Page 40 of South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5)

40.

“Mommy, what was that?”

The answer was: a gunshot.

But Dorion Shaw said, “I don’t know.”

And gave no visible reaction, though she was of course troubled by the sound. She was presently FaceTiming with her eldest daughter, Rebecca.

Back to the problem at hand. “It has to be somewhere. It can’t have vanished. That is physically impossible,” she said to the eleven-year-old.

Rebecca had misplaced her drawing tablet, and Dorion was presenting her case, which was based on the laws of the physical world, as well as personal knowledge of the facts of the situation.

Logic.

It was how Dorion ran her life.

How every Shaw sibling ran their lives.

“But I can’t find it!” the girl’s voice implored.

“The sunporch.”

“I looked.”

Dorion was standing beside her brother’s Winnebago, umbrella in one hand and iPhone in the other.

What was the gunshot?

She looked down to the command post tents.

On the small screen was the small face, brows knotted in worry.

She said to Rebecca, “The porch was the last place you were playing with it. Last night. I saw you.”

Digital art was Rebecca’s preference. She excelled in all media but Dorion and William were exceedingly grateful that she preferred the sort that did not leave pastel chalk dust or linseed oil and turpentine scents throughout the house.

When they’d FaceTimed last night, the girl had showed her mother a piece she was working on that had more than a little Picasso in it—angular people, angular pets. The distortion was intentional (if pressed, the girl could do a portrait in colored pencil that approached photorealism).

Becca had been in the family’s sunroom. Dorion had praised the work, told her to put the device away—it was bedtime—and to pick a story for Mommy to read. Her sister, Mary, summoned, they’d curled up in bed and listened to some Dr. Seuss. Dorion admittedly had poor performance skills when it came to prose narration—especially the different character voices, which the girls still liked—but she could hold her own with children’s verse.

After several encores, they’d handed the phone over to her husband. Their children had a bedtime pardon while the parents conversed, then it was lights-out for everybody, William included, as the three of them were on East Coast time.

Just moments ago, her phone had given a FaceTime chime. Those who had children and those who had their own businesses always answered their phones. Dorion fit both descriptions.

The girl now claimed that no magical conditions existed that would result in the wizardly disappearance of the tablet but the search her mother sent her on was proving futile.

“If Uncle Colter was here, he’d find it.”

The daughters of two engineers with a slurry of degrees between them, both daughters were heirs to their mother’s nickname within the Shaw family, the Clever One. They were aware of what their uncle did for a living and when he visited would often ask him about his business of seeking rewards. (Thank God, she and William agreed, they did not know what their older uncle did—a man who looked and behaved like the clandestine military operative that he was. That day would come. Rebecca was already asking about conflict zones and had recently queried, “What does ‘weaponizing food’ mean?”)

Then her eldest brought a smile to her mother’s face by adding, “I’d offer a reward.”

Thinking of her brother, she crooked her umbrella between chin and shoulder and dug out her other phone. No message from him. He was going to look for that woman whose fiancé had reported her missing.

“What’s that noise, Mommy? Like a bathtub.”

She reversed the camera on her iPhone to the back lens and aimed at the levee, over which the Never Summer spewed like an open Washington, D.C., fire hydrant on an August day.

“Oh! That’s awesome! Are you going swimming?”

“It’s a little cold.”

Both girls loved the pool at the neighborhood rec center and Mary was taking lessons. At eight years old, she was built like a swimmer, had good technique and a competitive edge. Dorion and her husband were pleased that she took to this particular sport, which did not involve body slamming or large blunt objects being swung or pitched toward heads.

Then she heard some words on the other end of the line, growing heated. Rebecca had to move the phone so that her mother couldn’t see what was transpiring.

Some shouting.

Dorion had learned not to be alarmed. Children were little geopolitical centers and conflicts arose and vanished. And growing up in the Shaw household rearranged your priorities and concerns in a big way.

“Mare took it,” Rebecca announced.

“You said I could!”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Last week. You said!”

“Did not!”

Dorion told Rebecca to be forgiving and told Mary that permissions were not indefinite—and taught her what the word meant.

Détente ensued, though it did not rise to the level of the girls working together on the tablet to “draw a picture for Mommy,” as she had suggested.

Then they both got tired of the dispute and said they were going to go play Stardew Valley .

Her husband came on the line. William Sharpe might have been a leading man, with trimmed black hair, a square face and endlessly dark eyes. “Hey. How’s it going?”

She gave him a rundown of the levee collapse case, adding that her brother had found evidence of sabotage.

“My God…”

He would understandably be concerned, but it was not in Dorion’s nature—or any of the Shaws’, for that matter—to avoid the truth about their professions. (As for personally? A different story. She thought grimly of her secret half-sister, Margaret.)

“Any ETA?” William asked. He worked as an infrastructure engineer mostly from home, so Dorion was free to grab one of her go-bags and jet off to a disaster site at any time, with no need for major parental schedule juggling. He was not only an expert at the esoteric discipline of applying the “wisdom of crowds” to solving engineering problems…he was far better at cooking and cleaning and laundry than Dorion would ever be.

She was just telling him that she had no way of knowing if the levee was still at risk when she stopped speaking, as her phone pinged with a text from Debi Starr.

It began:

Need you. County medical center. ER.

“I have to go love you.” All one word.

And she disconnected without waiting to hear her husband’s own words of farewell.