Carsten Stroud - The Shimmer

“Been done,” said Marsh. “Remember that case last year, prisoner goes into the Glades, in a hurricane, but the dogs found him anyway?”

“Because he was half eaten by a gator,” said Halliday, “and he’d started to stink. My mom coulda found him.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Redding. “Worth a shot. Let’s get the dog cars down here. And I want some Marine units out there. And let the Flagler County deputies know what’s going on too. I want a tight perimeter—lady could sure as hell motor—”

“Damn straight,” said Halliday. “She was going away so fast I thought I had stopped to pee.”

“So where the hell is she?” Redding said, a rhetorical question.

“Gotta be here somewhere,” said Marsh.

“LQ’s right, she’s still around. Have Flagler County set up a cordon around these blocks.”

“All this for an F thirty-seven?” said Marsh.

“I know. A lot of overtime. I just...”

“Got a feeling she’s worth chasing?”

“Yeah. I do,” he said, thinking about the expression on her face, cool, defiant, not frightened at all. And he knew her from... somewhere . “She got my attention.”

Marsh was reaching for his portable to make the calls when they heard two sharp flat cracks close together, a brief pause and then one more.

“Gunfire,” said Halliday, but Redding and Marsh were already running back toward the trees.

seventeen days ago

By the time Gerald Jeffrey Walker and his family arrived at their vacation condo at Amelia Island on Florida’s Atlantic coast—after thirteen hours on the road from St. Louis—the feeling inside the family’s GMC Suburban was sharply split on the issue of the Harwoods.

The Harwoods—Marietta, pronounced Mayretta , and her husband, Ellison—were Christian Evangelicals and they ran a very large and very rewarding ministry— financially rewarding at any rate—called the New Covenant Celestial Ministry, and one of their many income streams came from the sale of their Evangelical Christian audiobooks.

Walker—sometimes known as “Jerry Jeff” after the blues guy—was a forensic archaeologist working for a unit of the US Army Corps of Engineers based in St. Louis. His team was called in whenever artifacts or bones were unearthed at a construction site, sometimes in remote corners of the world.

He considered this calling a sacred duty, since it involved an effort to determine exactly where these artifacts or bones came from, and what sort of spiritual beliefs had once been attached to them. This information was hard to come by.

It required bone and DNA analysis, the assessment of causes of death, including weapons that might have been used if there were indications of murder or human sacrifice, as well as a grip on local cultural history and a great deal of spiritual imagination.

Perhaps because of his work and the moral challenges it presented—bringing peace to the spirits of the dead—in his off-hours Walker served as a Worship Leader at the Glad Day Assembly, an Evangelical Christian megachurch in their hometown of Florissant, Missouri.

Walker and his wife, Marilyn, who ran the childcare center at the Glad Day Assembly, tried very hard to believe that they had a Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ, a difficult exercise in faith that met with varying degrees of success, particularly for a man with a PhD in forensic archaeology and a woman with a master’s degree in education.

In an effort to bridge this gap they had invested in the Marietta and Ellison Harwood Collection of inspirational Christian audiobooks.

They did this because Walker’s work had brought him face-to-face with mass graves, with human sacrifices, with the residue of every kind of violent evil, and the only protection from the fallen world, both ancient and modern, seemed to be found in the teachings of Jesus Christ.

So they decided to take advantage of the drive down from Florissant to share the Harwood Ministry’s latest releases—Ellison’s The Power of Love and his wife Marietta’s My Celestial Heart Sings —with their three daughters, admittedly a captive audience.

The Suburban seated seven, but divisive forces relating to the Harwood Ministry had affected the family dynamic on the way down Interstate 75.

This had resulted in the front bucket seats being occupied by Walker and his wife, Marilyn, of course, since they shared the driving, and the bench seat immediately behind them had become the private domain of the youngest Walker daughter, six-year-old Alyssa.

Alyssa had set up housekeeping across the entire bench seat, surrounded by her Hello Kitty and Littlest Pet Shop collections.

Jerry and Marilyn and Alyssa composed what had become the pro-Harwood faction. Since the trip from St. Louis covered just under a thousand miles their time on the road lasted several hours, which is a long time to be in a car listening to inspirational evangelical audiotapes; it was longer for some than for others.

Which brings us to the anti-Harwood faction, the two older Walker daughters: Rebecca, seventeen, and Karen, sixteen, both very beautiful in that Midwestern corn-fed style, and both of them in many ways typical American teenage girls. And, as it turned out, in other ways, not at all typical.

Rebecca and Karen were sitting at the very back of the truck, in the two fold-down seats, pressed up tight against the luggage stacks that crowded the rear deck, isolating themselves as much as they could from the pro-Harwood faction up front, because, after a few hundred miles, they were both totally sick unto eye-rolling, please-kill-me-now death of Ellison and Marietta Harwood.

So it won’t come as a surprise to hear that, upon finally reaching their condo, a four-bedroom Italian-themed palazzo with a terrace overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, Rebecca and Karen had thrown their luggage onto the king-size bed in their shared bedroom, torn off their clothes, slipped into their strictly forbidden Tommy Bahama bikinis, censored by Ralph Lauren hoodies and baggy shorts, and bolted for the beach at a dead run.

Where, around sunset, strolling north through the crystalline water toward Fernandina Beach, the surf rolling and booming and sparkling all around them, the echoes of Ellison Harwood’s well-oiled baritone gradually fading from memory, they saw a woman walking south toward them.

She was alone. She was barefoot and tanned and wearing a one-piece suit in creamy white under a gauzy tourmaline beach wrap. She moved as if she were inside music, something rhythmic and Caribbean.

Her face was partially hidden by a broad-brimmed white straw hat, secured around her neck with a scarlet ribbon. Her eyes were cast down, as if she were lost in thought. She was less than twenty feet away before she seemed to sense rather than see them, and then she stopped and lifted her face up and considered them, as if she knew them, as if she had been looking for them.

Which, of course, she had.

They stopped to talk, then walked and talked and found themselves gradually...enchanted. How old she was—thirty, forty, even fifty—it was impossible to tell, and, after a short while in her effervescent company, it didn’t seem to matter.

Later, sitting by the palm-tree-shaded pool, sharing sips of her margarita with the girls when the waiter wasn’t looking, she told them her name was Diana Bowman, that she was a dealer in antique jewelry based in Palm Beach, that she was here on a much-needed vacation from her wealthy and demanding clientele, and that she loved meeting young people like Rebecca and Karen.

They each felt that galvanic spark of instant rapport that is not an uncommon event when people go on vacation, and by the second round of margarita sharing they decided that they should be newfound friends together and have such great fun while they were all here at this beautiful resort.