Sarah Armstrong - 01 - Singularity (5 page)

The horse shook its head, its snow-white mane flying, and I thought about shouting for Maggie. Instead, I hurried back into the garage and grabbed a bucket, then dunked it in the yellow oat can. By the time I’d reached the back door, Emma Lou was happily munching.

The truth is that the Rocking Horse Stables has seen better days. The grass and shrubs are overgrown, and there’s no way the place will ever make
Rancher’s Digest
. It’s a hodgepodge of additions tacked onto a dilapidated two-bedroom cabin. The whole thing’s covered with rough cedar seasoned battleship-gray. But it’s home, and it’s convenient, on the outskirts of Tomball, a once Podunk town that’s in the process of being swallowed up by the city. Mom and Dad bought the place when I was a kid, and I grew up here, riding horses and raising 4-H hogs. After Bill died, I brought Maggie and moved back in. Pop had passed on years ago, and Mom was alone. The place is only half an hour’s drive from my Houston office, and I figured we could all do with having more family around.

“Well, you took your time,” Mom chastised when I swung open the screen door. I’d been able to smell the cookies from the porch, sheets of saucer-sized oatmeal-raisin cookies that covered the counter.

“I had something I had to finish,” I said, reaching for one. “And I fed Emma Lou.”

“I would have done it,” Maggie protested.

“Magpie, it’s after ten,” I said. “You need to—”

“That horse has to be starved by now,” Mom scolded, and Maggie groaned.

Mom’s bushy white hair was pulled back in a scarf. Dressed in a pink sweatsuit with hand-painted tulips on the front, she looked the
consummate grandmother, which she is. Actually, she’s a professional. Along with running the ranch, Mom has a second business and a second name, Mother Adams, as in “Mother Adams’s Cheesecakes.” She sells her baked goods to caterers and the city’s fancy restaurants. Her real name is Nora Potts. “Mother Potts’s Cheesecakes” just didn’t have the same panache.

At five-foot-six, I weigh a hundred and thirty pounds, not bad, but I’ve got the hips of a woman ten pounds heavier, a deformity I blame on my mother’s talent with an oven. Still, since Mom went pro, she usually only bakes professionally. When she takes out the mixer for Maggie and me, it’s not good news.

“Sarah Jane Potts,” Mom chirped, clicking her teeth, a habit that since childhood has crawled up my spine like spider feet. “You’ve kept us waiting all morning. You get maybe two weekends off a month. Couldn’t you save those days for family?”

“Armstrong,” I reminded her, not bothering to again justify my tardiness. Nothing changes. Even if I’m a cop with a gun and a badge out on the street, in Mom’s kitchen I’m still a kid. “The name’s Sarah Armstrong.”

“Gram, you know that,” Maggie agreed, dipping a still-warm cookie in a tumbler of milk. “It’s Armstrong just like mine and Dad’s. Why do you always do that?”

“Well, of course it is, baby,” Mom said, wrapping her arms around Maggie’s shoulders. “Gram’s old. Sometimes she just forgets.”

I didn’t buy a word of it. Mom loved Bill, but she blamed him for luring me into law enforcement. A daughter who investigates brutal murders doesn’t give a sixty-six-year-old woman much peace of mind.

Looking back, Bill Armstrong had been the center of my life for nearly two decades. We met in college, and married the year I graduated. He was a third-generation Texas Ranger, and he coaxed me away from my textbooks with tales he’d heard as a kid, stories about
rangers with colorful nicknames like Big Foot, Three-legged Williamson, Lonewolf, and Senior Ranger Captain John “Rip” Ford, who earned his middle name during Texas’s bloody war for independence from Mexico. At first, Ford signed condolence letters to the families of fallen soldiers “rest in peace.” Weighed down by the sheer volume, he settled on RIR Those were the bad old days, when rangers ran roughshod over Texas, capturing train and bank robbers, simmering down blood feuds, corralling cattle thieves and rum runners, and holding off lynch mobs.

Personally, I’ve never been drawn to sepia photos of sour-looking men in handlebar mustaches and cowboy hats. I am, however, fascinated by the human mind. As soon as Bill brought his first case file home, I was hooked.

“So,” I asked, grabbing one of Maggie’s ponytail ties off the counter and looping it around a fistful of my dark straw-colored hair. “You two ready? I am. Just need to grab my purse and the car keys.”

“You bet,” Maggie said, her face breaking into an ear-to-ear grin. “And Strings is, too. We can pick him up on the way.”

“Ah, that’s my girl,” I said. “Then, Magpie, we’re off.”

I planted the second kiss of the morning on her head, thinking how with her shaggy black hair and hazel eyes she looked like Bill. She even had his build, lean, and with adolescence she’d developed that awkward lankiness kids share with puppies, the stage when their arms and legs appear only vaguely connected to their bodies.

At that point, I noticed Mom staring into the oven.

“Well, just a minute,” she said, her face flushed red from the heat. “I want to finish the last of this cookie dough. One more batch, and I can take off this apron and we’ll go.”

I gave her one of my quizzical looks, the kind I use when I’ve backed a suspect into a corner. “Guess I’m not the one holding up the works then, Mom. It looks like you are!”

Mom frowned and looked flustered. For a moment she was at a loss for words. “Sarah, just get your coat.” She sighed, realizing she’d lost. “I’ll put the dough in the fridge for later.”

“I don’t think dinosaurs are really extinct,” Strings said, with his usual certainty. “They’re alive on some island somewhere, not grown outta that DNA stuff like in
Jurassic Park
, but just alive, ‘cause they never all died.”

Maggie’s best friend, Strings, aka Frederick Allen Jacobs, Jr., was four-feet-ten-inches tall and bespectacled in wire-rimmed glasses. Strings’s dad, the Reverend Fred, preaches at Mount Zion African, an old, steepled church tucked into the woods not far from the ranch. The church and the shrinking community surrounding it are all that’s left of Libertyville, a once thriving black settlement that dates back to Reconstruction. On Sunday mornings, Alba Jacobs, a tall, elegant woman, wearing bright caftans with matching turbans, leads the choir, and even Mom has admitted that Alba makes the best buttermilk pie in the county. Gifted with his dad’s flair and his mother’s love of music, Strings plays a mean acoustic guitar, which explains his nickname.

All four of us, Maggie, Strings, Mom, and I, had just spent three hours touring the Natural Science Museum, especially a visiting dinosaur exhibit, and sat resting our feet and eating McDonald’s hamburgers in the cafeteria. Half the display detailed the dinosaurs’ extinction. It was vintage Strings to now insist he knew better.

“That’s really dumb,” countered Maggie, ketchup dripping from her bun. “How come no one’s seen them?”

“‘Cause they’re in a place that nobody’s been, that’s why. There are places like that, islands, aren’t there Mrs. A?” he said, nodding, apparently in hopes that I’d nod along. “I watched a show like that
on the Discovery Channel with my dad, about how some fish everyone thought was extinct wasn’t. Some guy caught one.”

“Now, that’s
really
dumb.” Maggie frowned, pointing a french fry like a bony finger just inches from her friend’s face. “Fish are small. Dinosaurs are huge. How would the whole world miss seeing them?”

“Margaret, it isn’t nice to say Frederick is dumb,” scolded my mother.

“Actually, someone did catch a fish that was supposed to be extinct,” I said, rewarded by a grin so wide it nearly split Strings’s face in two.

“Okay, a fish I understand. Like I said. But dinosaurs?” my ever-pragmatic daughter challenged.

“Well,” I admitted. “Maybe Strings isn’t right about the dinosaurs, but…”

“Geez, Mrs. A,” Strings protested. “How can anyone know for sure? I mean, really know for sure? In Africa, there are still whole tribes who have never seen a white man.”

“Strings does have a point, Maggie,” I said, to which my daughter and my mother shook their heads in unison, as if certain they were dealing with the reality challenged.

At home, I checked in with the office. No news on the Lucas case. It was a cool spring late-afternoon, so I moved Maggie’s telescope out of the way, the one Bill and I bought her the Christmas before he died, and Mom and I plunked down in the porch rockers to watch Maggie and Strings in the corral with Emma Lou. The air smelled sweet, filled with the heavy scent of the yellow jasmine climbing the porch railing. Maggie wielded a brush on one side of the filly, working on her coat, while on the other side Strings used his fingers to detangle her mane. Tied to a post, Emma Lou shifted
back and forth, shuffling left and right, while the kids stepped gingerly to stay out of her way. It looked like a dance of sorts, the horse in the lead.

“I miss your father and Bill,” Mom said, suddenly melancholy. “How they would love to see Maggie as she is now, growing up so fast.”

Caught up in the moment, the two kids nearby jabbering about Strings’s dinosaur theory, the peaceful country evening, I was surrounded by the warmth of family. Yet without Bill, everything felt odd, more remote. Even home.

“Yeah” was all I could muster.

As they had throughout the past year, the tears quickly welled in my eyes. Any thought of Bill’s death did that to me. So I did the only thing I could, and I tried not to think of it. Still, on this particular afternoon, it was there, so close I could touch it, and too painful to deny. There was something I’d been wondering. “Mom, do you think there’s a heaven?”

“Of course there is,” she said, frowning.

“How can you be so sure?” I asked.

She paused for a moment, deep in thought. “How could there not be a hereafter?” she asked. “Think about how strong love is, your love of Bill, the way you love Maggie. How can anything that powerful simply disappear?”

Although I understood any theory on life after death was necessarily unproven, the truth was that I longed for something concrete, something to hold on to. Yet, if nothing else, Mom’s words were comforting.

“Do you think Bill and Dad are close enough to watch over us? To know what’s going on in our lives?”

Mom sat back and rocked, mulling over her answer.

“Maybe. I hope so. When your father died, at first I felt so alone. But as time passes, I’ve grown to feel he’s with me.” She chuckled,
and then admitted, “Sometimes I even talk to him, out loud. But don’t worry. So far, I haven’t heard him talking back.”

I nodded at her, but by then I was barely listening, only thinking of Bill and how much I wanted to believe he was close.

If something happened to Bill or Maggie, I’d always figured I’d somehow know, as Priscilla Lucas said she had known with her husband, some kind of premonition. But when Bill died, I didn’t have a clue until the captain showed up at our front door. And as much as I wanted to, as much as I prayed to, I haven’t felt Bill’s presence for even a moment since. As far as I could tell, at the instant he died, Bill left us, and Maggie and I were alone. Part of me did believe in heaven, but the way I felt, it had to be many worlds away.

“I wonder sometimes what it’s like, up there,” Mom said. She held up her hands. They were thickening at the joints from arthritis. “I wonder about little things like hot water. It feels so good on my hands, takes the pain away. I wonder if they have hot water in heaven, to ease the pain in these old hands.”

“But if it’s heaven, there’s no pain,” I said, looking at the grooves in my mother’s weathered face.
When had she aged so?
I wondered. Time had passed so quickly, I hadn’t noticed.

Wrapped up in our conversation, Mom and I had stopped watching Maggie and Strings. I didn’t realize she’d left the corral and walked toward the house.

“Where are they then? Where’s heaven?” Maggie shouted. She held Emma Lou’s brush in her hand, and her eyes were filled with tears. “I’ve looked through my telescope at the stars, and I don’t see my dad or Grandpa. The astronauts have been to the moon and back and didn’t find heaven. We’ve even sent satellites to Mars. No one’s found heaven. Have they?”

“Oh, Magpie,” I said, sorry that I’d brought it up. “Please, don’t…”

“You sound like Strings. The dinosaurs are extinct, Mom. Dad
and Grandpa are dead,” Maggie said, sounding as sure as she was of the answers to last week’s algebra test. “There is no heaven. People die and we never see them again.”

I got up and walked over to her. Strings looked like he wasn’t sure what to do. He was pulling on Emma Lou’s mane so hard the horse was rolling her long, thin head away from him. “My dad says if you believe in God you have to believe in heaven and hell. That a God who loves us would never—” Strings started, but Maggie sent him a chill warning glance and he stopped talking.

“Strings, would you go inside and wait for Maggie? I think we need to talk alone,” I said.

He looked at me, again at Maggie, and then did as I’d ordered, but all the while he walked toward the house, the boy kept glancing back over his shoulder at us.

Once Strings was inside, I put my arms around my daughter and held her tight. “Maggie, I don’t know where Dad is. I don’t know where heaven is. I miss him, too,” I said. Then, despite my own doubts, I had to give her hope. I had to give her something to hold on to. “Maybe sometimes we have to believe in what we can’t see. Maybe we have to trust that even if we don’t know what’s best, God does.”

It sounded odd for me to be talking about God. Unlike Strings and his family, Mom and I aren’t churchy people. But that didn’t mean that at my core I didn’t believe someone, somewhere was in charge. I’d seen the worst men could do. Yet deep down, where I know the things I can’t explain, is a conviction that as chaotic and evil as this world can be, there is a powerful good, something that challenges us to love and care for one another.

“If there was a God, Dad would be here with us,” Maggie said, no longer crying. She pulled away from me, looking sad and small and determined. I reached out to her, but she ran toward the house. Before I could follow, Mom grabbed my arm.