Page 54 of The Oligarch's Daughter

On his second morning in Derryfield, five years ago, he sat at the counter of the Starlite Diner inhaling the tantalizing aromas of coffee and maple syrup and bacon, and ordered breakfast. Two eggs over hard, bacon, wheat toast, and coffee.

“Okay, honey,” said the waitress, a tall, slender woman with short black hair and heavy eye shadow. “Coming right up.” She poured coffee into a mug.

“Thanks, Fran,” Grant said. Her name was engraved on a black plastic nameplate on her pale-blue uniform.

The short-order cook was fast. Fran brought Grant’s plate of food not more than three minutes later. The diner was mostly empty, five or six people eating at tables. It was six thirty in the morning. Fran looked around but didn’t move from where she was standing across the counter from him.

“Visiting?” she asked.

Grant finished chewing a mouthful of egg. He shook his head until he was able to speak. “Just moved here.”

“Oh, yeah?” She sounded genuinely delighted. “Welcome.”

“Thanks.”

“What brings you to town?”

He paused for just a moment. “A job,” he said.

The Starlite Diner was slowly filling up.

“What’s your job?” Fran asked.

“Helping out John Casey, the boatbuilder.”

“Oh, yeah? He comes in here pretty often. Dinner, mostly.” She turned, glass coffee carafe in hand, and greeted a woman who had just sat down at the counter next to him, the only available place left. “Morning, Sarah. You waiting for a table or . . . ?”

“This is fine,” the woman named Sarah said. She was graceful and tall and pretty, with cognac-brown eyes and long brown hair. She looked to be in her late twenties. She smelled of woodsmoke and was wearing a pale-blue fleece and jeans.

“Usual?” Fran said, pouring coffee into a mug.

Sarah nodded.

“Meet the latest resident of Derryfield,” Fran said to Sarah.

Grant offered the young woman his hand. “I’m Grant,” he said.

*

Paul shivered as he pulled his poncho and the poncho liner over himself, for it wasn’t just raining, it was cold as well. And it was still too dark to navigate through the woods. He sat with the poncho’s hood over his head. At least he was dry. His stomach growled audibly. He was ravenously hungry and felt lightheaded. He still had half a protein bar left, which had to last him until he got to Lincoln. That was thirty-six hours, a day and a half away—if he was lucky.

He allowed himself a quarter of the bar now, leaving just a quarter. It barely satiated the hunger, and on top of it, he was awfully thirsty, too. The more you eat, he remembered, the more water your body requires.

He gathered the tarpaulin and the poncho liner and the fleece blanket, rolled them together with the tarp on the outside to deflect the rain. Over that, he put the Mylar space blanket. He thought about collecting some rain to drink, but all he had in his bag was an aluminum cup, and that wouldn’t collect much.

After another hour or so of rain, the sun came up and the sky lightened from pitch black to steel gray. It was a few minutes after six in the morning. But the rain continued, coming down even harder, a driven rain, drumming with the kind of force that can’t last long.

He pulled out his map, but without knowing what direction he was moving in, it was useless. He wondered which way the Russians had gone. They’d hiked past him; were they now ahead of him in the forest? But what did “ahead” mean? Had they gone farther west? Or were they moving in another direction? That he couldn’t tell. Presumably they had been following signs of disturbance in the forest, like crushed leaves and broken branches, signs that he had come this way. But he’d been careful not to leave traces, or at least to leave as few as possible. So how had they managed to get so close?

It was still raining hard. He was tempted to stay in his wolf den until it stopped, but then he remembered his father’s words:Rain is the perfect cover. Rain is your friend. It obscures your tracks, he’d say, it muffles the noise you make, and it obscures the vision of anyone who’s chasing you. These were things Stan remembered from his army days that he wanted Paul to learn. To a fourteen-year-old kid, it was a game. Evasion skills! Who would a fourteen-year-old possibly be evading?

So while it was raining was the ideal time to move through the forest.

He couldn’t locate west: the rainclouds in the sky obscured the sun. Periodically, he checked his burner phone, but there was still no reception. He wanted to call Sarah but couldn’t.

The rain was coming down forcefully, and the blisters on his toes hurt, and it was cold. At least it wasn’t snowing; it wasn’t quite that cold. He kept himself going by imagining the wonderful fire he’d soon warm himself by. Until he realized that, of course, in the pouring rain, he wasn’t going to be able to make any kind of fire; that was just a fantasy. Plus, his lighter was dead.

As the rain let up, he was surprised to come upon a low, crumbling brick wall. A little farther along, he saw a pile of red bricks that looked like they had once been part of a chimney. These were clearly from the foundation of ruined houses from an old, abandoned town, a ghost town, probably from the nineteenth century. He wondered what had become of the town, what had happened to its residents, why and how it had been deserted. Probably an old logging town. Who knew? It was a reminder that the White Mountain Forest he was navigating was clear-cut and burned to the ground a century ago. People had built a town here and lived in it before abandoning it to nature.

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