Desperate Measures

5

“Where are we going?”

Pittman shook his head, squinting at the painful glare of headlights on the crowded Massachusetts Turnpike. For several minutes, he’d been pensively quiet, trying to adjust-as he assumed Jill was-to the powerful change in their relationship. “We’re heading out of Boston. But where we’re going, I have no idea. I don’t know what to do next. We’ve learned a lot. But we really haven’t learned anything. I can’t believe that Millgate’s people would want to kill us because we’d found out what happened to him in prep school.”

“Suppose he wasn’t molested.”

“The circumstantial evidence indicates-”

“No, what I mean is, suppose he’d been willing,” Jill said. “Maybe Millgate’s people believe that the old man’s reputation would have been ruined if-”

“You think that’s what his people were afraid of?”

“Well, he confessed something to you about Grollier, and they killed him for it. Then you had to be stopped. And me because they have to believe you’ve told me what you know.”

“Killed him to protect his reputation? I just can’t… There’s something more,” Pittman said. “I don’t think we’ve learned the whole truth yet. Maybe the other grand counselors are trying to protect their reputations. They don’t want anyone to know what happened to them at Grollier.”

“But what exactly? And how do we prove it?” Jill asked. She rubbed her forehead. “I can’t think anymore. If I don’t get something to eat…”

Glancing ahead, she pointed to the right toward a truck stop off the turnpike, sodium arc lamps glaring in the darkness.

“My stomach’s rumbling, too.” Pittman followed an exit ramp into the bright, eerie yellow light of the gas station/restaurant, where he parked several slots away from a row of eighteen-wheel rigs.

After they got out of the car and joined each other in front, Pittman hugged her.

“What are we going to do?” She pressed the side of her face against his shoulder. “Where do we go for answers?”

“We’re just tired.” Pittman stroked her hair, then kissed her. “Once we get something to eat and some rest…”

Hand in hand, they walked toward the brightly lit entrance to the restaurant. Other cars were pulling in. Wary, Pittman watched a van stop ahead of them. The driver had his window down. The van’s radio was blaring, an announcer reading the news.

“I guess I’m needlessly jumpy. Everybody looks suspicious to me,” Pittman said. He made sure that he was between Jill and the van when they came abreast of the driver’s door. The beefy man behind the steering wheel was talking loudly to someone else, but the radio was even louder than his gruff tone.

Pittman turned toward the van. “My God.”

“What’s the matter?”

“The news. The radio in that van. Didn’t you hear it?”

“No.”

“Anthony Lloyd. One of the grand counselors. He’s dead.”