C.E. Murphy - Truthseeker

“I’m pretty sure that’s dammed up, Lara. I don’t know if there are any major falls on the Connecticut River that aren’t.”

“No, it’s this one.” Confidence jangled over Lara’s skin, its music imbuing her with hope. “If it’s dammed up, there must be a way to get beneath or behind or inside it. Something,” she said with less certainty.

“You’re the navigator. Okay, let me see that.” Kelly shoved the rest of her hot dog into her mouth and took the map, studying the thin road lines. “The thing is, we know they’re looking for us in Boston,” she said around her mouthful. “We don’t know if they’ll have spread out. Still, I don’t want to take the direct route. If we drive north a little ways farther we can get onto one of the smaller roads and come around and head south. Nobody’d be looking for us from that direction.”

“Your friend has the makings of a criminal mastermind, Lara.” Dafydd’s color and humor were both improved, though Lara thought it would take escaping the vehicle’s metal frame to really see a difference in his health. “Did you know this about her?”

“I had no idea.”

“C’mon,” Kelly muttered. “It’s the kind of adventure everybody dreams about, right? You think of all the ways you’d prepare. You just don’t expect a cop to end up dead and your fiancé to dump you along the way.”

“Oh, God, Kelly.” Lara reached for Kelly’s shoulder and was shaken off, though not rudely.

“No, forget I said that. It doesn’t make it any easier.”

“We don’t know Detective Washington’s dead,” Lara offered in a small voice. “The news hasn’t said so.”

“Yeah, well, Dickon didn’t technically dump me, either, but I’m kind of thinking we should consider this a worst-case scenario situation. Anyway,” Kelly said ferociously, “I thought everybody made up melodramatic plans about how they were going to survive the plane crash or how they would disappear after stealing a hundred million dollars from Wall Street or whatever. Don’t they?” She looked up and Lara gave her an uncertain smile.

“I never did, but you’re the one who was always telling me I never took any risks.”

“Start smaller next time,” Kelly suggested, and twisted to pop her back. “If we go the long way around we’re probably not going to get to Turners Falls until after dark, but that might be to our advantage. It’s easier to sneak at night. And then whether we find this staff or not …” She looked in the rearview mirror. “The car makes you worse, doesn’t it, David. Can you handle us taking the long way?”

His silence was more telling than the answer he gave: “I’ll manage.”

Kelly shot a look at Lara. “Is he telling the truth?”

Lara shivered, listening to the resolute notes lingering in Dafydd’s answer. “He’ll manage, but you don’t need my power to know it won’t be good for him.”

“Yeah.” Kelly blew a raspberry and gave Lara the map, then put the car back in gear. “Hang on till we get there, David. Then you can get out and go lie down in a forest or something while Lara and I do the heavy lifting.”

“I would be grateful.” Dafydd spoke quietly. “I don’t need shelter, but I think even a few hours under the moonlight, in a green and growing place, would restore me greatly.”

“Okay.” Kelly pulled back onto the road decisively. “Lara, you navigate. Keep us off the blue roads, even, if you can, and push us west.”

The dam blocking the river at Turners Falls was massive enough to make Lara laugh. Despairing humor, she thought, but humor regardless. Three enormous walls—levies, blockades; she didn’t know what to call them—pooled the river behind them into a glittering black lake. The grounds around the lake, at least where Kelly had found parking, were well-kept lightly forested greenlands. Dafydd had gratefully stumbled from the car to sit beneath a tree while the women got out to study the dam in dismay.

“There’s no way you’re getting behind or under that thing, Lara. There can’t possibly be any artifacts left under it anyway. They’d have been pulverized when it was built.”

“But it’s here.” Lara turned in a loose circle, wishing her conviction would offer more information. “Someone must have taken it before they built the dam,” she said slowly, testing the idea for veracity. It rang true, though uncertainty caught her for a moment. With the way her power was changing, it seemed possible that if she wanted it to be true badly enough, she might convince herself of the lie.

Or she might force a true thing back to before the dam’s construction, changing the time line that had led to this moment. That idea was vastly more appalling. Lara groaned, dropping her face into her hands, then let out an explosive breath as she looked up. “Okay. I’m going into town and see if I can find out when the dam was built. If it was recently enough, maybe there was some kind of preservation work done first.”

“You’re deluding yourself, Lar.” Kelly’s dry response sounded unfortunately accurate, but Lara spread her hands in semi-defeat.

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Not really. David, can you handle the car again?”

He pushed to his feet, using the tree for support. “Reluctantly.”

“Then we’ll drive in. C’mon.” Kelly headed for the car, Lara stepping up to Dafydd’s side to help him back. His weight was negligible, as though he might blow away in a strong wind, and she frowned at him.

“If we can’t find a clue or a hint somewhere fast, I want Kelly to take you back into one of the forests we just drove through, okay? You need the rest more than I need the help searching.”

“Lara, if the staff is what you say it is, it’s not meant for mortal hands. It could be very dangerous to you.”

“Oisín carried it for years,” Lara argued. “It might be less dangerous in mortal hands than in Seelie. And this isn’t up for debate. You’re—” She broke off, unwilling to finish the sentence. Unwilling to voice the truth that the Seelie prince was dying, as if letting it go unsaid might let him eke out a few more hours.

He hesitated beside the car, looking down at her before his shoulders slumped and he nodded. “Very well. I would prefer we find it rather than split up, but I … am not strong. I don’t want to burden you in your search.”

“You’re not a burden, Dafydd. I just have no intention of explaining to your father how I got his son and heir killed on a world not even his own.”

“You’re very sweet,” Kelly said from inside the car. “Now stop mooning over each other and get in. The longer this takes the more wasted David’s going to be.”

Dafydd murmured, “Again to the heart of the matter,” and accepted Lara’s help getting in the car. He shied away from metal, even forgoing the seat belt, and Lara kept a nervous eye out the window for patrolling police who might notice the minor transgression.

There were none on the short drive into Turners Falls, nor any readily visible as they reached the town center. Village center, Lara read on a tourist information sign minutes later. The township was Montague, made up of five smaller villages, of which Turners Falls was the largest.

“Oh, great,” Kelly said from the other side of the sign. “Welcome to beautiful Turners Falls, named after Captain William Turner, who slaughtered a village full of sleeping Indians in this location three hundred and forty years ago. I bet anybody who knew where your staff was has been dead since then.”

Lara came around the sign with a laugh, and chagrin crossed Kelly’s face. “I mean, okay, yes, obviously, they’d be dead by now anyway. You know what I meant.”

“The dam was built in the eighteen sixties,” Dafydd read from where Lara had left him, a note of discouragement in his voice. “Certainly there was no hope of preservation work having been done so long ago.”