Jane tried to remain stone-faced even though the question sounded psychotic. “I don’t think so,” she replied in the kindest way possible.
He moved closer to her, his boots crushing the broken glass from the shattered bowl. “
Are you certain
?”
“Yes. I’m certain.”
His hand still shook with an anxious tremor. “This
means
something,” he said, regarding his shaking hand. “This
always
means something!” He grabbed Jane’s shoulders. “We’re connected, don’t you see?” His eyes were wild and remote.
Jane wondered how quickly she could get to her Glock. The only way out of this was to change the subject, but she was coming up short on options. She blurted the first thing she could think of. “You mention dreams…what about that other dream you told me about? Remember? The one about the little kid you call
Red
? You know, the one you said came to the back gate of your property in Short Hills and talked to you with his mind? You still dreaming of him?”
Jordan’s eyes washed with sadness. She could see that he wanted to pursue the obsessive connection he had regarding the dream of his mother and how it could be tied to Jane. The fact that Jane disarmed him by altering the subject didn’t seem to set well with the man. Almost instantly, his hand stopped shaking. He let out a long breath of air. “
Red
…Yeah… Every fucking night he comes to me. Why? Is he coming to you?”
Jane remained stoic under a ball of nerves. “No, Jordan. Why would I dream of
Red
? That’s your dream.”
He thought about it. “Who said it’s a dream?”
Jane felt trapped. In her opinion, the conversation had taken a seriously dark turn. Whoever this
Red
kid was, whether he was real, made up, a projection of Jordan as a troubled child or a twisted version of Jake Van Gorden, she didn’t know. But she craved more physical distance from Jordan. Jane stretched, allowing a few more inches of freedom from his glare. “You told me it was a dream.” She slowly got up, making sure that her movement was calculated and smooth.
Jordan stood up, engaged by the new shift in conversation. “I know. I know. But what if…what if he’s coming to me and trying to tell me something? What if he’s trying to send me a message?”
Jane needed to end this fast and get out of his cabin. “Okay, look, you told me that you just started dreaming about this
Red
kid recently…”
“Right!”
“And you don’t know his name, and the last contact you
had with him in the real world was a few months before you killed Daniel Marshall…”
“
Six months
!” Jordan corrected. “It was six months. He stopped coming to the gate. But I never knew why!”
“Right. Exactly…” Jane maneuvered her way around the kitchen table.
“So, why am I suddenly dreaming about him now, Jane?” Jordan’s voice was becoming distressed.
“It’s okay, Jordan. You need to calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down! I can’t stand it when people tell me to calm down!”
“Fine. Stay up all night and obsess on
Red
.”
“I might just do that…” Jordan turned away, buried in his private thoughts.
“I’m going to go now.”
“Yes. Right,” Jordan’s mind was occupied elsewhere. “Goodnight.”
Jane observed him. Suddenly all the fear she felt just minutes before dissolved. She walked to the door, crunching the broken glass bowl under her cowboy boots. For whatever reason, she felt a need to reach out to him verbally. “Thank you for helping me tonight,” she stammered.
“Yeah… sure…” He was still locked in his thoughts.
They didn’t call the guy anti-social for nothing. “Okay,” she touched the door handle and he suddenly turned to her.
“Hey, Jane?” She turned to him. He’d quickly lifted out of his quandary and was focused on her with renewed interest.
“Yeah?”
“I got another riddle for you. The strange man who lives in the log cabin promised the detective today that he will tell her a
big
secret on the day before two days from the day after tomorrow. Since today is Saturday, on what day will the strange man who lives in the cabin tell the detective the big secret?”
Jane’s mind worked out the numbers in her head. “Monday?”
He smiled. “See you then.”
CHAPTER 21
It was closing in on 8:45 pm when Jane rolled back into Midas. All she wanted to do was head to her room at the B&B, soak in a hot bath and go to bed. But after she took a gander at her leather jacket and saw the splatters of blood across it, she knew she had to resolve it before she encountered Weyler. The high country night air carried an icy sting through the shattered driver’s side window.
Shit
. That was going to be another complication to explain.
There was only one person she could think of to go to for help.
Jane parked the Mustang around the back of The Rabbit Hole. Checking the menu on the outside of the building, she found the phone number and dialed. The bartender answered. Jane announced who she was and told him to ask Hank to meet her at the back entrance. No sooner did she walk around the building than Hank was waiting for her.
“Hey, Chopper,” Hank said gently. “You okay?” Jane walked under the backdoor lamp. Hank could easily detect the blood on her jacket. “Holy shit. What happened?”
“Can we talk somewhere private?”
Hank nodded and led Jane back to his three-bedroom cottage behind The Rabbit Hole. The place was light and airy and fairly immaculate for a guy’s bachelor pad. The first thing Jane noticed when she walked in and the lights came on were the bookshelves. There were three, floor-to-ceiling units neatly filled with all types of books. Literature, old police manuals, poetry, modern fiction, crime and suspense and even a few of the esoteric titles she inherited from Kit Clark’s library, made up Hank’s diverse collection. Whenever she entered a homicide scene in a private home, Jane tended to check out the vibe of the house before she canvassed the dead bodies. When she spotted a large bookcase, it immediately impressed her, if only because it told her that the poor butchered stiffs on the floor covered in
blood had been literate. There was a huge difference, in Jane’s opinion, between the kind of people who owned a lot of books and the kind who accumulated DVDs. The latter fell short on the intellect meter. Hank’s well-read assortment of books earned him a few points in Jane’s book of judgment.
The floor plan of Hank’s place was wide open, allowing the dining room to flow into the kitchen which then flowed into a small living room. Two bedrooms were located down a short hallway with a third room located off the living room dedicated to Hank’s office. A small bathroom sat just off the front door next to a large poster of Pavarotti wearing a costume from Puccini’s
Turandot
. Again, she was impressed. For a guy to plaster Pavarotti near his front door, it had to mean something to him. She had to ask.
“He’s one of my favorites,” Hank told her. “I have
The Three Tenors
on DVD and CD. Bought it on one of those PBS pledge drives.”
Jane smiled. Sergeant Weyler and Hank would get along just fine since Weyler was a card-carrying member of PBS and had probably purchased every single CD and DVD that they pimped during their annual begging ritual. While she wasn’t a huge opera fan, there certainly was a soft spot in her heart for “Nessun Dorma.” The evocative melody from
Turandot
had followed her throughout her life, becoming the emotional background melody for everything from her mother’s death to a painfully personal case she’d worked two years prior. It wasn’t the only Puccini melody that haunted her though. There was another that she could never listen to; one that ripped at her heart and drew her back to that fateful, shocking scene she would never get out of her head.
“You like Puccini?” Hank asked.
“Yeah. I do.”
“I got a compilation of his work somewhere around here.” Hank started to search his neatly organized CD holder.
“It’s okay,” Jane said, her voice full of tension. “I don’t need
to hear it right now.” Jane took off her jacket and crossed to the kitchen sink.
“Here,” Hank took her jacket, “I’ll take care of it. Sit down, Chopper.” He pulled out a chair from the kitchen table. Jane reluctantly took a seat. She wasn’t used to having someone else in charge. But at that moment, the shock of the events that occurred earlier was starting to coagulate in her consciousness. And to top it off, she was still feeling the peculiar perspectiveshifting effects of the sacred blue lily tea Jordan had given her. Sure, she figured, Hank could clean the blood off her jacket, but that would be the extent of it. She suddenly felt thirsty and was about to ask Hank for some water when he strangely grabbed a glass, filled it with water from the filter on the tap and handed it to her.
“Why did you do that?” Jane asked, suspicion rearing its ugly head.
Hank looked confused. “I figured you might be thirsty and I didn’t think a shot of Jack Daniels was appropriate.”
Jane took a sip. “Right.” There was definitely something otherworldly happening to her. It was as though she had a heightened understanding of her surroundings. It wasn’t a high or a buzz but a focused realization that attracted to her what she needed. Her thoughts seemed to project outward and mingled in the unseen field before becoming reality. It was disturbing to a point but Jane noted that there wasn’t any of the usual fear attached to it. Instead of blocking the effect, it was as if her body was more willing to accept the experience—devoid of all the second-guessing and scrutinizing—and allow whatever occurred
to just be
.
The more Jane thought about it, the more she realized that it went against her typical M.O. to approach a total stranger like Hank Ross to help her. But for whatever reason, she opted against her usual tough-girl approach. Even the reliable wall that she built with such precision between people wasn’t properly established. The crazy thing was that Jane didn’t care. The
bricks and mortar were still available, but the need to construct the barricade wasn’t a paramount concern.
Hank dabbed at the jacket with a wet cloth and some leather cleaner he found beneath the sink. He looked perfectly content standing there in the dim light. “So, you gonna tell me what happened, or am I gonna read it tomorrow in the paper?”
“I danced with a deer on the two-laner out of town.” Hank’s eyebrows arched. “Don’t worry. The deer’s just fine.” She proceeded to tell him the abbreviated version of her accident, minus the ghostlike hand that grabbed the wheel and swerved the Mustang away from the river. “Jesus, Jane. Maybe I need to take you to the hospital…”
“No, no, no. The glass is out of my head.”
“How do you know?” Hank was obviously concerned.
Jane let out a sigh. “If I tell you, you gotta promise you’re not gonna spill it to anybody.” She was, after all, in the land of secrets.
“Who in the hell would I tell?” He took his attention off her jacket and focused on Jane. “What’s going on?”
Jane laid out the story regarding Jordan, doing her best to minimize and eliminate some of the more odd comments he made. She did not disclose the fact that Jordan was a mulatto, figuring that was actually too private to share. Jane also purposely left out Jordan’s parting comment, cloaked in a riddle, that he would reveal a “big secret” on Monday to her. Some things, she felt, needed to stay unspoken right now. Hank pulled out a kitchen chair and dragged it next to Jane. He took a seat and, after a thoughtful pause, he spoke.
“Jane, he’s a serious suspect in Jake’s case. That’s general knowledge. He’s the first one we all considered being involved when Jake went missing. What if he really is linked with Jake’s disappearance? If he tells somebody what happened between the two of you…”
“You see? This is why I like to work alone!” Jane felt her back go up…well, as up as it could travel feeling the way she did.
“Hey, come on,” Hank put a hand on her thigh. “You
know
I’m right,” he said quietly.
“Fuck,” Jane muttered. “Of course, you’re right. But I was unconscious at the time it happened. So, you know…”
“Wait a second.” Hank stared at Jane as if she was one of his former fraud suspects. She could feel his tentacles of understanding wrap around her unrehearsed story and forcing out the unspoken words that would tell the whole story. “Jordan Copeland is as private as they come. He doesn’t just go save somebody’s ass and willingly bring them onto his property…
into his cabin
…if he doesn’t have some prior relationship with them.”
“Relationship?” She shifted in her chair and turned away. “Jesus! You make it sound like Jordan and I are lovers…”
“Hey,” Hank gently reached up and touched Jane’s chin, turning it back toward him. “You can’t bullshit another drunk, Jane.”
Maybe it was the smoothing effects of the blue lily tea, but Jane couldn’t come up with her usual “
Fuck you
” retort. She touched Hank’s hand and pushed it away. After a careful moment, she began talking. She told him about her first outdoor, campfire visit on his property in detail. After Hank digested that confession, he got up and whipped up an impromptu chicken salad with leftovers from his refrigerator, before sitting back down and listening to Jane recount the second visit she shared with Jordan. She included everything she could recall of Jordan’s sermons about secrets.
“Remember that comment that Jake made to me?” Hank offered. “The one where he asked me about family curses and if a family could be
infected
with a curse?”
Jane took another bite of the chicken salad. Maybe it was the lingering effects of the blue lily tea but she couldn’t remember when she’d had a chicken salad that tasted so damn good. “Yeah. You said it was six weeks before he went missing.”
“Right. Where do you think Jake came up with that
philosophic idea? You gotta admit it, Jane. That’s a little too coincidental.”