Page 94 of South of Nowhere

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 betweenthem, 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 theirolderuncle 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 upin 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 playStardew 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 thelevee 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.

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