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She had lost one of
the sheets. It was just a sheet of her notes, not one of the document sheets, but still she clearly remembered seeing “Creag Dhu” on it as she reached for it. What were the odds against one of those men picking it up? Not very good. They had to know they weren’t just after her, but some papers as well.
She had given Parrish the location of the Treasure; all he had to do was figure out what it was. She had to assume he would. After all, the Foundation’s business was archaeology. Parrish had access to any number of old maps, files, cross-references. He would learn Creag Dhu had been a fourteenth-century castle, and with a little effort he would be able to pinpoint its location. He could throw the Foundation’s enormous resources into excavating the site—and he would find the Treasure.
Her fault. Her fault. The words drummed ceaselessly through her head. She had failed Ford and Bryant, letting Parrish attain the knowledge for which he had killed them.
She had failed Niall.
She should have done something, should have shot both the other men if necessary, and chased down that errant sheet. But all she had been thinking about had been escape, survival; she hadn’t remembered the paper until she was already in Iowa.
She had actually shot a man. All of Matty’s advice had worked, and she had functioned well enough to do something, instead of simply flailing in terror and hoping for a lucky blow. Eight months ago she wouldn’t have had any idea how to use a pistol, and would have been horrified at the thought of doing so; this afternoon she had used both knife and pistol. Thinking of the moment when she had pulled the trigger, Grace wondered numbly if she was still the same person at all.
But what good had all of it done? She was alive, yes, but still she had failed Niall. She had failed to protect the papers. Parrish had won, through her own negligence.
Eaten alive by guilt, sick in the aftermath of battlefield adrenaline, it was almost ten when she thought of Kris. Swearing softly to herself at her lack of consideration, she began looking for an exit occupied by people and equipped with a pay phone. Perhaps she simply hadn’t been paying attention, but it seemed as if most of the exits were nothing more than lonely intersections, access to empty roads leading off into empty night.
She must not have been paying attention. There was a brightly lit truck stop at the next exit. She pulled into the crowded parking lot, her truck dwarfed by the huge tractor-trailer rigs that sat idling, their motors rumbling like enormous sleeping beasts. She decided she might as well gas up while she was there, so she pulled up to one of the islands and stood shivering in the icy wind as the tank filled. At least the cold woke her up; she had sunk almost into a stupor, her eyes half closed, hypnotized by the endless zipper of stripes between twin banks of dirty snow, where the snowplows had cleared the highway.
It had started snowing again, she realized, seeing the white flakes blowing through the bright vapor lights of the truck stop. She couldn’t go much farther; she was too exhausted to battle snow too. She paid the attendant for the gas, then got in the truck and moved it to the restaurant.
The warmth inside went right through her, making her shudder with relief. Truckers sat at a long counter, or in pairs in the booths that lined the wall. A jukebox played some rollicking honky-tonk song, and a cloud of blue cigarette smoke hovered against the ceiling. There was a tiny hallway to the left, decorated with an arrow and a sign that said “Rest Rooms,” and two pay phones were crowded into it. One of the phones was in use by an enormous bearded fellow whose gut strained his thermal-knit shirt. He looked like a cross between Paul Bunyan and a Hell’s Angel, but when she neared she heard him say, “I’ll call you tomorrow, honey. Love you.”
Grace squeezed past him and dug change out of her pocket. A quarter bought her a dial tone. She punched in the numbers, then waited until a recorded voice told her how much more change to feed the beast.
Kris answered immediately, his voice anxious.
She turned her back on the big guy, and lowered her voice. “I’m okay,” she said, not giving her name. “But they almost caught me this afternoon, and I had to leave. I just wanted you to know. Is everything okay on your end?”
“Yeah.” She could hear him gulp. “Are you hurt, or anything?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“That was you, wasn’t it?” His voice shook. “That shooting at the McDonald’s. They said—on television—a woman in a brown truck. I knew it was you.”
“Yes.”
“The police don’t know what happened. All those men vanished before the cops got there.”
Grace blinked. That was surprising news. She had expected the cops to be hot on her trail, too. Evidently Parrish didn’t want the cops to catch her, preferring to do so himself. She didn’t know why; she had seen about half the city’s muckety-mucks on the donor list, so she had no doubt he could pull enough strings to get the papers out of the evidence room, or whatever they called it. He could also have her killed in her cell, and she would be just one more jail violence statistic.
The implication was startling. Parrish wanted her alive, and he wanted her as his prisoner. A wave of revulsion swept her at the thought, but she didn’t analyze it.
“I have to go now,” she told Kris. “I just wanted you to know I’m okay, and tell you how much I appreciate what you did.”
“Grace—” His voice cracked on her name. “Take care. Stay alive.” He paused, and his next words came out quiet and strained. “I love you.”
The simple words almost shattered her. She had been too alone; too many months had passed since she had heard them. She gripped the receiver so tightly her knuckles turned white, and the plastic creaked under the strain.
She couldn’t blow off his youthful devotion as an adolescent crush; he deserved more respect than that. “Thank you,” she whispered. “I love you, too. You’re a wonderful person.” Then she gently hung up, and pressed her forehead against the wall.
Beside her, the trucker was saying his own good-byes, more “I love yous” and “I’ll be carefuls.” He hung up and glanced at her.
A meaty paw patted her shoulder with surprising delicacy. “Don’t cry, little bit,” he said comfortingly. “You’ll get used to it. How long you been on the road?”
He thought she was a truck driver. Amazement chased away all other emotion. Did she look like a truck driver? Her, the poster girl for academia?
She looked down. He wore boots; she wore boots. He had on jeans; she had on jeans. Baseball caps topped their heads.
