There’s a soft buzz that sounds like it’s coming from her phone, but when she looks to where she thought she left it, on the edge of Thorpe’s desk, it’s not there.
“It’s mine,” Dylan says. “Sorry, I thought I turned it off.”
“Where’s mine?”
“Stay focused, Charley. I think we’re onto something here.”
“OK. It’s just . . . it’s hard to focus right now.”
“Because you need some sleep?”
“Yeah,” she finally says. “I need some sleep. It’s just . . .”
“What, Charley?”
“There were pills before.”
Dylan seems genuinely concerned. For Christ’s sake, it’s not like she’s about to disclose she was molested. But that’s how he’s acting.
“You’ve tried medication before?” he asks.
“My father tried medication. On me. When I was ten.”
Dylan nods, and his expression is grim. “And what prompted your father to put you on medication back then?”
“I started complaining. About the appearances. The movies.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“Your father drugged you to silence you, and so you’re afraid that’s what I’m trying to do to you now.”
“It’s not like it worked. I started hiding the drugs after a few weeks.”
“But you stopped complaining, didn’t you?”
“For a while.”
“From age ten to age sixteen is a long while.”
“I guess.” Christ, she sounds sixteen. She’s even staring down at her lap now like a sullen teenager.
“I’m not trying to silence you, Charley. I didn’t reach out to you and offer my ear because I thought what you needed was more silence. Quite the opposite, in fact. And I can assure you that if you decide to go the medication route this time, it’ll be entirely different.”
“How can you assure me of that?”
“Because this time the choice will be yours.”
3
Access Denied.
Jason isn’t surprised when these words appear on the keypad’s display.
He never expected to crack her code on the first try.
There’s no telling exactly what type of security system she has; she hasn’t posted a sign next to her driveway like a suburban family would.
She doesn’t really have a driveway. Just a strip of tire-scuffed earth that looks a little smoother than the surrounding desert. It leads to a reinforced-steel garage door that, like the rest of her squat, one-story stucco house, is painted the common colors of the Sonoran. The paint does its job. The house is pretty much camouflaged from the nearest road. But he had no trouble finding the place with the directions the Savior gave him.
Given his research into alarm systems, he figures he’s got about three more tries before he’s locked out or the alarm company alerts local law enforcement.
The nearest police station is just inside the Scarlet town line, a thirty-minute drive away. So if he does get locked out, he’ll have time to race back to the dried-out arroyo where he hid his car. Then he’ll have to reassess.
He has to teach Trina that her defenses against him are useless, and he can only do that by getting inside her house, by showing her that he belongs there, that their union is inevitable. On the basis of his e-mails, the Savior seems to understand this. He sent Jason a list of possible code words—objects and places with a special meaning to her, terse descriptions of her favorite memories—and strings of relevant numbers—her birthday, her birth mother’s birthday—that might be the basis of her alarm code.
If he cracks the code, he’s in.
She’s afraid of keys, the Savior told him. They’re too easily lost, too easily stolen or copied. The idea behind a security system like hers is to make sure no door is ever left unlocked by mistake and to eliminate any exposed mechanisms that might allow an intruder access to the locks themselves. The cylinder inside each is several inches deeper than your average dead bolt, too deep to be jimmied open by even the most skilled locksmith. And in the absence of a key mechanism, you’d have to tear apart the door frame or the adjacent wall to even try for access to the lock itself. The code unlocks a specific series of doors for several minutes, and then they lock again automatically. It’s the kind of system usually reserved for vaults or other storage facilities that rarely see human visitors, and Trina’s installed it in her own home.
Can she not see how desperate this is, how it smacks of someone denying the inevitable?
Chances are the system includes smoke detectors that disengage all the locks in case of a fire. But what if something else happened to her out here? What if she had a heart attack or was bitten by a snake and she couldn’t enter the code and so EMS couldn’t get to her?
Stupid. So stupid.
Not stupid, he reminds himself. Just misguided, that’s all.
He scans the words and numbers again.
The meaning of some are clear to him thanks to his study of Lowell Pierce’s book—bluebird, for instance, Joyce Collins, her birth mother’s maiden name—but the others he doesn’t understand. As he reads over them now, he feels a surge of jealousy.
The Savior knows why these words are precious to her. The Savior knows more about her than Jason’s managed to learn in a decade. Whoever the Savior is, they’ve come to the same conclusion Jason did years ago. That Trina was taught the cleansing power of murder at a young age, and with every day she refuses to put this lesson to good use, her soul dies a little bit more.
As evidenced by this secluded prison in which she now lives.
It’s literally in the middle of nowhere, this tiny house, surrounded by parched desert sliced by arroyos and dotted with sparse stands of blue paloverde trees that give only teasers of shade. On his walk in, he’d passed the old fence lines, spotted a few crumbling stakes. His Internet research into the area told him this used to be part of a sprawling housing complex for the workers in the copper mine just up the road, which probably explains its water and electrical lines. But the mine’s been closed for years, and most of the houses were abandoned after a big fire swept through the area. Trina’s is the only one within view.
A courtyard sits between the solid-metal entry door and the front door of the house itself, which he can’t see from where he stands. The wall is eight feet high. She poured a river of concrete along the top and studded it with huge, jagged shards of glass that give off rainbow reflections in the dusk. Did she set each piece by hand? If so, she didn’t do it to keep out snakes; she did it to stop him, and so the sight of all that jagged glass now makes him angry. But if he gets angry, he’ll get distracted, and that’s unacceptable.
BBIRD474
It feels like a wild guess. But it isn’t really.
The code’s the average length of most computer passwords; eight characters, with a mix of letters and numbers.
And how many times did he sit in the audience and listen to her tell the story of how she came to see the bluebird, the one she didn’t kill, as a symbol of her rebirth?
As for the numbers, 474 are the last three digits of her mother’s birthday, if you chop off the month, which is March. And in all her years of signing his books, her handwriting would always place the emphasis on the final letters in her name and not the first, as if her hand always needed a second or two to gather energy before exploding with it at the end. That’s why he’s assumed she would cut off some of the first few letters of the word bluebird and drop the number of the month in the sequence of digits in her mother’s birthday.
And it’s wrong.