Son of the Morning

He nodded briefly, then took himself up the stairs to rid his bedchamber of the untrustworthy wench. Before he left the hall, however, he took one last look around, hoping to espy the woman who had been watching him, whose feminine concentration he had felt. There was nothing, but he knew she had been there. He had felt her. He would find her.

Chapter 7

THERE WAS NOTHING UNUSUAL ABOUT THE WOMAN WHO GOT OFF the bus in Chicago . No one had paid her any attention, not the agent who had sold her the ticket, not the driver, not the other passengers who sat absorbed in their own lives, their own troubles, their own reasons for being on the bus.

Her hair was blond and curly, one of those frizz jobs that didn’t look good on anyone but required no maintenance beyond washing. Her clothes were clean but nondescript, the kind that could be bought at any discount store: baggy jeans, inexpensive athletic shoes, a navy blue sweatshirt. Nothing about her luggage attracted attention, either. It was a cheap nylon model, in a particularly unappealing shade of brown that the designer had tried to brighten by adding a red stripe down one side. It hadn’t worked.

Maybe it was a little unusual that she’d worn sunglasses the entire trip, because, after all, the bus windows were tinted, but there was one other passenger who also wore sunglasses, so overall there was nothing about her that would make anyone look twice.

When the bus lurched to a stop at the depot inChicago , Grace silently produced her luggage receipt and took possession of the ugly brown duffel. She would have preferred keeping the laptop with her, but people tended to notice if someone carried a computer everywhere. With that in mind, she had packed the computer in its protective case, then further buffered it in the duffel with her meager supply of clothing. It had been a week since her world had shattered, a week exactly.

Her life then had ended, and another had begun. She didn’t feel the same, didn’t look the same, didn’t think the same way she had before she had lost everything and been thrown into a life in the streets and on the run. The sharp paring knife rode in a scabbard on her belt, and was covered by the sweatshirt. The screwdriver she had taken from the storage building on that horrible first day was tucked into her right sock; it wasn’t as good a weapon as the knife, but she had honed it against a rock until she was satisfied with its sharpness.

She had exhausted theEau Claire library’s fund of knowledge about the Templars. She had learned a lot, including the significance of the date on which the Order had been destroyed: Friday the thirteenth, giving birth to the superstition about the combination of day and date. Interesting, but not what she had wanted. She had searched in vain for any reference, in either the Templars’ recorded history or inScotland ‘s history, to Niall of Scotland.

She had to dig deeper, andChicago , with its vast library on things Gaelic, was a good place to start. Remaining another day inEau Claire would have been risky, anyway. Parrish’s men would have tried to pick up her trail outsideEau Claire , but when they didn’t find anything they would return to the town. Any halfway competent goon would begin checking the motels, and though she’d been careful to alter her appearance by either wearing the blond wig or tucking her hair up under the baseball cap, eventually they would find her.

She felt stronger now, no longer operating in a barely controlled panic, but at the same time she was alert. She had slept, and she had forced herself to eat a peanut butter sandwich at least once a day. Eating was still difficult, and her jeans were even looser now than they had been before. The belt she wore, bought at another Kmart, was a necessity. She had even washed the jeans in hot water in an effort to shrink them, but any shrinkage must have been in length instead of width, because they still hung on her. If she lost much more weight, even the belt wouldn’t help. She didn’t intend to spend any more of her precious store of money on new clothes, so what she already had would have to do.

She had formulated a plan. Rather than living off her cash until it was all gone, she had to have a job. There were underground jobs inChicago , washing dishes or cleaning houses, and those suited her perfectly. No one would become concerned if one day she didn’t show. On the other hand, those types of jobs would be low-paying, and while they would tide her over for now, she would soon need something better. For that, she would need to develop another identity, and back it up with documentation.

Being what she was, a researcher, that was the approach she had used to find out how to establish a new identity. In this instance, theEau Claire library had provided her with the information she needed.

It seemed relatively simple, though it would take time. First she would need a dead person, someone who had been born about the same time she had, but who had died young enough that there wouldn’t be a job history, school records, or traffic violations to follow Grace around after she assumed the girl’s identity. Once she had a name, she could write to the proper department at the state capital and get a copy of the birth certificate. With the birth certificate, she could get a social security number; with that, she could get a driver’s license, establish credit, become a new person.

She stored the duffel in a locker and carefully tucked the key in her front pants pocket. Then she located a phone book and flipped through the directory until she found the listing for cemeteries. After jotting down the names, she stopped a maintenance worker and asked which cemetery was the nearest, then went to someone else, a ticket agent, and asked for directions.

Two hours later, after having ridden on five different buses, she arrived back at the bus depot.

She bought a newspaper, found a seat, put on her glasses, and began looking through the tiny, densely printed classifieds for a place to stay. She didn’t want crummy and couldn’t afford comfortable, so run-down was the best alternative. By comparing prices, she eliminated both ends of the scale, and that left several places that fell in the middle. Two were boardinghouses, and she put those at the top of her list. Two phone calls later, she had a place to stay and directions on how to get there, including which train and buses to take.