.

‘With the Aryan Nations, it’s black people. With some of the others, in these little shacks-’ they had passed one or two barely-discernible outlines of buildings a long way off the road, surrounded by acres of nothing, ‘-it’s the Feds. You know, the guys who think the federal government is coming to take their guns away? And some folks just need to run away.’

Like Anne and Randall Everett, thought Maggie.

They drove for another ten minutes, climbing ever steeper, until the satnav told them their destination was approaching on the right.

Maggie asked the driver to pull up twenty yards away and to stay: she would pay him once they were back among what now seemed like the bright urban lights of Coeur d’Alene.

‘How long you gonna be?’

‘That’s the trouble. It might be thirty seconds, it might be an hour or more. But keep the meter running.’

He grumbled, but finally agreed and she stepped out into the bracing air. It was not just cold but fresh enough to make the skin tingle, the way it does after a plunge into iced water. Standing there listening, she became aware of a sound she had probably not heard in years: complete, impeccable silence.

The darkness was total, too. There was no fraying at the edges, no dull, electric orange of city lights hovering above the horizon. The only light to break this darkness came from the stars and the lamp above the entrance of what she dearly hoped was the Everett residence.

This house was much closer to the road than the others. There was a modest fence, but no hint of the quasi-military compounds she had seen on the way up. Indeed, as she got nearer, she could see that the house itself would not have looked out of place in most American suburbs. It was timber-fronted, with a two-step walk-up, a porch with two neatly arranged outdoor chairs covered in tarps, waiting for the winter to end, and a wind-chime, jangling in the chill air.

The porch light was encouraging, but it was hard to tell if there was any light within. Heavy curtains were drawn across both the upstairs windows. It was late, no doubt about it. Folks out here – in Idaho, for heaven’s sake – were bound to be early to bed. And the Everetts would be in their sixties by now…

Maggie did what she always did when faced by a moment of fear: closed her eyes for a moment, then took a step forward. She knocked on the door.

There was a creak and then the sound of an interior door opening, followed by a brief cone of light, visible in the pane of glass above the door, pushing forward into the hallway. And now another light came on. Maggie waited for a voice to call out asking her to identify herself. But it did not come. Instead, without fear or hesitation, the door opened.

That the woman was the mother of Pamela Everett, Maggie could tell instantly. All Principal Schilling had told her was that Pamela was strikingly pretty, nicknamed Miss America. This woman had the fine features, the clean lines, of a long-ago beauty queen.

‘Hello,’ Maggie smiled, hating herself for what she was about to do. ‘My name is Ashley Muir and I’m so sorry to disturb you so late at night. But I’ve come a long way to fulfil the wish of a dying man. A dead man, now. My late husband. This is something I promised him I would do. I know it’s crazy, but can I ask if you are Mrs Anne Everett?’

The woman looked aghast, as if even the uttering of her name out loud violated a sacred taboo. But, Maggie noticed, she did not slam the door. Nor did she call for her husband.

Maggie pressed on. ‘My husband died a few months ago. In one of our last conversations he told me about his first love. Your daughter, Pamela.’

Now the woman’s face turned white, and it was as if she had aged by twenty years. ‘How did you find me?’

‘My husband did that. Worked that computer for months, I don’t know how he did it. But he was determined, Mrs Everett.’

The woman remained frozen to the spot, still holding the door, unable to speak.

‘Do you think, Mrs Everett, we could speak inside? I promise this won’t take long.’

Still unspeaking, staring at her as if at an apparition, Anne Everett widened the door to let her in. Maggie stepped inside hesitantly, wanting her body to convey what she felt: that she was treading carefully here, not wanting to bring more pain to this house of loss.

There were reminders everywhere: a large photograph of Pamela Everett in the costume of high school graduation, several smaller photos of a girl at the seaside, on a rocking horse, blowing out birthday candles on the hallway table. For the second time in a week, Maggie looked at a woman she had never met and thought of her mother.

‘Could we sit down?’

Still in silence, Mrs Everett ushered Maggie into a sitting room organized around a single chair facing a TV set; next to it, a side table bearing a tray with a half-eaten supper of cold meat and boiled potatoes.

Maggie sat on a couch whose smooth lines suggested it was rarely used. Anne Everett perched on the edge of her chair.

‘My late husband was in the class below your daughter. He told me she’d have never even noticed him. But he had a crush on her. His first.’ Maggie smiled, the rueful smile of a widow. ‘He said he had hardly thought about her for years, until he got his own diagnosis. And then he remembered what he heard about Pamela Everett. The “beautiful Pamela”, he called her. And how she had died from a sudden illness. And it hurt him, Mrs Everett. It hurt him to think that maybe people would think your daughter had been forgotten. Because she hadn’t been forgotten. He had remembered her. And it was so important to him that you knew that. Because, and this is what he said, if people remember us, then it means a little part of us lives on.’

Maggie had told herself it was a white lie, but that did not reduce the shame she felt for what she had done. When she saw the tear falling slowly down the cheek of Anne Everett it made her loathe herself all the more. She had crossed the line, she realized. Nothing – not Stuart, not Baker’s presidency, not Forbes, not her own safety – could justify this. She began to stand up, mumbling the beginnings of an apology.

‘Please don’t go!’ The woman spoke with such urgency that her voice pushed Maggie back onto the cold, stiff couch.

Anne Everett wiped the tear from her eye and, to Maggie’s great surprise, revealed the beginnings of a smile. ‘Young lady, I have waited twenty-six years for this day.’

Involuntarily, Maggie’s face turned into a mask of surprise.

‘Oh yes. Twenty-six years and nine days, I have waited for someone to come and say what you just said. That my daughter lived. That her life meant something.’

‘Why did you doubt it?’

‘Doubt it? I was never allowed to believe it.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Of course you don’t. How could you? How could anyone? No one ever knew. Except me. And Randall.’ She was animated now, leaping up from the chair. ‘Are you a whisky drinker, Mrs Muir? I am,’ she said, without waiting for Maggie’s answer. From under the side table, she produced a bottle, now down to its last third, and a used glass. She poured herself a healthy measure and downed half of it.