then half-walking, half-crawling to a bed. Drinking something hot, nasty tasting. My last conscious image was of Bear, anxiously licking my face.
52
Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch
Murray was lying between life and death at the University of Chicago hospital. Lotty had sent me text after text. Mr. Contreras had phoned a dozen times, and there were messages as well from Sergeant Pizzello. Cassie didn’t have Wi-Fi or cell service. I saw the messages only after I was in the Mustang on my way east.
After a night and a day of Cassie’s unguents and potions, I was not healed but I was well enough to leave, and everyone agreed it was high time I was gone.
Franklin Alsop put it baldly: “Warshawski, I believe you mean nothing but good, but your good creates burnt offerings in the world. I know you came down here hoping to sort out Lydia’s and Coop’s problems, but you brought ravening hyenas with you. And I’m not sure what you found out, except that someone doesn’t like you and is going to a lot of trouble to prove it. If people think there’s any chance you’re hiding at Cassie’s, they’ll come looking and then it won’t just be you with a bullet, but Cassie and Lydia, too.”
Cassie didn’t think my hands had healed enough to drive to Chicago, but she agreed with Alsop: if people were hunting me, they’d run me to earth sooner rather than later. Literally run me to earth at her dugout.
I didn’t argue the point. Lydia was starting to walk around the house and to spend time on the flagstones outside Cassie’s door, with Bear as her constant companion. It was hard to know, looking at the sky, whether hawks or drones were circling overhead. Nothing I’d learned in Salina or Horsethief Canyon explained why someone would work that hard to find Lydia, but best not tempt fate.
Lydia still wasn’t speaking, but when she encountered me in the big room late in the afternoon, when I was drinking a last herbal brew, she knew—maybe not who I was, but the context where we’d met. She was agitated, making small chirping noises. Alsop thought she felt me as a threat and started to bustle me out the door, but Lydia shook her head, pointed at me, then at the ground.
I was bewildered, but I sat, and then she sat, cross-legged. Her eyes were shut and she began to produce a hoarse crooning sound. She made the swanlike gesture with her arms that I’d witnessed when I found her in her hole in the ground.
“I think she misses her music,” I said. “I think she wants her piano. Can you find one for her in Salina?”
“We can’t carry a piano out here,” Alsop said.
“She played on a toy model, which disappeared when she ran away from the TV cameras in Chicago. Hopefully some store in Salina will have one.”
Cassie clapped her hands with delight. “That’s a splendid idea. Franklin, can you go over tomorrow to look for one?”
Alsop made a mock bow. “When three women all want the same thing, what can I do but say yes.”
The atmosphere around me lightened for the rest of my short stay. Cassie urged me to take a nap. It was close to eleven when she roused me. The Clarina Prairie was shrouded in a darkness so complete it felt like a physical weight as I once again followed Alsop through the high grasses.
Alsop had moved my car into an abandoned barn in the Black Wolf region. When he led me to it, he adjured me not to reconnect with my smartphone until I was on the far side of Salina: if someone was tracking my GPS, they’d be less likely to trace me to Cassie.
“I still need to talk to Coop,” I said, before getting into the car. “He is the one person Lydia may have talked to, to explain what she had learned from Hector before he was killed.”
“I told you before—”
“Yes, even if you knew how to reach him you wouldn’t let me know. If he gets in touch, let him be the one to decide. If Lydia confided in anyone, it would be Coop. And despite what you think of me and my work, knowing what secrets she’s harboring will make it possible for me to create a place of safety for her in the world.”
He frowned; he didn’t like it. I guess, even though he’d saved my life, he didn’t like me. But he thought