David Baldacci Read online

  “What’s it like to be dead, Lou?” Oz stared out into the night as he asked this.

  After a few moments she said, “Well, I guess part of being dead is not feeling anything. But in another way you feel everything. All good. If you’ve led a decent life. If not, well, you know.”

  “The Devil?” Oz asked, the fear visible in his features even as he said the terrible word.

  “You don’t have to worry about that. Or Dad either.”

  Oz’s gaze made its way, by steady measures, to Amanda. “Is Mom going to die?”

  “We’re all going to die one day.” Lou would not sugarcoat that one, not even for Oz, but she did squeeze him tightly. “Let’s just take it one step at a time. We’ve got a lot going on.”

  Lou stared out the window as she held tightly to her brother. Nothing was forever, and didn’t she know that.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT WAS VERY EARLY MORNING, WHEN THE BIRDS had barely awoken and thumped their wings to life, and cold mists were rising from the warm ground, and the sun was only a seam of fire in the eastern sky. They had made one stop in Richmond, where the locomotive had been changed, then the train had cleared the Shenandoah Valley, the most splendidly fertile soil and temperate climate for growing virtually anything. Now the angle of land was far steeper.

  Lou had slept little because she had shared the top bunk with Oz, who was restless at night under the best circumstances. On a swaying train heading to a new, terrifying world, her little brother had been a wildcat in his sleep. Her limbs had been bruised from his unconscious flailing, despite her holding him tight; her ears were hurting from his tragic screams, in spite of her whispered words of comfort. Lou had finally climbed down, touched the cold floor with bare feet, stumbled to the window in the darkness, pulled back the curtains, and been rewarded by seeing her first Virginia mountain face-to-face.

  Jack Cardinal had once told his daughter that it was believed that there were actually two sets of Appalachian mountains. The first had been formed by receding seas and the shrinkage of the earth millions of years before, and had risen to a great height that rivaled the present Rockies. Later these ridges had been eroded away to peneplain by the pounding of unsettled water. Then the world had shaken itself again, Lou’s father had explained to her, and the rock had risen high once more, though not nearly so high as before, and formed the current Appalachians, which stood like menacing hands between parts of Virginia and West Virginia, and extended from Canada all the way down to Alabama.

  The Appalachians had prevented early expansion westward, Jack had taught his ever-curious Lou, and kept the American colonies unified long enough to win their independence from an English monarch. Later, the mountain range’s natural resources had fueled one of the greatest manufacturing eras the world had ever seen. Despite all that, her father had added with a resigned smile, man never gave the mountains much credit in shaping his affairs.

  Lou knew that Jack Cardinal had loved the Virginia mountains, and had held high-angled rock in the deepest awe. He had often told her that there was something magical about this stretch of lofty earth, because he believed it held powers that could not be logically explained. She had often wondered how a mixture of dirt and stone, despite its elevation, could impress her father so. Now, for the first time, she had a sense of how it could, for Lou had never experienced anything quite like it. The bumps of tree-shrouded dirt and slate piles Lou had initially seen really qualified only as small offspring; behind these “children” she could see the outlines of the tall parents, the mountains. They seemed unlimited by sky or earth. So large and broad were they that the mountains seemed unnatural, though they had been born directly from the planet’s crust. And out there was a woman Lou had been named for but had never met. There was both comfort and alarm in that thought. For one panicked moment, Lou felt as though they had passed right into another solar system on this clickety-clack train. Then Oz was beside her, and though he was not one to inspire confidence in others, Lou did feel reassurance in his small presence.

  “I think we’re getting close,” she said, rubbing his small shoulders, working out the tension of another round of nightmares. She and her mother had become experts in this. Oz, Amanda had told her, had the worst case of night terrors she had ever seen. But it was something neither to pity, nor to make light of, she had taught her daughter. All one could do was be there for the little boy and work out the mental and physical snarls as best one could.

  That could have been Lou’s own personal scripture: Thou shalt have no greater duty than taking care of Thy brother Oz. She meant to honor that commandment above all else.

  The little boy focused on the landscape. “Where is it? Where we’re going to be?”

  She pointed out the window. “Somewhere out there.”

  “Will the train drive right up to the house?”

  Lou smiled at his remark. “No. Someone will be waiting for us at the station.”

  The train passed into a tunnel slashed through the side of one of the hills, throwing them into even greater darkness. Moments later they shot clear of the tunnel and then how they climbed! Their degree of ascent made Lou and Oz peer out anxiously. Up ahead was a trestle. The train slowed and then eased carefully onto the bridge, like a foot at cold water’s edge. Lou and Oz looked down, but could not see the ground below in the poor light. It was as though they were suspended in the sky, somehow carried aloft by an iron bird weighing many tons. Then suddenly the train was back on firm ground, and the climb was on again. As the train picked up speed, Oz took a deep breath interrupted by a yawn—perhaps, Lou thought, to stifle his anxiety.

  “I’m going to like it here,” Oz suddenly proclaimed as he balanced his bear against the window. “Look out there,” he said to his stuffed animal, which had never had a name that Lou knew of. Then Oz’s thumb nervously probed the insides of his mouth. He’d been diligently trying to stop sucking his thumb, yet with all that was happening he was finding it tough going.

  “It’ll be okay, right, Lou?” he mumbled.

  She perched her little brother on her lap, tickling the back of his neck with her chin until Oz squirmed.

  “We’re going to be just fine.” And Lou somehow forced herself to believe that it would be so.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE TRAIN STATION AT RAINWATER RIDGE was no more than a glorified pine-studded lean-to, with a single cracked and spider-webbed window and an opening for a door but no door to fill the space. A narrow jump separated this wreck of nail and board from the railroad track. The channeled wind was fierce as it fought its way through the gaps in rock and tree, and the faces of the few folk hanging about, along with the runted trees, evidenced the blunt force of its chisel.

  Lou and Oz watched as their mother was loaded into an ancient ambulance. As the nurse climbed into the vehicle, she scowled back at her charges, the confrontation of the day before obviously still rankling her.

  When the doors of the vehicle closed, Lou pulled the quartz necklace from her coat pocket and handed it to Oz.

  “I slipped into her room before she got up. It was still in her pocket.”

  Oz smiled, pocketed the precious item, and then reached on tiptoe to give his sister a kiss on the cheek. The two stood next to their luggage, patiently awaiting Louisa Mae Cardinal.

  Their skin was scrubbed raw, each hair on their heads assiduously brushed—Lou had taken extra time with Oz. They were dressed in their very best clothes, which managed barely to conceal their pounding hearts. They had been there for a minute when they sensed someone behind them.

  The Negro man was young and, in keeping with the geography, ruggedly built. He was tall and wide of shoulder, deep-chested, with arms like slabs of ham, a waist not small but not soft either, and legs long but one oddly pushed out where calf met knee. His skin was the color of deep rust and pleasing to the eye. He was looking down at his feet, which necessarily drew Lou’s gaze to them. His old work boots were so big a newborn could have slept in them w
ith some room to spare, the girl observed. His overalls were as worn as the shoes, but they were clean, or as clean as the dirt and wind would allow anything to be up here. Lou held out her hand, but he did not take it.

  Instead, with one impressive move, he picked up all their bags, then flicked his head toward the road. Lou interpreted this as “hello,” “come on,” and “I’ll tell you my name maybe later,” all wrapped into one efficient motion. He limped off, the bulging leg now revealed to be a bum one. Lou and Oz looked at each other and then trudged after him. Oz clutched his bear and Lou’s hand. No doubt the boy would have tugged the train after them if he could have somehow managed it, so as to effect a quick escape if needed.

  The long-bodied Hudson four-door sedan was the color of a sweet pickle. The car was old but clean inside. Its tall, exposed radiator looked like a tombstone, and its two front fenders were missing, as was the rear window glass. Lou and Oz sat in the backseat while the man drove. He worked the long stick shift with an easy skill, nary a gear ever left grinding.

  After the woeful state of the train station, Lou had not expected much in the way of civilization up here. However, after only twenty minutes on the road they entered a town of fair size, though in New York City such a meager collection of structures would hardly have filled one sorry block.

  A sign announced that they were entering the township of Dickens, Virginia. The main street was two-laned and paved with asphalt. Well-kept structures of wood and brick lined both sides of it. One such building rose five stories, its vacancy sign proclaiming it to be a hotel at fair rates. Automobiles were plentiful here, mostly bulky Ford and Chrysler sedans, and hefty trucks of various makes adorned with mud. All were parked slantwise in front of the buildings.

  There were general stores, restaurants, and an open-door warehouse with box towers of Domino sugar and Quick napkins, Post Toasties and Quaker Oats visible inside. There was an automobile dealership with shiny cars in the window, and next to that an Esso gas station sporting twin pumps with bubble tops and a uniformed man with a big smile filling up the tank of a dented La Salle sedan, with a dusty Nash two-door waiting behind it. A big Coca-Cola soda cap was hanging in front of one café, and an Eveready Battery sign was bolted to the wall of a hardware shop. Telephone and electrical poles of poplar ran down one side of the street, black cables snaking out from them to each of the structures. Another shop announced the sale of pianos and organs for cash at good prices. A movie theater was on one corner, a laundry on another. Gas street lamps ran down both sides of the road, like big, lit matchsticks.

  The sidewalks were crowded with folks. They ranged from well-dressed women with stylish hairdos topped by modest hats, to bent, grimy men who, Lou thought, probably toiled here in the coal mines she had read about.

  As they passed through, the last building of significance was also the grandest. It was red brick with an elegant two-story pediment portico, supported by paired Greek Ionic columns, and had a steeply pitched, hammered tin roof painted black, with a brick clock tower top-hatting it. The Virginia and American flags snapped out front in the fine breeze. The elegant red brick, however, sat on a foundation of ugly, scored concrete. This curious pairing struck Lou as akin to fine pants over filthy boots. The carved words above the columns simply read: “Court House.” And then they left the finite sprawl of Dickens behind.

  Lou sat back puzzled. Her father’s stories had been filled with tales of the brutish mountains, and the primitive life there, where hunters squatted near campfires of hickory sticks and cooked their kill and drank their bitter coffee; where farmers rose before the sun and worked the land till they collapsed; where miners dug into the earth, filling their lungs with black that would eventually kill them; and where lumberjacks swept virgin forests clean with the measured strokes of ax and saw. Quick wits, a sound knowledge of the land, and a strong back were essential up here. Danger roamed the steep slopes and loamy valleys, and the magisterial high rock presided over both men and beasts, sharply defining the limits of their ambition, of their lives. A place like Dickens, with its paved roads, hotel, Coca-Cola signs, and pianos for cash at good prices, had no right to be here. Yet Lou suddenly realized that the time period her father had written about had been well over twenty years ago.

  She sighed. Everything, even the mountains and its people, apparently, changed. Now Lou assumed her great-grandmother probably lived in a quite ordinary neighborhood with quite ordinary neighbors. Perhaps she had a cat and went to have her hair done every Saturday at a shop that smelled of chemicals and cigarette smoke. Lou and Oz would drink orange soda pop on the front porch and go to church on Sunday and wave to people as they passed in their cars, and life would not be all that much different than it had been in New York. And while there was absolutely nothing wrong with that, it was not the dense, breathtaking wilderness Lou had been expecting. It was not the life her father had experienced and then written about, and Lou was clearly disappointed.

  The car passed through more miles of trees, soaring rock and dipping valleys, and then Lou saw another sign. This town was named Tremont. This was probably it, she thought. Tremont appeared roughly one-third the size of Dickens. About fifteen cars were slant-parked in front of shops similar to those in the larger town, only there was no high-rise building, no courthouse, and the asphalt road had given way to macadam and gravel. Lou also spotted the occasional horse rider, and then Tremont was behind them, and the ground moved higher still. Her great-grandmother, Lou surmised, must live on the outskirts of Tremont.

  The next place they passed had no sign naming its location, and the scant number of buildings and few people they saw didn’t seem enough to justify a name. The road was now dirt, and the Hudson swayed from side to side over this humble pack of shifting earth. Lou saw a shallow post office building, and next to that was a leaning pile of boards with no sign out front, and steps that had the rot. And finally there was a good-sized general store with the name “McKenzie’s” on the wall; crates of sugar, flour, salt, and pepper were piled high outside. In one window of McKenzie’s hung a pair of blue overalls, harnesses, and a kerosene lamp. And that was about all there was of the nameless stop along the poor road.

  As they drifted over the soft dirt, they passed silent, sunken-eyed men, faces partially covered by wispy beards; they wore dirty one-piece overalls, slouch hats, and lumpy brogans, and traveled on foot, mule, or horse. A woman with vacant eyes, a droopy face, and bony limbs, clothed in a gingham blouse and a homespun woolen skirt bunched at the waist with pins, rocked along in a small schooner wagon pulled by a pair of mules. In the back of the wagon was a pile of children riding burlap seed bags bigger than they were. Running parallel to the road here a long coal train was stopped under a water tower and taking in big gulps, steam belching out from its throat with each greedy swallow. On another mountain in the distance Lou could see a coal tipple on wooden stilts, and another line of coal cars passing underneath this structure, like a column of obedient ants.

  They passed over a large bridge. A tin sign said this was the McCloud River flowing thirty feet underneath them. In the reflection of the rising sun the water looked pink, like a miles-long curvy tongue. The mountain peaks were smoke-blue, the mists of fog right below them forming a gauzy kerchief.

  With no more towns apparent, Lou figured it was time to get acquainted with the gentleman up front.

  “What’s your name?” she asked. She had known many Negroes, mostly writers, poets, musicians, and those who acted on the stage, all her parents’ friends. But there had been others too. During her excursions through the city with her mother, Lou had met colored people who loaded the trash, flagged down the cabs, heaved the bags, scooted after others’ children, cleaned the streets, washed the windows, shined the shoes, cooked the food, and did the laundry, and took, in amicable measures, the insults and tips of their white clientele.

  This fellow driving, he was different, because he apparently didn’t like to talk. Back in New York Lou had befriended
one kindly old gentleman who worked a lowly job at Yankee Stadium, where she and her father would sometimes steal away to games. This old man, only a shade darker than the peanuts he sold, had told her that a colored man would talk your ear off every day of the week except the Sabbath, when he’d let God and the women have their shot.

  The big fellow just continued to drive; his gaze didn’t even creep to the rearview mirror when Lou spoke. A lack of curiosity was something Lou could not tolerate in her fellow man.

  “My parents named me Louisa Mae Cardinal, after my great-grandmother. I go by Lou, though, just Lou. My dad is John Jacob Cardinal. He’s a very famous writer. You’ve probably heard of him.”