No Safe House

Twenty-seven Terry

“What happened?” Grace asked as we walked back to my car out back of Vince’s beach house. “What’s going on?”

“Get in,” I said.

I let Grace handle her own door this time. I was keying the engine as she got into the passenger seat.

“What are we going to do now?” she asked. “Did Vince know what’s happened to Stuart? Was Stuart with him? Are we going to the hospital? Are we going to Stuart’s house? What about—?”

I slammed the heel of my hand against the steering wheel. “Enough. No more questions.”

“But—”

“Enough!” I put the car in drive and did a U-turn on East Broadway. “We’ll talk at home.”

Grace turned away and pressed herself up against the passenger door. I glanced over, noticed her shoulders trembling slightly.

We were back at the house in five minutes. We got out of the car like two people coming home from a funeral service. Moving slowly, not talking, wrapped up in our own thoughts. She stood next to me while I fumbled with the key to let us in.

“Kitchen,” I said.

She walked ahead of me like a condemned prisoner. I pointed to a chair and she sat down compliantly. I pulled out a chair and sat down across from her.

“There’s no point in looking for Stuart,” I said.

Her eyes filled with tears. “Oh my God.”

“It looks like Vince, or his crew, or both, were in the house between the time you left and when we got back there. They cleaned the place up. They’re going to go back, finish up, fix the window.”

“But what—?”

“Whatever happened to Stuart, Vince has taken care of it.”

Grace’s face was flushed. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What do you think it means?”

You want to protect your kids from bad things, but sometimes there’s no way. Especially when they’re the ones who got themselves into the mess in the first place.

“I think it means he’s dead,” I said.

She put her hands to her face, covering all of it save for her frightened eyes. “I shot him,” she said, the words coming out muffled. “I killed him.”

“That part’s less clear,” I said. “I don’t have all the information when I say this, but I don’t think so.”

She brought her hands down. “Why?”

“A few things. One, from what you’ve said, it’s pretty clear someone else was in the house. Two, if you’d fired that gun, I think you’d have known it. The kickback, when you pulled the trigger — it would’ve knocked you on your ass. I think you may have been — maybe you still are now — suffering from a mild form of shock when things started getting scary in that house. So your perception of things is skewed. You don’t really know what went down.”

She swallowed. “What else?”

“Vince says you’re to forget any of this ever happened.”

“Yeah, like that’s going to happen.”

I grabbed both her wrists and squeezed. “You listen to me and you listen good.”

She gulped.

“Vince isn’t kidding around. You won’t forget what happened tonight, but you’re going to have to pretend you have. He wants you to forget you ever even met Stuart Koch. He doesn’t want you, or me, talking to anybody about this. He doesn’t want us looking for Stuart — he doesn’t want us checking the hospital, going to his house, nothing. And he sure doesn’t want us going to the police about it.”

Even without Vince leaning on us, I’d have had pretty mixed feelings about calling the Milford cops. What the hell would I have told them? That my daughter broke into a house with her boyfriend, who may or may not have been shot? Point the cops in the direction of Vince Fleming for the full story? Who had as much as told me he had, in his possession, the gun Grace had been holding?

That gun was a wild card. Even if Grace hadn’t fired it, what if, after she’d dropped it, someone else had? What if Grace’s prints were still on it?

“But isn’t that wrong?” Grace asked.

The question snapped me out of my thoughts. “What?”

“Isn’t it wrong? If something has happened to Stuart, whether I did it or somebody else did, isn’t it wrong not to go to the police? Don’t we have to tell them what happened?”

I felt like this was a test. Of whether I was a good father. Of whether I was a good man. It struck me at that moment that being one did not necessarily mean you were both.

I squeezed her wrists harder and looked down at the table briefly, then met her eyes with mine.

“Grace, you and that boy broke into a house. You were going to steal a car. You’re vulnerable. Very vulnerable. If there’s a way to keep you out of this, I’m going to do it and I don’t give a good goddamn whether it’s the right thing or not.”

“You’re hurting me,” she whispered.

I let go of her wrists. “The only thing that matters to me right now is you. Making sure that you’re safe, that nothing bad happens to you. There’s a lot we don’t know right now, and without knowing everything, it’s hard to figure out what the best thing to do is. And as much as I don’t like having to follow orders from a thug like Vince Fleming, right now I don’t see a lot of other options.”

“This feels wrong.”

“Grace... I don’t have all the answers right now.”

She searched my eyes for some sort of comfort. I shifted my chair around the corner of the table and hugged her. She buried her face into my shoulder and wept.

“I’m so scared,” she said.

“Me, too.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“We have to ride this out. Maybe, soon, we’ll have an idea what we’re dealing with. But until then — and I hate this, believe me, I hate this — I’m not sure we have much choice but to go along with what Vince wants.”

She pulled away and asked, “What if my friends start asking?”

“Start asking what?”

“What’s happened to Stuart? What am I supposed to say?”

I felt a constriction in my neck. We were on borrowed time. I could keep Grace out of trouble maybe for a while, but at what point would all this catch up to us? When would the unraveling begin?

“How many know you were seeing Stuart?”

“A couple of my friends. And Stuart might have told somebody. I mean, we weren’t, like, going out, but we’d hung out together a few times, is all. I might have mentioned him on Facebook.”

Jesus. Once it was online, it was out there forever.

“If there are any mentions of him, delete them,” I said. “Delete anything you can. No, wait. Later, if they find you were deleting everything about him the same night he disappeared — Shit. I don’t know. If your friends ask what’s going on with him, you haven’t seen him lately. You drifted apart, something like that. Did anyone know you and Stuart were going to be together tonight?”

Grace thought a moment. “I don’t think so. I didn’t tell anyone.”

“What about Sandra?”

“Sandra?”

“Sandra Miller. The girl you were supposedly going to the movies with tonight.”

Grace winced.

“Yeah,” I said. “Did you tell her she was your cover story, so if I called her or her mother she’d know what was going on?”

Grace shook her head. Kids think they’re so smart sometimes, but the perfect crime is beyond them.

“You told me Sandra’s mother was going to drive you home? How were you going to make that work?”

“I was going to get Stuart to drop me just down the street, so you wouldn’t have seen any car pull into the driveway,” she said.

I pushed my chair back. It was difficult, in the midst of trying to comfort my daughter, not to be furious with her, too.

“Tell me about Jane,” I said.

“What about her?”

“When did you two connect?”

Picking up the accusing tone, she pulled back. “I found her online and became her friend.”

“Being a friend online and being someone you call in the middle of the night when you think you’ve shot somebody, those are two very different levels of friendship,” I said. “Why did you call her? When did you get so chummy?”

“I got to know her over the last few months. I wanted to know.”

“You wanted to know what?”

“I wanted to know about Mom, and you, and what happened back then.” She sniffed. “You guys never really talk about it. I mean, you talk about how Mom’s still all freaked-out about what happened to her, that it was this big trauma and all, but you never get into the details so I could really try to understand, you know?”

I listened.

“But I knew that Vince Fleming helped you guys back then, and that he was with Mom the night her family disappeared back in, like, 1983. And I knew you used to be Jane’s teacher and that Vince was kind of her stepfather. I wasn’t going to ask Vince about things. He was way too scary, and too old to talk to. But I thought if I asked Jane, she’d answer some of my questions.”

“You could have just asked us,” I said.

“Oh yeah, right,” Grace said. “You guys have been, like, superprotective forever about this. When I was seven, and Mom and I nearly got killed, it’s like you guys put me in this bubble. It’s the thing you always say we’ll talk about one day, but we never do. And it’s like Mom’s the only one who gets to be a basket case about it. What about me? You think because it happened a long time ago I’m not still freaked-out, too? I haven’t forgotten being in that car at the top of that cliff. I can close my eyes and it’s like I’m right back there. I remember. And I want to know. I want to know everything about it, not just discuss my stupid feelings about it, like that time you sent me to that shrink Mom sees. And even if Jane wasn’t right there when it all happened, she knows a lot about what went down and she doesn’t mind talking about it with me. She’s helping me, okay? Is that okay with you and Mom? That I talk to someone who can really help me?”

My neck was getting too tired to hold my head up. I let it fall again while I considered her words. “So you got together,” I said.

“Yeah. We met a bunch of times. For coffee and like that. And we didn’t just talk about all the shit that happened a long time ago, either. We just talked about stuff. I like her — I like her a lot — and when I was in trouble, I called her.”

“Because you thought she could help you more than I could?” I asked. It was hard not to feel slightly wounded.

“Not... exactly,” she said. “It was because of Stuart. And her connection.”

“Because she knew him,” I said. “Because Stuart’s dad works with Vince.”

“Yeah. I’d seen Stuart around school and all, but it was Jane who actually introduced us.”

“When was this?”

“Like, a few weeks ago? We were in the food court, and she saw him and called him over, and we all got talking. And after that, Stuart texted me and we hung out.”

“Did you know that Stuart was connected to Vince Fleming? That his father is Eldon Koch? That he works for Vince?”

“Yeah, I knew that.”

“You knew that, and you went out with him? This kid whose father is some kind of fucking gangster? You know he kidnapped me off the street back when all that stuff happened?”

I shook my head in disbelief.

“But he also helped you, right? If it hadn’t been for him helping you figure out what happened, I’d be dead, right? And Mom, too? Not bad for a fucking gangster.”

I had no comeback for that.

“That’s the stuff I found out from Jane. Maybe if you guys would tell me something once in a while, I’d have known.”

“You should never—”

I stopped myself. I was letting things get out of hand. Now I was the one losing control. Of the situation, and myself.

“You’re always about not prejudging people,” Grace said.

“What?”

“Just because someone’s dad is bad doesn’t have to mean the kid’s bad.”

I looked at her, dumbfounded. “Stuart broke into a house so he could steal a car. Who’s prejudging? The kid already proved himself to be bad news. Just like his father.”

Grace got up, ran upstairs to her room, and slammed the door hard enough the house shook.

Hard enough that it shook something free that I’d been thinking about without actually realizing I’d been thinking about it.

For all he knows, she saw him.

This person who ran past, who may have shot and killed Stuart.

Did he know Grace failed to get a good look at him?

If he believed Grace had seen him, that she could identify him...

We might have more to worry about than the police finding out Grace was in that house.