Hood knocked on Seliah's door and waited. He heard music inside. He turned to look at the sun lowering toward Catalina Island.
"Come on in, Charlie."
She wore baggy hiker's pants and a Susan Komen T-shirt and an Angels cap and red slip-on sneakers. She followed him into the living room where the curtains were still drawn tight and the laptop sat where it had been before.
"He turned me down. Bly got to it first and forwarded. She must have called you."
"Yes. You knew that would happen, Seliah."
Hood sat and read Ozburn's message.
… I love you more than life, Seliah, but I smell Blowdown on you. This letter doesn't even sound like you. Don't let them manipulate. Don't let them break you down. Go away if you have to… "Do I need to write him back right now?"
"No. Later is better."
She slung a little silk bag over her shoulder. "Ready?"
Hood drove them down the hill to the restaurant at the foot of the pier. They got a table outside and a bucket of clams and beers. Seliah drank hers quickly, then ordered a bottle of petite sirah. Hood couldn't read her face through the sunglasses and the hat. She was subdued and deliberate. She told him she'd run ten miles after he and Bly had left, and she felt a little spacey.
"So, we went to Costa Rica to help Sean," she said. "The undercover assignment was killing him. He was bitter and disillusioned with his work. He missed me and his home and our runs on the beach. So we got to San Jose and rented a cute little Piper and tooled all around the western coast for a couple of days. Expensive, but, Charlie, there's nothing like the earth from above. Then we got checked into our tree house hotel on the volcano and we made great love and ate good food and enjoyed the creatures and the staff and the other tourists. It was called the Arenal Volcano View eco-resort and you could see the volcano from every single room, the bar, the dining room and the observation deck. You could hear it rumble. In the middle of the night people would rush out onto their decks if it got loud enough and they thought it would blow. Everybody but us had at least two cameras going-a video and a regular. We just had my little digital but we got some good shots.
"There were all sorts of characters running around that place, getting the volcano rush. One night Sean and Leftwich stayed up late talking. The next day the three of us took a nice long hike up the volcano. It was beautiful and dramatic and Sean and Joe had to hike way the heck up near the rim and, of course, I had to keep up with them. We got close. Every few minutes the volcano would rumble and spit up rocks the size of passenger cars and tons of black-red magma would come pouring out. Just like you picture in hell. Awesome to behold. Of course if it blew, even just a little, we'd have been cooked where we stood. That was part of the rush. Leftwich told us he'd never seen Arenal so angry as that day. He was messing with us, but it was fun.
"We got back that afternoon and started drinking. By dinnertime we were fairly bombed. Joe had his magic potion that somehow stayed cold on its own, and we had cocktails, too, then ordered bottles of wine with dinner and brandies after. I remember the conversation getting heavy between Sean and Joe. The consequences of sin. Good and evil. God and the devil. Man and Jesus. The blackness of human nature and God's love. Sean was really letting it hang out about his work. No details, nothing about which agency he was with or where he was stationed, but all the bitterness and anger, Charlie, it was ready to blow up, just like Arenal. I went to the room. My head was spinning. I read a page and crashed. I woke up at two in the morning, the light still on, about a billion bugs stuck to the screen outside.
"Sean wasn't beside me so I got on some clothes and went down to the bar but the bar was closed. I saw a light inside Joe's room so I walked down there. I stepped up close to the screen to look in. There were lots of bugs and moths and freaky-looking things on the screen so I crept up slow so they wouldn't fly up into my face. And when I looked in, there was a ceiling fan, making the room flicker. Sean was flat on his back on the bed, still wearing his tropical shirt and shorts and flip-flops. He was actually snoring. And Father Joe was sitting at the foot of the bed in a chair, leaning forward toward Sean. His back was to me. It looked like he was reaching out with his hands. His head was bowed. I thought he was praying but I wasn't sure. So I moved a couple of big steps to my right, and I'm really quiet about this because something tells me not to disturb him. The bugs flitter and flutter a little. And from there, I could see that Father Joe wasn't praying at all. His hands were out and he was… well, touching Sean's toe. Or possibly toes."
"Touching his toe or toes."
"Correct. And he was talking very quietly. Conversationally. I couldn't hear the words. Weirdest thing, Charlie. A drunk, muttering priest with my husband in his bed. Playing with his toes. It made me… mad. I thought maybe he was one of those molester priests."
Seliah finished her first glass of wine and poured another. She smiled and offered the bottle but his glass was still almost full.
Hood watched her pour, saw the orange of sunset on her cheek and the sheen of perspiration. There was a cool breeze coming onshore and he felt a chill through his denim jacket.
"I feel hot," she said, smiling. "It takes me hours to cool down after ten miles."
"I'm enjoying the story. So you're looking through the screen at Sean and the priest-"
"And all of a sudden the moths and bugs got spooked and flew and their wings were noisy and flapping. I could see their wing dust floating in the light. Then Leftwich turned around and I saw something fall from his hands to the floor. It landed in the bedspread. The spread was bunched on the floor because it was way too hot to sleep with it over you. Joe popped right up and opened the door for me. Big smile on his face. A bunch more bugs went flying. I went inside and asked him what he was doing and he said he was praying and watching Sean sleep. He said he was about to come get me. He said they'd had a great conversation. But he'd rarely seen a man of such moral fiber and spiritual goodness so dispirited by his work. He said Sean had reserves of strength and goodness that were rare. He hoped that he had helped a light go on in Sean's mind-the idea that his work against drugs and guns was vital to the freedoms that we Americans enjoy at home. Vital, he said. He said he tried to paint the world in simpler terms than Sean's complex, shaded, compromised world. He said it was one of the hardest things he'd ever done but he finally convinced Sean to think of himself as good. Good. A good man. And I said, 'Well, that's all fine and dandy, Joe, and pardon my French, but what the fuck were you doing with his toes?' He chuckled and his face lit up and he said he was shooing away a fly. 'Some of them can draw blood,' he said, 'make a nasty little sore-the owner's son lost a toe to an infected bite, ask him about the flies here. He'll show you his half toe.'"
"And what were you doing while this priest was going through all that?"
"Looking for what fell into the bedspread."
"I knew it. I like your curiosity and your practical side, Seliah. Tell me what it looked like. What was the first thing you thought of when you saw this thing fall into the spread?"
"I barely saw it. It happened so quickly and I was upset and the light was bad. It was something heavy and small, inside something larger and loose. Like… like a golf ball wrapped in a washcloth. But we couldn't find it. Joe saw it, too, and came over to help me look. We lifted up the bedspread and shook it real good but nothing was there. Nothing under the bed, either. Joe just kept talking away. I could smell the booze on his breath, though to be truthful it could have been the booze on my own. Sean just lay there snoring through the whole thing. That's when Joe told me he thought Sean and I were special, that we'd do great things on earth. I said getting Sean to his own room would be a good start. I finally woke him up, which wasn't easy. He walked to our room and crashed down on the bed and fell asleep again. I tried to get his shirt off but he was just too heavy and dead asleep. I took off his flip-flops. He'd dinged a toe on the walk over, so I got an alcohol wipe and cleaned it up. Just a drop of blood, not even that. Or maybe it was one of the flies Joe was shooing."
"Did you see the blood before you got him home?"
"No."
"But the light in Joe's room was on, right?"
"Yeah, but weak, like I said. And the ceiling fan, chopping it into spokes. But the blood was nothing, Charlie, less than a drop. That isn't the point. The point is the whole way Leftwich pried into Sean's life. And kind of… what… pointed Sean in a new direction. Changed him. He woke up a new man. I'm not saying the new direction wasn't good. I know the priest meant well. But he drinks Sean under the table with his secret concoction and watches him sleep and plays with his toes. The whole thing just basically gave me the creeps."
"What did the priest look like?"
"Short side, muscular. Black hair and blue eyes. From Dublin. Had the accent. The drunker he got, the stronger the accent. He had… what-charisma? Force of character? Sean hasn't been the same man since he crashed out that night. He woke up filled with optimism about his work, and us, and having a family someday soon. That was all good. But after it wore off, then all the things that he wrote in the e-mails started up. All the pain and the aches and the insomnia and hyperactivity. All his crazy talk about being chosen to do a mission, that someone or something was guiding him. All the… Just everything. Then, what you say he did down in Buenavista. That was not my husband. That could not have been Sean."
"It was but it wasn't."
Seliah swirled the wine and drank. "And I have to admit, Charlie, I've been feeling the same way. The same… wrongness. The same strangeness. I can't…"
"What?"
"Explain it any better to you."
"You don't have to."
"Like what I said to Janet. I don't say things like that. I don't think things like that."
Seliah finished the wine and ordered another bottle. They ate the clams and ordered dinner. The sun set in a red-black sky and fell out of sight. Seliah took off her sunglasses and Hood saw that even in this soft darkness her pupils were closed down hard against the light. She excused herself, slinging her little bag over her shoulder and navigating between the tables. An older woman at the adjacent table gave Hood a disapproving look. Seliah was back a few minutes later. She ate quickly-her swordfish, all of the bread, dessert-and drank most of the second bottle of wine.
"We'll get through this, Seliah. We'll get him back."
"Then what?"
"I don't know what."
"If what you say happened really happened, then I won't see him for a good long while."
"It's up to us. When we know the whole story, things will make sense."
"I believe that, Charlie. I believe things will make sense and that Sean and I have a future."
Hood reached out and put his hand on hers and felt the startling heat.
Later he drove her home and walked her to the door.
"Let's see what Sean wrote," she said.
"Good."