Zeitgeist Read online

  At the tail end of the entourage would be Clark, the vice president of distribution. Clark was an organizational giant and, despite his advanced age, a relationship midget who was shy around women. Whenever Fiona caught him staring at her, which occurred frequently, he always looked away. Clark had never spoken directly to her.

  None of them—Daddy, Vince, Ted, or Clark—would speak to her, and she wouldn’t have spoken to them, not when she was in a sullen mood, as everyone must expect her to be, based upon what the woman had said about the volume of her argument with Daddy.

  Caught up in her thoughts, Fiona was startled to realize she’d walked as far as the glass doors, she was now through them, she was standing on the sidewalk and staring up at the pale blue, post-snow sky, waiting for her father’s plane to appear above. Only when she saw it would she continue onward to short-term parking.

  Tugging her scarf higher on her face so it concealed all of her nose, she waited. Had the woman boarded? Had they taken off with her? Or, as was more likely, would she feel a tap on her shoulder and turn to see Vince, a disapproving expression on his narrow, horse-like face while he told her Daddy was waiting?

  This would work. It had to work. For Chad’s sake.

  An involuntary smile teased her lips while anticipating the surprised look on Chad’s face when he opened the door and saw her standing there. He’d been disappointed when she’d told him she had to fly out this morning and would be gone for three days. “Can’t you get out of it?” he’d asked, those gorgeous eyes of his darkening with regret. She’d said no, but the seeds of his disappointment had borne fruit, a fruit brought to maturation by a strange woman with a strange request.

  As soon as Fiona left here, she’d drive to his hotel, showing up at his door unannounced and watching pleasure chase the clouds from those eyes. Maybe she should stop on the way and pick up something sexy to wear tonight. She could put it on in the car, stepping inside, removing her coat, and—

  There it was! Daddy’s plane, a royal blue dolphin skimming the light blue sky, flew into view. Fighting the brief twinge of guilt besetting her at having deceived a decent man, Fiona forced herself to remember the deed had been done for his own good. He would thank her when he returned home. Fiona began moving toward the crosswalk but stopped at the sound and feel of a concussive boom. She glanced up.

  Where the plane had once been hovered a fiery black-and-orange ball.

  Chapter 2

  That couldn’t be right.

  Fiona frowned at the sky, certain she’d misunderstood the message her brain had transmitted. Daddy’s plane hadn’t exploded. That was all wrong. Maybe someone else’s father had been on an exploding plane, but not hers.

  Maybe it hadn’t been an explosion at all. Maybe it had been some rare astronomical occurrence, like a solar eclipse. Or maybe one of those Air Force planes had exceeded the speed of sound and made a sonic boom. Yes, that’s what happened! A sonic boom with special effects. There must be an air show in town, like the Thunderbirds or the Blue Angels.

  Blue Angels. That would explain the color.

  If so, then why was everyone running? People raced around her and shoved past her, screaming, some trying to force their way into the terminal, others trying to force their way out, jamming the doors, pushing and jostling, shouting and shrieking. Somewhere, a child cried. Or was it a woman?

  She couldn’t be bothered with them, not right now. Right now it was imperative she comprehend what had happened. Fiona continued to frown at the sky.

  A man grabbed her and flung her back against the front terminal wall, shielding her with his body when plane pieces began to rain down. Later, she would realize he’d likely saved her life, a wing from Daddy’s private jet landing in the street in front of her. Not a whole wing, a piece of one, but it was a big piece. At least, she thought while squirming to look past the man’s shoulder, it looked like a wing, but who could tell anymore? It was blue, and it was twisted and blackened with what looked like soot.

  Fuselage. She’d heard the word before. Maybe it was fuselage.

  She wondered whether she was in shock. She felt cold, chilled to the bone. She reminded herself this was March in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the day after a heavy snow, with temperatures still in the low twenties. Feeling cold would be normal. Feeling hot would be odd. The man stepped back and asked whether she was okay. Even though his voice came from a thousand miles away, she managed to assure him she was fine.

  But she wasn’t. Not really. He gave her a searching look before walking away in pursuit of other people to save. A good Samaritan. Daddy could have used someone like him on the plane, his plane, the plane that had just blown up.

  A plane had blown up and it had been Daddy’s plane and he was dead.

  She frowned again. It was too much to process. Her head hurt from trying to understand. Like quadratic equations in a senior math class, she wasn’t getting this. What use would she ever have for quadratic equations? Or logarithms, for that matter? Cosines and tangents—what were those all about, anyway?

  Concentrate. This wasn’t like that at all. Focus.

  She needed to get away. She needed to find someplace quiet, someplace warm. There was too much screaming and hollering and panicking here for her to concentrate. Her gaze went to the tangled piece of black-streaked blue fuselage lying half on and half off a black-labeled yellow taxicab. She moved toward it, one cautious step at a time, approaching it as one might a tiger freed from its cage.

  Jostled from behind, she almost went down to her knees but managed to regain her balance by grasping the back of someone’s long overcoat, stumbling forward with him or her. The mob had made up its mind to escape in unification. No longer did the outward-bounds fight the inward-bounds. Everyone was now outward-bound and heading for the parking lots. It was move or be trampled as a rampant stream of humanity flowed to both sides of her, bumping her from this way and then that. Forced into motion, Fiona’s legs became two of the hundreds of legs belonging to one massive torrent fleeing the terminal, a tumultuous river of human limbs overlaid with a foam of bobbing heads.

  Fiona hoped they were flowing toward short-term parking. With difficulty, she marshalled her thoughts, digging through the woman’s purse and pulling out a parking stub while her feet continued to move like the good little mob participant she was. Once she tripped, and another good Samaritan, this time a woman, hauled her upward. Bouncing from one human to another, she studied the parking stub while floating on a crest that almost bore her past the car. Spotting the Massachusetts license plates in time, she made a valiant and violent effort to break free.

  She’d made it. She was standing by the black Impala. Still the child or woman cried. Could she be imagining it? The crowd passed at flood-crest velocity and she was digging through the woman’s purse for car keys and she shouldn’t still be able to hear the same child crying.

  Should she?

  And then she was sitting inside the woman’s car with the doors locked, and she was scooting down in the seat because she needed to understand what had happened, and she couldn’t do that with people spilling past, their shadowy forms mocking her through the frosted car windows. She was shaking. She held out a hand before her and watched it tremble. After several attempts at inserting the key into the ignition, she turned on the car, warming the engine, hoping to dispel the icy cold settling over her.

  And when understanding arose in a cruel and relentless assault on her psyche, when she finally knew and accepted what her brain had told her she’d seen, when she realized that, all along, she’d been the child she’d heard crying, Fiona lowered her face to her hands and succumbed to the grief treading the heels of awareness. Crying until she was dehydrated from the gallons of tears shed, tears spilling from between quivering fingers, Fiona rocked back and forth, a bobble-head crying machine.

  Several minutes later, she removed her hands from her face, staring down at her damp palms. Dry-eyed, every last tear spent, she sat back and struggled to come
to grips with the knowledge that she’d killed her father. The enormity of her crime engulfed her, suffocating her soul in a shroud of horror. She’d sent a terrorist onto her father’s plane and the terrorist blew up his plane with him on it and Fiona was responsible. Not only was he dead, the man she loved so much, but he’d died at her hands.

  She struggled to recall her last words to him. She couldn’t be certain, and she hoped she was wrong, but she thought she’d told him she hated him. Had she? Could she? She never had before, no matter how frustrated he made her. Was she thinking she had because she wanted to exacerbate her sense of wrongdoing, to lacerate herself with a false memory?

  She felt tired. She’d never felt this tired in her life. Fiona stared through the thin layer of ice remaining on the windshield, her head wobbling to one side, wishing she’d been on the plane, wishing her father hadn’t been on the plane. There was nothing she could do, not now. There were no do-overs after death.

  She’d been through this when Mommy died, wishing she’d gone with her that day as planned instead of insisting on joining her friends at the Mall of America. If she’d been with her, Mommy never would have been in a car accident. She’d still be alive. Wishing a different outcome didn’t help. She knew this.

  There would be no do-over this time either, no going back to the restroom and telling that horrible woman what she could do with her plan, no grabbing her by the throat and slowly strangling her to death. She wanted to watch her die. She wanted to watch the light leave those sharp brown eyes. Knowing she was dead wasn’t enough. She wanted to be responsible for the woman’s death, much as the woman had been responsible for her father’s death.

  Jolted out of her lassitude by the ferocity of her thoughts, Fiona glanced around, surprised to see how few cars remained. She was one of only three cars left in this row. The rest had fled. She needed to flee, too, but not, as planned, to Chad. She needed to find Whitley. She needed her brother. Whitley would know what to do. He always did.

  They weren’t close in age, Whitley having been born ten years before her, but he possessed a comforting solidity, a no-nonsense demeanor making him the perfect older brother for an often volatile little sister. All her life, from the time she’d learned to talk, Fiona had turned to Whitley in troubling times. Unlike Daddy, Whitley didn’t believe problems could be resolved with a hug or a kiss or a trip to the zoo. He listened, really listened, and she told him everything. Before anyone else, she’d told him about her first crush, the time she’d been caught shoplifting and let go by an understanding store clerk, the dent she’d put in Daddy’s new Porsche, and every man she’d ever loved and subsequently fallen out of love with.

  Whitley listened. He didn’t judge. Sometimes, he didn’t even speak, merely serving as a sounding board, allowing her to sort out her own difficulties by hearing them spoken out loud.

  It occurred to her he must be shattered now, too. Fiona kicked herself for being so self-absorbed. She wasn’t the only one to have lost a father. Whitley. Poor Whitley.

  She must get to him. She needed to tell him what she’d done. He’d contact the proper authorities. She needed to let the law know who’d killed her father and three others, four others, counting the pilot. Daddy, Vince, Clark, Ted, and the pilot—their blood was on Fiona’s hands. It didn’t matter that the strange woman, a suicide-bomber, had done the deed; Fiona had facilitated the deed by going along with the switch.

  She wondered whether she’d go to jail. She deserved incarceration. No, she deserved worse. She deserved the same death penalty she’d given her father.

  Fiona dragged the purse onto her lap and searched for her driver’s license. She should know who she was in case she was pulled over. Flipping open the pocketbook, she studied the face, hating the face, but determined to learn the name. Valencia McDermott. A good Irish or Scottish name for a woman who looked Native American or Spanish. Now Fiona’s name, a woman who looked Indian or Pakistani. Valencia had been much older than Fiona at thirty-two. The extra thirteen years had no doubt been spent committing one evil crime or another.

  How many others had this supposed anthropologist killed? How did a woman who studied human beings and evolution and cultures become a mass murderer? What events had shaped her into a suicide-bomber?

  After using the windshield wipers to scrape the remaining slivers of ice from the windshield, Fiona backed from the parking slot and exited the garage, stopping when she encountered the double line of vehicles with like-minded drivers. Everyone wanted to flee the scene of her crime. In the distance, she could see road blocks with blue flashing lights, and when she drew nearer, she could see each car being inspected before being waved through. German shepherds wearing cunning little black vests were sniffing trunks and backseats and, when their handlers weren’t watching, each other’s bottoms.

  Fiona panicked. She should have waited longer. She should have left under the cover of darkness. No, darkness would have done her no good, not with those dogs. If Valencia had carried the bomb in this car, then the vehicle was bound to smell of explosives. Darting her gaze from left to right, Fiona sought a means of egress, of jumping the line and turning around, but there was no escape. Hemmed in by a concrete guardrail on one side and a second line of vehicles on the other, she must accept her fate. She could call Whitley from jail. She should be given one phone call.

  Or would she? She wondered whether suspected terrorists received a phone call. Didn’t they automatically ship them to Guantanamo Bay? It didn’t matter. She deserved it. She didn’t care. Her selfishness had killed her father. She loved her father.

  Fiona recoiled at the sound of the tapping on the window. She rolled down the window, looking up in resignation at the police officer staring down at her, his sharp eyes the only expressive feature in an otherwise wooden countenance.

  “Ma’am, may I see some identification?”

  “Of course.” She handed him Valencia’s driver’s license.

  Using the thumb of one hand to press the license against the clipboard he held, he scrawled something, probably Valencia’s name, before passing the license back. “I’ll need you to open the trunk and unlock the back doors.”

  While popping the trunk and door locks, Fiona cast surreptitious glances from right to left. There was no hope for escape. She couldn’t run. She wouldn’t get ten feet away, not in this crowd of law enforcement officials wearing the uniforms of at least three different agencies. And those German shepherds with their adorable vests didn’t look all that cute up close. They looked toothy and eager to do their jobs, less “good doggie” and more the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood.”

  She flinched at the sound of the trunk lid being slammed down and gave two minor flinches, more reflexive twinges, at the sound of the back doors being closed. “On your way, ma’am,” the policeman said. “And drive carefully.”

  Fiona smiled at him while pulling away and was assailed by a sense of injustice. She shouldn’t be allowed to drive away, much less smile while doing it. She was responsible for the deaths of five people and one monster. Drive carefully? Why did that even matter anymore?

  So she couldn’t kill anyone else, that’s why.

  Whitley. She must get to Whitley. She widened her eyes at the realization that her brother thought she’d been on the airplane. He’d be doubly devastated. He thought he’d lost more than a father. He thought he’d lost his entire family.

  Chapter 3

  Fiona parked the car a half-mile from home in the hopes of avoiding the notice of patrolling police cars. Saint Paul’s finest were out in full force today in her neighborhood, probably because of the attack against her father.

  On any other day, Fiona would have enjoyed nothing more than a winter’s stroll through Saint Paul’s famous West Summit Hill Historic District, with its stately white-capped Victorian mansions erupting from expansive lawns sparkling beneath six inches of pristine, diamond-studded snow. Normally, she relished her sense of belonging to a community tracing its roots to
Saint Paul’s earliest days, when it serviced as many as a thousand steamboats bearing westward-bound emigrants and thus earning it the name “The Last City of the East.”

  Today, she crept past homes she’d visited as a child on Halloweens past, garbed as a maharani in a traditional Maharashtra saree, its satiny folds whispering her approach up long, white sidewalks. Today, instead of a proud maharani with her head held high, Fiona skulked down freshly shoveled concrete, a humbled woman with her head ducked low, her parka hood up, a scarf high on her face, and her hands thrust deeply into her pockets. The difference between then and now exemplified the difference between the Fiona who’d slipped from Chad’s hotel room this morning and the Fiona who’d driven from the airport over an hour later.

  Skulking felt an alien act to a poised woman accustomed to facing problems head-on. She wanted to walk openly, as she once had, but the secret she bore was too large to share with anyone but Whitley. Whitley would know what to do. Her brother would have an answer to the question now plaguing her: Why had Valencia McDermott wanted to kill her father? As far as she knew, Daddy had never received so much as a death threat.

  Would he have told her if he had? Would she have listened or even cared?

  In the past hour, Fiona had traveled more than mere miles, looking back on the type of daughter she’d been to a man she’d loved and taken for granted. Lately, Daddy had become a forbidding authority figure, a man determined to spoil her good time for unfathomable reasons. Now, having contributed to his death, she looked beyond the past two years of teenage rebellion, remembering the man who’d taken time from his busy schedule to sip pretend tea with her and her dolls, who’d marched into her second-grade classroom and taken her teacher to task for having unjustly accused her of cheating, and who’d buried her dog in the back yard, saying a prayer over him and holding her while she cried.