All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 131

131

Saint did not leave her apartment for two weeks. She checked in with Himes and told him she was tracking the pirate. She listened to hours of interviews, pored over transcripts and tapes from her grandmother’s answering machine, and plotted his route like there was some kind of method in reams of madness. She ate little, slept on the sofa, took comfort in Patch’s voice as she shut out all the light and cranked the volume on the small stereo beside the television.

“She told me about the sky at Baldy Point, how Lake Altus-Lugert spills from the dam, crashing its way along the Fork Red River.”

“You think she’s from that way?”

“I just know that she saw it. She knew places I never heard of. How could I know this if she wasn’t real?”

Saint brought her knees to her chest and took her pen and marked the spot in Oklahoma on her map.

“She told me how the sun sits on Fort Sumter before dropping into the Charleston Harbor. In White Point Garden you can smell peach and violet.

You know it’s haunted, right? They hung thirty pirates in the marsh beside it. Stede Bonnet. She even knew more about pirates than me.”

Saint marked that point in South Carolina.

She ate cans of soup. Did not let the sun in at all. Just broke from herself and moved into his world so she did not have to face her own.

Forty hours. She was back there, her mind in Monta Clare, Patch fourteen again.

“She made it so I could see the mining villages, those elegant Victorian buildings. I could hear the stampede of bison, see the view from the mile-

high step at the state capitol.”

Saint marked Denver.

For another five days she sifted the crumbs of Joseph Macauley’s memory, listened to talk of Cottonwood Falls to New York City, New England to Montana. She marked the map and drew her routes.

And then, thirteen days after she’d begun, she listened to the final tape, checked it against where he’d mailed the last girl from, and drew her circle in bold red.

“She told me you could see more of the universe over Tucson. The Pima County dark sky code…Kitt Peak, it made us feel smaller, you know. You don’t know. You don’t know shit because you’re looking at me like I’m some crazy kid when you should be out there finding her.”

They had thought his order random.

She paced a little, and then she picked up the telephone and called Himes.

“The pirate. He’s seeing what the girl saw. I think I know where he’s headed next.”

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