experts to guide them. Perfectly safe, everyone said. Absolutely, perfectly safe. So what the fuck went wrong?”
Tina could no longer sit still. She got up and began to pace, taking another swallow of cognac.
Elliot said nothing. He seemed to know that she had to go through the whole story to get it off her mind.
“Something sure as hell went wrong,” she said. “Somehow, for some reason, they drove the bus more than four miles off the main highway, four miles off and a hell of a long way up, right up to the damn clouds. They drove up a steep, abandoned logging trail, a deteriorated dirt road so treacherous, so choked with snow, so icy that only a fool would have attempted to negotiate it any way but on foot.”
The bus had run off the road. There were no guardrails in the wilderness, no wide shoulders at the roadside with gentle slopes beyond. The vehicle skidded, then dropped a hundred feet straight onto rocks. The fuel tank exploded. The bus opened like a tin can and rolled another hundred feet into the trees.
“The kids . . . everyone . . . killed.” The bitterness in her voice dismayed her because it revealed how little she had healed. “Why? Why did a man like Bill Jaborski do something so stupid as that?”
Still sitting on the couch, Elliot shook his head and stared down at his cognac.
She didn’t expect him to answer. She wasn’t actually asking the question of him; if she was asking anyone, she was asking God.
“Why? Jaborski was the best. The very best. He was so good that he could safely take young boys into the Sierras for sixteen years, a challenge a lot of other winter survival experts wouldn’t touch. Bill Jaborski was smart, tough, clever, and filled with respect for the danger in what he did. He wasn’t foolhardy. Why would he do something so dumb, so reckless, as to drive that far along that road in those conditions?”
Elliot looked up at her. Kindness marked his eyes, a deep sympathy. “You’ll probably never learn the answer. I understand how hard it must be never to know why.”
“Hard,” she said. “Very hard.” She returned to the couch.
He took her glass out of her hand. It was empty. She didn’t remember finishing her cognac. He went to the bar.
“No more for me,” she said. “I don’t want to get drunk.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “In your condition, throwing off all that nervous energy the way you are, two small brandies won’t affect you in the slightest.”
He returned from the bar with more Rémy Martin. This time she was able to hold the glass in one hand.
“Thank you, Elliot.”
“Just don’t ask for a mixed drink,” he said. “I’m the world’s worst bartender. I can pour anything straight or over ice, but I can’t even mix vodka and orange juice properly.”
“I wasn’t thanking you for the drink. I was thanking you for … being a good listener.” “Most attorneys talk too much.”
For a moment they sat in silence, sipping cognac. Tina was still tense, but she no longer felt cold inside.
Elliot said, “Losing a child like that . . . devastating. But it wasn’t any recollection of your son that had you so upset when I walked in a little while ago.”
“In a way it was.”
“But something more.”
She told him about the bizarre things that had been happening to her lately: the messages on Danny’s chalkboard; the wreckage she’d found in the boy’s room; the hateful, taunting words that appeared in the computer lists and on the monitor.
Elliot studied the printouts, and together they examined the computer in Angela’s office. They plugged it in and tried to get it to repeat what it had done earlier, but they had no luck; the machine behaved exactly as it was meant to behave.
“Someone could have programmed it to spew out this stuff about Danny,” Elliot said. “But I don’t see how he could make the terminal switch itself on.”
“It happened,” she said.
“I don’t doubt you. I just don’t understand.” “And the air … so cold . . .”
“Could the temperature change have been subjective?” Tina frowned. “Are you asking me if I imagined it?” “You were frightened—”
“But I’m sure I didn’t imagine it. Angela felt the chill first, when she got the initial printout with those lines about Danny. It isn’t likely Angela and I both just imagined it.” “True.” He stared thoughtfully at the computer. “Come on.”
“Where?”
“Back in your office. I left my drink there. Need to lubricate my thoughts.” She followed him into the wood-paneled inner sanctum.
He picked up his brandy snifter from the low table in front of the sofa, and he sat on the edge of her desk. “Who? Who could be doing it to you?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
“You must have somebody in mind.” “I wish I did.”
“Obviously, it’s somebody who at the very least dislikes you, if he doesn’t actually hate you. Someone who wants you to suffer. He blames you for Danny’s death . . . and it’s apparently a personal loss to him, so it can hardly be a stranger.”
Tina was disturbed by his analysis because it matched her own, and it led her into the same blind alley that she’d traveled before. She paced between the desk and the drapery- covered windows. “This afternoon I decided it has to be a stranger. I can’t think of anyone I know who’d be capable of this sort of thing even if they did hate me enough to contemplate it. And I don’t know of anyone but Michael who places any of the blame for Danny’s death on me.”
Elliot raised his eyebrows. “Michael’s your ex-husband?” “Yes,”
“And he blames you for Danny’s death?”
“He says I never should have let him go with Jaborski. But this isn’t Michael’s dirty work.”
“He sounds like an excellent candidate to me.” “No.”
“Are you certain?”
“Absolutely. It’s someone else.”
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