Текст книги "The First Prophet"

Автор книги: Kay Hooper

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“She never wanted to be found, you know. That’s why you couldn’t.”

That was when he had started to believe in Sarah Gallagher.

He drew a breath and kept his own voice quiet. “Maybe that’s natural, Sarah. For you.”

“You mean for what I’ve become.”

“I mean for who you’ve become. Who you’re becoming. How could you not change after what’s happened to you?”

“Words,” she said softly. “Just words. They don’t mean a lot to me these days.”

“Then tell me what I can do to help you.”

“I told you the day we met. You can’t help me.”

“Sarah, I thought we had gotten past that.”

“Then you were wrong.” She turned her head once more to look at him, and something hard and bright glittered in her eyes. “You think we’re safe here? We’re not. They’re everywhere. All around us. All the time. We’re never going to be safe until it’s over. And it won’t be over until they get me. That’s one of the things I know now. One of the things I can’t explain knowing.”

“You were wrong about Margo,” he reminded her, still holding on to that evidence of fallibility.

“Strike one. Do I get three before I’m out?” Her voice was tight and brittle.

Tucker frowned suddenly as his own instincts and senses stirred and began talking to him. Flatly, he said, “I’m not going anywhere, Sarah.”

She sent him a quick glance, then returned her gaze to the lake. Her profile was immobile, unrevealing.

“I’m not going to run away from this,” he went on steadily. “From you. I don’t believe you’re some kind of freak. I’m not afraid of you, or of anything you might see.”

“You’re lying,” she whispered. “You are afraid of what I might see. If I look inside you.”

He had never really been faced with a genuine psychic before, not one like Sarah, so Tucker had not realized, in all the years of his search, that he would in fact be wary of one. But he was. And the only thing he knew for certain was that he couldn’t lie to her about it.

“This is new to me too,” he reminded her quietly. “Give me a little time to get used to it.”

“Time is something we don’t have a lot of.”

“Maybe. But you might at least stop trying to scare me off. I don’t scare so easily.”

Almost inaudibly, she said, “What I know would scare you. What I’ve seen.”

Tucker reached out and turned her to face him, keeping his hands on her shoulders. She felt very slight to him, and there was a tremor running through her tense body.

Is she strong enough to make it through this?

“Sarah, we’re going to survive this. Both of us.”

“Are we?” She refused to meet his eyes, keeping her gaze fixed on his chest. She sounded very tired all of a sudden, and there was something hollow in her tone that told him she was alone once more.

He wondered whether she had finished grieving for her David, the dead lover Margo had been so scornful of. Had she? Was he just a memory now, or would she torment herself for the rest of her life because she hadn’t been able to save him?

Are we both haunted by what we didn’t do?

That thought almost made him obey the urge to protect himself and pull away from her, but instead, giving in to some compulsion he didn’t question, he pulled her into his arms and held her.

Sarah was stiff for only a moment before she relaxed and leaned into him. Her head tucked perfectly into the curve of his neck, and her warm breath against his skin sparked a tiny flare of heat deep inside him. She felt good in his arms. Almost terrifyingly delicate, but very good.

Her arms slid inside the flannel shirt and around his waist, and he knew the moment when she touched the gun.

She didn’t react at all except to say, “You have a gun.”

Belatedly, he remembered she was an army brat; guns undoubtedly were familiar to her. “I thought it might come in handy,” he said.

“You’re probably right.”

One of his hands lifted to touch her hair, winding the silky strands around his fingers. “Can you handle guns?”

“Yes. But I never liked them much.”

“It’s just another precaution, Sarah.”

“I know.” She drew back just enough to look up at him.

He hadn’t intended this to go any further than comfort, but the next thing Tucker knew, her warm, soft lips were beneath his.

It was a careful, tentative kiss, without force and yet tense with a hunger he could feel growing stronger and stronger inside him. A hunger he felt in her as well. It was held rigidly under control in both of them, something he was very aware of, and that restraint made the kiss curiously more erotic.

He raised his head finally, reluctant but all too aware of both her vulnerability and a bad situation that was only going to get worse. “Sarah…”

She reached up and touched his mouth lightly, her fingers gently stopping whatever he would have said. “I don’t think either of us is going back to sleep. Why don’t I go get the coffee started?” Her voice was a little husky and nakedly defenseless.

After a moment, he nodded and let her go. He wanted to say something, to reassure now in a different way, but the words wouldn’t come.

Left alone on the deck, he stood for a few more minutes gazing out over the lake. It was quiet and calm and peaceful. He wished he could say the same about himself. Finally, he turned and went into the cabin, where Sarah had turned on the lights and was making coffee.

“You’re so cautious,” Cait said with a sigh.

“When you’ve been at this a little longer, you will be too,” Brodie told her as he peered through the infrared binoculars.

“You’re also made of iron,” she grumbled. “What, you only sleep on odd Thursdays? I’m beat.”

Brodie smiled slightly but kept the glasses trained on the small cabin on the other side of the lake.

She shifted, trying to find some comfortable position on a hard and chilly ground, and sighed. “Look, we’ve got to approach them sooner or later, or Gallagher’s going to slip right through our fingers again.”

“Not in the dark,” Brodie said flatly. “Never trust anybody who comes to you in the dark, Cait.”

She glanced at him curiously, but said only, “Lesson number one thousand and one?”

“If you like.” He met her gaze, his own a little impatient. “Dammit, I’m trying to keep you alive.”

“I realize that,” she said with some dignity. “Just stop treating me like a child.”

He looked at her a moment longer, then shook his head and returned his gaze to the cabin. “It’ll be light soon.”

“What’re we going to do about Mackenzie?”

Brodie’s mouth tightened. “Not much we can do.”

“He won’t let us get at her without a fight.”

“I know that.”

“So? If she’s made him part of the package—”

“Then he’s part of the package. I doubt the world would notice the disappearance of one writer more or less.”

Cait opened her mouth to respond, but before she could, Brodie spoke again. “Pack up.”

“Yes, sir,” she muttered with a small salute.

Brodie didn’t notice.

Tucker came into the great room after showering and shaving, feeling better physically but still more than a little rattled emotionally. He didn’t really know what to say to Sarah, except to follow her lead and just not mention those unsettling few minutes on the deck.

They had both retreated, quickly and cautiously, as if from the edge of a precipice.

She was frying bacon in the kitchen, and as he came to fix a cup of coffee, she said, “Tucker?”

“Hmm?”

“What we found on your computer last night…all those dead and missing people…Who could be doing it? I mean, the whole thing is so huge. Do you think…it might be the government?”

He understood her wary suggestion. “I know it’s a pet theory of the people who believe there’s a conspiracy under every bush.”

“I know. But…”

Tucker nodded. “Yeah. But. It’s hard not to wonder. The kind of manpower this has to involve, the cost, the sheer scope of the thing—how many organizations could handle it? Not many, I’d guess.”

“But the government could.”

He smiled faintly as she turned her head to look at him. “I’m one of those people who believe our beloved government couldn’t keep a secret for more than ten minutes no matter what it involved. However…I also believe that’s the Our Government entity—the entire unwieldy mass of bureaucrats stabbing each other in the back while they try to run the country. Or not, as the case may be. Within that mess, there could well be considerably smaller groups a bit better organized and a lot better at keeping secrets. The CIA’s supposed to be dandy, and the FBI not half bad. And we can’t discount the various branches of the military.”

“But why would they?”

“That’s the question we need to answer. Somehow I doubt we’ll be able to figure out who’s doing this until we understand why it’s being done.”

She was silent for a moment or two, then said absently, “Your computer beeped a little while ago.”

“Um. Must be finished with the search.” Before they had gone to bed, he had set up his laptop to search a number of data banks for some of the information they sought, and then had simply closed the lid and allowed the machine to work, hoping the satellite wouldn’t cut the search short; reception up here tended to be spotty at times.

Now, he carried his coffee with him to the couch and sat down to open the laptop. What he saw surprised him.

“E-mail? What the hell…”

Sarah turned off the stove and came to look over his shoulder at the computer. “Is something wrong? You have an e-mail address, don’t you? Everybody seems to, these days.”

“Yeah.”

“Then it’s probably one of your friends.”

Tucker shook his head. “Sarah, this message isn’t coming through a server into an e-mail account. It’s being sent directly into my system via the satellite dish and my wireless connection, even though I set the program to disconnect from the Internet as soon as it had completed its task. A message being sent straight into the laptop’s operating system…that is not supposed to be possible. Not only does it mean my firewall has been breached, it also means whoever did it knows where I am.”

After a moment, she said steadily, “Then maybe we’d better see what the note says.”

Tucker opened the note. And it was brief.

Leave the cabin now.

They’re coming.

“It could be a trick,” Sarah whispered.

“To drive us into a trap?” Tucker knew his voice was grim. “We’re trapped now, with our backs against the lake. God, how stupid can I be? Grab your bag, Sarah.” He was typing rapidly.

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to find out where the note came from. Grab your bag, we’re leaving.”

She obeyed, returning to the great room only a couple of minutes later. “I’m ready. I have your bag too.”

“Thanks. Dammit, they’ve routed the call through so many proxy servers, it’d take me a week to trace it.”

“We don’t have a week.”

He hesitated only an instant, then swore and quickly closed his computer, flipped it over, and removed the battery, severing whatever connection there was between his laptop and whoever had contacted it. Sarah was right; they were out of time. It took only a minute more to pack up the computer in its case, grab it and his other bag, and kill the lights.

They slipped from the darkened cabin as quietly as possible. The car was parked nearby, and it took only seconds to stow the luggage and get moving. Tucker didn’t turn on the car’s lights.

“I know these roads,” he told Sarah as she sat tensely beside him. “They’re like rabbit trails around here. If I can get far enough back into the woods, we may be able to slip past them.” He was assuming that, as at the apartment, the enemy would come in force, possibly from several different directions at once. He thought it was poor strategy to make any kind of assumption, but knew it would be far safer to overestimate the enemy rather than underestimate them.

The Mercedes purred quietly through the woods, shocks efficiently absorbing most of the bumps from a narrow and badly rutted road. But they were forced to go slowly without headlights as Tucker picked his way cautiously around curves and between looming trees.

And they were no more than half a mile from the cabin when suddenly, ahead of them, lights stabbed blindingly through the darkness.

Tucker didn’t hesitate. He hit his own lights and turned the wheel hard to the right in almost the same movement. “Hang on,” he told Sarah.

It was in all reality hardly more than a rabbit trail, an old road so narrow that brush scraped along the sides of the Mercedes, and so uneven that the shocks didn’t have a chance—especially since Tucker was driving at a reckless speed. But, somehow, he was able to keep the heavy car on the road around one hairpin curve after another, even at this speed and with the roar of a pursuing car behind them.

Unlike all the car chases in television and the movies, no shots came from the car behind them. Hardly any sound at all, in fact. There was just that grim, steady pursuit, unceasing and unrelenting. But there was only one car behind them—as far as they could tell.

“There have to be more,” Sarah said.

“Bet on it. If I were them, I’d take one or two more cars and circle around, try to get ahead of us. They have to figure these roads all lead to the main one, where we have to end up eventually.”

“Are they right?” she asked, hanging on for dear life to keep from being tossed around inside the hurtling car.

“No. This road goes on for miles, all the way to the highway—and it doesn’t cross another road along the way.”

Sarah looked back over her shoulder. “I think they’re gaining on us.” Her voice was remarkably calm, especially considering that she could hardly breathe for the fear clogging her throat.

“In just a minute,” Tucker said tensely, “I’ll see what I can do about that. If memory serves—and I hope to God it does—our friends back there are about to get a little surprise.”

Memory served. It was a very easy turn to miss, because it was sharp and totally unexpected; a deceptively gentle rise kept even a wary driver from realizing that there were only two choices once you reached the top—take a punishingly sharp turn to the right, or do a swan dive into a small pond.

Tucker made the turn.

The car behind them didn’t.

Duran stood behind the cabin looking out over the lake. With the sun up now, it sparkled invitingly. He thought briefly of swimming or fishing or just drifting on a boat, but the thoughts didn’t last. They never did.

“Report,” he said as almost silent footsteps approached behind him.

“They didn’t leave anything behind but a half-cooked breakfast. No sign of where they’re headed next. No sign of their ultimate goal.”

Duran glanced over his shoulder briefly. “I imagine the ultimate goal is to escape.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell the others it’s time we were going.”

“Yes, sir.”

Footsteps retreated.

Duran returned his attention to the lake, but this time his gaze scanned beyond it. Eventually, he focused on a spot directly across from the cabin. Misty in the early morning. A couple of fallen trees, thick shrubs. A very peaceful scene. A perfect place from which to…observe.

He smiled slightly as he studied that perfect place. Then, still smiling, he turned and went unhurriedly toward the cabin.

“Tell me that bastard didn’t know we were here,” Cait pleaded.

Watching several dark cars leaving the cabin across the lake, Brodie laughed shortly. “He knew.”

Cait was still visibly upset. “What’s he doing here? Why is he leading the hunt for Sarah Gallagher?”

“She must have more potential than we realized.”

“But they tried to kill her.”

Brodie sat back and began stowing the binoculars, frowning. “Maybe not. That fire could have been an attempt to get her rather than kill her. A house burns down, a female body is conveniently found inside burned beyond recognition—who’s to say it isn’t Gallagher?”

Cait looked a little sick. “Kill some poor woman just to provide a body for something like that?”

“It’s been done before,” Brodie replied without emotion.

After a moment, Cait drew a deep breath. “So you think Duran wants her?”

“I think he wouldn’t be here on the front lines unless he had something more in mind than Gallagher’s death.”

Cait nodded slowly. “What now?”

“Now,” Brodie said grimly, “we find some way of getting our car out of that fucking pond.”

EIGHT

“I am guilty of criminal stupidity.”

Sarah turned her head quickly to look at Tucker, startled by the grim anger in his voice. “Why? You couldn’t know they’d find us back there so quickly—”

“That’s just it. I should have known. I should have realized.”

“Realized what?”

“How they could find us. Wasn’t there a sign back there for a rest stop coming up?”

“I think so. But—”

Tucker shook his head. “Let’s see if I’m right about this. Ah…” He took the exit for the rest stop, and minutes later he was pulling into a parking space slightly apart from several other cars. “There should be a flashlight in the glove compartment; could you get it for me, please?”

She did, and handed it across. “Tucker—”

“It’ll just take me a minute to check something. Stay here, Sarah.”

He left the car running, and she watched in puzzlement as he got out and promptly dropped to the pavement to check underneath the car. He hadn’t been there more than a couple of minutes when another motorist paused on his way past and called sympathetically, “Hit something?”

Tucker’s response was cheerful, “Yeah, a hell of a pothole back there. No damage, though.” He climbed to his feet and brushed at his jeans.

“Your lucky day,” the man responded, and continued on his way.

Tucker slid into the car and closed the door. “No damage at all,” he muttered, his face grim once more as he reached across Sarah to return the flashlight to the glove compartment.

“What is it?”

“A bug,” he said bitterly. “A damned electronic device used to track things. In this case—us. They didn’t have any trouble finding us because they knew exactly where we were.”

It shouldn’t have surprised Sarah since they had already agreed that their enemy had to be both smart and organized. But it did surprise her. And it gave her a creepy feeling, even worse than being watched. Someone knew every place they had been, every stop they had made. It was as if a ghostly companion had come along in the backseat, smiling derisively because they’d thought they were alone.

“Did you remove it?” she asked him, trying to keep her voice steady.

“No.” He looked at her intently. “Let’s make it work for us.”

“How?”

“By leading them on a wild-goose chase while we head in another direction. How do you feel about a quick but roundabout trip to Chicago?”

Her first impulse was to say that was the wrong direction, but she thought she had some idea of what he had in mind. “Then we’d double back?”

“Later. After we get rid of this car.”

Sarah thought about that, then said, “Wouldn’t it be easier to just put the bug somewhere else—maybe on a bus or something? You shouldn’t have to lose your car because of this.”

He shook his head. “This bug has a magnetic seal, and I’m betting they’d know it if we tried to switch it to another vehicle. But if we switch vehicles, they won’t know. And by the time they find out, we should be well on our way back…to wherever it is we’re going. And I was about ready to trade this car in anyway. We need something more rugged, maybe a Jeep or some other four-wheel-drive utility. Our romp through the woods proved that.”

“We couldn’t just switch vehicles here?”

“We could. But if we want to throw them off the track for any time at all, we should head in a direction other than north for a while. Besides, I have a friend in Chicago in the car business who’ll let me trade this car and conveniently lose the paperwork for at least a few days, which might give us a little more time.”

Paperwork could be traced, Sarah knew. And the DMV could almost certainly be accessed with a computer and the right codes, so they had to assume the enemy could do just that. At least that. But she still felt profoundly uneasy. So much time and distance would be lost. “If you have to wait until Monday to trade the car…”

Tucker started to reach for her hand but stopped himself before he touched her—and both of them were aware of that reluctance. “Chicago’s only ten or twelve hours from here, Sarah. We won’t lose much time. We can take a more direct route east as soon as the trade’s made, and be heading north again by Monday night.”

“With only a few days of September left.”

“It’s a risk, I know. We could just tear the bug off and leave it in the trash can out there. But if we do that, there’s a good chance they’d still be able to find us. This car is fairly visible, and they know we’re driving it. They could guess we’d still be heading north. If they have the right connections in law enforcement or just the right equipment, they could track this car’s GPS. Or they could even have all the major highways covered somehow, have people on the lookout for us. But even more, we can’t be sure they didn’t plant something else in this car. Something I wouldn’t recognize as dangerous to us. And that’s a chance we can’t take.”

Slowly, Sarah nodded. But in her mind was the panicked awareness of delay and time lost.

It was almost October.

Murphy’s third burner cell phone of the week rang, and she answered it with a frown. “Yeah?”

“What the hell happened?”

She didn’t allow his anger to spark her own. “I was doing my job. Did you enjoy your swim?”

“Goddammit, Murphy. Did you put them on alert?”

“Duran was coming.”

“Why the hell didn’t you warn me? Five minutes earlier and I wouldn’t have ended up looking like a jackass.”

“You’ll have to forgive me. I was more concerned with them than you.”

He drew a breath and let it out slowly. But the words were still snapped out when he said, “This is what happens when the right hand doesn’t know what the left one is doing. I’ve warned you, Murphy.”

“I work alone.”

“And I have no problem with that. But when I’m working the other side of the street, I expect you to alert me before you act.”

“Noted.” Her voice was level.

“Are you on them now?” He had the wisdom not to sound triumphant.

“Not exactly.”

“Murphy—”

“You worry too much, Brodie.”

“Do you understand how much time we have left?” His voice was tight. “Are you aware that it’s probably just a matter of days now?”

“I am aware of that, yes.” It was her turn to draw a breath in an attempt to hold on to patience.

“Then do your job.”

He hung up on her.

Murphy closed the burner phone and removed the battery for good measure, tossing it into a trash can as she passed while the phone itself was drop-kicked into the gutter. “But that’s what I’m doing, Brodie,” she murmured to herself. “My job.”

She pulled yet another disposable phone from the leather pouch hanging against her hip, turned it on, and punched in a familiar number. As soon as the call was answered, she spoke briskly.

“I kept him from making contact. And he’s pissed.”

“Never mind him. He’ll get over it.”

“Easy for you to say,” Murphy muttered. “He has a mean right hook. I’ve seen him use it. I’d rather not be on the receiving end, thanks all the same.”

“With a little luck, you won’t be anywhere near Brodie for a while, so relax.”

“Yeah, right. And in the meantime?”

“Chicago.”

Sarah didn’t say much after they turned back onto the highway, grappling with the growing certainty of just how far-reaching and complex this situation obviously was. And how terrifying.

The lake had seemed like a safe place, a place where they could rest and regroup, make plans. Then that warning had come, presumably from a friend or ally and, again in the middle of the night, they had run for their lives.

Where had the warning come from? A friend? Another psychic? How had it been sent to Tucker’s computer when he, a computer expert, insisted that was next to impossible?

Their car bugged, their every action apparently monitored by the enemy, and now it was beginning to look like there was someone else out there watching them, someone who might be on their side…

And Sarah had no idea who they could trust.

She wasn’t able to brood about it for too long, because Tucker turned the car toward the west about fifteen minutes later. And it required all her self-control to keep from reaching over and jerking the wheel to turn them north once more.

It was an actual physical sensation, a tugging deep inside her that almost hurt. This was the wrong way. The wrong way! She had to close her eyes and consciously argue with whatever was tugging at her. We’ll go the right way. We will. In a day or two, we will.

It has to be north.

I know.

The answer is north.

What answer is that?

North.

Right. We’ll go north. Soon.

After a few minutes of the continued silence between her and Tucker, she reached and turned on the radio, needing to listen to something besides the faint, anxious echo in her head.

“So she’s just a friend, huh?” Keith Hayden grinned at Tucker as they sat in his office at the car lot. “How come all your friends look like her and all my friends look like you?”

“Because there is a God.” Tucker was signing his name on a multitude of papers and didn’t look up.

Keith snorted. “Listen, Tuck—”

“Please don’t call me that,” Tucker interrupted. “It doesn’t sound any better now than it did in college. And it especially sounds bad when I’ve just let you rob me blind.”

“Who, me?” Keith was deeply injured. “Can I help it if you’re in too big a hurry to insist on a better price for that tank of yours? By the way, you didn’t tell me why you were in such a hurry.”

“Because we have places to go and people to see.” Tucker hesitated and looked at his old friend. “You won’t get into any trouble misfiling the papers on the Jeep for a few days, right?”

Keith shrugged. “It’s my business, I can do what I like. And I’m lousy at filing things promptly. Just remember, you’re still using your own tag, and it’ll be listed in the DMV as belonging on a Mercedes. If you get stopped or pulled over, they might ask questions. But you’ll have your copies of the papers, so it should be all right, at least for a few days. I still say you ought to switch the insurance, though.”

“I have a special policy that covers me no matter what I’m driving. It’ll have to do.” Changing his insurance would reveal the make and model of the Jeep in all the necessary records, and Tucker wasn’t prepared to risk that.

“Then for God’s sake, drive carefully.”

“I intend to.” Tucker nodded. “So we’ve taken care of my end. But on your end…Keith, if anybody shows up asking questions about Sarah and me, tell them you sold me a Corvette or something and don’t have a clue where we’re headed.”

“Is somebody likely to show up?”

Shrugging, Tucker finished signing and pushed the papers back across Keith’s desk.

“In trouble, old buddy?”

“Sarah’s ex isn’t too happy about us,” Tucker said lightly, ever inventive. “Let’s just say he knows some pretty ugly customers and we’ll both be better off if the trail ends here.”

“No problem.” Keith looked through the glass half wall of his office where he could see Sarah standing outside in the showroom apparently watching traffic pass the car lot. “I thought she looked a little ragged. You too, buddy. And now coming all the way to Chicago to trade your car in is starting to make a little more sense.”

“I want Sarah to have some peace finally, that’s all,” Tucker said in one of the few utterly truthful statements he’d made today.

“Yeah, I imagine you’d do most anything for a pretty lady like her.” Keith grinned, then added, “My guys are switching your stuff from the Mercedes to the Jeep, including the tag. While they’re doing that, I’ll have our bank transfer the balance I owe you to a branch of your bank here in Chicago.”

“Tell them I’ll be by for the cash within an hour,” Tucker said.

Keith raised his brows. “Is the ex that close? I was hoping I could buy you two lunch.”

“We need to be on our way, Keith, but thanks.” Tucker glanced back over his shoulder, and added, “I’ll wait with Sarah while you finish up in here, okay?”

“Okay.”

Tucker came up behind Sarah as she stood looking out at traffic, approaching her warily. He couldn’t help wondering how on earth Keith had mistaken them for lovers; two more guarded and isolated people would be hard to imagine.

She had withdrawn from him almost completely during the journey to Chicago. They had gotten motel rooms both Saturday night and last night but had spent less than six hours in them each night. Tucker, for one, had barely closed his eyes since they had left the cabin on the lake, and on Sunday morning Sarah had come to breakfast hollow-eyed and strained, saying in answer to his insistent questions that she’d had another vision. The yawning grave again, and the whisper of voice she couldn’t quite understand, but this time accompanied by the sounds of bells—“like church bells”—and the sight of a Celtic cross.

Neither of them had said much after that.

“Sarah?”

She looked at him, unsurprised by his approach but with distant eyes, as if she returned from someplace else.

“Keith’s taking care of the final details, so we’ll be out of here in just a few minutes.”

She nodded, but said only, “Did you notice it?”

“Notice what?”

“That.” She pointed toward the passing traffic.

He looked in the direction she indicated, but it took him several moments to realize what she meant. Across the street, at a slight angle to the car lot where they stood, was one of those places that sold stonework. There were all kinds of things outside the building advertising the business: birdbaths, statuary, columns, benches and tables—even tombstones. Off to one side, curiously isolated and leaning a bit, was a Celtic cross. A big one.

“I saw a Celtic cross, canted to one side.”

“Is that—?”

“It’s the one I saw in the vision.” She turned her head to look up at him again, her expression still. “A part of the journey. We were meant to come here all along. Do you still believe it was all your idea?”

“Sarah, there must be other crosses like that one, especially in the northeast where so many Irish settled. We’ll probably see dozens of them once we head north again.” He questioned her certainty not because he doubted her, but because he didn’t like to think that his decision to come here had been less his own idea than the dictate of fate.

“There may be thousands of crosses for all I know. But that one is the one I saw.”