Chapter 6 - The Girl in the Photograph
Tessa Mercer answered my call on the fourth ring.
"Nora?" Her voice sharpened. "You promised you wouldn't call again."
"Listen to me. Is June home?"
"She's with my mother. Why?"
I told her about the photograph. She went silent long enough for me to hear a kitchen faucet running somewhere behind her.
"They sent a picture of my daughter?"
"Yes. Get her away from her usual places. Don't post anything. Don't answer unfamiliar numbers."
"Who's they?"
"The people who buried what really happened to Eli."
Tessa had spent eleven months believing the report. At the funeral she had looked through me as if I were empty space. I couldn't blame her. I would have needed somebody to blame too.
"You told me he was behind you," she said. "You said he was alive when the truck turned."
"He was."
"Then why did you come home?"
The question hit exactly where it always did. "Because he pushed me out before the second blast."
Rourke took the phone. "Mrs. Mercer, I'm Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Rourke. I know you don't trust her. At this moment, I do. I'll send a state police officer to escort you somewhere safe."
He gave her a number to call back and verify independently. She hung up without thanking him.
We took shelter in an unused maintenance shed beyond the perimeter. Rourke photographed the evidence sleeve and phoned Maya Chen, a Defense Department inspector general investigator he knew from a procurement case.
"If you bring this to a command channel," she warned over speaker, "they'll seize it before I get there. Preserve the original. Don't access it."
"Our commander locked us in a burning room," Rourke said.
"Then this isn't merely an administrative complaint. I'm alerting federal agents. Stay reachable."
Atlas lay against my leg, wide awake.
Her voice was almost a whisper.
"June says a man came to her school last week. He told her Eli had left something for her."
"Did she go with him?"
"No. She told her teacher. But Nora..."
"What?"
"The man knew the bedtime phrase Eli used with her."
My stomach dropped.
"What phrase?"
"When the stars go out, count the four red ones."
May you like
That was no bedtime phrase.
It was the password Eli had yelled to me in the moments before Kharif Pass exploded.
