Free First Daughter by Eric Van Lustbader Page B

what happened?"
    They had reached the high brick wall that surrounded the property. It was guarded on this side by a double hedge: low, sheared boxwood in front of tall privet. Jack was already behind the boxwood, had found the slight gap in the stately privet. Pushing aside the sturdy branches, he vanished into the thicket.
    When Nina tried to follow him, she found the privet was so thick, she was forced to leave her coat behind, press herself bodily into what she was sure had a moment before been a gap. Shouldering her way through, she found herself on the other side, almost flush up against the brick wall. Jack was on his haunches, hands pulling at the bricks. To Nina's astonishment, they came away easily until he had a pile of approximately twenty, which left a hole in thewall large enough for a human being of small to normal size to wriggle through.
    "I followed her through here."
    Crouching down, Nina saw a wedge of lawn, the bole of a tree, and beyond, a field at the end of which were stands of oaks, birches, and mountain laurels.
    "I saw her meet someone; I couldn't tell who, it was just a shadow standing beneath that tree," Jack said. "Either she heard a noise or some instinct caused her to look back. She saw me, she came after me, pushed me back to this side, snarling like an animal." Jack sat back on his haunches, his eyes far away. "We had a real knock-down, drag-out shouting match. She accused me of spying on her, which was, of course, the truth. I told her I wouldn't have had to spy on her if she wasn't sneaking around in the dead of night. That was a mistake. She blew up, said what she did was no business of mine, said she hated my guts, said some things I don't think she really meant, at least I hope not."
    Nina was kind enough not to look at him directly. "You never found out?"
    Jack dived through the hole in the wall.
    O N HANDS and knees they picked their way through. There was about the hole the stink of the grave, a sickly-sweet scent that reminded Jack of the time when he was a kid and the neighbor's black cat got stuck inside the wall of his room and died there, giving off the stench of slow decay. The neighbor, an old woman married to a male harem of feral cats, wanted the black one back, to bury it properly beneath her fig tree, but Jack's father refused. "It's good for the boy to smell death, to understand it, to know it's real," he explained to her papery face and sour breath. "He needs to know that his life isn't infinite, that death will come for him, like it does for everyone, one day."
    In starless night, he lay in rageful silence, listening to the soundof his own ragged heart as he breathed in the stench that penetrated to the pit of his stomach until, unable to keep to inaction, he ran across the hall, there to violently lose his supper in the low porcelain bowl. In the adjacent room, his parents made love aggressively, raucous as sailors on shore leave, with no thought that they were not alone.
    J ACK AND Nina stood close together on the other side. Jack wondered whether Nina was thinking the same thing he was:
Is this how Alli's abductors smuggled her out of the school?
Over Nina's right shoulder, the hills rolled on, leading eventually to the Georgetown Pike.
    Saigon Road, the site of Emma's crash, lay just five miles west down the Pike. He felt a stirring, as if a cold wind were blowing on the back of his neck. A prickling of his scalp. Was Emma here in some form or other? Was such a thing possible? In the course of his work, he'd come across a psychic who believed that spirits of the dead who had unfinished business couldn't cross over into the light or the dark until that business was finished. These thoughts sent his mind racing back to when Emma was alive.
    At Sharon's fierce insistence, Emma had applied to Langley Fields. Jack saw no need for his daughter to be sequestered in what seemed like a four-year straitjacket, but Sharon had prevailed. The education was exceptional, she argued,