The Book of Joby (108 page)

Now, as Rose approached him, Hawk nudged his sunglasses higher up his nose and hoped he didn’t smell too much of beer. He tried to think of how he would explain his absence, but she didn’t ask where he had been. She just smiled and waved as if he’d done nothing wrong at all, which, in its way, made him just as uncomfortable.

“What’s up?” Hawk asked, determined to match her nonchalance. If she wouldn’t admit she was upset, he wasn’t going to do it for her. He didn’t play such games.

“It’s going great, I think!” Rose smiled, turning back to survey the carnival-like crowd below them. She grabbed his hand and led him back down toward the beach. “Tholomey and Blue have got the most delicious chicken going at their barbecue,” she said. “Remember that marinade their mother makes? Have you had lunch yet?”

Hawk shook his head, wondering if she really wasn’t mad.

“Nice sunglasses,” she said.

“Thanks,” he answered. “Got ’em at this place in Boston. They weren’t cheap, but you can’t drive straight into the sunset for five days wearing junk, unless you want to go blind, I guess.” He was babbling.
Be cool,
he told himself.
Just shut up, and be cool.

“I wish you didn’t have to go so soon,” she said, gazing at the beach. “You’ll miss all this amazing weather. Can’t you stay an extra day or two?”

“It’s gonna take at least four days to drive back, Rose,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of stuff to do at work, and this is unpaid leave.”

“I know,” Rose sighed. “I’m just not ready to start missing you again.”

“I’ll come back and get you,” Hawk assured her. “Soon as I’ve made something of myself.” Rose was silent in a way that made him feel he’d said something wrong. “I don’t want us out there just scraping by while all our dreams die on the vine,” he said, compelled somehow to explain. “You deserve to live in style. I want to—”

She turned around and put her fingers to his lips, then leaned in to kiss him. He kissed her back, feeling sick inside. Everything was empty all the time now. . . . Even this.

“So,” he said as soon as she had let him go, desperate for anything to fill the empty moment with. “We’ve still hardly talked about
your
work these days. How’s it going up there on the Coast?”

She looked at him sadly for a moment, then turned away as if to scan the beach again, though Hawk wasn’t fooled. She’d felt it—the emptiness inside him. Why had he even come back here?

“It’s going pretty well,” she said, still looking at the beach. “We’ve prepared almost all the seeds we’d need, and quite a few of the rarest animals are penned or caged and ready to take out quickly if it ever comes to that.” She sighed, and said, “I wish they’d find the Cup. Then at least we might know where to take them all.”

As he listened, Hawk felt torn between one mind that thought her task made all of his ambitions look like paste and paper, and another that struggled not to sneer at the pointlessness of scurrying around in preparation to go hide again in some new forgotten corner of the world. Would these people never tire of living tiny little lives in fear? This was why he’d left—what he had to get away from.

“Do you think I should?” Rose asked.

Hawk just blinked and stared, realizing he’d become lost in his own thoughts as she’d continued to talk. “I’m sorry. I missed that last bit,” he said, his face burning.

She just shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I was only chattering.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a tiny book four inches high and less than half an inch thick. “I wanted to give you this,” she said, “before you leave. I’ve had it since I was a little girl, but I want you to have it now, to remind you of home, and of me.”

“Rose, if this is something you care about, I shouldn’t—”

She shushed him, and put the book into his hand, curling his fingers around it with her own. “Bring it back to me when you’ve read it if you want to,” she said quietly. “The bent page marks my favorite one.” She leaned up to kiss him again, just a brush across his lips, then turned and waved good-bye as she ran down to rejoin the party.

Feeling more sick at heart than ever, Hawk looked down and read the small book’s cover.
Flower Fairies of the Winter,
by Cicely Mary Barker. The gift was quintessential Rose, but what was
he
to do with it? He sighed and opened it to find the poem she had marked. There was a picture of a butterfly-winged fairy that looked very much like Rose, wearing a child’s gingham dress and perched on a dark branch festooned in small white blossoms. A poem on the facing page was titled “Blackthorn.”

The wind is cold, the Spring
seems long a-waking;
The woods are brown and bare;
yet this is March; soon April
will be making
all things most sweet and fair.
See, even now, in hedge
and thicket tangled,
one brave and cheering sight;
the leafless branches
of the Blackthorn, spangled
with starry blossoms white!

Very pretty, Hawk thought wearily, but a child’s poem wasn’t going to do the job Rose had in mind. The sheer naiveté of such a gesture might have made him laugh if there’d been any laughter still within him. He shut the book, and jammed it in his pocket, then ambled toward the beach below to get some chicken and, he hoped, a few more beers. Surely no one in a riot like this would ask to see ID. Later, when he’d got his courage up again, he supposed he should go thank her for the gift, but he dreaded having to seem genuinely enthusiastic about fairy poems.

By six o’clock, the time seemed ripe for setting match to powder.

“Hey, GB!” shouted Tique, grinning impishly at Lucifer from within his adolescent guise. “Has Euro gotten back yet? We’re almost out of beer!”

“Keep your voice down, will ya?” Lucifer grinned back. “Ya wanna get us all
arrested
?” Virtually all of Hell’s operatives in Taubolt were on the beach by now, disguised as very naughty teenagers. “Light ’em if ya got ’em,” Lucifer said in a voice pitched for Tique’s ears only. Then he started up the trail toward town. It was time for Agnes Hamilton, or a damn good facsimile, to phone in her noise complaint. Then it was off to haunt the good sheriff’s binoculars. Gazing up to estimate the rate of failing daylight, Lucifer smiled to himself and thought again,
It’s all about the timing.

Donaldson didn’t delegate calls from Hamilton. He’d come out himself to have a look, and he’d heard the blare of music and the roar of people long before he’d reached the cliff tops. He’d heard something about a barbecue on the beach but had imagined nothing more than a small gathering of families and friends, nothing so large—or loud. Their little fliers had advertised no such circus. There should have been permits filed for something like this. Hamilton had been right to complain.

He’d brought a pair of binoculars along, and raised them for a better look. People of all ages gathered around coolers and ice-filled buckets full of cans and bottles. The beach was largely shadowed by the cliffs at this hour, so it was difficult to tell how much of what the chests contained was alcoholic, but he wagered by the party’s raucous mood that it was mostly booze. The more he looked, the more he realized how many of the crowd were kids, half of whom held cans and bottles too; flashes of aluminum, green and brown glass. Could have been soda, but he’d have bet his shirt it wasn’t. He lowered his binoculars and swept his eyes across the beach again. The dancing crowd was large and getting pretty crazy. Numerous bonfires had been lit as evening approached. No permits for those either. He was amazed no one had called him sooner. He raised his binoculars one more time to sweep the beach’s margins, knowing that’s where the worst offenders would be hanging out, and sure enough, behind a thicket near the bridge, he saw a group half-hidden in the tall grass, passing around something that sure looked like a bong. Their faces didn’t seem familiar, but by now the light was too poor to tell for sure.

He trotted back across the field to his patrol car, and radioed for backup. Nearly five months after his promotion and the arrival of his team, Donaldson had yet to achieve anything beyond the prosecution of another handful of teenaged pranks and minor violations. Finally, something major was going down right before his eyes, and he’d arrived in time to do more than
scratch his head the morning after. He’d have bet his badge that if they managed to bust enough of those booze-guzzling, bong-huffing kids down there tonight, Taubolt’s more mysterious crimes would fall off just as mysteriously, at least until Joby Peterson managed to get them all out and onto the streets again.

Kellerman’s Celts had been playing tunes back to back for almost thirty minutes, so when they stopped, everyone just assumed they were taking a well-deserved break until Ian started unplugging amps while his band members packed up their instruments.

“Hey! What are you guys doing?” Blue asked. “You’re not packin’ up!”

“Afraid we have to,” Ian said.

“It’s not even dark yet,” whined Blue’s brother, Tholomey. “What’s the hurry?”

As more people gathered to express their disappointment and surprise, Ian grabbed one of the remaining mics, and addressed the crowd. “Folks, we’ve had a great day playing for you all. Thanks for enjoying us so well. Unfortunately, Sheriff Donaldson has sent word down there’s been a noise complaint from up in town. We’re being asked to stop. So,” he smiled and shrugged, “all good things must end.”

There were boos and louder protests from all around the platform.

“Well, let’s go up and talk to him,” Blue suggested to his brother and several others around him.

The idea was immediately encouraged by everyone close enough to hear, but Ian leaned down to put a hand on Blue’s shoulder, and shook his head. “Already been tried,” he said. “He’s been up there half an hour, I’m told, with several other officers. Yours’d be the third group to approach him. Just leave it be. The party can go on without us.”