The long way back, p.29
The Long Way Back, page 29
DULUTH DIVERSITY EMPLOYMENT FAIR
There are tables and booths arranged around the park, and large banners that announce area businesses and prospective employers. Along the perimeter, Eva can see food trucks with long queues, a trailer emblazoned with the bold claim that Beans & Nosh makes the best iced coffee on the North Shore, and a small red tent that is serving up Belgian waffles and maple deer sausage. It looks like the job fair is just getting started, gearing up for a morning of meet and greets with hopeful employees. There are young people—recent college and high school graduates—everywhere.
Eva doesn’t realize what’s happening at first when Abner rolls down his window and says, “Booth seventy-four,” to a man wearing a yellow safety vest. The event attendant is holding a clipboard and scanning a list, but Eva can’t see his eyes behind the reflective aviators he’s wearing.
“You’re late,” the man says, crossing something off. “Better get going. You’re halfway around the perimeter to your right.”
Eva’s heart stutters to life and she draws a breath to say something—to call out, to scream, to do anything—but Buzz takes her by the jaw and wrenches her face toward his. If the look in his eyes isn’t enough to silence her, the gun he holds in his lap is. Then the van is easing forward, the man with the clipboard already focusing on his next task. The moment is gone before Eva can harness a single coherent thought.
“You got the hat?” Abner asks. “The glasses?”
Reaching into the glove compartment, Buzz produces a baseball cap and a pair of oversized sunglasses, as well as a roll of transparent duct tape. They must have improvised back at the compound when Eva became part of the plan. She vaguely remembers things being taken out and put back in, of commotion and activity, but her senses had been muted by raw terror and disbelief.
“Yup,” Buzz answers Abner unnecessarily. He’s already pulling the worn baseball cap down over Eva’s forehead. The sunglasses go on crooked, and then he’s ripping off a length of the tape.
“Please, no—” Eva manages in the second before he slaps it over her mouth, using his thumbs to seal the edges against her cheeks.
“The windows are tinted, Eva, but if anyone decides to press their nose to the glass, they’ll just see a girl in sunglasses and a baseball cap taking a moment to herself in the company van.”
Eva can feel herself begin to hyperventilate beneath the duct tape and the low-slung hat. She can’t believe that this is happening, that they’re actually going to do this unimaginable thing. When she starts to shake uncontrollably, Buzz draws away from her, cramming himself against the passenger door as if he can’t stand to touch someone so close to death.
Abner pulls into an empty space, parking behind a large delivery truck and in front of a van that looks similar to the one they’re in. Eva doesn’t think they’re in spot seventy-four, but they are well concealed, and no one pays any attention at all to one more cargo van among dozens. They’re on the outskirts of the park, past the main entrance and all the activity, but close enough that Eva can read the signs on some of the tables and make out the faces of several people. No one is looking in their direction. And if they did, what would they see? Nothing out of the ordinary.
“This is where we leave you, my dear.” Abner turns off the ignition and grabs Eva’s wrists. She struggles, trying to wrestle herself away from him, but Buzz pinches behind her elbows, thrusting her arms forward as if they’re nothing but kindling. Two quick movements are all it takes to zip-tie her hands to the bottom of the steering wheel, and then Abner and Buzz duck down and secure her ankles to a metal bar beneath the seat. Eva can’t move. She can’t scream or motion for help or even try to make eye contact with a close passerby. She’s imprisoned in the cab of the van, and she knows that it will soon be her coffin.
There’s a bomb in the cargo hold.
Abner glances at his watch, and then gives Eva a grim smile. “You have just under twenty minutes, Evangeline. I suggest you spend it in prayer.”
With that, Abner and Buzz wrench open their doors and hop out, but not before Abner hits the door lock and traps Eva inside.
Her face is slick with sweat and tears, and her hair clings to her damp neck. It’s impossible to comprehend just how she got here, and every time Eva tries to grasp the gravity of her situation, it slips right through her fingers. She can’t make sense of the fact that she only has nineteen minutes left to live (eighteen? seventeen?), but her heart swells in her chest as she thinks of her mother.
It’s true, Eva realizes, that your life flashes before your eyes when the end is near. Her mind is a spinning slideshow of memories—literal mountaintops and quiet moments with their toes buried in the sand, and late nights whispering in the warm, safe belly of Sebastian—and if Eva closes her eyes she can almost feel Scout pressed tight against her hip and the gentle drag of Charlie’s fingers toying with the curls that drape over her shoulder. She smells the smoky char of a lit grill, a smear of aloe lotion soaking into sun-warmed skin, Lake Superior on a fall morning when the wind carries a fine blade of winter sweeping down from the north like a prophecy. The tang of gasoline from a roadside pump in the desert. The moment when the edge of her spoon cracks the caramelized sugar on a perfect crème brûlée. The sound of Frank’s low, husky laugh. Her first kiss. Like fireworks and falling all at once.
Eva doesn’t want to die.
So she prays. No words, just her heart cracked open like a door, thrown off its hinges and turned inside out. Thank you and more and please. Love and longing, every mistake offered with open hands, fingers full and aching. Then a sudden, blinding, fleeting understanding of grace. She didn’t deserve any of it, and she was allowed to live and love anyway.
When a soft clicking invades her desperate reverie, Eva ignores it at first. There’s a jangly, grating scrape, followed by a soft pop, and then her eyes snap open at the exact moment that the driver’s-side door is softly unlatched.
It’s impossible to make sense of what she’s seeing. Zach is slipping into the cab beside her, his face a ruined mess of black and blue, and a bent wire clutched in one hand. He presses a finger to his split lips, and then carefully eases the door shut behind him.
“Hey,” Zach says quietly, although they are alone in the cab of the van. There’s no one to hear them, and the tape over Eva’s mouth renders her mute. Zach seems to notice it when Eva groans, and he reaches for a corner of her gag to begin to carefully peel it off. Her eyes must register the agony she feels, because he puts one hand on her shoulder to steady her. “Okay, I’m going to do it fast,” he warns. And then he rips, immediately covering her mouth with his free hand to stop her from screaming.
“We have to be quick,” he says.
“What are you doing here?” Eva is too shocked to fully register how much danger they’re in. “How did you find me? How did you know?”
“Rachel,” he says simply. “When she realized that they were taking you, she came to get me.”
“Rachel?” Eva can hardly believe it. “But she ratted me out!”
“My sister is a complicated person. But she didn’t want you to die.” Zach rubs his hands up and down her arms as if to smooth away the awful word. “I slipped in the back of the silver truck when they were getting supplies and hid underneath some tarps.”
“You’ve been here all along?” Eva thinks about the journey from the compound to the park, all those stops in the dark and all the frightening uncertainty. Somehow knowing that Zach had been near her every step of the way reframes the entire experience. She wasn’t ever alone. “I can’t believe you came for me.”
Zach pauses for just a moment, wiping the tears that stream down her cheeks with his palms. He kisses her once, sweetly, on the mouth. “I love you, Eva. Always have.”
From the waistband of his jeans he produces a kitchen knife. It’s wrapped in a plastic sheath and Eva realizes it’s the same knife that Rachel used to cut the chocolate cake the day before. Has it only been a day? Eva feels as if she’s lived multiple lifetimes since she stepped off the Summer Moon.
Zach slides the knife between Eva’s left wrist and the zip tie, and with one quick jerk it snaps. He frees her right hand and then bends to release her ankles. “Listen,” he says when she’s free. “It’s going to get bad here really fast. I hid under those tarps with an entire arsenal of weapons. After the bomb goes off, members of the Family are stationed at the freeway entrances and all over the downtown area to pick off survivors. You have to find a place to hide. If you—”
“Wait.” Eva puts a hand flat on his chest, stopping him. “What do you mean you? We have to find a place to hide. We have to—”
“Eva…” Zach starts, but Eva already knows what he’s going to say. All at once she can see it as clearly as a snapshot. The bomb is in the van. The van can’t stay here.
“Zach, no—”
“I don’t have time to argue with you. This is how it’s happening. You need to go now. You need to run.”
“I won’t leave you,” Eva sobs, but Zach wrenches open the door.
“Yes, you will. We don’t have time to clear the park. I need to get this van as far away from the crowd as I can.”
“But there’s only a few minutes—”
“I know. That’s why I’m leaving now.” Zach slides out of the van, pulling Eva with him. Almost the moment her feet touch the ground, he’s climbing back into the van and slamming the door in her face. The engine roars to life, and in the midst of her anguish, Eva feels a second of gratitude that Abner forgot the keys in the ignition.
“Wait!” she screams, pounding on the window with her fists. Zach rolls it down quickly, his face wild with the knowledge of what he’s about to do. There is an entire world contained in his eyes, but his hands don’t tremble on the wheel. Zach is resolute. Eva steps on the running board and throws her arms around his neck, squeezing with every last ounce of her strength for a single, frantic heartbeat before Zach drags her arms away and pushes her back to the ground.
“I love you too,” she says. She’s not sure exactly what she means by it, or how the vicious unspooling of her heart can ever be mended, but it’s exactly what he needs to hear. Zach’s eyes fill with tears even as he smiles at her. And then he’s pulling away.
VOICE MAIL SA JUDE TURNER
“James, it’s Turner. We have a situation developing in Duluth. Possible threat to life from a credible source related to the Evangeline Sutton missing person’s case. We’re en route from Landing but requesting Duluth PD presence at Bayfront Festival Park immediately.”
CHAPTER 23
CHARLIE & EVA
TUESDAY
By the time Charlie pulls off the interstate and turns toward Canal Park, she’s lost sight of Agent Turner and the convoy of law enforcement vehicles. The waterfront district is purring with excitement on the cusp of a new season, and already vacationers and sun-loving locals are wandering the streets hand in hand, appreciative of this early taste of summer. It’s another abnormally warm day, approaching seventy before ten a.m., but Charlie hardly registers the light pouring through her windshield or the cheerful, brightly dressed crowds. Instead, she’s taking stock of her surroundings: the police cruiser that sits askance on the corner with two cops leaning against the doors, the unexpectedly sluggish traffic on a Tuesday morning, and the conspicuous absence of the FBI tactical van. She’d trailed the black truck at a distance for eighty-some miles before losing sight of it on the outskirts of Duluth.
After the second call from the unknown number, Agent Turner had told Charlie in no uncertain terms to go home and wait. There were phone calls to make and things to do, leads to be followed and places to go, because the woman on the other end of the line appeared to be a credible source with information on a clear and present threat to life.
Eva’s life.
Of course, there was no way in hell that Charlie was going to just go back to the lakeside house and stare at her phone while her daughter was in danger. She swore to herself that she wouldn’t get in the way—she would let Jude and his team do what they needed to do—but when the dust settled, she would be there for Eva. Being that girl’s mama was what she had been put on this earth to do.
“I can’t prevent you from coming,” Jude told her as the room swirled around them. Agents were grabbing gear and car keys, checking guns and securing magazines of extra ammunition in their holsters. “And I know you’ll probably do the opposite of what I tell you to anyway. But please, Charlotte, for the love of God, stay far away.”
He must have seen the truth written in her eyes, because he pushed a heavy sigh through his teeth and added, “Be careful. Call me if you see or hear anything.”
Charlie sat in her car while they rolled out, the entire cavalry heading south toward Duluth and whatever was supposed to happen at Bayfront Festival Park. Then, when the last vehicle had rounded the corner and faded from view, she pulled out of the boathouse parking lot and followed them. Charlie still couldn’t get a clear perspective of the whole picture, but the drive to the city was an hour and a half of time to think it out, to turn the situation over again and again like a kaleidoscope catching a ray of sunshine. Just as everything slid into tentative focus, it blurred again, leaving her wrung out and confused.
It came down to this: Eva had a secret boyfriend who wasn’t the man he claimed to be. And that lie built on a lie landed her in a terrible situation with a very dangerous group of people. So Charlie would be there when everything exploded. She had to be.
Now, traffic crawls toward the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center and the Amsoil Arena, and then grinds to a stubborn halt. There’s not so much as a hint of movement. A few people have opened their windows or even stepped out of their cars, but Charlie can see that the long line of vehicles is going nowhere. Leaving her truck running, she slides out of the cab and walks toward a man who’s standing next to his minivan.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
“I’m trying to get my kid to the job fair.” He gestures toward a young man about Eva’s age in the passenger seat. The boy shrugs, salutes, and turns his attention back to his phone. The man continues, “They’ve shut down the road. They’re trying to turn people around.”
“Why?”
“Beats me.”
But Charlie is already walking away. Walking, and then jogging, and suddenly sprinting alongside the idling cars and toward the barrier that’s been put up to stop the flow of traffic. There’s a police cruiser jackknifed across the road, so Charlie cuts across a grassy ditch and through the arena parking lot. It’s full of vehicles and people, but she ignores them all and races across Harbor Drive toward Playfront Park where Eva used to climb the monkey bars, and once knocked out a baby tooth when she fell. She hadn’t even cried.
The pedestrian thoroughfare into the festival grounds is lined with balloons and crowded with people, and there’s happy pop music thumping from a stand of portable speakers. No one seems to know that anything is wrong, that just outside of the park the police have set up a roadblock to prevent more people from coming in. Charlie swivels as she runs, scanning faces and searching for anything that will give her the tiniest clue about where Eva might be, but nothing seems menacing or even slightly out of the ordinary. It’s a gorgeous late-spring day, and this multicultural job fair is an obvious, smashing success. All around her employers are passing out flyers filled with information about their companies, and prospective employees are perusing their fare as if each job opportunity is ripe with potential for a new future, a new life. The press of people is so overwhelming, Charlie wishes she had a bullhorn and a stage—if Eva is here, she likely won’t know what to do with a cop or a plainclothes FBI agent, but Charlie is family and safety and home.
The sudden sound of an engine revving stands out among all the noise only because it is accompanied by honking. A few quick bleats at first, then whoever is laying on the horn presses it down hard and doesn’t let up. It’s muffled, a distant annoyance that makes a few people look up and shake their heads. But the honking is not coming from some disgruntled driver stopped at the traffic jam on West Railroad Street. It’s coming from inside the park.
Charlie knows with a sudden, sickening certainty that she has to find the source of this commotion. The honking echoes around the warren of tables and booths and seems to originate near the frontage road that skirts the festival grounds. Charlie hurries in that direction even as the crowd around her begins to turn. A woman screams, a short peal of terror that cuts off almost immediately, but then more people begin to shout.
All at once the crowd is moving, a frenzy of fear and uncertainty that rolls like a ground swell across the wide green. It’s like watching a storm slowly spin to devastating life.
“Run!” someone shouts. “Get out of here!”
And then a single, chilling word rips through the commotion: bomb.
“There’s a bomb!”
“Bomb! Run!”
“It’s a bomb!”
Men and women are running past her, flying toward the entrance to the park and away from the harbor and the little canal in front of the boat club and resort. Because the festival grounds are shaped like a baseball diamond and surrounded on two sides by the water of the Duluth Harbor Basin, there’s only one way for people to run—toward the road and the traffic jam that they don’t know has trapped them here. Charlie’s heart stutters to a stop as she realizes that there’s nowhere to go, nowhere to run to get away from a… bomb?
“How do you know?” Charlie grabs a middle-aged businessman by the lapels of his suit jacket as he tries to rush past. “How do you know there’s a bomb?”
