Destiny

THIRTEEN

Early Saturday morning, Paul Marcus zipped up his suitcase and walked to his front door with Buddy at his side. Marcus set the bag down and squatted to rub Buddy’s head. “You keep an eye on this place, okay. No chasing the horses, especially Midnight. You know she’s not genetically wired for a game of tag.” Buddy wagged his tail and cocked his head. “Our neighbor Amber will come by twice a day to walk and feed you and the girls. Be a good boy. Hell, just be yourself.”

Buddy let out a slight whimper. Marcus stood, smiled and locked the door on his way out. The air was cool. He walked to the barn and looked toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. A blanket of fog rested on the shoulders of the ancient mountains, the peaks visible, craggy stone heads above the shroud. Daylight stole its way between the dark and the fog, the direction of the sunrise as obscure as the base of the old hills.

A whippoorwill called out into the cool morning air. Marcus walked inside the barn and approached his horses in their stalls. He stroked their necks and said, “I’ll miss you ladies. Stay strong.” He kissed them both on their foreheads, turned and went up the yard to his car.

As Marcus unlocked the car door, an acorn fell from one of the oak trees, popped off the hood and rolled to a stop in the driveway. Then all was quiet for a long moment as he took in his surroundings. He heard one of the horses snort and whinny in the barn. A rooster crowed somewhere in the black of the valley. Marcus thought of Jen and Tiffany. Sadness, cold and dark as the bottom of an abandoned well, filled his heart.

He needed to think, to plan for what he was about to do. He drove the back roads in the direction of Dulles International Airport. Fog crept across the road, the car’s low beams punching through the sheet of rolling white. The sun labored to climb above the tree line, a lit torch flickering in the mist and casting the tall pines in cloaks of blood orange.

Marcus drove across the bridge over the Shenandoah River, the mist twisting in slow pirouettes rising from the river’s belly. He thought about his grandmother, the worry building in her eyes. Marcus could still feel her frail and slow pulse in the palm of his hands, could hear her voice deep in the well of his submerged thoughts.

“There’s something in my heart that’s whispering disturbing things.”

Marcus pinched the bridge of his nose and pictured Buddy running after the horses. Since the deaths of Jennifer and Tiffany, Buddy and the horses were all that remained for him. He hoped his trip would be short.

His analytical, scientific side told him the person’s name Isaac Newton had written in the notes was nothing more than a striking coincidence. But something pulling deep in his chest left him with an aftertaste of uncertainty. He had always been an ardent admirer of Newton’s genius. What if Newton had discovered something really big? Maybe it was something too great to have been revealed then or now. If so, what would it have been, and why would Newton have hidden it?

At this point in his life, the place called the Holy Land had no meaning. He wondered if it ever really did. His father had little use for organized religion as his only church experiences had come from Sunday morning prayer in the Salvation Army after a week of binge drinking. His mother had been the opposite. Quoting passages from the Bible that she used to justify her own prejudices. God became her security blanket and then a shield, holding up her defense of all things that she found fault with, all things that didn’t parallel her grasp of the world. Both parents had been killed in a house fire.

Did they find a better place after life?

Marcus tried not to dwell on an afterlife or the after death. The current life was complex enough. He reached Dulles International Airport at few minutes before seven a.m. His flight was in ninety minutes. He parked, cleared security and bought a cup of coffee, waiting to board. When his seating section of the plane was called, Marcus began to board. He glanced back over his shoulder before he entered the covered ramp leading to the plane. For a millisecond, Marcus thought a man dressed in a gray sports coat with dark blue pants was watching him. But the distance was too great. Maybe the man had been looking at the clock above the entranceway to the plane.

Maybe not.

About an hour and a half later, Marcus landed in New York. He, again, had an eerie feeling of being watched. Just before Marcus boarded his international flight, he turned and briefly connected eyes with a man in a plaid shirt and jeans. The man abruptly turned and walked toward the expanse of windows in the terminal where he watched a jet touch down, looked at the time display on his cell phone and punched in numbers.

“He’s leaving now. Flight’s for Tel Aviv.”

The voice on the phone said, “As anticipated.”

Within a few seconds, the jet carrying Paul Marcus thundered down the runway, gained altitude, circled to the east and became a black dot on the horizon.