Read Online Heaven Is High by Kate Wilhelm - Free Book Online Page B

went to get cups and the carafe and took them to the table.
    After a moment, Bailey rose and crossed the space to the counter, where she had left the sugar and cream. “We can’t find him now,” he said, returning. “A crew of hundreds with unlimited time might do it eventually. Might never.” He fixed his coffee to his liking and again there was a lengthy silence.
    â€œI’ve been thinking,” he said. “Maybe if they send her back to Haiti, Martin could go first and meet the plane. Meet all the planes until hers gets there.”
    â€œShe isn’t going back!” Barbara said. “I’ll think of something. She is not going back!”
    Bailey shrugged. “The pictures and various attempts to get information,” he said, indicating papers clipped together. “And a little about that car Nicholson was driving, the plates I ran. Private car, registered to Rondell Emerson. Since it wasn’t reported as stolen, seems he must have lent it to Nicholson. Emerson’s in real estate and he’s a partner in the Marcos Import store. Scuttlebutt has it that Marcos is dealing in more than just trinkets and doodads, stuff like that.”
    â€œHe’s dealing drugs?”
    â€œNot sure, but that’s the rumor. Never charged, never really investigated maybe. Rumor.”
    The coffee was foul. Barbara added sugar and cream to her own and made it worse. She pushed her cup back. “I spent yesterday and most of this morning cramming on immigration law,” she muttered. “No loopholes that I could find.” Although, she added to herself bitterly, an expert in the field might have known a dodge unavailable to her.
    â€œBailey, will you be around later? I need to think.”
    â€œUntil ten,” he said. “Phone rings after ten, we let it.”
    â€œSure,” she said. “Before ten.”
    *   *   *
    But walking and thinking were not helping, she admitted to herself later, sitting on a bench staring blankly at the river. She should not have told Martin that, she thought then. She should not have told him they wouldn’t let Binnie go back. It amounted to a promise and she had no way of fulfilling such a promise.
    A flash of memory rose in her mind. Not the incident that sparked it, something she had wanted as a child, something she had insisted on being promised in advance. Whatever that something had been was lost in time.
    â€œI can’t promise,” Frank had said. “I’ll do the best I can, but I can’t promise.”
    â€œJust say it,” she had insisted.
    â€œHoney,” he had said, “never make a promise you don’t intend to keep, and never make a promise that you know you can’t keep, or that you don’t know if you can keep. Your promise is your word of honor and it’s sacred. Promises should be very rare.”
    Her words to Martin had constituted a promise, one that she could not keep.
    God, how long ago was that little lesson? she wondered. She had been small, six, seven at the most. And there it was, stashed away in her memory to come back and shame her now. Slowly she rose and started to walk again. The air was cooling and she was getting chilled, but there was something important nagging her. Frank might not even recall that incident, he had no reason to recall it, but it had been faithfully stored away in her brain to come back now.
    Memory seemed to be a bottomless purse, or the magic salt-shaker that contained all the salt in one’s personal universe, waiting to be tapped. Who knew how many memories anyone stored away, how relevant they were, how to access those you needed? She suspected the answer had to be nobody. Maybe every minute of a life was there in the memory bank, irrelevant for the most part, and mostly inaccessible. She stopped walking. Relevance, that was what she was searching for.
    Someone, more than just one person in Belize, would remember