Beyond Recognition

47

It was not such a long drive, but for Daphne it felt nearly interminable. Boldt had not been told about the meeting. Susan Prescott did not know. It was the bit of conspiracy between Ben and Daphne that had convinced Ben to cooperate with the video lineup and the police artist: the promise of seeing Emily.

The meeting could not take place at Emily’s because Daphne remained concerned about the Scholar’s possible whereabouts and media references to the participation of a local psychic and the existence of a twelve-year-old witness. Even without names being mentioned, Daphne was taking no chances; she would protect Ben at every opportunity.

Both Boldt and Susan would have been highly critical of her for arranging such a meeting, but a promise was a promise. Her fears ran far beyond the tongue-lashing she might suffer from Boldt. More important, she might lose her newly formed bond with Ben to this other woman. She wondered if the transition from a possible future with Owen to a present with this boy had resulted in a transference; if, in fact, she was fooling herself, not being honest, using the boy to soften the landing. She had barely thought about Owen over the past few days. He had been gracious enough to give her the distance she requested, and that distance had ended up an emotional abyss, a black hole across which she had not returned. She had rid herself of him. It felt good on many levels. She missed Corky, especially at dinnertime, but much of what she gained from Corky had been easily replaced by her time with Ben. At that point it hit her hard: If she lost Ben the world was going to seem incredibly empty for a time. For the past week, the kid had done more good for her than he would ever know.

She did not trust Emily. The woman was a proven con artist. She played on a person’s superstitions, fears, and aspirations. She tricked people. She used the stars and a tarot deck to feed people what they wanted to hear. Worst of all, she owned Ben’s heart free and clear; in the eyes of the youngster this woman could do no wrong. If she told Ben to stop talking to Daphne, he would; if she told him to run for her car and lock the doors, he would do this as well. Just the mention of her name drove the boy’s eyes wide. Daphne realized that she was in many ways jealous of Emily, just as she was jealous of Liz-envy was too light a word. She didn’t like herself much, and that discovery made her wonder if her impending breakup with Owen was a product of his failures, their combined failures, or her own internal dissatisfaction with herself.

Martin Luther King Boulevard was a four-lane road through several miles of an economically patchy black neighborhood kept separate from Lake Washington’s upscale white enclaves by a geological formation, a high spine of hill running as a steep ridge, north to south. Daphne marveled how Seattle, like so many U.S. cities, was segregated into dozens of small ethnic and microeconomic communities, villages, and neighborhoods. People moved freely and, for the most part safely, one community to the next, but park a car of blacks in a gated community and a cop or security person would arrive within minutes. A car of whites would not draw the same response. Seattle’s various communities consisted of African Americans, Hispanics, Vietnamese, Caucasians, Jews, Scandinavians, yuppies, yaughties, and computer nerds.

Ben pointed out the park before they arrived. A row of cement obelisks loomed in the distance, looking like support piers for a highway overpass. Daphne didn’t know this area well and was unfamiliar with the park itself. She followed Ben’s directions and pulled over to stop where he indicated.

Ben could not remember feeling this happy, this excited. Emily. He had missed her to the point that he felt his heart might rip from his chest. He had dreamed about her, written in his journal about her, lay awake thinking about her. He had so many questions to ask. More than anything, he wanted a hug-to feel her arms around him.

He walked fast, outpacing Daphne, who chided him for it. “Stay close,” she called out to him, and he could hear something wrong in her voice, something different.

To him, the place was out of a Star Trek movie: the towering blocks of concrete, the enormous metal cages attached to cement walls, all of it cut into the massive hill like a giant bunker. To Ben it was the tunnel park-eight lanes of I-90 passed beneath it, unheard, unseen. The facility had only recently been completed as a park, and the sidewalks, the flower beds-everything about it-were so new it did not feel inhabited; each time Ben came here it felt as if he were the first person to discover it: the giant slabs of concrete all lined up like blocks, stretching toward the gray sky, all different sizes but topping out at the exact same height.

The sidewalk climbed up a steady grade to reach a wide bike path that ran down the center of the park and served as its focus. A bicyclist sped by, head bent low, legs pumping. Ben said hi to the man, but the cyclist never looked up, never acknowledged him.

Ben’s legs began to run underneath him before he managed to say to Daphne, “There she is!” He took off at lightning speed, his eyes welling with tears not because of the wind in his face but because of the ache in his heart. He hadn’t realized how much he had missed her until he saw her again. Her silhouette, so unmistakable in the distance, so beautiful, so wonderful. Perhaps it was the sound of his footsteps slapping beneath him, perhaps she had sensed his approach out of thin air as she could sense so much, but something caused her to spin around and face him. As she did, her face lifted in a big moon of a smile, her eyes lighted up, and she opened her arms invitingly.

Daphne let the boy have some distance. She owed the two of them a moment in private, given all she had put them through. A part of her had no desire even to greet Emily, to give the woman a chance to wield her power over the boy and dominate him the way she knew was possible. She would not turn this into an emotional tug-of-war, not for anything. She would not put the boy through that; worse, she would not inflict it upon herself, for she knew this was a game she was certain to lose, and at that point in time she could not afford to lose the boy and his dependence on her. It was a delicate line to walk, and she walked it with one eye glued to the scene before her but with her head turned down in indifference. The human heart is more fragile than one ever expects, she thought.

She strolled the bike path, unfamiliar with it, intrigued by a series of stone posts that rose to knee height on either side. She approached the nearest of these stone posts, admiring the tile work at its base.

The tile held an odd stick-figure drawing, evoking a Native American pictograph. Surrounding the tile’s perimeter were words. It took her a moment to discern where the sentence began. But it wasn’t a sentence, she realized; it was a quotation: “Crooked is the path of eternity.” Nietzsche. She hurried to the next post: more primitive art and a quote from Lao-tsu: “The way that can be told, is not the constant way.” Heart pounding, she hurried to the next, reading words emblazoned on her memory: “Suddenly a flash of understanding, a spark that leaps across the soul.” Plato. The same quote that had accompanied a melted piece of green plastic. One post to the next, like a bee to flowers. A dozen such quotations and pictographs. She stopped and stared: “He has half the deed done who has made a beginning.”

The first of the threats: Dorothy Enwright. She had profiled the suspect as highly educated, a scholar! He was nothing more than a plagiarist who had walked or ridden through this park. The Bible-thumping disturbed man in the trees had not lined up well for her with the poetic intellect, but with this discovery the two melded into one: A plagiarist, with little education and the need to appear smart; a mind steeped in biblical significance; a sociopath intent on burning or disfiguring women.

There on that bike path she found each and every quote mailed to Garman. And then the most important thought of all: The arsonist used this section of bike path-he lived somewhere in the area.

“Quick, Ben!” she shouted from a great distance. “We have to go. Right now!”