Life Blood --VI---Page 23

My heart went out to him, and I reached over and took the locket for a moment, feeling the strong "SRC" engraved on its heart-shaped face. "Lou, she's going to come out of it. And when she does, she'll probably explain everything. She's going to be okay any day now, I've got a hunch. A gut feeling."

I had a gut feeling, all right, but not that she was going to be
fine. My real fear was she was going to wake up a fantasy-bound
child again.

Then I handed the locket back. He'd seemed to turn anxious without it. He took the silver heart and just stared down at it. In the silence that settled over us, I decided to take a closer look at the passport. I supposed Lou had already gone through it, but maybe he'd missed something.

As I flipped through the waterlogged pages, I came across a smudgy imprint, caked with a thin layer of dried river clay, that was almost too dim to be noticed.

"Lou, did you see this?" I held it under the light and beckoned him over. "Can you read it?"

"Probably not without my specs." He took it and squinted

helplessly. "My eyes aren't getting any better."

I took it back and rubbed at the page, cleaning it. It was hard to make out, but it looked like "Delegacion de Migracion,
Aeropuerto Internacional, Guatemala, C.A."

"I think this is a Guatemalan tourist entry visa." I raised the
passport up to backlight the page. "And see that faint bit there in
the center? That's probably her entry date. Written in by hand."

He took it and squinted again. "I can't read the damned thing,
but you're right. There's some numbers, or something, scribbled
in."

I took it and rubbed the page till I could read it clearly. "It's March eleventh. And it was last year."

"Hot damn, let me see that." He seized it back and squinted

for a long moment, lifting the page even closer to the light. "You're right." He held it for a second more, then turned to me. "This is finally the thing I needed. Now I'm damned well going to find out what she was doing down there."

"How do you think you can do that?" I just looked at him, my mind not quite taking in what he'd just said.

"The airlines." He almost grinned. "If they can keep track of

everybody's damned frequent-flyer miles for years and years, they undoubtedly got flight manifests stored away somewhere too. So my first step is to find out where she flew from."

"But we don't know which—"

"Doesn't matter." He squinted again at the passport. "Now we
know for sure she showed up at the airport in Guatemala City on
that date there. I know somebody downtown, smooth black guy
named John Williams, the FBI's best computer nerd, who could
bend a rule for me and do a little B&E in cyberspace. He owes me
a couple. So, if she was on a manifest for a scheduled flight into
Guatemala City that day, he'll find it. Then we'll know where she
left from, who else was on the plane." He tapped the passport

confidently with his forefinger. "Maybe she was traveling with some scumbag I ought to look up and get to know better."
        "Well, good luck."

In a way I was wondering if we weren't both now grasping for a miracle: me half-hoping for a baby through some New Age
process of "centering," Lou trying to reclaim Sarah from her
mental abyss with his gruff love. But then again, miracles have been known to happen.