Since We Fell

23 Dark

The first thing she removed was her watch. Then her necklace, the same one he’d bought her in the mall three weeks back. Kicked off her shoes. Pulled off her windbreaker, followed by her T-shirt and her jeans. Put everything on the table with the gun she’d used.

She moved past Caleb and went down into the hold. Just to the right of the door, she found a flare gun and a first aid kit but no flashlight. Farther down the counter, though, she found one encased in yellow plastic and black rubber. She tested it. Worked beautifully. She checked the base — solar powered. If she’d had time to look for an oxygen tank, she could have stayed down there forever. She went back out on deck, found Caleb waiting for her by the rail.

“Listen,” he said. “He’s dead. And if he’s not—”

She brushed past him. She stepped up on the rail. Caleb said, “Wait,” but she dove into the bay. The cold seized her heart, her throat, and her intestinal tract all at the same time. When it found her head it drilled down through her temples, rolled through her sinuses like acid.

The flashlight beam was even brighter than she could have hoped for, though, and illuminated a lime green world of moss and seaweed, coral and sand, black boulders the size of primitive gods. She descended through the green and felt alien, very much the unnatural intruder into the natural world. The world before the world, so old it pre-dated language, humanity, conscience.

A school of cod passed within feet of her. When they were gone, she saw him. He sat on the sand about fifteen feet below by a rock as old as the world. She swam down to him and treaded water in front of his corpse. She wept, her shoulders convulsing, and he stared back at her with sightless eyes.

I’m sorry.

A thin rope of blood pirouetted along the rim of the hole in his chest.

I loved you, I hated you, I never knew you.

His body was canted to the right, while his head was cocked to the left.

I hate you. I love you. I’ll miss you for the rest of my fucking life.

She stared at him and his corpse stared back until her lungs burned and her eyes burned and she couldn’t take it any longer.

Good-bye.

Good-bye.

As she swam up, she saw that Caleb had turned the boat lights on. The hull bobbed on the surface, twenty feet up and about fifteen yards to the south of her. She kicked for the surface and was halfway there when something grazed her thigh just above the knee. She slapped at her leg but nothing was there and all she managed to do was drop the flashlight. It dropped faster than she rose, and the last she saw of it, it had settled on the sandy floor, a bright yellow eye looking up toward the world.

When she broke the surface, she took a great guzzle of oxygen, then swam to the boat. As she climbed aboard, she noticed a tiny island off the starboard side that she hadn’t been able to make out in the dark. It was an island for birds and crabs only, barely big enough to plant one butt cheek on, definitely not two. A lone and sickly thin maple pointed up from the bedrock, bent about forty-five degrees by the elements. Several hundred yards away, as she’d guessed, sat Thompson, a bit more clearly defined but just as lightless as before.

On the boat, she took her clothes with her into the cabin, ignoring Caleb, who sat on the deck with his hands between his knees and his head lowered. She found a small bathroom with a sliding door just past the bed. There was a picture of them hanging over the toilet, one she’d never seen before. She remembered when it had been taken, though, because it was the first time Brian met Melissa. They’d had lunch in the North End, then walked over to Charlestown and sat on the grassy hill by the Bunker Hill Monument. Melissa had taken the picture, Rachel and Brian with their backs to each other, the monument rising behind them. They’d been smiling — no news there; people always smiled in photographs — but the smiles were genuine. They were happy, radiant. That night he’d told her he loved her for the first time. She made him wait half an hour before she said it back.

She sat on the toilet seat for a few minutes and whispered his name a dozen times and wept noiselessly until her throat clogged. She wanted to explain that she was sorry because she’d killed him and she wanted to explain that she hated him because he’d played her for a fool, but the truth was she didn’t feel either of those things one-tenth as much as she felt the loss of him and the loss of who she’d been with him. So much of her essential wiring had been shorted in Haiti — her empathy, her courage, her compassion, her will, her integrity, her sense of self-worth — and only Brian had believed it would come back. He’d convinced her the shorted wires could be re-fused.

“Oh, Rachel,” she heard her mother say, as she’d said more than once, “isn’t it sad that you can only love yourself if someone else gives you permission?”

She looked in the mirror and was shocked to see how much she resembled her, the famous Elizabeth Childs, the woman whose bitterness everyone always mistook for courage.

“Fuck you, Mother.”

She stripped off her bra and underwear and dried herself with a thick towel she found on a shelf. She put her jeans, T-shirt, and windbreaker back on, found a brush and did the best she could with her hair, staring in the mirror again at her mother around the time The Staircase had been published, yes, but also at a new version of Rachel. A killer. She had taken a life. The fact that the life had been her husband’s didn’t make the fact worse or better; the act itself was empirically grave no matter who was killed. She was the agent of removing human life from this planet.

Had he been raising his gun?

She’d thought he had.

But would he have pulled the trigger?

In the moment, she’d been certain he would.

Now? Now she didn’t know. Was the man who’d given his coat to a homeless man on a night of drenching rain capable of murder? The same man who’d psychologically nursed her through three years of illness with nary an impatient word or frustrated glance? Could that man commit homicide?

No, that man couldn’t. But that man was Brian Delacroix, a falsehood.

Brian Alden, on the other hand, could slap an old friend with imperious calm. He could kick his partner and best friend with enough fury to suggest he’d never stop kicking until that friend was dead. Brian Alden had raised that gun toward her. No, he hadn’t pointed it directly at her and no, he hadn’t pulled the trigger.

Because she hadn’t given him the chance.

She went back out on deck. She felt calm. Too calm. And she recognized it for what it was — shock. She could feel herself in her body but not of it.

She found her gun on the deck where he’d dropped it. She tucked it in her waistband at the small of her back. She lifted Brian’s gun off the table. She walked toward Caleb with it and he narrowed his eyes at her, too late to stop her from whatever she planned to do with it.

She flicked her wrist and tossed it past his head into the ocean. She looked down at him.

“Help me wash the blood off the deck.”

24 Kessler

On the drive back, Caleb had trouble taking clean breaths without pain. They both began to suspect Brian had fractured at least one of his ribs. Once they reached the city proper, Caleb bypassed the first exit for Back Bay. At first she thought he meant to take the next one, but when he passed that too, she said, “What’re you doing?”

“Driving.”

“Where?”

“I have a house that’s safe. We need to go there, figure this out.”

“I need to go to my apartment.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“There are very pissed-off people who could be after us by now. We have to get out of this city, not into it.”

“I need my laptop.”

“Fuck your laptop. With the money we’ll have you can buy a new one.”

“It’s not the laptop, it’s the book that’s on it.”

“Download another one.”

“Not a book I’m reading, a book I’m writing.”

He looked wildly at her as they passed under a series of bright lamps, his face white, slightly ghoulish, and helpless. “You didn’t back it up?”

“No.”

“Put it in the Cloud?”

“No.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“I need my laptop,” she repeated as the exit approached. “Don’t make me pull the gun again.”

“You don’t need your book with the money you’ll—”

“It’s not about money!”

“Everything’s about money!”

“Take the exit.”

“Fuck!” He screamed it at the ceiling and swerved the car into the exit lane.

They came out of a short tunnel onto the edge of the North End and turned left and headed through Government Center toward Back Bay.

“I didn’t know you were writing a book,” he said at one point. “Is it, like, a mystery? Science fiction?”

“No. It’s nonfiction. It’s about Haiti.”

“That could be a tough sell.” His tone was almost chiding.

She loosed a bitter chuckle. “Check your fucking privilege, my man.”

He shot her an apologetic smile. “I’m just telling you the truth.”

“Your truth,” she said.

Up in the apartment, she went into her bedroom and changed again, back into a dry bra and underwear and swapping out the jeans for black tights, a black T-shirt, and an old gray sweatshirt from her college days at NYU. She opened her laptop and dragged the book files into a folder, something she probably should have been doing all along. She addressed an e-mail to herself and attached the folder and hit send. Voilà. Her novel was now accessible to her no matter what computer she used to access it.

She came out of the bedroom with the laptop under her arm to see Caleb had made himself a drink, as she’d known he would. The kicks to the groin, he said, made sitting uncomfortable, so he stood at the kitchen bar and sipped his bourbon and gave her a thousand-yard stare as she entered the kitchen.

She said, “I thought you were in a rush.”

“We have an hour’s drive ahead.”

“By all means then,” she said, “imbibe.”

“What did you do?” he said with a hoarse whisper. “What did you do?”

“I shot my husband.” She opened the fridge but then couldn’t remember why and closed it. She brought a glass to the bar and helped herself to some of the bourbon.

“In self-defense?”

“You were there,” she said.

“I was on the ground. I’m not even sure I was fully conscious.”

The equivocation irritated her. “So you didn’t see it happen?”

“No.”

No equivocation there. So what would he say from the stand someday? Would he say she acted to save his life and her own? Or would he say he wasn’t “fully conscious”?

Who are you, Caleb? she could have asked. And not in the day-to-day parts of you but in the essential ones?

She drank some bourbon. “He turned his gun toward me and I could see in his face what was going to happen, so I shot first.”

“You’re so calm.”

“I don’t feel calm.”

“You sound robotic.”

“It’s consistent then with how I feel.”

“Your husband’s dead.”

“I know that.”

“Brian.”

“Yes.”

“Dead.”

Now she looked across the bar at him. “I know what I did. I just can’t feel it.”

“Maybe you’re in shock.”

“That’d be my guess.” A horrific realization lurked at the back of her skull, deep in the lizard folds, that for all the grief she could feel swelling in her heart, pushing and scraping at its walls, the rest of her body felt alive in a way it hadn’t since Haiti. The grief would consume her when she stopped moving and stopped focusing on the problems immediately at hand, so the trick for now was to not stop moving and not widen her focus.

“Will you go to the police?”

“They’ll ask why I shot him.”

“Because he was kicking me to death.”

“They’ll ask why he was doing that.”

“And we’ll say he freaked out because you discovered his double life.”

“And they’ll say it wasn’t because you were fucking each other?”

“They won’t go there.”

“It’s the first place they’ll go. Then they’ll want to know what business you were in together and if you had any recent disputes over money. So whatever you and Brian were into, you better hope none of it gives you motive to kill him. Because then they’ll decide not only were you and I fucking each other, we were fucking over Brian on a business deal. And then they’ll want to know why I threw the gun in the water.”

“Why did you?”

“Because, Jesus Christ, I was fucking confused? In shock? Overwhelmed? I mean, take your pick. And now, once Brian’s death comes to light, I can’t imagine one scenario in which I don’t end up serving some time in prison. Even if it’s just three or four years. And I won’t go to prison.” Now she could feel something, a flutter of fear that bordered on hysteria. “I won’t sit in a box with someone else holding the key. I won’t fucking do it.”

Caleb watched her, his mouth a small oval. “Okay. Okay.”

“I will not.”

Caleb drank a little more bourbon. “We’ve got to go.”

“Where?”

“A safe place. Haya’s already there with the baby.”

She took her laptop and keys off the counter and then stopped. “His body will resurface.” The realization kicked something loose in the center of her. She felt a little less numb suddenly, a little less calm. “It will, won’t it?”

He nodded.

“Then we have to go back.”

“Go back and do what?”

“Weigh the body down.”

“With what?”

“I don’t know. Bricks. A bowling ball.”

“Where are we going to get a bowling ball at” — he looked at the clock on the microwave — “eleven o’clock at night?”

“He has barbells in the bedroom. Two of them.”

He stared at her.

“For curling. You know the little ones. They’re twenty pounds each. Two of those should do the job.”

“We’re talking about weighing down Brian’s corpse.”

“Yes, we are.”

“It’s absurd.”

There was nothing absurd about it. Rationally, she knew exactly what she needed to do. And maybe her shock wasn’t shock at all but was, instead, her brain divesting itself of all unnecessary data in order to process only that which was vital. She’d felt the same way in the squatters camp in Leógâne, moving from tent to tent, tree to tree. Complete clarity of purpose — move and hide, move and hide, move and hide. There were no larger existential questions in play, no shades of gray. Her sense of smell, sight, and hearing were not employed in pursuit of gratification but in pursuit of survival. Her thoughts didn’t wander; they marched in a straight line.

“It’s absurd,” Caleb said again.

“It’s where we find ourselves right now.”

She headed for the bedroom to get the barbells but stopped halfway there when the doorbell rang. It wasn’t the buzzer, which is what normally rang if someone was outside the building. And it wasn’t the intercom on their phone, which is how the doorman announced visitors. No, this was the small doorbell just outside her front door, ten feet away.

She looked through the eyehole and saw a black man with a trim goatee in a brown half-fedora, wearing a leather car coat over a white shirt and black skinny tie. Behind him were two of Boston’s finest in uniform, both women.

She kept the security chain on as she opened the door a crack. “Yes?”

The man held up a gold shield and a Providence Police ID card. His name was Trayvon Kessler. “Detective Kessler, Mrs. Delacroix. Is your husband home?”

“No, he’s not.”

“Do you expect him back tonight?”

She shook her head. “He left today on a business trip.”

“To where?”

“Russia.”

Kessler had a very soft voice. “Would you mind if we came in and chatted for a few minutes?”

If she hesitated, this would turn adversarial, so she opened the door. “Come in.”

He removed his hat as he crossed the threshold and placed it on the seat of the antique chair to his left. His skull was shaven, as she’d somehow known it would be, and gleamed in the dim light of the entryway like polished marble. “This is Officer Mullen,” he said, indicating the blond cop with bright friendly eyes and freckles that matched her hair, “and that’s Officer Garza.” He indicated the dark-haired, heavyset woman with a hungry gaze that was already drinking in the apartment. The gaze fell quickly on Caleb, standing at the kitchen bar with a bottle of bourbon. Rachel noticed she’d left the bottle of wine she’d polished off earlier on the corner of the bar as well, between an empty wineglass and the rocks glass she’d just half filled with bourbon. It looked like they were throwing a party in here.

Caleb came over and shook their hands, introduced himself as Brian’s partner. Then in the silence that followed, with the three cops looking at the apartment with cop’s eyes, Caleb got nervous.

“First name’s Trayvon?” he said to Kessler, and Rachel wanted to shut her eyes in horror.

Kessler took in the bottle of bourbon and the empty wine bottle. “Everyone calls me Tray, though.”

“But like that kid in Florida, right?” Caleb said. “The one who got killed by the neighborhood watch guy?”

Kessler said, “Same first name, yeah. What, you never met no one else named Caleb before?”

“Well, sure.”

“Then...” Kessler raised his eyebrows, waited.

“Trayvon’s just a less common name.”

“Where you’re from.”

Rachel couldn’t stand another fucking second of this. “Detective, why are you looking for my husband?”

“We just want to ask him a couple of questions.”

“You’re from Rhode Island?”

“Yes, ma’am. Providence PD. These wonderful officers are serving as my liaisons.”

“What does my husband have to do with something in Providence?” She was pleasantly surprised with how effortlessly she slipped into the role of the befuddled wife.

“You got a mouse under your eye,” Kessler said to Caleb.

“’Scuse me?”

Kessler pointed and now Rachel could see it too, a red welt in the fold of Caleb’s right lower eyelid, growing angrier as they watched. “Look at that, Officer Mullen.”

The blond cop stooped a bit to get a better look. “How’d you happen to come by that, sir?”

“An umbrella,” Caleb said.

“An umbrella?” Officer Garza said. “It jump out and bite you?”

“No, a guy had one on the T when I was coming over here. I work in Cambridge. Anyway, he had it resting on his shoulder and we came to his stop and he turned real quick and it poked me in the eye.”

“Ouch,” Kessler said.

“Exactly.”

“Had to hurt twice as much when you think how little rain there’s been this week. I mean, the beginning of the month, sure, that was crazy. But lately? When’s the last time it rained?” he asked the room.

“Ten days easy,” Officer Mullen said.

“Fuck’s this guy doing carrying an umbrella then?” Again Kessler spoke to no one in particular, a bewildered smile on his lean face. “’Scuse the f-bomb,” he said to Rachel.

“No problem.”

“Crazy world we live in, dudes walking around subway cars with umbrellas when there ain’t no rain.” He looked at the bottles and glasses on the bar again. “So your husband is in Russia?”

“Yes.”

He turned to Caleb, who was clearly hoping he wouldn’t. “And you came by to drop something off?”

“Hmm?” Caleb said. “No.”

“Business papers or something like that?”

“No,” Caleb said.

“So... I mean, stop me if I’m being too personal here...”

“No, no.”

“But why are you here? Man’s out of the country, and you just drop by to get your drink on with his wife?”

Officer Mullen cocked an eyebrow at that. Officer Garza wandered around the living room.

Rachel said, “We’re all friends, Detective. My husband, Caleb, and me. Whatever antiquated notions you’re bringing in here about whether a man and a woman can hang out as good friends while her husband is away, I’d really like it if you parked those notions somewhere outside these walls.”

Kessler leaned back a bit, gave her a wide smile. “Well, all right.” The words rode a soft chuckle out of his mouth. “All right. I stand corrected. And I apologize for any offense I may have given.”

She nodded.

He handed her a photograph. One look, and the blood rushed along her hairline and behind her eyes and barreled through her heart. Brian sat with his arm around the pregnant woman she’d seen this afternoon. She wasn’t pregnant in the picture and Brian’s hair had less gray in it than it did now. They were sitting on a couch. It had gray cushions and looked to be made of white rattan that blended with the white beadboard wall behind them. It was the kind of wall you found in a beach house or, at the very least, a house in a beach town. Above them hung a reproduction of Monet’s Water Lilies. Brian appeared very tan. He and the woman sported big white smiles. She wore a blue flower-print summer dress. He wore a red flannel shirt and cargo shorts. Her left hand lay quite casually on his right thigh.

“You don’t look well suddenly, ma’am.”

She said, “How am I supposed to look, Detective, when you hand me a photograph of my husband and another woman?”

He held out his hand. “Can I have it back?”

She handed it to him.

“Do you know her?”

She shook her head.

“Never seen her before?”

“No.”

“How about you?” He handed the photograph to Caleb. “Know this woman?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No,” Caleb said.

“Well, you’ve missed your chance.” Trayvon Kessler returned the photograph to the pocket of his car coat. “She turned up dead about eight hours ago.”

Rachel said, “How?”

“Shot once in the heart, once in the head. It probably led the news tonight if you’d been watching.” He gave the bar another glance. “But you were engaged in other activities.”

“Who was she?” Rachel asked.

“Her name was Nicole Alden. Beyond that, I don’t know much. No criminal record, no known enemies, worked in a bank. Knew your husband, though.”

“That picture’s old,” she told him. “Might even pre-date when I met my husband. So what’s to say he’s still in contact with her?”

“You say he’s in Russia?”

“Yeah.” She found her phone, opened the last text he’d sent her claiming to be on the runway at Logan. She showed it to Kessler.

Kessler read it and handed the phone back. “He drive himself to the airport or take a cab?”

“He drove himself.”

“In the Infiniti?”

“Yes.” She stopped. “How do you know—?”

“What he drives?”

“Yes.”

“Because an Infiniti FX 45, registered to your husband at this address, was found parked across the street from the victim’s home this afternoon. And a witness saw your husband exit the home on or around the time of the murder.”

“And, what, he just walked away and left his car behind?”

“Can we all sit down?” He tilted his head at the bar.

All five of them took stools around the bar, Kessler in the middle, like the father at a family meeting.

“Our witness says your husband drove up in the Infiniti, but he drove off again an hour later in a blue Honda. You ever use one of those map programs where you can see the actual street? Either of you?”

They both nodded.

“What the map companies do to get that picture is drive around in a van and film the streets. So you’re looking at pictures could be months old or weeks but not years. So I went on a real estate site and I punched in the victim’s address and then I went to street view and I clicked around a bit. And guess what I found?”

“A blue Honda,” Caleb said.

“A blue Honda parked halfway down the block on the east side of the street. Got me a license plate, ran that plate, and discovered it was registered to a Brian Alden. Ran Mr. Alden through the DMV, got a driver’s license photo that looks identical to your husband.”

“Jesus,” Rachel said, not having to bring much to the performance to make it convincing. “You’re telling me my husband is not my husband.”

“I’m telling you your husband may be living a couple of lives, ma’am, and I’d like to talk to him about that.” He folded his hands on the bar and smiled at her. “Among other things.”

After a minute, she said, “I only know he’s in Russia.”

Trayvon Kessler shook his head. “He’s not in Russia.”

“I only know what he tells me.”

“And that’s looking like it could be a lot of lies, ma’am. He go on business trips a lot?”

“At least once a month.”

“Where to?”

“Canada and the Pacific Northwest mostly. But he also goes to India, Brazil, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom.”

“Some cool places there. You ever go with him?”

“No.”

“Why not? I’d like to see me some Rio, maybe walk around Prague.”

“I have a condition.”

“A condition?”

“Or, I mean, I had one until recently.”

She could feel them all looking at her, particularly the two female cops, wondering what “condition” could possibly afflict an entitled Back Bay princess like her.

“It kept me from leaving the house,” she said. “I couldn’t fly, that’s for sure.”

“So you’re afraid of flying?” Kessler’s tone was helpful.

“Among other things.”

“You agoraphobic?” he said.

She looked in his eyes and they were far too wise.

“I majored in psychology at Penn.” Again with the helpful tone of voice.

“It’s never been officially diagnosed,” she said eventually and thought she heard Officer Mullen sigh. “But I definitely had symptoms that suggested it.”

“Had? Past tense?”

“Brian’s been working with me on it.”

“But not enough to take you on a business trip.”

“Not yet, no.”

“Would you like protective custody?”

He said it so casually it took her a moment to process the words.

“Why would I want that?”

He turned on his stool. “Officer Garza, you got that other picture?”

Garza handed him a photograph and he turned it faceup on the bar so she and Caleb could see it. The blond woman lay facedown on a kitchen floor, her lower half out of frame. Blood had billowed out from under her chest and pooled above her left shoulder. Her left cheek and part of the refrigerator door were also splattered with blood. But the worst image, the one Rachel suspected she’d be woken up by for the rest of her life, was the black gouge at the top of her head. It didn’t look like someone had shot her; it looked like something had taken a bite out of her skull. And the hole left in the wake of that bite had immediately filled with blood that spilled into her hair and turned black.

“If your husband did this and—”

“My husband didn’t do that,” she said loudly.

“—I’m not saying he did but he’s the last person we know of to see her alive. So let’s just say, let’s just say, Mrs. Delacroix, that he did do this?” He turned on his barstool and pointed. “Well, ma’am, he has a key to that door.”

He’s beyond using it, she thought.

She said, “So you’d like to take me into your custody?”

“Protective custody, ma’am. Protective.”

Rachel shook her head.

“Officer Mullen, please make note that Mrs. Delacroix declined our recommendation of PC.”

“Got it.” Mullen scribbled on a pad.

Kessler tapped a finger on the marble bar top, as if testing it, then looked at her again. “Will you be willing to come down to the precinct and talk about when you last saw your husband?”

“The last time I saw Brian was eight o’clock this morning when he drove himself to the airport.”

“He didn’t drive himself to the airport.”

“So you say. That doesn’t mean you’re right.”

He gave that a small shrug. “But I am.”

He exuded equal parts serenity and skepticism. The odd mixture made her feel as if he knew all her answers before they left her mouth, as if not only could he see into her, he could see into the future; he knew how this was going to end. It was all she could do to hold his mildly curious gaze and not fall to her knees and beg for mercy. If she ever went into an interview room with this man, the only way she’d exit would be in handcuffs.

“I’m tired, Detective. I’d like to get into bed and wait for my husband’s phone call from Moscow.”

He nodded and patted her hand. “Officer Mullen, please make a note that Mrs. Delacroix declined to join us at the precinct to answer further questions.” He reached into the inside pocket of his car coat and placed his business card on the bar between them. “My personal cell is on the back.”

“Thank you.”

He stood. “Mr. Perloff.” His voice was suddenly louder and sharper, though he kept his back to Caleb.

“Yes?”

“When’s the last time you saw Brian Delacroix?”

“Yesterday afternoon when he left work.”

Kessler turned to him. “You’re in the lumber business together, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And you knew nothing about your business partner’s other life?”

“No.”

“Care to come to the precinct and speak about that at length?”

“I’m pretty tired too.”

Another short glance at the bar, followed by a slightly longer one at Rachel. “Of course you are.” Kessler handed Caleb one of his business cards.

“I’ll call you,” Caleb said.

“Yes, you will, Mr. Perloff. Yes, you will. Because, can I tell you something?”

“Sure.”

“If Brian Delacroix-slash-Alden is as dirty as I think he is?” He leaned into Caleb and spoke in a whisper loud enough for all of them to hear. “Then that means you’re fucking dirty, my man.” He slapped Caleb hard on the shoulder and laughed like they were old friends. “So you stay in plain sight now, hear?”

Officer Mullen jotted in her notepad as they headed for the door. Officer Garza moved her head on a slow swivel, as if everything she saw was transmitted to a central database. Detective Kessler paused at a Rothko reprint Brian had brought with him from his previous apartment. Kessler gave the painting a squint and then a soft smile, looked back at her and raised his eyebrows in approval of her taste. His smile broadened, and, man, she did not like what she saw there.

They let themselves out.

Caleb went straight to the bourbon. “Jesus,” he said. “Jesus.”

“Calm down.”

“We’ve got to run.”

“Are you nuts? You heard what he said.”

“All we’ve got to do is get to the money.”

“What money?”

“The money.” He drained his glass. “So much money these fucking guys, they’ll never catch us. Get the money, get to the safe house. Jesus. Shit. Fuck.” He opened his mouth to loose another expletive but then closed it. His eyes widened and welled. “Nicole. Not Nicole.”

She watched him. He pressed the heel of his hand to each of his lower eyelids and exhaled through pursed lips.

“Not Nicole,” he said again.

“So you knew her.”

He glared at her. “Of course I did.”

“Who was she?”

“She was...” Another long exhale. “She was my friend. She was a good person. And now she’s...” He shot her another heartless glare. “Fucking Brian. I told him not to wait. I told him you’d either catch up or you wouldn’t. We’d either send for you when it was safe or he’d forget about you.”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Me? What were you waiting for me to—?”

The doorbell rang. She looked at the door and noticed Trayvon Kessler’s half-fedora sitting on the chair beside it. She crossed the condo and picked it up. Had it in her hand when she opened the door.

But it wasn’t Detective Kessler on the other side of the threshold.

It was two white men who looked like actuaries or mortgage brokers — middle-aged, bland, forgettable.

Except for the guns in their hands.

25 What Key

Each man held a 9mm Glock in front of his groin, their hands crossed at the wrists, barrels pointed at the ground. If anyone passed in the hall, they’d see only the men, not the guns.

“Mrs. Delacroix?” the one on the left said. “Good to see you. May we come in?” He flicked the gun barrel toward her and she stepped back.

They came into the apartment and shut the door behind them.

Caleb said, “Who the fuck are—?” and then saw the guns.

The shorter of the two, the one who’d spoken, pointed his at Rachel’s chest. The taller one pointed his at Caleb’s head. He used it to gesture toward the dining room table.

“Let’s all have a seat over there,” the shorter one said.

Rachel immediately saw the logic — of all the places in the apartment, the dining area was the farthest from any windows. The only way you could see it from the front door was to enter the apartment, close the door behind you, and then look to your left.

They sat at the table. Rachel placed Detective Kessler’s hat on the table in front of her because she had no idea what else to do with it. Her throat closed up. Fire ants scuttled along her bones and crawled over her scalp.

The shorter man had sad eyes and a sadder comb-over. He was about fifty-five and paunchy. Wore a fraying white polo shirt under a sky-blue Members Only jacket, the kind that had been ubiquitous when Rachel was in grade school but which she hadn’t seen much of since.

His partner was maybe five years younger. He had a full head of gray hair and fashionable gray stubble on his cheeks and chin. He wore a black T-shirt under a black sport coat that was a size too big for him and looked to be cheaply made. The shoulders spiked at the ends from spending too much time on wire hangers and in between the spikes and the corresponding lapels lay a poppy field of dandruff.

Both men gave off a whiff of curdled dreams and dead ambitions. That’s probably how they ended up here, Rachel thought, threatening ordinary citizens with guns. The one in the Members Only jacket, she decided, looked like a Ned. The one with the dandruff she dubbed Lars.

She’d hoped humanizing them would reduce her terror but it actually had the reverse effect, particularly once Ned screwed a silencer onto the muzzle of his Glock and Lars followed suit.

“We,” Ned said, “are pressed for time. So I’m going to ask you both to look after your best interests and not go down the ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ route. Fair enough?”

Rachel and Caleb stared at him.

He pinched the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes for a moment. “I said, ‘Fair enough?’”

“Yes,” Rachel said.

“Yes,” Caleb said.

Ned looked at Lars and Lars looked at Ned and then they both went back to looking at Rachel and Caleb.

“Rachel,” Ned said. “It is Rachel, right?”

Rachel could hear the tremor in her voice when she answered. “Yes.”

“Rachel,” he said. “Stand up for me.”

“What?”

“Stand up for me, hon. Really. Just right here in front of me.”

She stood and the tremor that had been in her voice found her legs.

Ned’s nose, red-veined and pitted, was eye level with her belly. “Good, good. Stay right there now and don’t move.”

“Okay.”

Ned leaned back in his chair so he could get a clear look at Caleb. “You’re his partner, right?”

Caleb said, “Whose?”

“Ah ah ah.” Ned tapped the butt of the Glock on the table. “What’d we say about that?”

“Oh, Brian,” Caleb said quickly. “Brian’s partner. Yes.”

Ned rolled his eyes at Lars. “‘Oh, Brian.’”

“Oh, that Brian,” Lars said.

Ned gave it a rueful smile. “So, Caleb, where’s the key?”

Caleb said, “What key?”

Ned punched Rachel in the stomach. Punched her so hard she could feel the impression of his knuckles as they burrowed under her windpipe and lifted her off her feet. She landed on the floor and lay there, stripped of oxygen, her insides aflame, her mind filled with black gum, unable to process anything. And once she could process, around the time that the air returned to her lungs, the pain intensified. She ground her head into the floor and made it to her hands and knees. She gasped several times. But the pain was nothing compared to the realization that she was going to die tonight. Not soon. Not someday. Probably in the next five minutes. And definitely tonight.

Ned lifted her to her feet. He grasped her shoulders. He seemed worried she might collapse. “You okay?”

She nodded and for a moment was sure she was going to vomit.

“Say it.” His eyes searched hers. Ned, the Good Samaritan.

“I’m okay.”

“Good.”

She went to sit down but he held her upright.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but we may have to go again.”

She couldn’t stop the tears. She tried, she did, but she was overwhelmed by the memory of his knuckles, of the loss of breath, of pain so acute and immediate it short-circuited her ability to think, and, worst of all, the advance knowledge that it was coming, that this sad-eyed man with the comb-over and the concerned voice would hit her again and keep hitting until he got what he wanted or she was dead, whichever came first.

“Ssshhh,” Ned said. “Turn around. I want him to see your face.”

He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her so that she was facing Caleb. “My first punch, young man, was to her solar plexus. Hurts like hell but it’s not all that harmful to your health. My next punch will blow up her fucking kidneys.”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Sure you do. You’re the IT guy. You were part of this from the beginning.”

“Brian went rogue.”

“He did, huh?”

Caleb’s eyes danced. His face was covered in sweat and his lips twitched and he looked for all the world to see like the frightened boy she now realized he’d always been. He glanced at Rachel and at first she mistook the emotion in his eyes for empathy but then realized, to her horror, that it was embarrassment. Shame. Pity. He was ashamed because he knew he’d never have the courage to save her. He pitied her because he knew she was going to die.

He’s going to pulverize my kidneys, Caleb. Tell him what you know.

Ned ran the silencer down the side of Rachel’s right temple and then along her neckline. “Don’t make me do this, young man. I got a daughter. I got sisters.”

Caleb said, “Look—”

“There’s no look, Caleb. There’s no ‘Hang on a second,’ or ‘Let me explain, or ‘This is just a big misunderstanding.’” Ned inhaled deeply through his nostrils, a man trying to retain his cool. “There’s only a question and an answer. That’s it.”

Rachel felt his penis stiffen against the back of her left hip. He was hard, this father of a daughter, this brother of sisters. Monsters, her mother had told her and she had learned herself over the years, don’t dress like monsters; they dress like humans. Even stranger, they rarely know they’re the monsters.

“Where’s the key?” Ned said.

“What key?” Caleb said, his entire face quivering.

It stopped quivering when Ned fired a bullet into it.

She wasn’t sure what had happened at first. She registered the slap of the bullet entering flesh. She heard Caleb make a surprised yelp, the last sound, it turned out, he’d ever make. His head snapped back hard, as if he’d just heard the funniest of jokes. His head snapped forward, except now it was covered in a beaded curtain of blood, and Rachel opened her mouth to scream.

Ned placed the silencer to the side of her neck. It was hot enough to burn if he left it there too long. “If you scream, I have to kill you. I don’t want to kill you, Rachel.”

But he would.

No, Rachel, he will. The moment they’re done here. The moment they get whatever it is they want. A key. What fucking key? Brian had so many keys on his key ring that it would take a mathematical savant to notice he’d added one. But if he did have this key they were looking for, that’s where it probably was — on his key ring.

Which was on his person.

Which was sitting at the bottom of Massachusetts Bay.

Caleb’s corpse slipped sideways in the chair and would have slid all the way to the floor, but his shoulder wedged underneath the arm. For a moment, the only sound came from him dripping.

“So the answer you want to give my next question,” Ned said, “is definitely not ‘What key?’”

No matter what answer you give, he will kill you.

She nodded.

“Are you nodding because you have my answer or because you agree that saying ‘What key?’ would be a big mistake?” He took the gun away from her neck. “You can talk. I know you’re not going to scream.”

“What am I supposed to say?”

On the other side of the table, Lars stood. Clearly bored. Ready to leave. And that was far more unsettling than if he’d tried to be menacing. What was happening here was coming to a close. And the period on the sentence would be another bullet to another face, this time hers.

“So here we go,” Ned said. “Only one answer we’re looking for and that’d be the right one. Rachel,” he said with the utmost delicacy and concern, “where’s the key?”

“Brian has it.”

“And where’s Brian?”

“I don’t know,” she said and then, rushing, as Ned raised his gun, “but I have an idea.”

“An idea?”

“He has a boat. Nobody knows about it.”

“What’s the name of it, and where is it moored?”

She’d never seen the name. She’d never thought to look. She said, “It’s moored—”

The doorbell rang.

They all looked at the door, then at one another, then back at the door.

“Who would that be?” Ned asked.

“I haven’t a clue.”

“Your husband?”

“He wouldn’t ring the bell.”

The bell rang again. Followed by a knock on the door. “Mrs. Delacroix, it’s Detective Kessler.”

“Detective Kessler.” Ned tried the words out. “Huh.”

“I forgot my hat, ma’am.”

Ned and Rachel both looked down at the half-fedora Rachel had placed on the table.

Another knock, insistent, the knock of a man used to knocking on doors whether the people on the other side wanted him to come in or not. “Mrs. Delacroix?”

“Coming!” Rachel called.

Ned shot her a look.

Rachel shot him a look back: What did you want me to do?

Ned and Lars looked at each other. Whatever telepathic language they spoke, they arrived at a decision. Ned handed her the hat. He raised his palm in front of her face. “You see the width of my hand?”

“Yes.”

“That’s how far you open the door. And then you give him his hat and you close it.”

She started to step away from him, but he grabbed her arm at the elbow and turned her to face Caleb. The blood curtain on his face was darkening. If this were Haiti, his head would be covered with flies.

“If you deviate from my instructions one iota, I do that to you.”

She started to shake and he spun her toward the door.

“Stop shaking,” he whispered.

“How?” Her teeth chattered.

He slapped her hard on the ass. She looked back at him and he gave her a small smile because the shakes had stopped. “Now you’ve learned a new trick.”

She took the hat and crossed her apartment. To the left of the door, on a hook, was her bag, a mini shoulder bag, brown leather, a Christmas gift from Brian. She put her hand on the doorknob and decided what she was going to do as she was doing it, not giving herself time to think, not giving them time to think. She opened the door past the recommended two to three inches, opened it so that Detective Trayvon Kessler had a clear angle past her left shoulder, could see the hallway that led to the bedrooms, the half-bathroom door, the kitchen bar. She pulled her bag off the hook, crossed the threshold, and handed him his hat, pretty much all in the same motion.

The bullet entered her back, cut her spine in half, spewed the bone chips into her bloodstream as she collapsed into Detective Kessler. The fall kept him from clearing his own gun. Ned kept firing, shot Kessler in the head and the shoulder and the arm. He fell with Rachel. They landed in a heap on the marble floor, and Ned and Lars straddled their bodies. They looked down on them with nothing in their faces and fired into their bodies until their corpses jumped...

“Detective.” She closed the door behind her. “I’d been wondering if you’d come back for that. I was about to call your cell.”

He fell into step behind her as she walked to the elevators. “Heading out?”

She looked back over her left shoulder at him. Brian, Sebastian, and two ex-boyfriends had all told it was her sexiest look. She could see it scored with Trayvon Kessler by the way he blinked at it, as if to deflect it from landing. “Just trying to walk off the buzz.”

“Isn’t sleep for that?”

“Can I come clean on something? A secret?”

“I love secrets. Why I’m a cop.”

They reached the elevator bank. She pressed down and risked a glance back up the corridor to her apartment door. What would she do if the door opened? Run for the stairs?

They’d just kill her in the stairwell.

“I’m a closet smoker,” she said. “And I ran out.”

“Ah.” He nodded several times. “I bet he knows.”

“Hmm?”

“Your husband. I bet he knows you smoke but he chooses not to let on. Where’s Mr. Perloff?”

“Passed out on the living room couch.”

“I’m sure your husband’s cool with that too, another man sleeping over. He’s progressive that way, your husband. Nothing ‘antiquated’ about ol’ Brian.”

She looked at the numbers above the left elevator and saw the car was stalled on three. Looked at the numbers on the right elevator and saw nothing was lit up. They’d shut it down for the night. It was probably on a timer to save energy costs.

Fucking timers, she thought, and looked back at her door.

“You expect it to move?” Trayvon Kessler asked.

“What’s that?”

“Your door. You keep looking back at it.”

If Ned and Lars walked out now, guns drawn, they’d have the drop on Kessler. But if she told him — told him they were in there, told them what they’d done — he’d pull his gun, shield her with his body, and call for the cavalry. And this nightmare would be over.

All she had to do was tell him. And prepare herself for jail.

“Do I? I’m not myself right now.”

“Why’s that?”

“Learning my husband is living a double life could have affected me a bit.”

“There’s that.” He looked above the elevator. “Should we take the stairs?”

She didn’t give it a thought. “Sure.”

“No, wait. It’s moving.”

The elevator car crawled from three to four and then picked up speed and shot from four to five to six to seven to eight to nine.

And stopped.

She looked at Kessler.

He gave her a “Sue me” shrug.

She said, “I’m taking the stairs,” and turned toward them.

“It’s moving again.”

The red light jumped from nine to ten, and then zipped from eleven to fourteen. And stopped again. She could hear laughter from the shaft, the people getting off on fourteen sounding Saturday-night drunk on a Tuesday.

Trayvon Kessler had his back to the corridor when Ned stepped out of her apartment. She thought of screaming. She thought of running for the stairs, the red EXIT sign beckoning like the hand of God. By the time Kessler followed her gaze and turned, Ned had strolled up the corridor to them, his hands free, the gun probably tucked at the small of his back, hidden by the hem of his Members Only jacket.

“Rachel,” he said. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

“Ned.” She watched a quick flare of confusion in his eyes. “Been staying home mostly, ordering in.”

Ned turned to Detective Kessler. “Ned Hemple.” He stuck out his hand.

“Trayvon Kessler.”

“What brings the Providence police to Boston?”

Kessler looked confused for a moment, until he glanced down at his own belt, saw the gold badge clipped there.

“Checking out a few leads.”

The elevator dinged as the car arrived and the doors opened. They got in. Kessler pressed L.

26 Mouthpiece

“Is everything okay, Rachel?” Ned looked across the car at her, his face the picture of concern.

“Sure. Why?”

“Well, I just...” He looked embarrassed as he turned to Trayvon Kessler. “I live next door to Rachel and Brian. Sorry, I should keep my big mouth shut.”

Kessler gave that a loose grin. “Should he keep his mouth shut, Rachel?”

“Not on my account.”

Kessler held out his hand. “Proceed, Mr. Hemple.”

Ned hemmed and hawed and looked at his shoes for a moment. “I heard some, a little, uh, shouting a few minutes ago. I guess you and Brian aren’t getting along. Same thing happens with me and Rosemary. No big deal. I just hope everything’s okay.”

“Shouting?” Kessler’s grin grew broader.

“People fight,” Ned said.

“Oh, I know people fight,” Kessler said. “I’m just surprised Rachel was fighting with Brian. Only a few minutes ago, huh?”

The car stopped at seven and Mr. Cornelius, who owned three nightclubs in the Fenway, got on. He gave them all a polite smile and went back to texting someone on his phone.

Ned had served her up to Kessler on a platter. Even if she managed to get away from both of them when they reached the lobby — and she had no idea how she’d manage that — Kessler would go back to her apartment, this time with a warrant, and find Caleb dead inside. Not passed out. Dead.

She realized they were both looking at her, awaiting a response. “It wasn’t Brian, Ned, thank you.”

“No?”

“It was his partner. You’ve met him a few times. Caleb?”

Ned nodded. “Good-looking fella.”

“That’s him.”

Ned said to Kessler, “Like I’m always telling the wife, though, looks fade.”

Rachel said, “He wanted to drive home and I didn’t want to let him. Too much bourbon.”

Kessler said, “But he took the T.”

“What?”

“Over from Cambridge, he told us he took the subway.”

“But he lives in the Seaport and he didn’t want to take the T back there. He wanted to borrow my car. That’s what the fight was about.”

Jesus, how many fucking details could she keep straight here?

“Ah.”

“Makes sense,” Ned said in a tone suggesting that it didn’t.

“Why wouldn’t he just take a cab?” Kessler said.

“Uber,” Ned ventured.

“What he said.” Kessler jerked his thumb at Ned.

“You’ll have to ask him when he sobers up,” she said.

Now Mr. Cornelius was watching the three of them, not sure what was going on, but recognizing conflict when it was in front of his face.

They reached the lobby.

The moment they exited the building, Kessler would, she presumed, leave her. Even if she stalled, chatted Kessler up on the sidewalk, Ned would just act as if he’d walked away. And the moment Kessler did, in fact, drive off, Ned would reappear. Or just shoot her from across the street.

She placed her hand up to the back of her neck, fingered the clasp of her necklace. If she could twist it a bit and then snap her fingers, she might be able to break the strand. The beads would hit the floor. The men would bend to retrieve them. And she could scoot out through the mail room.

“Got a bite?” Kessler asked.

“What?”

“An itch,” he said. “Is your neck itchy?”

Now Ned was looking at her.

She dropped her hand. “Yeah. A little bit.”

They walked into the lobby. Mr. Cornelius turned right into the hall for the garage elevators. Ned and Kessler kept moving forward.

Dominick, behind the desk, glanced up at them, seemed mildly baffled by the presence of Kessler and Ned, but he gave Rachel a nod and went back to his magazine.

“No garage?” she asked Ned.

“Hmm?” Ned followed her gaze to the garage door. “No.”

“You’re parked on the street?” she said.

Ned looked back over his shoulder at her. “Oh, no, I’m just going out for a walk, dear.”

“Everyone’s going for a walk tonight,” Kessler said. He patted his stomach. “Makes me feel like I gotta hit the gym.”

He opened the front door, inward, and made an “after you” gesture to them both. Ned went through the door, followed by Rachel.

On the sidewalk, Rachel said to Ned, “Enjoy your walk. Tell Rosemary I said hi.”

“Will do.” Ned stretched out his hand to Kessler. “Nice to meet you, Detective.”

“You too, Mr. Temple.”

“Hemple,” Ned said, shaking his hand.

“Of course. My bad.” Kessler dropped his hand. “Take care, sir.”

For an odd few seconds none of them moved. Eventually Ned turned and headed east along the sidewalk, his hands in his pockets. Rachel glanced over at Detective Kessler, who seemed to be waiting on something. When she looked back down the darkened street, Ned was nowhere to be seen.

“So that’s Ned.”

“That’s Ned.”

“He and Rosemary been married a long time?”

“Ages.”

“No wedding ring, though. He didn’t strike me as the bohemian type thinks rings are just symbols of societal oppression from the dominant paradigm.”

“Probably just in for a cleaning.”

“That could be it,” he said. “What’s he do, our friend Ned?”

“You know, I’m not sure.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“Some kind of manufacturing, I think.”

“Manufacturing?” Kessler said. “We don’t make shit in this country anymore.”

She shrugged. “You know how it is with neighbors these days.”

“Oh, do tell.”

“Everyone guards their privacy.” She gave him a tight smile.

He opened the passenger door to a dark four-door Ford. “Let me give you a ride to get your cigarettes.”

She looked back down the street. Every twenty feet was a pool of light cast by the streetlamps. In between those lights lay the dark.

“Sure.” She got in the car.

Kessler got in, put his hat between them on the seat, and pulled away from the curb. “I been on some fucked-up cases, if you’ll excuse my language, but this is one of the more fucked-up ones I been on of late. I got a dead blonde in Rhody, a missing guy leading a double life, his lying wife—”

“I’m not lying.”

“Oh ho!” He wagged a finger at her. “Yes yes yes you are, Mrs. Delacroix. You’re telling so many lies I can’t even count them. And your neighbor there, the married guy in the Members Only jacket and the JCPenney slacks without the wedding ring? Guys like him don’t live in buildings like yours. He didn’t even know where the fucking garage was, and the doorman had clearly never seen him before.”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Lucky I’m a cop. They fucking pay us to notice shit like that.”

“You say ‘fuck’ a lot.”

“And why not?” he said. “It’s a great word. Verb, noun, adverb, adjective. ‘Fuck’ is fucking utile.” He turned left. “My problem with your lying is that I don’t know why or what you’re lying about. It’s still too early in the case. But, man, do I know you’re lying.”

They stopped at a light and she felt certain Ned was going to appear by Kessler’s window and start firing into the car.

The light turned green and Kessler took another left and parked outside the Tedeschi’s on Boylston, across the street from the Prudential. He turned in the seat toward her and all the hard mirth left his eyes and what replaced it was something she couldn’t identify.

“The late Nicole Alden,” he said, “was executed. As professional a hit as I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a few. So your husband with the double life? There’s a good chance he’s a pro at, you know, ending lives. And either him or some of his friends may come a-calling. And Rachel?” He leaned across the seat, close enough that she could smell the Altoids. “They will fucking execute you.”

He couldn’t save her. Even if he was interested, and she doubted he was. His job was to close the Nicole Alden murder. He’d decided with a cop’s narrow certitude that the best way to do that was to pin the murder on Brian. But when Brian didn’t turn back up, Kessler would dig deeper. Maybe he’d find out she’d been in Providence just before the victim was killed. Zipcars, she was fairly certain, had tracking devices on them so the company always knew where their cars were. Wouldn’t take much to put Rachel on that street outside Nicole Alden’s house. And then the scenario was easy to see — wife discovers husband has another wife with a baby on the way to boot and kills her. And if that scenario wasn’t damning enough, there was the dead body of her husband’s business partner sitting up in her apartment. And a coroner’s examination would prove said partner was dead prior to Rachel claiming to this very police officer that he was alive and well and passed out on her couch.

“I don’t like being bullied,” she told Detective Kessler.

“I’m not bullying you. I’m stating facts.”

“You’re stating conjecture. In the most threatening manner possible.”

“It’s not conjecture,” he said, “to notice you’re terrified right now.”

“I’ve been terrified before.”

He shook his head slowly, this tough cop looking at this entitled yuppie without a day job. Probably pictured her walk-in closet full of high-end workout clothes, Louboutin heels, silk business suits she wore to restaurants no cop could afford.

“You think you have but you haven’t. There’s darkness in this world you can’t learn about watching TV and reading books.”

That night at the camp in Léogâne, the men strode back and forth through the mud and the heat in the light of the trash can fires, serpettes and bottles of cheap liquor in hand. Around two in the morning Widdy said to her, “If I let them have me now, they may only” — she made a circle with one hand and drove the index finger of the other hand in and out of the circle several times — “but if we make them wait, they may grow angry and” — she drew the same finger across her throat.

Widdy — Widelene Jean-Calixte was her full name — was eleven years old. Rachel had convinced her to stay hidden. But, as Widdy had predicted, all that did was make the men angrier. And a short time after sunup, they had found her. Found them both.

“I know a little bit about the darkness in this world,” Rachel told Trayvon Kessler.

“Yeah?” His eyes searched hers.

“Yeah.”

“And what have you learned?” he whispered.

“If you wait for it to find you, you’re already dead.”

She got out of the car. When she came around to the sidewalk, he’d rolled down his window. “You planning on giving me the slip?”

She smiled. “Yes.”

“I’m a cop. Kinda good at keeping people in my sights.”

“But you’re from Providence. And this is Boston.”

He acknowledged that with a slight tilt of his head. “Next time you see me, then, Mrs. Delacroix, I’ll have a search warrant in my hand.”

“Fair enough.” She walked up the sidewalk as he pulled away. She didn’t even pretend to walk into the store, just watched Kessler turn right at the next corner before she crossed Boylston to the cab stand in front of a hotel. She hopped into the back of the first cab and told the driver to head for the marina at Port Norfolk.

The parking lot at the marina was empty, so she had the driver wait a few minutes to see if anyone had followed her but the entire neighborhood was gone to bed, so quiet you could hear the boats bump against their slips and the old wood buildings creak in the night breeze.

Back on the boat, she went into the galley, turned on the lights, and pulled the keys out of the drawer where she’d left them when they’d tied the boat off. She untied the ropes next and then motored out into the harbor, running lights on full. Twenty minutes later, she could see Thompson Island appear in the starlight, and a minute after that she reached the minuscule island with the one bent tree. She went back into the galley, and this go-around, with the luxury of time, she found the scuba gear: mask, flippers, oxygen tank. She rummaged around a little more and found another flashlight and a wet suit, woman’s medium, belonging, she presumed, to the late Nicole Alden. She changed into the suit, donned the oxygen tank, flippers, and mask, and returned with the flashlight to the stern. She took her seat on the gunwale and looked up at the sky. The cloud bank from earlier had moved on and the stars arrayed themselves in clusters, as if seeking the protection of the herd, and she felt them not as celestial things, as gods or the servants of gods, but as castoffs, exiles, lost in the vast ink sky. What appeared as clusters down here were, up there, fields a million miles wide. The closest stars were light-years apart, no closer to one another than she was to a tribeswoman of the Saharan steppe in the fifteenth century.

If we are this alone, she wanted to know, then what is the point?

And she tipped back and fell through the ocean.

She turned on her flashlight and soon discerned the one she’d dropped. It winked up at her from the floor of the bay. As she descended, she saw that it had landed in the sand about twenty yards from the boulder where Brian lay. She trained her light on the top of the boulder and moved the shaft down and down some more until she reached the sand.

There was no body there.

So she’d gotten the boulders mixed up. She turned her beam to the left and saw another boulder about twenty yards away. She swam halfway to it but then grew certain it was the wrong shape and color. She’d left Brian against a tall, conical rock. Just like the one she’d landed near. She swam back, moving her flashlight continually left and then right. Then farther left. Then farther right. No boulders that looked anything like the one where she’d left him. The one in front of which she now floated.

This was the boulder where she’d left him. She was sure of it. She could tell by the depth of its craters and the conical shape.

Had he been carried off by the current? Or worse, a shark? She kicked her way over to exactly where she’d last seen him. She checked the sand for signs of indentation, an impression of his legs or buttocks, but it had been worn smooth by the water.

She caught a glimpse of black that was blacker than the boulder. It was just a flicker of it, like a flaking of skin along the left edge of the rock. She kicked to her left and shone her light around the corner and at first she saw nothing.

But then she saw everything.

It was a mouthpiece.

She swam around to the back of the rock. The mouthpiece was attached to a tube that was attached to an oxygen tank.

She looked back up through the dark water to the hull of the boat.

You’re alive.

She kicked for the surface.

Until I find you.

27 It

She motored out to Thompson Island and found the dock within four hundred yards of where Brian had fallen in. There was no boat there, of course. Whatever boat had been there was long gone.

And he was on it.

She had to wait a long time for the cab. It was four in the morning and the dispatcher didn’t know where the Point Norfolk Marina was. She heard him tap his computer keyboard for about half a minute before he grumbled, “Twenty minutes,” into the phone and hung up.

She stood in the dark parking lot and imagined all the things that could be going wrong right now. Trayvon Kessler could have gotten his warrant. (No, Rachel, he’d have to go back to Providence, find a judge, deal with jurisdiction issues. Maybe by sunup, but probably not even then. Breathe. Breathe.)

Breathe? Brian was alive. Ned had shot Caleb in the face. She could see the older man’s face as he did it, lupine somehow, wholly comfortable with predatory dominance. He’d looked at a fellow human being sitting four feet away from him and killed that human being as easily as a hawk would spear a chipmunk with its talons. There was no pleasure to be had in the killing for Ned but no regret either.

Brian was out there, eluding her. Alive. (Had she always known somewhere deep in her lizard brain that he’d never died?) But vengeance on Brian was, at this immediate moment as she stood in an empty parking at the witching hour, a luxury.

Ned and Lars were out there, hunting her.

Smartphones could be hacked. Turned quite easily into tracking devices and listening devices for hostile parties or government snoops. If Ned or Lars knew how to hack into hers, they’d know where she was.

Headlights appeared two hundred yards away, at the beginning of the rutted street that led from the edge of Tenean Beach to here. The two lights bounced and canted and glowed brighter as they neared. Could be a cab. Could be Ned. She wrapped her hand around the gun in her bag, the gun her husband had tried to kill her with. Or acted as if he were trying to kill her. She wrapped her finger around the trigger and thumbed off the safety even as it occurred to her that it wouldn’t matter. If the car belonged to Ned and Lars, they could just accelerate at the last possible second and run her over. Not a thing she could do about it.

The headlights swept the parking lot and the car turned in an arc to pull in front of her. It was brown and white and had BOSTON CAB painted on the doors. The driver was a middle-aged white woman with a beige afro. Rachel climbed in, and they pulled out of the marina.

She had the cab drop her two blocks south of her apartment and walked up through an alley as a false dawn grayed the lower edges of the sky. She crossed Fairfield and walked down the ramp to the garage grate. She entered her code in the keypad to the right of the grate and the grate rose and she entered the garage. She took the elevator to eleven, got out, and walked up the stairs to fifteen. Soon she stood outside her door.

This was the step she’d agonized over. If either Ned or Lars had remained behind, she was dead as soon as she entered the apartment. But if — no, when — Trayvon Kessler returned with that warrant and broke down this door, she needed to know what he’d find on the other side. The ride back from the bay to the marina, she’d debated if it was worth the risk and decided that Ned and Lars would assume she’d never return. It made no sense. Then again, she mused as she stood outside the door with the key in her hand, maybe they were counting on her to do the stupid thing. She had no experience dealing with people like them, but they had plenty of experience dealing with rubes like her. On the other side of that door was either death or knowledge. Plus a stash of cash Brian kept in a floor safe. Not much, a couple thousand, but enough to run on if Kessler had already taken the step of shutting down her credit cards. She doubted, on one hand, that he had the power to do so, but then, on the other, what did she know about police procedure when dealing with a murder suspect? And by now that’s what she could be, a murder suspect. By midmorning, she could be a suspect in two murders.

She looked at the lock. At the key in her hand. She took a breath. Her hand shook when she raised it, so she lowered it again. Took several more breaths.

Brian was alive. Brian had put her in this situation. Somehow, some way, she was going to find him and make him pay.

Or she was going to die in the next thirty seconds.

She inserted the key in the lock. But she didn’t turn it. She imagined a fusillade of bullets punching through the door and into her head, neck, and chest. She closed her eyes and tried to will herself to turn the key, turn the key, but once she did, the only step to take would be forward. Into the apartment. And she wasn’t ready. She wasn’t.

If they were on the other side and if they were close enough to the door to have heard her insert the key, they could simply shoot her through the door. But just because they hadn’t didn’t mean they weren’t in there. They could be waiting patiently on the other side of the door, exchanging glances, maybe even smirks, screwing their silencers onto their pistols, taking careful aim at the doorway, and waiting for the moment when she opened the door.

She’d wait them out. If they were in there, they’d heard the key enter the lock. Sooner or later, if she didn’t enter, they’d open the door.

Then again, Rachel, you dumb fuck, they could be watching you through the spyhole right now. She stepped to the right of the door, pulled the pistol from her bag, thumbed off the safety yet again. Waited.

She waited five minutes. Felt like fifty. Checked her watch again. Nope. Five.

In some time continuum, we’re all dead as soon as we’re born. By that logic, she was long dead somewhere, looking back through the portals of time at this very moment and smiling at all the fuss Corporeal Rachel was putting herself through.

I’m already dead, she assured herself. She turned the key in the lock and threw the door open, the gun pointing straight into the apartment, completely useless if either Lars or Ned was to her right or her left.

They weren’t. Caleb still sat at the table, his flesh the white of soap, the blood crusted and black in the center of his face. She closed the door behind her and moved to her right, inching down the wall until she reached the open doorway of the half bath. It appeared empty. She looked in the crack between the open door and the jamb and saw that no one was hiding on the other side.

She moved toward the bedroom. The door was closed. She put her palm on the handle but her flesh was so slick with sweat it slid off. She wiped it on her pants, used her sleeve to wipe the door handle. Grasped it with her left hand, held the gun in her right. Swung the door inward. As she did, she imagined Lars sitting on her bed, waiting for her. A soft pop and she’d be on her back, leaking.

He wasn’t there. The room appeared empty. But it reinforced what she’d felt entering the apartment — they were better at this than she was. If they were in here with her, she was already dead. She entered the master bathroom and then checked the his and her walk-in closets with a sudden fatalism. She felt closer to death than at any time since Leógâne. She felt it emerge through the floorboards and penetrate her body, conjoin with her blood and pull her back down through the floor into the cellar of the next world.

That’s what was waiting, what had always been waiting, the next world. Whether it was above or below, white or black, cold or warm, it was not this world with its comforts and distractions and knowable ills. Maybe it was nothing at all. Maybe it was just absence. Absence of self, absence of sense, absence of soul or memory.

She realized now that in Haiti, even before the camp, as far back as Port-au-Prince and the corpses smoldering in the streets and stacked in the parking lot of the hospital, stacked like old cars in junkyards, beginning to swell and balloon in the heat, as far back as then, the truth of their deaths became the truth of her own: We are not special. We are lit from within by a single candle flame, and when that flame is blown out and all light leaves our eyes, it is the same as if we never existed at all. We don’t own our life, we rent it.

She searched the rest of the apartment, but it was clear they weren’t there. Her initial instinct had been right — if they’d been waiting to kill her, they would have done so the moment she came through the door. She returned to the bedroom and packed a backpack with hiking boots, several pairs of warm socks, a heavy wool coat. She took a gym bag with her into the kitchen and added one carving knife, one paring knife, a flashlight and batteries, half a dozen power bars, several bottles of water, and the contents of the fruit bowl on the counter. She left the bag and the backpack by the door and returned to the bedroom. She changed into cargo pants, a thermal long-sleeved T-shirt, a black hoodie. She tied her hair back into a ponytail and covered it with a Newbury Comics ball cap. She opened the floor safe in his closet and removed the cash there and took it and the gun into the bathroom and placed them on the counter and looked in the mirror for a long time, and the woman who stared back at her was exhausted and angry. She was also afraid, but not paralyzed with it. She said to herself, with the compassionate authority of an older sister speaking to a younger, “It is not your fault.”

What’s “it”?

It was Widdy and Esther and the ex-nun, Veronique, and all the dead in Port-au-Prince. It was her mother’s toxicity and her father’s absence and Jeremy James’s abandonment. It was Sebastian’s disappointment in just about everything she did. It was the feeling she’d had as long back as she could remember that she was unforgivably inadequate and worth abandoning.

And the voice in her head was primarily correct — most of it was not her fault.

Except for Widdy. Widdy was her insurmountable sin. Widdy was four years dead. And Rachel, who’d gotten her killed, was four years older.

She lifted a picture of her and Brian off the dresser. Their unofficial wedding photo. She looked in his lying eyes and his lying smile and she knew she was just as much a liar as he was. From grade school through high school, college, grad school, and out into the working world, she had assembled herself into a character she played every day for most of her life. Once that character failed to connect with the audience any longer, she disassembled it and assembled a new one. And on and on. Until, after Haiti, after Widdy, she couldn’t reassemble. All that was left of her was the nub of her hollow, manufactured self and the whole of her sin.

We are liars, Brian. We.

She left the bedroom. In the living room, she realized her laptop wasn’t on the bar where she’d left it. She looked around for a few minutes but surmised pretty quickly that Lars and Ned had taken it with them when they left.

Fine. She had a smartphone.

What she didn’t have was a car. Even if Kessler hadn’t frozen her credit cards, she couldn’t rent a car or use Zipcar because then she’d be a cinch to find. She looked around the apartment again, as if it could tell her something, looked everywhere except at the corpse at her dining room table. And then she realized that’s exactly where she should be looking.

The key fob was in the right front pocket of Caleb’s jeans. She could see the bulge of it when she came around the table to him. She didn’t look at his face. She couldn’t.

What about Haya? she wondered. What about AB? At the party just four days ago, Caleb had lifted his daughter in front of his face and she’d gripped his upper lip and pulled it toward her like a drawer. He’d let her do it. He’d laughed, even as it was clearly painful, and when Annabelle released his lip, he held her to his chest and pressed his nose to the crown of her head and breathed her in.

Caleb had been an actor. Just like Brian. Just like her. But the acting was just one aspect of the whole. He wasn’t acting the father. He wasn’t acting his loves. Wasn’t pretending what his dreams and desires and hopes for the future were.

He had been, she realized, her friend. She’d always thought of him as Brian’s friend, as Brian’s partner because those roles (there was that word again) had been firmly entrenched when he’d entered into his association with her. But time and attrition had created a familiarity and comfort with each other that one could only call friendship.

She reached into his pocket. The denim was stiff and his body was stiffer. Rigor mortis had set in, and it took her a solid minute to work the key fob up his thigh and out of the pocket. In that time it occurred to her that if they’d never returned here so she could e-mail her book to herself, he might still be alive.

But, no. No, no, no, that big sister’s voice whispered in her ear. He stayed behind to drink. He stayed behind to collect his thoughts before an hour’s drive. And if that weren’t enough, whatever game he and Brian were playing, they had set it in motion a long time ago.

She looked at him now. For a full minute.

“You’re not my fault.” The tears fell and she wiped at them. “But I’ll miss you,” she said and walked out of the apartment.

28 Plunging

She gassed up Caleb’s Audi and then got breakfast at the Paramount on Charles Street once it occurred to her that she hadn’t eaten in about twenty-four hours. She didn’t feel hungry, but she ate like it. She drove back over into Copley Square and parked at a meter on Stuart Street and walked the small side street that ran between the Copley Plaza Hotel and the Hancock Tower. She passed the loading dock and the rear door where she’d seen Brian exit in the rain and climb into the black Suburban. She walked around the building, walked along St. James, and at one point she saw a dozen Rachels reflected and re-reflected in the panes. They formed a disjointed ribbon, like a chain of Rachel dolls cut from construction paper. When she rounded the corner, they all took flight. And she never saw them again.

It was almost nine and the streets were filled with morning commuters. She reached the entrance to the skyscraper and followed the stream heading in through the revolving doors. She found the directory to the right of the security desk. She went through the As and saw no Alden Minerals. Went through the Bs and saw nothing she’d consider germane to her quest. But in the Cs, there it was — Cotter-McCann, the venture capital firm Glen O’Donnell had mentioned. It wasn’t a guarantee, but it was certainly a fair assumption that Brian had come here that day to meet with representatives of Cotter-McCann and sell off a part of his mining interest.

She exited the building and walked back a block to the central branch of the Boston Public Library. She passed through the McKim building into the Johnson building where the computers were and set to researching Cotter-McCann’s acquisition of an interest in Alden Minerals. There wasn’t anything on it save one tiny item in the business digest section of the Globe, which must have been the source of Glen’s information because it told her nothing new.

She clicked off and looked up Baker Lake, worked her way to a satellite map, click-click-clicked the zoom icon until she could discern the only abodes in the area, eight roofs in the northeast corner of the lake along the Canadian border, three more she almost missed peeking out a bit to the west of the eight. She printed several images of the region, zooming out a little bit more each time, until she was satisfied she had a reasonable representation of the area. She retrieved the pages from the printer tray, quit all applications, cleared her history, and left the library.

Just before Haiti, Rachel had done a story for Little Six on the tax breaks the Commonwealth was offering to lure Hollywood film production to Massachusetts. In order to assess the economic effect of the tax breaks on the local economy, she’d interviewed Hollywood studio execs and statehouse reps on Ways and Means as well as local actors, location scouts, and one casting director. Her name was Felicia Ming. She was a jaded gossip, as Rachel recalled. She and Rachel had met for drinks a few times in the months before Rachel left the country for Port-au-Prince. They’d fallen out of touch after that, but Felicia had sent her a few kind e-mails after the meltdown and Rachel still had her contact info in her phone.

She called her standing outside the library and asked her how she’d track down an actor starring in a local production.

“Why are you trying to find him?”

Rachel tried a version not far from the truth. “He got into a drunken tiff with my husband in a bar the other night.”

“Oh, do tell.”

“I just feel bad. He got the worst of it, and I want to apologize to the guy.”

“Was this fight over you, honey?”

Rachel hoped her instinct was right on this one. “It was, I’m afraid, yeah.”

“Somebody’s making a comeback,” Felicia Ming said. “You return to this world with us, honey, and you make them crawl to you.”

Rachel forced a chuckle. “That’s the plan.”

“What company is he working with right now?” Felicia asked.

“The Lyric Stage.”

“What’s his name?”

“Andrew Gattis.”

“Give me a sec.”

While Rachel waited, a homeless guy walked by with his dog. Rachel recalled the night Brian forfeited his coat to a needier soul in the park. She gave the dog a pat and the homeless guy ten bucks and Felicia came back on the line.

“He’s at the Demange. It’s corporate housing in Bay Village.” She gave Rachel the address. “Want to grab a drink soon? Now that you’ve rejoined the living?”

Rachel actually felt bad about lying. “I’d love to.”

Twenty minutes later, she stood on a sidewalk in Bay Village and rang his doorbell.

When his voice came through the intercom it was groggy. “Yeah?”

“Mr. Gattis, it’s Rachel Delacroix.”

“Who?”

“Brian’s wife.” The pause that followed was so lengthy she finally said, “Mr. Gattis, you there?”

“I’d like you to go away.”

“I won’t.” The calm force in her voice surprised her. “I’ll wait down here until you have to come out. And if you slip out the back, I’ll come to your performance tonight and cause a scene in the middle of it. So, let’s—”

The door buzzed and she grabbed the handle and entered the building. It smelled of Lysol and linoleum in the lobby, Indian food as she climbed to the second-floor landing. A woman passed her leading a huffing French bulldog on a leash, the dog reminding Rachel of something you’d get if a pug impregnated a wombat.

Gattis was waiting in the doorway of 24, his stringy gray hair yellowed by nicotine. He tied it back into a bun as he led her into the apartment. It was a simple layout — kitchen and living room to the right, bedroom and bathroom back to the left. The window at the back of the living room opened onto a fire escape.

“Coffee?” he said.

“Sure. Thanks.”

She took a seat at a small round table by the window and he brought them each a cup of coffee, put a carton of creamer and a bowl of sugar between them. In the morning light, he looked even worse than the drunk she’d met Saturday night. His skin was scaly and pink and blue veins had erupted along the sides of his nose like electric bolts. His eyes swam.

“I have rehearsal in an hour and I have to shower, so we’re going to have to move this along.”

She sipped her coffee. “You and Brian were actors together.”

“Caleb too.” He nodded. “Brian had more raw talent than I’ve ever seen before or since. We all knew he’d be a star as long as he didn’t find a way to fuck it up.”

“What happened?”

“Couple things, I guess. He had no patience. And maybe, I dunno, he didn’t respect it because it came so easy to him? Who knows? He was angry, I remember that. Charming and angry. Cut quite the romantic figure in that regard. Chicks were fucking crazy about him. No offense.”

She shrugged and drank her coffee. Say what you would about Andrew Gattis, he made good coffee. “What was he angry about?”

“Being poor. Brian had to work. I mean we were dawn to dusk at school. We had acting classes and improvisation classes and improvisational movement classes. We had dance and playwriting and stagecraft and directing classes. Voice class, speech class, and something called Alexander Technique, which taught command of the body so you could use it as an instrument, you know? Morph it to your will. All that work was no joke. You’d get to six o’clock, your eyes would be shutting and your muscles screaming and your head throbbing. You’d go to bed or you’d go to the bar. Not Brian, though. Brian would go to work until two in the morning. And then right back at it at seven. Most of us were in our mid-twenties so, shit, plenty of energy, but even at that age we wondered how he did it. Then all that work added up to nothing anyway when he got kicked out.”

“He was kicked out of Trinity?”

Gattis nodded and took a long chug of coffee. “I look back now and I think he was probably popping a lot of speed or doing blow to keep up his pace. Either way, he was getting edgier and edgier during our second year. We had this one professor, real to-the-manner-born dilettante douchebag named Nigel Rawlins. He was one of those break-you-down-to-build-you-up kind of teachers, but I always suspected he didn’t really know about building anyone back up, he just liked to break them down. He was notorious for getting students to drop out. He built his rep on it. One morning he went after the only student there who was poorer than Brian. This kid had Brian’s bare pockets but not his talent, not a tenth of it. Anyway, Nigel Rawlins, one morning they’re rehearsing a scene set in a men’s room, right? And this kid’s got a monologue about unclogging a toilet — that’s all I remember about it to this day; I think it was a student piece — and the kid, he’s just not selling the scene. He’s fucking gassing it, to be quite honest. Which is setting Nigel off. He tore into that kid for being a shit actor and a shit human being, an embarrassment as a son and a brother, a source of shame to anyone unlucky enough to have him as a friend. He’d been on the kid for months, but that morning he was the fucking Terminator. Kept coming and coming. The kid pleads for him to stop, but Nigel gets stuck in this rage-loop about how the kid is a log of shit covered in hair that’s clogging the drain and it was Nigel’s job to plunge him the fuck out of the class before he dragged everyone else into that clogged toilet with him. So Brian, man — I mean, nobody ever even saw him leave the stage — but when he came back he had an actual plunger in his hand, not the fucking stage prop, and it was dripping with piss. He flipped Nigel on his back and he fitted that plunger over his mouth and nose and he just started... plunging. Once Nigel managed to push his head off the floor, grab at Brian’s legs, and Brian punched him so hard in the center of his face, you could hear it in the back row of the theater. And Brian went back to plunging and plunging and fucking plunging Nigel’s face until Nigel passed out.” He sat back and drained his coffee. “They kicked Brian out the next morning. He hung around Providence for a while, delivering pizzas, but I think it grew too embarrassing, ya know, handing over pies and taking sweaty bills from people you used to party with. He lit out one day and I didn’t hear from him again for, I dunno, nine years.”

She sat with that a bit, wishing she hadn’t heard it because it actually made her like the lying prick again, if only for a moment. “What happened to the other student? The one who was being abused?”

“You mean Caleb?”

She chuckled in sadness and surprise and Gattis refilled their coffee cups.

She said, “When’s the last time you saw Brian before the other night?”

“Ten years ago, maybe twelve.” He looked out the window for a bit. “Can’t remember exactly.”

“Any idea where he’d go if he didn’t want to be found?”

“That cabin he has in Maine.”

“Baker Lake.”

He nodded.

She showed him one of the satellite photos. He looked at it for a bit and took a Sharpie from a cup on the windowsill. He circled the cluster of three rooftops.

“Those other eight cabins over here? They’re part of a hunting camp. These three, though? Brian owns them. We had a Trinity reunion there around 2005. Not too many showed up but it was fun. Don’t ask me where he got the money for them because I didn’t ask. Brian preferred the middle cabin. It was painted green when I was there, had a red door.”

“And that was 2005?”

“Or 2004.” He nodded at the bathroom door. “I got to shower.”

She returned the satellite photo to her bag and thanked him for his time and the coffee.

“I don’t know if this is worth anything,” he said as she reached the door, “but he looks at you different than I’ve ever known him to look at anyone.” He shrugged. “Then again, he’s a very good actor.”

He remained in the bathroom doorway. She held his gaze and saw his eyes change as, she presumed, he watched hers do the same.

“Wait,” she said slowly.

Andrew Gattis waited.

“He paid you to crash our party that night, didn’t he? He staged the whole fight, everything.”

Andrew Gattis stroked the jamb of his bathroom door, a jamb that looked to have been painted so many times over the decades she bet the door never latched correctly. “And if he did?”

“Why are you helping him?”

His shoulders rose and fell in a half shrug. “When we were young, at a crucial time in the development of our selves, Brian and I were great friends. Now he’s where he is and I’m where I am” — he looked around the room, which suddenly appeared grim and insignificant — “and I’m not sure who we are anymore. When you spend so much time in the skins of others that you don’t even recognize the smell of your own anymore, maybe the only allegiance you owe is to the people who remembered you before the makeup and the stagecraft took over.”

“I don’t follow,” she said.

He gave that another half shrug. “You remember how I told you that at Trinity we studied every discipline, no matter what our focus — dance, acting, writing, what have you?” He gave her a soft, distant grin. “Well, Brian was a hell of an actor, like I said. But you know what his real passion was?”

She shook her head.

“Directing.” He disappeared into the bathroom. He closed the door behind him, and she was mildly surprised to hear it latch.

29 Enough

I-95 took her through Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and what she would have previously described as deep into Maine, up all the way to Waterville. But from there, she had to leave the interstate and hop onto Route 201, after which everything grew first rural, then desolate, then slightly ethereal, the air and sky turning the cast of newspaper, the land eventually disappearing in thickets of trees as tall as skyscrapers. Soon the sky was gone, and all she knew of the world was the brown trunks and the dark treetops and the ashen road feeding into the space between her thrumming wheels. It felt as if she moved under heavy cloud cover; soon that gave way to the sensation of driving at night, even though it was three in the afternoon in late May.

She reached a clearing between two forests. Miles of green. Farmland, she presumed, though she couldn’t see any houses or silos, just swaths of well-tended fields, spotted with cows and sheep and the occasional horse. Her phone was propped in the cup holder and she looked down at it long enough to confirm it no longer received service out here. When she looked up again, the sheep — or goat, she’d never be sure which — stood six feet from her bumper. She spun the wheel and swerved off the road, bounced into a small ditch hard enough to bang the top of her head off the roof and the bottom of her chin off the steering wheel. All four wheels detached from the earth. She shot back out of the ditch like something strapped to a booster rocket and hit the road on the front quarter of her left bumper. The air bag punched her in the face as it deployed, and she could taste blood after she bit her tongue. The back of the vehicle rose and the front lifted off the pavement again. It flipped twice to the soundtrack of breaking glass, grinding metal, and her screams.

It came to a stop.

She was upright. She shook her head several times and small chunks of glass, dozens of them by the sound of it, flew out. She sat where she was a while longer, chin resting on the air bag like it was a pillow, until she ascertained that she wasn’t in any pain, nothing felt broken, she didn’t seem to be bleeding anywhere but her tongue. The back of her head throbbed and her neck felt stiff and the muscles closest to her spine had turned to rock, but otherwise it seemed possible she was all in one piece. The console compartment and glove compartment had divested themselves of their contents and they were strewn across the dashboard and passenger seat and foot wells — maps, insurance cards, registration, packets of handkerchiefs, loose change, pens, a key.

She unlocked her seat belt.

She bent over the passenger seat. She pushed aside a pair of cracked sunglasses and lifted the key off the mat. It was small and thin and silver. Not a house key, not a car key. A locker key, or padlock key, or safe deposit box key.

Was this the key? Which would mean Caleb had had it, not Brian. Which would mean he’d died rather than give it up.

Or it was just a key.

She pocketed it and got out of the SUV. It sat dead center in the middle of the road. The sheep or goat was long gone. The black crescents of her skid marks snaked from the center of the road, off the edge, and vanished where she’d left the road. A shower of glass — some clear, some red — marked her return and littered the road along with pieces of chrome, hard black plastic, and a detached door handle.

She got back in and tried starting the SUV. The engine turned over followed by a repetitive ding-ding-ding to remind her to fasten her seat belt. She used the paring knife she’d packed to cut away the air bag. She popped the hood. She checked under there and couldn’t find any obvious danger. Checked the tires and they looked fine. She turned on the lights — that’d be a problem. The right headlight was shattered. The left was cracked but functional. In the rear, it was the reverse — where the driver’s-side brake light had been, only a metal cavity remained. The passenger’s-side brake light, on the other hand, looked fit for a brochure photo.

She considered the endless stretches of farmland, the forest behind her and the one ahead. It could be hours before any help arrived. Or it could be minutes. No way to tell.

The last time she’d looked at the trip meter she’d been seventy miles away from Baker Lake. And that had been ten minutes before the accident. So sixty-five then. Brian had paid Andrew Gattis to show up that night at their party and leave her a series of clues. He’d wanted her to know about Baker Lake. It’s possible his motive had been to draw her up here and kill her. She’d mulled that over a lot. But if he wanted to kill her, he could have done it on the boat. Instead he’d faked his own death at her hand. Every time she’d looked at Baker Lake on the maps, it felt like a door. If you crossed the lake, you reached another country. Was Brian leading her to the door?

Whether he was or he wasn’t, she was out of alternative plans that didn’t involve a jail cell and eventual prison. At this point, it was find Brian in Maine or game over.

“Here we go,” she whispered. She got back in the car and drove away.

Above her, the sun was on the run.

She left 201 at a place called The Forks. Not The Fork, singular. The Forks. It was so named, she suspected, because if you wanted to enter the wilderness by trekking northeast from here, the roads, as faint on her map as veins in an X-ray, splintered off 201 and then off one another and then off one another’s progeny until it appeared the only way back would be scent trails or prayer. It was full dark now, the dark of Germanic fairy tales and solar eclipses.

She turned onto Granger Mills Passage and drove along it for several miles — or it could have been just a couple; it was slow going up here — before she realized she must have missed the turnoff for Old Mill Lane. She turned back and drove through the black until an anorexic sliver of road appeared on her left. There was no marker to tell her what the road was or where it went. She turned onto it, drove about four hundred yards, and it ended. She flashed her sole high beam and all she saw beyond her grille was an embankment about four feet tall and a field on the other side of it. The road had never been a road, just the idea of one, soon abandoned.

There was no place to turn around, so she put the battered, creaking SUV in reverse and tried to navigate her way back through the pitch with one shattered brake light. Twice she drove into the shoulder. When she reached Granger Mills Passage, she drove back the way she’d come for about three miles until she found a cutout alongside some farmland. She pulled in there and killed the engine.

She sat in the dark. There’d be no more driving tonight. She sat in the dark and prayed that movement would be just as impossible for him, at least until morning.

She sat in the dark and realized she hadn’t slept in over thirty-six hours.

She climbed into the backseat, pulled her coat from her backpack and wrapped it around her, and used the backpack as a pillow.

Lying in the dark now, as opposed to sitting in it. Closing her eyes.

The sun woke her.

She looked at her watch. It was six-thirty in the morning. A low mist hung over the fields, beginning to smoke along the upper edges as the sun burned it away. A cow stood about ten feet away, on the other side of some loose barbwire fencing, staring through her with cow eyes, its tail swishing at a small squall of flies. She sat up and the first thing she wished was that she’d thought to pack a toothbrush. She drank one of the bottles of water, ate a power bar. She stepped out of the car and stretched and saw more cows in the field across the road, more smoking mist. It was cool, even with the sun, and she tightened the coat around her and breathed in the clean air. She peed by the side of the car under the steady, disinterested gaze of the cow, its tail still swishing like the needle of a metronome, and then she got back in the car, U-turned, and headed off.

It was only twenty-five miles to Baker Lake, but it took her three hours. Anything one would call a road gave way to what one could only charitably call trails, and she was forever grateful she’d stopped last night because she would have ended up in a ditch or driving into a pond. Soon she was so deep into the wilderness that the trails lost their names and some that appeared on the map had been reclaimed by the weeds and the brush. She relied on the SUV’s compass to continue heading due northeast. The rocky dirt paths crunched under her wheels and the chassis rocked from side to side like a child’s carnival ride, exactly the type of motion that often nauseated her, but she gripped the wheel and stared through the window for the next hard curve or sudden rock formation, and she felt fine.

The farmland had given way to tumultuous fields of overgrowth and those eventually gave way to the return of woodlands, the kind of woodlands Brian had always claimed to be part and parcel of his family history and subsequent career. She realized now that Brian had chosen a symbol to represent himself that was the exact opposite of who he actually was. Wood was dependable, sturdy, you could place your faith in it for generations.

Brian, on the other hand, was the biggest liar she’d ever known. And as a reporter, she’d known a lot.

Then how did he manage to deceive you?

Because I let him.

And why would you do that?

Because I wanted to feel safe.

Safety is an illusion we sell to children to help them sleep.

Then I wanted to be a child.

The path ended in a small clearing. There were no other paths beyond it. Just the small oval of weeds and sand and then the next forest. She checked her map, but it wasn’t detailed enough to include this. She checked her satellite photos and felt hopeful that she’d reached a pale spot on one of them that, if she were correct, would mean she was about three miles south of the hunting camp. She changed into her hiking boots and checked that the safety on the P380 was on before she slipped it into her waistband at the small of her back. She’d barely walked ten feet before the rise and fall of it back there grew uncomfortable and she moved it to the pocket of her coat.

The trees were gargantuan. Their canopies blotted out the sun. She presumed bears lived in these woods, and she had a moment of panic when she couldn’t recall how recent her last period had been. But then she remembered — it had been about ten days ago, so at least her blood wouldn’t attract a predator. By the looks of these woods, though, the scent of her flesh might be enough; nothing human had passed along her footpath in a long time. And whatever hunter may have done so in years past, she was fairly certain he’d been quieter than she. She pushed through like the awkward city girl she was, crunching leaves, snapping twigs, breathing audibly.

She heard the lake before she saw it. It wasn’t gurgling or lapping against the land. It presented itself as a pocket, a lack of density that removed pressure from her left ear, pressure she hadn’t even known was there until it wasn’t. Soon small patches of blue winked through the tree trunks. She turned toward them. In fifteen minutes she stood along the water’s edge. There was no shore, just the edge of the forest and a six-foot drop to the water. She made her way along it for another half an hour before the light changed ahead of her, the trunks of the trees brightening with it, and she picked up her pace and stepped through the last of them into a clearing.

The first cabin she encountered was missing all its windows and half its roof. One wall was caved in. The one next to it, however, was the one Gattis had described — faded green trim, faded red door, but clearly kept up, no sense of the land reclaiming it, no cracks in the foundation, the steps leading up to it swept clean, the windows dusty but intact.

The boards croaked when she climbed the four steps to the door. She removed the pistol from her jacket and tried the door. The knob turned in her hand. She pushed the door open. It smelled of must inside, but not mold or rot, and it smelled of the forest, of pine and moss and bark. The fireplace was swept clean. It didn’t smell as if it had been used in a while. In the tiny kitchen, the counters bore a thin film of dust. The fridge was stocked with waters, three tall cans of Guinness with the plastic ring still holding them together, and some condiments still shy of their use-by dates.

The den, also small — the entire cabin wasn’t more than five hundred square feet — sported a cracked brown leather couch and a small bookcase filled with adventure novels and positive-thinking manuals. This was Brian’s place, all right. In the bathroom, she found the toothpaste and shampoo brands he preferred. In the bedroom, she found a queen-size brass bed that squeaked when she sat on it. She walked around a bit more but found no evidence anyone had been there recently. She went outside and looked for footprints around the cabin but found none.

She sat on the porch as exhaustion found her bones and her brain. She wiped at a tear with the heel of her hand and then another, but then she sucked hard through her nostrils and stood and shook her head like a dog who’d been caught in the rain. It wasn’t just that she would have to trek to the car and drive back toward civilization with not enough daylight to reach it before she’d probably have to pull over with her one working headlight and sleep along the side of the road again. It was that she had nothing to return to. By now they’d have found Caleb and would have ascertained that she’d been in Providence the same time Nicole Alden had been murdered. The circumstantial evidence might not be enough to convict her in a trial, but she would most definitely go to jail until such a time as that trial was held. Could be a year or more. And who’s to say that the circumstantial evidence wouldn’t be enough to convict her? Certainly for Caleb’s murder; a policeman would go on record saying she’d lied about the victim being alive in her condo when, at that point, he’d been dead. Once they had you on record lying about anything, they could convince a jury you were lying about everything.

So she had no home. No life waiting for her. She had two thousand dollars in cash. She had a change of clothes in a bag in a car she’d have to abandon in the first city where she could find a bus terminal.

But a bus to where?

And wherever she got, how was she going to survive on two thousand dollars with her picture on every TV screen and every Internet news site in this country?

Trudging back through the woods, she rifled through her options until she came to the grim conclusion that she had only two — turn herself in or take the gun from her pocket right now and use it on herself.

She found a rock and sat. The lake was an hour back. All she had to look at were trees. She took the gun out of her pocket, hefted it in her palm. Brian, by this point, was probably a continent or two away. Whatever scam he’d been running through Alden Minerals and that mine in Papua New Guinea, he’d run it. And run off with the profits.

She’d been played. That was possibly the worst of it. That she’d been used and discarded. To what end, she had no idea, couldn’t see what her role had been in all this. She was simply the dupe, the rube, the unforgivably innocent pawn.

How long would her body lie among the trees before it was found? Days? Seasons? Or would animals come to feast on it? Years from now someone would find a bone or two and the state police would arrive to find the rest. And the mystery of the missing reporter suspected in the murders of two people would finally be solved. Parents would tell it as a cautionary tale to wayward teens. See, they’d say, she didn’t get away with it. Justice prevails, the status quo is reaffirmed, she got what was coming to her.

Widdy stood about fifty feet away and smiled at her. Her dress was not bloodied, her throat was intact. She didn’t open her mouth when she spoke, but Rachel heard her more clearly than the birds.

You tried.

“I didn’t try hard enough.”

They would have killed you.

“Then I should have died.”

And who would tell my story then?

“No one will care about your story.”

But I lived.

Rachel wept into the dirt and the dead leaves. “You lived poor. And black. On an island no one gives a shit about.”

You gave a shit.

She stared through the trees at the girl. “You died because I convinced you to hide. You were right. If they had found you earlier they would have raped you, but they wouldn’t have cut your throat, they wouldn’t have, they would have let you live.”

What life?

“A life!” Rachel screamed.

I wouldn’t want that life.

“But I want you to be alive,” Rachel begged. “I need you to be alive.”

But I’m gone. Let me go, Miss Rachel. Let me go.

Rachel was staring right at her. And then she was staring at a tree. She wiped her eyes and nose on her sleeve. She cleared her throat. She sucked the forest air into her nostrils.

And she heard her mother’s voice. Jesus. This had to be dehydration or exhaustion or low blood sugar or maybe she’d already put the gun to her head and fired and she was already dead, but here came Elizabeth Childs and her nicotine vocal cords.

Lie down, her mother said with a distinctly weary benevolence, and soon we’ll be together again. And it’ll be like that week you were sick in bed and I never left your side. I’ll make all your favorite foods.

Rachel caught herself shaking her head, as if her mother could see her, as if the trees could, as if she were anything but alone. Was this how people went crazy? Ended up talking to themselves on street corners, sleeping in doorways, skin covered in sores?

Fuck that.

Rachel pocketed the gun and stood. She took in the woods all around her. And she knew she wasn’t going to die to make life easier for Brian or Kessler or anyone else who assumed she was too weak for this world.

“I’m not crazy,” she told her mother, told the trees. “And I don’t want to be with you in the afterlife, Mother.” She looked at the sky. “One lifetime of you was fucking plenty.”

It was one o’clock by the time she reached the SUV. It would take two hours to get back to 201. Three hours on 201 until she hit a town big enough to have a bus station. She’d have to hope buses ran through that small town after six in the evening. That’s if she were lucky enough to get from here to there without being pulled over for driving an SUV that looked like it had been dropped from a crane.

She got behind the wheel and pulled out onto the dirt road. She’d driven for about a mile when the man lying on the backseat said, “Fuck happened to Caleb’s car? You look good, by the way.”

He sat up, smiled at her in the rearview.

Brian.

30 Primal Self

She stood on the brakes, slammed the gearshift into park, and unlatched her seat belt. Brian sat up halfway in the backseat as she came through the space between the two front seats and punched him in the side of the face. She had no experience with hitting someone, particularly with a closed fist — it stung her knuckles far worse than she would have expected — but she knew a direct hit when she heard one, and her fist connecting with Brian’s face made a sound as sharp and solid as any she’d ever heard. She watched his eyes water and grow disoriented.

So she hit him again. She pinned his shoulders with her knees. She punched his ear and his eye and the side of his face again. He bucked at her with his upper body, but the weight imbalance was all on her side and she knew the only rule at this point was to not stop until something forced her to. She heard his voice asking her to stop, her own voice calling him motherfucker over and over, saw his eyes scrunched up against the flurry of her fists. He squirmed his right shoulder free and that turned her awkwardly to her left, and he pushed off the foot well and the seat. She fell back through the space between the two front seats and he loomed up in the backseat, surging toward her.

She kicked him in the face.

If anything, it connected more thoroughly than her first punch. Bone or cartilage cracked, and the back of his head slammed into the window. He opened and closed his mouth several times, as if he were nibbling on the air, and then his eyes rolled back to the whites, and he lost consciousness.

I. Knocked. Someone. Out.

A small laugh popped from her mouth as she watched Brian’s eyes flutter under his sagging eyelids. Her right hand was already swelling and was slick with blood. His blood. His face, she realized with both shock and surprising concern, was battered. And she was pretty sure it hadn’t been battered five minutes ago.

I did that?

She took the car key and the gun with her and got out of the car and stood on the road. She experienced the worst craving she’d had for a cigarette since she’d quit seven years ago. She inhaled the impossibly fresh forest air instead and she couldn’t relate even a little bit to the person she’d been just hours ago, the one who’d contemplated suicide, the one who’d thought of giving up.

Fuck giving up. I’ll give up when I die. And it won’t be by my hand.

His door creaked open and his palms appeared above the window. The rest of him stayed below the roofline. “You done?”

“With what?”

“Beating the shit out of me.”

Her right hand was screaming now, but she wrapped it around the pistol just the same. “Yeah, I guess.”

He raised his head above the roofline and she pointed the pistol at him.

“Jesus!” He ducked down again.

She came around the car in three long strides and trained the gun on him. “Blanks?”

He lowered his hands from around his head and straightened from a crouch, resigned to his fate suddenly. “What?”

“Did you put blanks in this gun too?”

He shook his head.

She pointed the gun at his chest.

“No, really!” He raised his hands again. So maybe not so resigned after all. “Those are real fucking bullets in there.”

“Yeah?”

His eyes widened because he could see hers suddenly, could see what was in them.

She pulled the trigger.

Brian hit the ground. Well, he bounced off the vehicle first, trying to break to his left to escape the bullet. Bounced off the SUV, landed on the ground, hands still up in the universal, if wholly ineffectual, please-don’t-shoot-me gesture.

“Get up,” she said.

He stood, looked at the chunk of bark she’d shot out of the thin pine to his right. Blood dripped from his nose, over his lips, and off his chin. He wiped at it with his forearm. He spit red into the green grass by the side of the road.

“That looks like real blood. How’d you fake the blood in your mouth on the boat?”

“Wanna guess?” A small smile found his eyes but not his lips.

She put herself back on the boat, back in their conversation. She could see him sitting there so calmly as she confronted him about his second wife and second life. And he just sat there, eating.

“The peanuts,” she said.

He gave her a halfhearted thumbs-up. “Two of them were squibs, yeah.” He shot the gun a wary eye. “What are you going to do here, Rachel?”

“I haven’t decided yet, Brian.” She lowered the gun for a moment.

He lowered his hands. “If you kill me — and I wouldn’t blame you — you’re fucked. No money, no way of getting any, wanted for questioning in a murder, and hunted—”

“Two murders.”

“Two?”

She nodded.

He processed that and then continued. “You’re also being hunted by some very bad fucking guys. If you kill me, you’re staring down two, maybe three more days of free air and picking your own clothes to wear. And I know how you like to be stylish, honey.”

She raised the gun again. He raised his hands. He cocked an eyebrow at her. She cocked one back at him. And in that moment — what in the hell? — she felt connected to him, felt like she wanted to laugh. All the rage remained, all the sense of betrayal and fury at him for dismantling her trust, her life... and yet entwined with it, for just a moment, were all the old feelings.

It took every bit of muscle control she could muster not to smile.

“Speaking of stylish,” she said, “you’re not looking it right now.”

He touched his face with his fingers, came back with blood. He looked at his reflection in the window of the SUV. “I think you broke my nose.”

“Sounded like it at the time.”

He lifted the hem of his T-shirt up his chest and dabbed at his face. “I’ve got a first aid kit stashed nearby. Could we go back for it?”

“Why should I do you any favors, dear?”

“Because I’ve also got an SUV back there that doesn’t look like someone drove it off a fucking bridge, dear.”

They drove back to the clearing and then walked into the woods no more than twenty feet and there sat, perfectly camouflaged, a forest green Range Rover, early nineties vintage, some rust in the wheel wells, some dents in the rear quarter panels, but the tires were new and it had the look of something that would run another twenty years. She kept the gun on Brian as he retrieved a first aid kit from a canvas cargo bin in the back. He sat on the bed under the raised hatchback and rummaged around in the bin until he came up with a shaving mirror. He went to work swabbing the cuts clean with rubbing alcohol, wincing occasionally, scrunching his face against the stings.

“Where should I start?” he said.

“Where can you?”

“Oh, it’s easy. You came in during the late innings. I put this in motion a long time ago.”

“And what is ‘this’?”

“In the parlance of my business, it’s a salting scam.”

“And your business is?”

He looked up at her with mild hurt and dismay, like a fading movie star she’d failed to recognize. “I’m a grifter.”

“A con man.”

“I prefer grifter. It’s got some panache to it. ‘Con man’ just sounds like, I dunno, some guy could be selling you penny stocks or fucking Amway.”

“So you’re a grifter.”

He nodded and handed her some alcohol swabs for her knuckles. She nodded her thanks, tucked the gun in her waistband, and took a few steps back from him as she cleaned her knuckles.

“About five years ago, I came across a bankrupt mine for sale in Papua New Guinea, so I formed a corporation, and I bought the mine.”

“What do you know about mines?”

“Nothing.” He worked on the blood in his nose with a Q-tip. “Jesus,” he said softly with something akin to admiration, “you fucked me up, girl.”

“The mine.” She suppressed another smile.

“So we bought the mine. And simultaneously, Caleb created a consulting company, with an entirely fictitious but quite believable deep history in Latin America, generations of it, if you didn’t look too closely. Three years later, that company, Borgeau Engineering, undertook an ‘independent’ study of the mine. Which by that point, we’d salted.”

“What’s salting?”

“You sprinkle a mine with gold in places that are easier to access — but not too easy — than others. The idea is one of extrapolation — if x percentage of gold is found here, then one can assume the totality of the mine is sitting on y percentage. That’s what our independent consultants—”

“Borgeau Engineering.”

He tipped an imaginary cap to her. “That’s what they ascertained — that we were sitting on resources worth up to four hundred million troy ounces of gold as opposed to four million.”

“Which would drive your stock up.”

“If we had stock, but we didn’t. No, what it would do was make us a potential threat to any competitors in the region.”

“Vitterman.”

“You have been doing your research.”

“I did spend ten years as a reporter.”

“You did. So what else did you find out?”

“That you probably got a loan from a VC concern called Cotter-McCann.”

He nodded. “And why would they loan us money?”

“Ostensibly to help shore the company up against a hostile takeover by Vitterman while you pulled enough gold out of there to make the company impregnable to takeover.”

He nodded again.

“But,” she said, “word around the campfire is that Cotter-McCann is predatory.”

“Very,” he confirmed.

“So they were going to eat up your little mine and all its profits anyway.”

“Yup.”

“But there wouldn’t be any profits.”

He was watching her carefully now, dabbing at the last of his cuts.

“How much was the loan for?” she asked.

He smiled. “Seventy million.”

“In cash?” She had to force herself to keep her voice low.

He nodded. “And another four hundred and fifty million in stock options.”

“But the options are worthless.”

“Sí.”

She walked in a small circle, her feet crunching leaves and pine needles, until she got it. “All you’ve been after from the beginning was the seventy million.”

“Yup.”

“And you got that seventy million?”

He tossed the last of the bloody swabs into a plastic bag, held the bag out in front of her. “Oh, did I ever. It’s sitting in a bank in Grand Cayman, waiting for me to walk in and pick it up.”

She dropped her own bloody swabs in the bag. “So what’s the hitch in this great plan of yours?”

His face darkened. “The hitch is that the moment we wired the money out of the account in Rhode Island, we were on a clock. That kind of transaction gets noticed quick, particularly by the likes of Cotter-McCann. We made two mistakes — we underestimated just how fast they’d notice the wire because we had no way of knowing they had someone on the payroll in Homeland who flagged it for an SAR.”

“Which is?”

“Suspicious Activity Report. We knew we’d get flagged, but there’s normally a delay between the flagging and the payer hearing about it.”

“What else didn’t you count on?”

“You got an hour?” he said ruefully. “You try something like this, there’s about five hundred things that can go wrong and only one that can go right. So we didn’t count on them putting a tracker on my car. And they didn’t even do it because they were suspicious at that point. They did it because it’s their standard operating procedure.”

“And they followed you where?”

“Same place you did. Nicole’s.” Something caught in his voice. Authentic grief, she would have assumed, if she didn’t know how good an actor he was. “They probably missed me by ten minutes. But they found her. And they killed her.” He exhaled a steady stream of air through pursed lips. He stepped out from under the hatchback abruptly, closed it, and clapped his hands together. “Anything else you really, really need to know right now that can’t wait?”

“About a hundred things.”

“That can’t wait,” he repeated.

“How’d you look so dead? At the bottom of the harbor? With the blood flowing out of you and the...” She waved her hands as she trailed off.

“Stagecraft,” he said. “The blood was easy. That’s all squibs. The ones in my chest were wired up before you got on the boat. The ones in my mouth came out of the bag of peanuts, as you know. The oxygen tank was waiting for me as long as I could get to that rock in time. You dove in fast, by the way. Shit. I barely had time to get situated.”

“The look,” she said impatiently. “You looked right at me with dead eyes and a dead face.”

“Like this?”

It was as if someone had plunged a needle full of strychnine into the base of his brain. All light bled from his eyes and then from the rest of his face. It wasn’t only that his face grew impossibly still, its spirit vacated.

She waved her hand in front of his eyes and they remained fixed on nothing and never blinked.

“How long can you do this?” she asked.

He let out a breath. “I probably could have done another twenty seconds.”

“And if I’d stayed down there looking at you?”

“Oh, I had maybe forty more seconds, a minute tops. But you didn’t. And that’s what a good grift always relies on — that people will act predictably.”

“If they’re not Cotter-McCann.”

“Touché.” He clapped his hands together again and the ghoulish aura of death left his face. “Well, we’re still on a tight clock, so mind if I download the rest to you while we go?”

“Go where?”

He pointed north. “Canada. Caleb’s meeting us there in the morning.”

“Caleb?” she said.

“Yeah. Where’d you ditch him, the safe house?”

She stared back at him, no idea what to say.

“Rachel.” He stopped with his hand on the driver’s-side door. “Please tell me you went to the safe house after the boat.”

“We never made it.”

His face drained. “Where’s Caleb?”

“He’s dead, Brian.”

He put both hands to his face. He brought them back down and then pressed them flat against the windows of the Range Rover. He lowered his head and didn’t seem to breathe for a full minute.

“How’d he die?”

“They shot him in the face.”

He came off the car, looked at her.

She nodded.

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Two men looking for a key.”

He looked helpless. Worse, she realized. Bereft. He gave the woods a wild look, as if he were about to faint again, and then he slid down the side of the Range Rover and sat on the ground. He trembled. Wept.

In three years, she’d never seen this Brian. She’d never seen anything close. Brian didn’t cave, Brian didn’t break, Brian didn’t need help. She was witnessing the reduction of him, the essential pieces at the core of him being removed and carted off. She engaged the safety on the pistol and placed it behind her back and sat on the ground across from him. He wiped at his eyes and sucked air in through wet nostrils that still glistened with blood.

His hands shook along with his lips when he said, “You saw him die?”

She nodded. “He was as close to me as you are now. The guy just shot him.”

“Who were these guys?” He blew air through his lips in short bursts.

“I don’t know. They looked like they sell insurance. And not the high-end kind, the kind you get at strip malls.”

“How’d you get away from them?”

She told him, and in the telling, she watched him return a bit to form. The trembling stopped, his eyes cleared.

“He had the key,” he said. “It’s over. Game fucking over.”

“What key?”

“Safe deposit box at a bank.”

She fingered the key in her pocket. “Bank in the Caymans?”

He shook his head. “Rhode Island. That last day? I carried around a bad feeling, an ugly hunch, I guess. Either that or I simply panicked like a fucking child. I dropped our passports in the bank. If anyone got to me, I figured Nicole could get to them. But they got to Nicole instead. So I handed the key off to Caleb.”

“What passports?”

He nodded. “Mine, Caleb’s, Haya’s, the baby’s, Nicole’s, yours.”

“I don’t have a passport anymore.”

He stood wearily and held out his hand. “Yes, you do.”

She took the hand and allowed him to pull her to her feet. “I’d know if I had a passport. Mine expired two years ago.”

“I got you another one.” He still hadn’t dropped her hand.

She still hadn’t pulled it away. “Where’d you get a picture?”

“The photo booth in the mall that time.”

Not bad, she thought. Not bad.

She pulled the key out of her pocket. She held it up and watched him come back from the dead for the second time in fifteen minutes. “This key?”

He blinked several times, then nodded.

She put it back in her pocket. “Why did Caleb have it?”

“Caleb was supposed to get the passports. He and I could impersonate each other in our sleep. Shit, his version of my signature looked more like mine than mine.” He looked up at the hard sky. “You and I were supposed to slip into Canada, meet the others in a place called Saint-Prosper. From there — fuck — from there, we’d all go to Quebec City, fly out of the country.”

She looked in his eyes and he looked back and neither of them said a word until she said, “So all six of us were supposed to leave the country together?”

“That was the plan, yeah.”

“You, your best friend, his wife and child, and your two wives.”

He dropped her hand. “Nicole wasn’t my wife.”

“Then who was she?”

“My sister.”

She stepped back and took a hard look at his face to see if he was telling the truth or not. But then what did she know about that? She’d lived with him for three years and never knew his real name or profession or history. Just two nights ago, he’d convinced her he was dead, stared back at her with sightless eyes from the bottom of the ocean. This was not a man who wore his lies the way normal people wore theirs.

“Was your sister pregnant?”

He nodded.

“Who was the father?”

“We don’t have time for this.”

“Who was the father?”

“Guy named Joel, okay? Worked at the bank with her. Married guy, three kids of his own. It was a fling. But Nicole always wanted a kid, so even after she broke things off with Joel, she went forward with the pregnancy. She didn’t need Joel’s support; we were going to be sitting on seventy million. You want to meet Joel? I can set it up. You can ask him if his dead ex-mistress was six months’ pregnant with his child when someone executed her in her kitchen because her brother” — he was pacing now, agitated — “her dumb fuck brother left his car in front of her house while he went back to Boston to shock you back to reality.”

Her laugh sounded like a bark. “You what? You tried to shock me back to reality?”

He was all earnest innocence. “Well, yeah.”

“That’s the biggest load of horseshit I’ve ever heard.”

“I needed you ready to run. I didn’t expect Cotter-McCann to bite down hard on the hook for, shit, three months. Six? I was hoping for six. But they fucking bit early because they’re aggressive and greedy and they want what they want on their timetable, no one else’s. I didn’t expect them to put the money into our account and hire an independent consulting firm to double-check the mine on the same day. But they did. And I didn’t expect them to put a two-man hit squad on me and my crew simultaneously. But, once again, they did. So I had to skip plan A, dump plan B, and go right to plan C, the one where I shock you the fuck awake. And, whattaya know, it worked.”

“Nothing worked. Nothing—”

“You afraid to drive anymore?”

“No.”

“Afraid to take cabs?”

“No.”

“Afraid of wilderness or wide open spaces? How about elevators? Diving into the ocean? Have you had a panic attack, Rachel, since this whole thing started?”

“How could I tell? I’ve been in a state of panic ever since I saw you walk out of the back of a building in Boston when you said you were in London.”

“Right.” He nodded. “And you’ve overcome that panic, every minute of every day since, to do what needed to be done. Including killing me, by the way.”

“But you didn’t die.”

“Yeah, well, my apologies.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “You’re not afraid anymore because you stopped listening to anyone but your own primal self. You had all the ‘evidence’ you needed to crawl back into your life and stay there. I didn’t paint the clues in neon; I made you work for them. You could have trusted your eyes — the visa stamps looked real enough, to give you just one example — but you trusted your instinct, babe. You acted from what you knew there” — he pointed at her chest — “not here.” He pointed at her head.

She stared at him for a long time. “Don’t call me ‘babe.’”

“Why not?”

“Because I hate you.”

He took that into consideration. Shrugged. “That’s how we usually feel about the things that wake us up.”

31 Safe House

They left Caleb’s smashed-up SUV in the woods and drove the Range Rover three hundred miles south to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, just south of the Massachusetts border and about fifteen miles north of Providence. They’d had a lot of time to talk on the drive but hadn’t really, except about the essentials. They’d listened to the radio long enough to hear they were both considered “persons of interest” in the deaths of two people in two different states. Police in Providence and Boston were tight-lipped as to why they believed the murder of a small-town bank employee in Providence was connected to the murder of a businessman in Boston, but they were determined to meet with Brian Alden, the brother of the Providence victim and business partner of the Boston victim, and with Brian Alden’s wife, Rachel Childs-Delacroix. Handguns registered to both “persons of interest” had not been recovered at their Back Bay home, so they were to be considered armed.

“Basically my life is ruined,” Rachel said somewhere near Lewiston, Maine. “Even if I could clear my name.”

“Big if,” Brian said.

“I’d fuck myself financially to do it.”

“Spend a lot of time in jail while that was happening.”

She shot him a dirty look he didn’t see because his eyes were on the road. “And they could still bury me deep on ancillary charges.”

He nodded. “Obstruction of justice comes to mind. Cops tend to get a bit miffed when you forget to tell them there’s a corpse sitting at your dining room table. Leaving the scene of a crime, unlawful flight, reckless driving, I’m sure I’ll think of a few more.”

“This isn’t funny,” she said.

He looked over at her. “When did I give the impression it was?”

“Right now. You’re being sarcastic, snarky.”

“I get that way when I’m terrified.”

“You’re terrified? You.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Beyond terrified. If no one’s found the safe house and we can do what we need to do there and if we can slip into Providence without being made, and if we can get into the bank and get to the safe deposit box where I stashed the passports and the running money, if we can still get back out of that bank and out of Providence and grab Haya and the baby and find an airport where no one’s looking for us and our faces aren’t plastered over everyone’s home screen and the nine TVs tuned to CNN in the airport bar, and if they don’t have someone waiting for us in Amsterdam, then, yes, we could possibly survive the year. But I’d put our odds at successfully navigating all those obstacles at, oh, I dunno, grim to none.”

“Amsterdam,” she said. “I thought the bank was in the Caymans.”

“It is, but they’ll definitely be waiting for us there. If we get to Amsterdam, we can wire it all to Switzerland.”

“But why stop in Amsterdam?”

He shrugged. “I’ve always liked Amsterdam. You’d like it too. The old canals are pretty. Lotta bikes, though.”

“You talk like you’re taking me sightseeing.”

“Well, that’s the plan, isn’t it?”

“We’re not together,” she said.

“No?”

“No, you lying sack of shit. This is a business arrangement from here on out.”

He rolled down his window for a moment, took a blast on his face to wake himself up. Rolled the window back up.

“Okay,” he said, “you play the business tip. But I’m in love with you.”

“You don’t know the first thing about love.”

“Guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that one.”

“Did you ever search for my father?”

“What?”

“When I met you, you were a private investigator.”

“That was a scam. My first one, actually.”

“So you were never an actual private investigator?”

He shook his head. “I set up that front to do background checks for all the employees of a tech start-up that was setting up shop in the area.”

“Why would you set up a front just to do background checks?”

“There were sixty-four employees of that company, if memory serves. Sixty-four DOBs, sixty-four SSNs, sixty-four histories.”

“You stole sixty-four identities.”

He nodded. It was a quick nod but full of pride. “One of them’s on your passport.”

“But when I came through your office door?”

“I tried to talk you out of hiring me.”

“But when I came back a few months later, you just took my money and—”

“I looked for your father, Rachel. I busted my ass on it. I wish I’d been smart enough to consider that James was his last name, but I wasn’t. But I ID’d every professor with the first name James who’d taught in that region over the previous twenty years, just like I said I did. The only honest work I ever did as a private eye, I did for you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re good.”

“I’m what?”

“You’re good. You’re one of the only good people I’ve ever met. And you’re worth fighting for and fighting with. You’re worth everything.”

“You’re such a liar. You’re running a fucking con right now. On me.”

He thought about that. Eventually he said, “When I met you in the bar that night, Caleb and Nicole kept telling me to get rid of you. Grifters can’t have love lives, they said, just sex lives. This from my sister who would end up getting knocked up by a married guy. She’s giving me advice on love. And Caleb, who would marry a woman who couldn’t speak English. Those are my Dear Abbys.” He shook his head. “‘Don’t fall in love.’ Well, that worked out fucking great for all of us.”

She willed herself not to look over at him but instead out the window.

“I fell for you because that’s what you do when you meet the woman whose face you want to be looking into when you die. You fall. And keep falling. And if you’re really lucky, she falls with you and you never get back up again to where you were because if that was so great, you wouldn’t have needed to fall in the first place. But when I fell, I fell all the way. I had just started this con. I met you the night I closed papers on the mine. Caleb was supposed to meet me at the bar to celebrate, but I saw you and I texted him and told him I’d eaten bad tuna at lunch, and he went out to dinner somewhere by himself. And I looked across the bar and I thought, ‘That’s Rachel Childs. I tried to find her father once. I used to watch her on the news.’ I used to wonder who was lucky enough to go home to you. And then that drunk fucked with you and I got to come to your rescue and the irony is, you thought it might be a con. I always loved that. Made me believe in God for a minute. And you left and I ran out onto the streets looking for you.” He looked across at her. “I found you. And then we had the walk and the blackout and found our amazing bar.”

“What was playing when we entered?”

“Tom Waits.”

“What song?”

“‘Long Way Home.’”

“Should have been ‘16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought-Six.’”

“Be nice.” He shifted in his seat, resettled his wrist against the top of the wheel. “You might not like my methods, Rachel, and it may be unwelcome news to learn I make my living running long cons. So you can fall out of love with me, but I can’t fall out of love with you. I wouldn’t know how.”

She almost bought it, if only for a second, but then she remembered who this man was — an actor, a con man, a grifter, a professional liar.

“People who love each other,” she said, “don’t wreck each other’s lives.”

He chuckled softly. “Sure they do. That’s what love is — where once there was one, now there’s two, and that’s so much less convenient and less orderly and less safe. You want me to apologize for blowing your life up? Okay. I’m sorry. But what did I blow up? Your mother’s dead, you never knew your father, your friends are transitory at best, and you never leave the apartment. What life did I take, Rachel?”

What life indeed, she wondered, as they entered Woonsocket at sundown.

It was a faded, cauterized mill town with hopeful pockets of gentrification that couldn’t compensate for the air of abandonment. The main street was peppered with vacant storefronts. Some mills rose up behind those buildings, their windows broken or nonexistent, the brick edifices festooned with graffiti, the land reclaiming the lower floors and punching cracks through the foundations. It had happened before she was born, this wholesale discarding of American industry, this switch from a culture that made things of value to a culture that consumed things of dubious merit. She’d grown up in the absence, in other people’s memory of a dream so fragile it had probably been doomed from the moment of conception. If there had ever been a social contract between the country and its citizens, it was long gone now, save the Hobbesian agreement that had been in play since our ancestors had first stumbled from caves in search of food: Once I get mine, you’re on your own.

Brian drove over a series of dark hilly streets and then down to a quartet of long, four-story buildings that comprised a failed mill sitting along the river with nothing else around it for blocks. Each brick building had at least a hundred windows fronting the street and the same amount again on the river side. The high window frames in the center of the buildings were twice as large as the others. Brian drove around the complex to reveal a pair of covered passageways between the fourth floors connecting the buildings, so that the complex, if seen from the air, would look like a double H.

“This is your safe house?” she said.

“No, this is an abandoned mill.”

“So where’s the safe house?”

“Nearby.”

They rolled past broken windows and weeds the height of the Range Rover. Gravel and rocks and pebbles of broken glass crunched under his tires.

He took out his phone and fired off a text to someone. A few seconds later it vibrated with the return text. He put the phone back in his jacket. He drove around the mill twice more. At the tip of the property, he killed the headlights and rolled up a small knoll, just upriver from a dam by the sound of it. At the top of the knoll, partially obscured by a stand of half-dead trees, stood a small brick two-story house with a black mansard roof. He put the Rover in park but left the engine running and they sat and watched the house.

“Used to be the night watchman’s. City’s owned all this land ever since the mill went tits-up in the seventies. Most of the land is probably poisoned and no one has the money to test it, so they sold us this house for pennies on the dollar.” He shifted in his seat. “It’s got good bones, actually, and clear sight lines. Impossible to approach without being seen.”

“Who’d you text?” she asked.

“Haya.” He nodded at the house. “She’s inside with Annabelle. Wanted her to know I was coming.”

“So why aren’t we going in?”

“We will.”

“What’re we waiting for?”

“For my sense of terror to be overridden by my impatience.” He looked up at the house. A light came from somewhere deep in the back of it. “If all was clear, Haya was supposed to text ‘I am OK. Come in.’”

“And?”

“She only texted the first half.”

“Well, it’s not her native tongue. And she’s scared.”

He chewed on the inside of his mouth for a moment. “We can’t tell her about Caleb.”

“We have to.”

“If she thinks he’s just held up and will meet us in Amsterdam in a couple days, she’ll keep her shit together. But if she doesn’t?” He turned in the seat, touched her hand. She pulled it back. “We can’t tell her. Rachel, Rachel.”

“What?”

“If this goes south, they will kill us all. The baby too.”

She stared through the dark Range Rover at him.

“We can’t give her any reason to be any more unpredictable than she’s liable to be already. We tell her in Amsterdam.”

She nodded.

“I need to hear you say it.”

“We tell her in Amsterdam.”

Brian looked at her for a long time before he said, “You still got your gun?”

“Yup.”

He reached under the seat and came back with a 9mm Glock, put it behind his back.

“You’ve had a gun the whole time,” she said.

“Shit, Rachel,” he said with a distracted sigh, “I’ve got three.”

They walked around the outside of the house twice in the dark before Brian led them up the sagging back steps to a door that had lost most of its paint over the years. The floorboards squeaked underfoot and the house itself creaked in an unseasonably cool wind, more early autumn than early summer.

He moved along the porch, checked all the windows and the front door before they returned to the back. He unlocked the door and they entered.

An alarm beeped to their left and Brian punched in her birthdate on the keypad and the beeping stopped.

The central hallway ran straight from the back door, past an oak staircase to the front door. The house smelled clean but dusty, maybe a light foundational odor of mildew that a thousand housecleanings could probably never remove. He produced two penlights from his jacket, handed her one, and turned on his own.

Haya sat below the mail slot in the front door, junk mail off to her right, a gun clasped in her hands.

Brian gave her a wave and a warm smile and came down the hall to her. She lowered her gun and he hugged her awkwardly and then they stood in front of her.

“Baby is asleep.” She pointed at the ceiling.

“You need sleep,” Brian said. “You look exhausted.”

“Where is Caleb?”

“The bad men, Haya, they may be following him. He didn’t want to lead them here. To you and Annabelle. You understand?”

Her breath was coming too fast. She bit her upper lip so hard Rachel feared it would spout blood. “He is... alive?”

Jesus.

“He is,” Brian said. “He’s going to go out through Maine. Remember how we talked about it? He’s going to cross into Canada and fly out of Toronto. No one will be able to track him in Maine. We know that terrain. You understand ‘terrain’?”

She nodded twice. “He will be... okay?”

“He will be,” Brian said with a firmness Rachel despised.

“He does not answer his... mobile phone.”

“We explained that. They can track a phone, Haya. If any of us thinks they’re being followed, they stay off the phone.” Brian took her hands in his. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll all be out of here in the morning.”

Haya looked at Rachel, woman to woman, a look that transcended any language barrier: Can I trust this man?

Rachel blinked an affirmative. “Get some sleep. You’ll need the rest.”

Haya climbed the dark stairs and Rachel resisted the urge to run to her and tell her everything they’d said was a lie. Her husband was dead. The father of her child was dead. She and her infant were about to go on the run with a pair of two-faced strangers who lied to her and would continue to lie to her until she couldn’t fuck up their escape.

Haya turned right at the top of the stairs and Rachel lost sight of her.

Brian read her mind. “What do you want to tell her?”

“That her husband is dead,” she whispered.

“Fine. Be my guest.” He waved his arm at the staircase with a flourish.

“Don’t be cruel,” she said after a moment.

“Don’t be judgmental,” he said, “unless you’re willing to walk the walk.”

They checked the downstairs together, room by room, and it was empty.

Only then did he turn on the lights.

“Sure that’s wise?” she asked.

“If they knew about the place,” he said, “they’d have been out in the mill or inside with her. They aren’t, which means this safe house is still safe. Nicole didn’t give it up. Probably because they didn’t know to ask her.”

“Haya’s got the bedroom up top on the right.” His body sagged with exhaustion all at once and she realized how wiped she was as well. He used his gun hand to point vaguely back up the stairs. “There’s a linen closet outside the bathroom. The first bedroom on the left has a dresser with a bunch of clothes in your size. Let’s each take a shower, I’ll put on some coffee, and we’ll get back to work.”

“What do we have to work at?”

“I gotta teach you a little forgery.”

32 Confession

Hair still wet, coffee in a mug, wearing a T-shirt, hoodie, and sweats that were, as promised, in her size, she sat at the table with her husband — was he still that? — as he placed a pad of blank paper in front of her with a pen. He then laid down several documents with his sister’s signature on them.

“I’m going to be Nicole?”

“For the five minutes it should take to get in and out of that bank, you’re going to be Nicole’s last alias.” He dug around in a gym bag until he came back with a small stack of IDs and credit cards wrapped in a rubber band. He extracted a Rhode Island driver’s license. It was in the name of Nicole Rosovitch. As he placed it on the table in front of her, Brian shook his head tightly. She got the feeling he didn’t know he was doing it.

“I don’t look anything like her,” she said.

“Similar bone structure,” he argued.

“Eyes are different.”

“That’s why I keep a set of color contacts.”

“They’re shaped differently.” She pointed. “And hers were bigger. Her lips are thinner.”

“But your nose is close and so’s your chin.”

“Anyone will be able to tell I’m not her.”

“A straight, almost-middle-aged guy with the two-point-two kids, the world’s most boring job, and I’ll assume the corresponding world’s most boring wife? He’s gonna remember one thing about the hot blonde in his office three months ago — that she was a hot blonde. So let’s make you a blonde. The hot part’s already covered.”

She ignored the appeal to her vanity. “You’ve got the right hair dye in this place?”

“I got wigs. Same one she wore.”

“Banks have face recognition software these days, you know.”

“Not at this bank,” he said. “That’s why I picked it. When in doubt, go mom and pop. This bank has been in Johnston for three generations. They only got an ATM four years ago and only after their customers filed a petition. The owner, that’s who you’ll be meeting, is also the bank manager and handles all safe deposit transactions. His name is Manfred Thorp.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” she said.

He straddled the chair beside her. “No, really. He told me the name Manfred goes back in the family a thousand years. Says every generation has to name one kid ‘Manfred’ and he, as he put it, drew the short straw.”

“How well do you know him?”

“Just met him once.”

“But you know all that about him.”

He shrugged. “People like talking to me. My father was the same.”

“Who was your father?” She turned her chair toward him. “Your real father.”

“Jamie Alden,” he said brightly. “People called him Lefty.”

“Because he was left-handed?”

He shook his head. “Because he never met a place or a person he wouldn’t leave. Left the army without telling them, left about twenty jobs, left three wives before my mother and two more after her. He’d pop back in and out of my life until he stuck up the wrong jeweler in Philadelphia. Guy was armed to the teeth and Lefty wasn’t a shooter anyway. Guy killed my dad.” He shrugged. “Live by the sword, die by the sword, I guess.”

“When did this happen?”

He looked up at the ceiling as he searched his memory. “While I was at Trinity.”

“When you got kicked out?”

He acknowledged her scoop of that little fact with a head cock and a small smile. Stayed that way for a moment, staring across the table, and eventually nodded. “Day after I found out he was dead, yeah, I kicked the shit out of Professor Nigel Rawlins.”

“With a plunger.”

“It was on hand.” He chuckled suddenly at the memory.

“What?”

“That,” he said, “was a good day.”

She shook her head at him. “You got thrown out of acting school for assault.”

He nodded. “And battery.”

“How’s that a good day?”

“I acted on my instinct. I knew what he was doing to Caleb was wrong, and I knew what I had to do was right. Nigel kept his job, might still be teaching second-rate method-acting tips to students right now, for all I know. But I’d bet my share of the seventy million, he’ll never treat another student like he treated Caleb or the victims who came before Caleb. Because he’s got it in the back of his head that one of the other students in his class might go all Psycho Brian Alden on him and face-fuck him with a plunger. What I did that day was exactly what I needed to do.”

“And me?” she said after a bit.

“What about you?”

“I don’t act on my instincts. I don’t engage the world.”

“Sure you do. You just fell out of practice. But now you’re back, babe.”

“Don’t call me babe.”

“Okay.”

“You’ve been running this mining scam for, what, four years?”

He thought about it, did some math in his head. “About that, yeah.”

“But how long have you pretended to be Brian Delacroix?”

Something akin to shame found his face. “On and off for almost twenty years.”

“Why?”

He was quiet for a long time, turning the question over as if no one had ever thought to ask him before. “Back in Providence, I was at work one night at the pizza place when a coworker said, ‘Your double’s in the bar across the street.’ So I went over and, sure enough, there was Brian Delacroix with several guys like him, looked like they came from money, and a bunch of hot girls. Long story short, I hung around the bar long enough to figure out which coat was his and I stole it. It was a beautiful coat — black cashmere with blood — red lining. Every time I put it on, I felt...” — he searched for the word — “... substantial.” His gaze was that of a little boy lost in a shopping mall. “I couldn’t wear the coat much, not in Providence, too many chances I’d run across him, but once I got bounced from Trinity, I went to New York, and I started wearing that coat everywhere. If I needed to talk myself into a job, I wore it, and the job was mine. Saw a woman I liked, I put it on, and abracadabra, she ended up in my bed. I realized pretty quick that it wasn’t the coat per se. It was what I covered with it.”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

“The coat,” he explained, “hid my old man bailing on me and my drunk old lady, hid the Section 8 unit we lived in that always smelled a little bit of the dude who OD’d in it just before we moved in, hid all the shitty Christmases and the birthdays we never celebrated and the WIC checks and the power getting shut off and the drunk assholes who hung around my mother and how I’d probably just become one of those drunk assholes someday in the life of a woman just like my mother. I’d have the same nothing jobs and the same barroom stories and put some kids into the world I’d neglect until they grew up to hate me. But none of that was in my future when I put on that coat. I put that coat on and I wasn’t Brian Alden, I was Brian Delacroix. And being Brian Delacroix on his worst day always trumped being Brian Alden on his best.”

The confession seemed to exhaust him and embarrass him in equal measure. After looking at the wainscoting along the wall for a bit, he sighed and glanced over at the papers his sister had signed. He turned one of them upside down on the table. “The trick to forging a signature is to see it as a shape, not a signature. Try to duplicate the shape.”

“But then it’ll be upside down.”

“Oh, right, I wouldn’t have thought of that. We might as well quit then.”

She elbowed him. “Shut up.”

“Ooof.” He rubbed his rib cage. “I’ll teach you how to do it right side up, once you master upside down. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough.” She put her pen to the page.

In the spare bedroom, she could hear him on the other side of the wall, first as he turned back and forth in the bed, and then as he began to snore. So she knew he was on his back then, which is when he snored, never when he was on his side. It also meant his mouth would be open. Typically, she’d nudge him — gently, it never took much — and he would turn on his side. She pictured herself doing so now but that would mean climbing in bed with him, and she didn’t trust herself to do that and stay clothed.

On one hand, this was the definition of insanity — her life could end tomorrow or even tonight because of this man. No other reason. He’d unleashed demons from their basement cages who would not stop until she was dead or in prison. So to feel a sexual pull toward him was batshit.

But, looked upon another way, her life could end tomorrow or even tonight, and that knowledge opened up every pore and receptor she had. It transformed and sharpened everything she saw, smelled, felt. She could hear the ping of water moving through the pipes and smell metal in the river and hear rodents scuttle along the foundation. Her flesh felt as if it had been freshly slathered over her body this morning. She bet if she tried to guess the thread count of these sheets she’d come close, and her blood raced through her veins like a train moving across a desert at night. She closed her eyes and imagined waking as she had once, in the first months of their relationship, to find his head buried between her thighs and his tongue and lips moving softly, ever so softly, along her folds, which were already as wet as the bath she’d been taking in her dream. When she’d come that morning she kicked her left heel into his hip so hard she left a bruise. He grasped the fresh injury, still working the kinks out of his jaw, looking so silly but so sexy at the same time, and she was giggling and still trembling from the orgasm, still, in fact, receiving small electric aftershocks as she apologized. She didn’t even wipe herself off his mouth before she kissed him, and once she started kissing him, she couldn’t stop until she had to take a gulp of air, a big ravenous gasp of it. He’d refer to that kiss over the years, say it was the best he’d ever had, that she climbed so far into him with that kiss he could feel her swimming in the darkness of himself. And after she’d brought him to climax and they lay in the wreckage of the bed with stupid grins and sweaty brows, she wondered aloud if sex was its own mini life cycle.

“How so?” he asked.

“Well, it starts with a thought or a tingle but something small and then it grows.”

He looked down at himself. “Or shrinks.”

“Well, yeah, after. But for the sake of my argument, it grows and grows and builds in power and then there’s the explosion and after that a kind of death or dying, a diminishing of expectation, and usually you close your eyes and lose consciousness.”

She opened her eyes now in the strange bed and assumed the reason she was contemplating sex with a man she currently hated was because of her proximity to death. And even though her rage at him was as close to the surface as her top layer of skin, she had to tamp down the urge to slide out of this bed, pad barefoot around the corner into his room, and wake him the way he’d woken her that morning.

Then she realized it wasn’t sex she wanted. Not at all. It wasn’t even touch.

She walked down the hall and let herself into his room. His breathing changed as she closed the door softly behind her. She knew he’d woken and was trying to adjust his eyes to the darkness as she removed her T-shirt and underwear and left them at the door. She climbed onto the bed, but did so in the opposite direction, her back to the footboard, her feet up by his elbow.

“Can you see me?” she said.

“Mostly.” He placed a hand on the top of her foot but otherwise didn’t move.

“I need you to see me. That’s all I want, nothing else right now.”

“Okay.”

She took a minute to compose herself. She didn’t have a firm grasp on what she was doing here, only that it was mandatory in some way. Essential. “I told you about Widdy.”

“The girl in Haiti, yeah.”

“The one I got killed.”

“You didn’t—”

“I got her killed. I didn’t kill her myself,” Rachel said, “but she was right — if I’d let them take her four, even two hours, earlier, they wouldn’t have been as crazed. They might have let her live.”

“What kind of life, though?”

“That’s what she said.”

“What?”

“Never mind.” She took a deep breath, felt the warmth of his hand as he stroked her foot. “Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Caress me.”

He stopped. But he kept his hand there as she’d hoped he might.

“I told you that she wanted to go to them and I talked her out of it but later they found her.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“And where was I during that?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out for a bit. “You never told me,” he said eventually. “I always assumed you two got separated somehow.”

“We were never separated. Not until the end anyway. I was right by her side when they found her.”

“So...?” He sat up slightly.

She cleared her throat. “The leader of the... pack, no other word for them, was Josué Dacelus. He’s actually quite the crime kingpin there these days, or so I’ve heard, but back then he was just a young thug.” She looked across the bed at her husband as the night rattled the window casings in the old house. “They found us just before sunup. They pulled Widdy from me. I fought, but they pushed me to the ground and spit on me. They stomped on my back and punched me in the head several times. And Widdy wasn’t screaming, she was just crying, the way a girl that age would cry over a dead pet, you know? A hamster, say. I remember thinking that’s what a girl should be crying over at eleven. And I tried to stop them again, but, man, it just infuriated them. I might have been a white woman with press credentials and that made raping and killing me a far riskier proposition than raping and killing Haitian girls and Haitian ex-nuns, but they were ready to throw that caution to the wind if I kept it up. I’m looking at Widdy as they’re pulling her away. And Josué Dacelus slides the barrel of his filthy.45 into my mouth and he moves it back and forth and in and out over my tongue and my teeth like a cock and he says, ‘Would you like to be good? Or would you like to live?’”

For a moment, she couldn’t go on. She just sat there with the tears falling on her body.

“Jesus,” Brian whispered. “You know you couldn’t have—”

“He made me say it.”

“What?”

She nodded. “He pulled the gun from my mouth and he made me look at her as the men dragged her off and he made me say the words.” She wiped her cheeks and pushed the hair out of her face in the same motion. “I. Would. Like. To. Live.” She lowered her head, let the hair fall back in her face. “And I said them out loud.”

When she raised her head a minute or two later, Brian hadn’t moved.

“I wanted to tell you that for some reason,” she said. “Some reason I haven’t figured out yet.”

She slid her foot out of his hand and got off the bed. He watched her put her underwear and T-shirt back on. The last thing she heard as she left the room was his voice as he whispered, “Thank you.”

33 The Bank

The baby’s crying woke her.

It was just after sunup. She went down the hall as the cries lessened and found Haya removing Annabelle’s diaper on a changing table beside a crib. Brian or Caleb had even thought to hang a mobile above the crib and paint the walls pink. Haya wore a Green Day concert T-shirt Rachel recognized as Caleb’s over a pair of plaid men’s boxer shorts. Judging by the dishevelment of the bedsheets, Haya had tossed and turned through the night. She dropped the soiled diaper and wipes into a plastic bag at her feet and pulled a fresh diaper from a shelf below the table.

Rachel retrieved the bag. “I’ll throw it away.”

Haya gave no indication she’d heard her as she placed the fresh diaper on Annabelle.

Annabelle looked at her mother and then over at Rachel and kept looking at her with her warm dark eyes.

Haya said, “Do women in America keep... secrets from their husbands?”

“Some do,” Rachel said. “Do women in Japan?”

“I do not know,” she said with her usual stop-and-start cadence. And then, quite smoothly: “Probably because I’ve never been to Japan.”

A wholly transformed Haya stared back at Rachel suddenly, a Haya marinated in cunning and curdled wisdom.

“You’re not Japanese?”

“I’m from fucking San Pedro,” Haya whispered, eyes on the doorway behind Rachel.

Rachel went to the door and closed it. “Then why are you...?”

Haya exhaled so hard her lips flapped. “Caleb was a mark. I knew he was a con man the day I met him. So I was always stunned he never picked up on my bullshit.”

“How did you meet? We all suspected like a mail-order bride thing.”

She shook her head. “I was a hooker. He was my john. The woman who ran the escort service would always tell someone who’d never been with me that I’d only been in the country three weeks, I was very new at the business, etc.” Haya shrugged. She lifted Annabelle off the changing table and gave the baby her left breast. “Drove the price up. So Caleb shows up and right away it doesn’t make sense — he was too good looking to pay for it. Unless he was into violence or severe kink and he wasn’t. Not even close. Straight missionary style, very tender. Second time he came around, he talked after about how I was the perfect girl for him — knew my place, knew my role, didn’t speak the language.” She smiled ruefully. “He said, ‘Haya, you can’t understand me, but I could fall in love with you.’ I looked at his watch, his suit, and I said, ‘Love?’ Gave him a real searching, lost-child look, pointed between me and him, and said, ‘I love.’” She stroked her baby’s head and watched her suckle. “He bought it. Two months later he paid the owner of the service a hundred grand to steal me away. I’ve been watching and listening as him and Brian put this scam together ever since.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“Because I want my end.”

“I don’t have anything to—”

“Is Caleb dead?”

“No,” Rachel said with the emphasis of someone who was almost offended by the absurdity of the question.

“Well, I don’t believe you,” Haya said. “So, here’s the thing — if you two run on me, I will drop a dime on you before you can ever get near an airport. And I won’t just tell the cops. I’ll reach out to Cotter-McCann. And they will find you and they will fist-fuck you in the ass until you die.”

Rachel believed her. “Again, why tell me?”

“Because Brian would take his chances if he knew. He rolls dice. You, though, you’re not that suicidal.”

No? Rachel thought. You shoulda seen me yesterday.

“I’m telling you because you’ll make sure he comes back for me.” She indicated the baby. “For us.”

Haya was back in character when she asked Brian if Caleb was alive or not as Brian went over the game plan for what to do if anyone came calling while they were out.

Brian lied to her as Rachel had. “No. He’s fine.” Then he asked Haya, “Which shade do you pull?”

“The orange,” she said. “In...” She pointed.

“The pantry,” Brian said.

“The pantry,” she repeated.

“And when do you pull it down?”

“When you... text.”

Brian nodded. He reached his hand across the kitchen table. “Haya? It’s gonna be all right.”

Haya stared back at him. She said nothing.

Cumberland Savings and Loan was, as advertised, a family-owned business with a history in Providence County, Rhode Island. The strip mall that abutted it had been, until the late 1980s, farmland. Most every bit of land in Johnston, Rhode Island, had once been farmland, and that’s who the Thorp family had originally gone into the banking business to serve — the farmers. Now the strip malls were overtaking the farms, Panera had replaced the produce stands, and the farmers’ sons had long since declined a seat on the tractor in favor of a cubicle in an industrial park and a split-level ranch with travertine countertops.

The Panera was doing a bang-up business, judging by the number of cars out front. The bank, on the other hand, had fewer cars when she pulled into its lot at nine-thirty in the morning. She counted eleven cars in the lot. Two were close to the front door in designated spots — a black Tesla in the “Bank President” spot, a white Toyota Avalon in the “Cumberland S&L Employee of the Month” spot. The Tesla gave her pause — when Brian had described Manfred Thorp she’d pictured a doughy suburban yokel in a butterscotch sport coat and a cornflower tie, maybe with man boobs and a double chin. But the Tesla didn’t fit that image. She scratched her nose to obscure her lips from anyone who could be watching. “Manfred drives a Tesla?”

Brian, lying on the backseat under a painter’s tarp, said, “So?”

“Just trying to picture him.”

“Dark hair, young guy, works out.”

“You said he was middle age.” She scratched her nose again and spoke into her palm and felt ridiculous.

“I said almost middle age. He’s, like, mid-thirties. What do you see in the lot? Pretend you’re talking on your cell.”

Ah. He had mentioned that.

She lifted her cell to her ear, spoke into it. “The two cars by the front door. Four other cars in the center of the lot. Five employee cars against the slope at the far end of the lot.”

“How do you know they’re employee cars?”

“They’re all grouped together at the edge of the lot when there are plenty of closer spaces. That usually means the section is for employees.”

“But Manfred’s car is by the doors?”

“Yup. Beside the employee of the month’s.”

“Seven employee cars? That’s too many for a bank this small. You see any heads in any of those cars?”

She looked. The knoll backed up to a great red maple that had probably been there when the first Puritans arrived. Its branches were long, its leaves abundant, and the five cars sitting underneath it could have been sitting under a bridge for all the sunlight that reached them. If there was a suspicious car among them, she would say it was the center car. The driver had backed into the spot. The other four cars were parked nose-in. The grille emblem told her it was a Chevy. By the length of it, she’d guess a four-door, but the interior was impossible to discern under the cover of that shade.

“Hard to tell,” she said to Brian. “They’re in the shade.” She reached for the gearshift. “Should I drive over?”

“No, no. You’re already parked. It’ll look weird. You sure you can’t see into the cars?”

“Pretty much. And if I stare too long and there is somebody in one of those cars, won’t it look suspicious?”

“Good point.”

She let out a long, steady breath. Her blood slithered through her veins; the tom-tom beat of her heart echoed in her ear canals. She felt like screaming.

“I guess there’s nothing to do but gut it out at this point,” he said.

“Great,” she said into the phone. “Great, great, fucking great.”

“There could also be someone inside the bank. Someone just sitting around leafing through brochures or something. They could have flashed a fake badge, told the bank they were staking it out because of blah-blah-blah. That’s what I’d do anyway.”

“Will the person inside be smart enough to spot a wig?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will they be smart enough to recognize me under a disguise?”

“I. Don’t. Know.”

“Is that all you got? A Hail Mary and I-don’t-knows?”

“That’s what most cons are made up of. Welcome to the club. Dues payable at the end of every month and don’t park on the lawn.”

“Fuck you.” She got out of the car.

“Wait.”

She reached back in for her bag. “What?”

“Love ya bunches,” he said.

“You’re an asshole.” She slung her bag over her shoulder and shut the door.

As she walked toward the bank, she resisted the urge to look across the parking lot where the five cars sat under the shade of the maple. By the position of the sun, she guessed she might catch the light right just as she reached the door, but she couldn’t conceive of a casual way to turn her head that far left. She caught her reflection in the front door — honey blond hair that fell to her shoulders and looked completely unnatural to her, though Brian assured her this was only because she wasn’t used to it yet; bright blue, alien eyes; dark blue skirt, peach silk blouse, black flats, the uniform of a supervisor at a medium-size software development company, which is what Nicole Rosovich claimed paid her bills. Her bra matched the color of the blouse; they’d decided on a push-up bra with just a hint of cleavage, not so much to be obvious, but not so little Manfred Thorp would refrain from stealing a glance every now and then. If it helped keep him from looking too closely at the rest of her, she would have agreed to waltz in there naked.

Ten steps from the front door now and all she wanted to do was turn and run. The recent history of panic attacks had at least prepared her for a body awash in hysteria — the Saharan tongue, the spastic heart, the electrified blood, every sight too sharp, every sound too loud — but she’d never had to function normally with a panic attack. But now if she didn’t fake calm at an Oscar-caliber level, she would die or be arrested. Wasn’t really a Door Number Three that she could see.

She entered the bank.

The history of the bank was documented on a plaque just inside the front door and in a series of photographs within the bank itself. Most of the photographs were tinted sepia even though the bank had been established in 1948 as opposed to 1918. There it was as two men in ill-fitting suits and too short, too florid ties cut a ribbon. There it was surrounded by miles of farmland. There it was surrounded by tractors and other farm machinery on what looked to be some kind of holiday.

The door to Manfred Thorp’s office was as old as the first photo. Its wood was thick and painted a reddish brown. The office’s glass walls gave way to wooden or faux-wooden blinds that were closed. No way to tell if Manfred was even in there.

The bank had no customer service station. She had to stand in line behind an elderly woman who sighed a lot until the two tellers dispatched both their previous customers at roughly the same time. The male teller, dark skinny tie over a red plaid shirt, nodded to the elderly woman. The female teller said, “Help you, miss?”

She shot Rachel a vague smile as she approached and emitted the air of someone who was rarely present in a conversation but who’d learned her lines enough to imitate someone who was. She was about thirty, in a sleeveless top, the better to show off well-toned arms and a spray-on tan. She had straight brown hair that fell to her shoulders, a rock the size of a Prius on her left ring finger, and she might have been pretty if the skin weren’t stretched so tight against her face it gave her the unfortunate look of someone who’d been struck by lightning during an orgasm. She flashed eyes as bright as they were dead and said, “What can we do for you today?”

Her name tag identified her as Ashley.

Rachel said, “I need access to my safe deposit box.”

Ashley crinkled her nose at the counter. “Do you have ID?”

“Yes, yes.” Rachel produced the Nicole Rosovich license and dropped it into the tray beneath the glass partition.

Ashley pushed it back out with two fingers. “I don’t need it. You’ll need it for Mr. Thorp, when he’s available.”

“And when will that be?”

Ashley gave her that nothing smile again. “I’m sorry?”

“When will Mr. Thorp be available?”

“You’re not the first customer of the day, ma’am.”

“I never claimed to be. I’m just wondering when Mr. Thorp will be available.”

“Mmmm.” Ashley gave her another smile, this one tight with waning patience. She crinkled her nose again. “Shortly.”

Rachel said, “Is that ten minutes? Fifteen? How would you define it?”

“Please take a seat in the waiting area, ma’am. I’ll let him know you’re here.” She dismissed her by looking past Rachel’s shoulder and saying, “Help you, sir?”

Rachel’s spot was overtaken by a guy with snow-white hair and a shy, apologetic gaze that he dropped as soon as she stepped away from the counter.

She sat in the waiting area with a twentysomething woman with a blue-black dye job, a few New Age neck and wrist tattoos, and sapphire eyes. She wore high-end biker boots and high-end wrecked jeans and a black tank top over a white one, both under a white cotton shirt that was perfectly pressed but two sizes too big. She leafed through a local real estate magazine. After a few glances, Rachel ascertained that she was quite pretty under the dye job and had the kind of posture one associated with supermodels and finishing-school grads.

Not the kind of person one would assume worked for Cotter-McCann and spent her days staking out a bank. In fact, she’d barely looked at Rachel, her eyes locked on the pages of the real estate magazine.

But it was a suburban real estate magazine, the homes on the cover of the small Cape, starter home variety, and this girl didn’t give off that vibe at all. She was downtown loft space all the way. Then again, Rachel herself had leafed through plenty of literature that she’d normally never pick up in a variety of waiting rooms over the years; once, while waiting for her car to be serviced, she’d read an entire article on the best after-market chrome accents for your Harley, fascinated by the similarities between that article and one she’d read in a hair salon a few weeks prior on the best ways to accessorize your spring wardrobe.

Even so, the way this girl read the real estate magazine, her brow furrowed, her eyes studiously — conspicuously? — glued to the pages made Rachel wonder why she could be sitting there. The accounts manager, Jessie Schwartz-Stone, sat in a typical glass-enclosed office, tapping on her desktop keypad with the eraser of a pencil, and both tellers were currently unburdened of customers. The office of Vice-President Corey Mazzetti, also glass-enclosed, was empty.

She’s waiting for the same guy you are, Rachel told herself. Maybe she has a safe deposit box as well. Not something you usually see in the possession of a twentysomething at a hick bank twenty miles from a medium-size city, but the box could have been passed down through generations.

Who passes a safe deposit box down through generations, Rachel?

She glanced at the girl again only to find her staring directly back at her. She shot Rachel a smile — of confirmation? of triumph? of simple acknowledgment? — and went back to her ridiculous magazine.

The brown door opened and Manfred Thorp stood in the doorway in a light pinstripe shirt, red skinny tie, dark suit pants. As Brian had said, he looked quite fit. He had dark hair and dark eyes she didn’t like — they seemed hooded, although that could be because his eye sockets were slightly large for his face. He looked at the two women in his waiting area and said, “Miss...” He looked down at a scrap of paper. “Miss Rosovich?”

Rachel stood and smoothed the back of her skirt, thinking, Okay, so who the fuck is she waiting for?

She shook Manfred Thorp’s hand as he ushered her into the office. He shut the door behind her and she imagined the girl in the waiting room diving into her bag, grabbing her cell phone, and texting Ned or Lars: She’s in the bank.

Ned and Lars, if they were watching the parking lot from one of the cars under the great sugar maple, would now search the parking lot. They’d find Brian easily enough — lying on the backseat of a car under a tarp was hardly foolproof. One of them would open the door, place the muzzle of that silencer to his forehead, and — pop! — lather the backseat with his brain matter. Then all that would be left to do would be to wait for her to exit the bank.

No, no, Rachel. They’d need Brian alive to get the money wired back into their account. So they wouldn’t kill Brian.

But what did they need her for?

“Now how can I help you?”

Manfred was looking at her funny, waiting for her to speak.

“I need to access my safe deposit box.”

He opened a drawer. “Of course. Can I see your driver’s license, please?”

She opened her bag, fumbled inside for her wallet. She retrieved it. Opened it. Pulled out the fake license and handed it across the desk to him.

He didn’t look at it. He was too busy staring at her. She hadn’t been wrong about his eyes — they were, if not cruel, callous and entitled. He’d never formed an opinion about himself and his place in the world that wasn’t flattering.

“Have we met?” he said.

“I’m pretty sure,” she said. “My husband and I rented this box about six months ago.”

He tapped a few keys, looked at his computer screen. “It was five months ago.”

Like I said, she thought, about six months ago, dick.

“And you have all-access privileges.” Another click on the keyboard. “So if all’s in order, we can take you down there.” He held her license up to the screen — comparing signatures, she assumed — and his eyes narrowed. He sat back in his chair, pushed the chair an inch or two back on its wheels. He flicked his eyes at her and then back at the screen and then down at the license in his hand.

Her throat closed.

Followed by her nasal passages.

No oxygen coming in, no oxygen going out.

The office was unreasonably hot, as if it sat on a thin ledge of shale over the mouth of an active volcano.

He dropped her license to the floor.

He leaned sideways in his chair and picked it back up, tapped it off his knee. He reached for the phone and she thought of pulling the gun from her bag, pointing it across the desk at him, and telling him to take her to the fucking safe deposit box right fucking now.

She couldn’t imagine a world in which that scenario ended well.

“Nicole,” he said, the phone in his hand.

She heard herself say, “Uh-huh?”

“Nicole Rosovich.”

She realized she’d sucked her lower lip so deeply into her mouth it probably looked like she’d vacuumed up her chin in the process. She opened her mouth and looked across the desk at him, waiting.

He shrugged. “Cool name. It’s got a good hard sound to it.” He pressed a button on the phone. “You work out?”

She smiled. “Pilates.”

“It shows.” He said into the phone, “Bring the keys over to the office, Ash.” He hung up. He handed her license back to her. “Should be just a minute.”

The relief flooded her body like a broken fever until he reached into a drawer and said, “Just a quick signature.”

He slid a signature card across the desk to her.

“You still use these things?” she said lightly.

“As long as the old man is still with us.” He looked up at the ceiling. “And thank God he is, as I say every day.”

“Well, he built all this.”

“He didn’t build it. My grandfather did. He just...” His voice trailed off. “Whatever.” He unclipped a Montblanc from his shirt pocket and handed it across the desk to her. “If you’d do the honors.”

Thankfully she hadn’t returned her license to her wallet. It was on the desk by her elbow. She’d learned last night through two hours of practice that even when the signature was right side up — particularly when it was right side up — the only way to duplicate it was by seeing it as a shape. Last night, she’d also done best when she’d taken it all in with one quick glance and then plunged straight into duplicating it without pause. But that had been last night, at the kitchen table in Woonsocket, without any stakes.

I am enough.

She looked at the license, drank in the signature, and put the tip of the Montblanc to the signature card. She was halfway through the signature when the door flew open behind her.

She didn’t look back. She finished writing.

Ashley came around to Manfred’s side of the desk and handed him a key ring. She remained by his side and stared down at Rachel as if she knew her name wasn’t Nicole, as if she could see the clips that held her wig in place.

Manfred went through the key ring until he found the one he liked. He noticed Ashley beside him.

“Are you on break?”

“Sorry, Manny?”

“Thank you for the keys, but we have a bank to run.”

Ashley smiled at him in such a way that Rachel knew he’d pay for it later, and just like that Rachel knew they were fucking, which may or may not be news to the blank-faced wife in the pictures, but probably would be to the two hopeful, pudgy boys in the same photos. As Ashley left, Rachel decided Manny cheated on the wife because of her blankness, but he cheated on his sons because they were fat. And you don’t even know it, do you, you son of a bitch? Because you have no integrity. So vows — the ones you made in a church or the ones you should have made to yourself — mean nothing.

He didn’t even glance at the signature card before he came out from behind the desk. “Let’s go then, shall we?”

When they exited the office, the girl had left the waiting area. Had she been waiting on a boyfriend or girlfriend, perhaps? They’d agreed to meet here because her lover had some banking to do before they could pop over to the Chili’s across the road. She wasn’t in the bank any longer, at least not the parts Rachel could see. So that was it — boyfriend or girlfriend came to meet her and they were now ordering the Tequila Lime Chicken across the road.

Or scenario number two: She’d ID’d Rachel, texted Ned, Lars, or men like them, and now she was driving home with plausible deniability in her pocket should the police ever question her about the woman in the blond wig who’d been assassinated in the parking lot around 10:15 that morning.

Manny stopped before an eight-foot-high vault door. He stepped in close to a keypad and punched some numbers onto it. He took one step to his left and pressed his thumb to another pad. The vault door clicked open. He pulled it back. Now they faced a gate. He unlocked that with one of the keys on his ring and then led her into the vault.

They stood there, surrounded by safe deposit boxes, and she realized she’d never asked Brian for the number.

And he’d never told her.

How do you spend hours teaching someone how to fake a signature, weeks, if not months, prepping for this worst-case scenario, make fake IDs, fake passports, pick the perfect bank... and still not tell your wife the actual fucking number of the actual safe deposit box?

Men.

“... in case you want privacy.”

Manny had been talking to her. She followed his gaze to a black door on her left.

“Did you use the privacy room last time you were here?”

“No,” she heard herself say. “I didn’t.”

“Will you need it today?”

“Yes.” There had to be six hundred boxes in here. For a small, former farming community? What were people putting in here — recipes for peach cobbler? Daddy’s Timex?

“Well,” Manny said.

“Well.”

He led her to the middle wall. She reached into her bag for the key. Held it between her index and thumb, felt the numbers there. She dropped it into her palm — 865 — as Manny inserted his own key into the box marked 865. She placed her key in the other lock and they turned them together. He withdrew the box, rested it along his left forearm.

“You said you would be needing privacy?”

“Yes.”

He indicated the door with a jut of his chin and she opened it. The room beyond was tiny, nothing in there but four steel walls, a table, two chairs, and thin white shafts of recessed lighting.

Manny placed the box on the table. He looked directly at her with their bodies only inches apart and she realized the asshole was actually hoping for a “moment,” as if his charms were so universal and magnetic, women had no choice but to act like porn stars in his presence.

“I’ll be out in a few minutes.” She moved around to the other side of the table and slipped her bag off her shoulder.

“Of course, of course. See you out there.”

She didn’t even indicate she heard him and only looked back up again once he’d closed the door behind him.

She opened the box.

Inside, as promised, was the messenger bag she’d seen Brian enter the bank with four days ago. Had it only been that long? It felt like a thousand years in her rearview.

She wrenched the bag out of the tight space and held it by the handles as it unfurled. The cash was on top, as he’d said it would be, stacks of hundred- and, in one case, thousand-dollar bills, neatly rubber-banded together. She transferred them to her bag. All that was left were the six passports.

She reached in and pulled them out and a small bit of bile and vomit reached her mouth when she saw that there were only five of them.

No.

No, no, no, no.

She beseeched the recessed lighting and the cold steel walls: Please, no. Don’t do this to me. Not now. Not after I’ve come this far. Please.

Hold it together, Rachel. Look at the passports before you lose all hope.

She opened the first one — Brian’s face stared back at her. His latest alias was there as well: “Hewitt, Timothy.”

She opened the next one — Caleb’s. His alias had been “Branch, Seth.”

Her hands shook when she reached for the third passport. Shook so bad she had to stop for a moment and clench them into fists and then press the fists together and breathe, breathe, breathe.

She opened the third passport, saw the name first — “Carmichael, Lindsay.”

And then the photograph:

Nicole Alden.

She opened the fourth passport: “Branch, Kiyoko.” Haya stared back at her. She opened the fifth and final one — the baby’s.

She didn’t scream or throw anything or kick over a chair. She sat on the floor and placed her hands over her eyes and stared into the darkness of herself.

I’ve watched my life away, she thought. I’ve failed to act at every step of the way, and I’ve justified that by claiming I was here to bear witness. But in reality I was just choosing not to act.

Until now.

And look what that’s gotten me. I am alone. And then I die. All else is window dressing. Wrapping paper. Sales and marketing.

She found a pack of Kleenex at the bottom of her bag, past the stacks of money, and used a couple of tissues on her face. She found herself staring back in the bag, the money taking up the left side, and on the right, her keys, her wallet, the gun.

And as long as she stared at it, and it could have been ten minutes or one, she had no idea, she knew in the end she could never point a gun at him and pull the trigger a second time. She didn’t have it in her.

She was going to let him go.

Without his passport — fuck him, that was staying here — and without his money, because she was walking off with that.

But she couldn’t kill him.

And why?

Because, God help her, she loved him. Or at least the illusion of him. At least that. The illusion of how he’d made her feel. And not just during the false happiness of their marriage, but even in these last few days. She would rather have known the lie that was Brian than the truth of anything else in her life.

She dropped the pack of tissues back into her bag and pushed the stack of money in over it and that’s when she saw the flash of dark blue vinyl. It slipped out between two stacks of bills like a card used to cut the deck.

She pulled it out of the bag. It was a United States passport.

She opened it.

Her own face stared back at her — one of the photos taken that rainy Saturday in the Galleria Mall three weeks ago. The face of a woman who was trying hard to look strong but hadn’t gotten all the way there yet.

But she was trying.

She put all six passports into her bag with the money and left the room.

34 The Dance

Leaving the bank, she again looked for the woman with the neck tats and the perfect posture but, if she was in the building, she wasn’t anywhere Rachel could see her. She turned right past the waiting area and saw Manny behind the teller’s window, speaking to Ashley with his chin tilted toward her shoulder. They both looked up as she turned left at the door, Manny’s mouth opening as if he were about to call after her, but she went through the front door and into the parking lot.

Now she had the perfect angle on the cars under the tree, and the sun was cooperating too. Of the four cars that remained, only one was clearly occupied. It was the Chevy that had backed into its spot, and a man sat behind the wheel. It was still too shady to see his features, but it was definitely a man’s head — squared off at the top and at the jaw, ears the size of change purses. No way to tell if he was there to kill her or survey her or if he was simply a middle manager ducking out on his work, a john getting a blow job, or an out-of-town salesman who’d arrived early for an appointment to beat the traffic that clogged I-95 in Providence between eight and ten.

She looked straight ahead as she passed between the Employee of the Month’s car and a van parked in the handicap spot. It too had backed in, the sliding door by her left shoulder now, and she imagined the sound it would make as it was pulled open and hands reached out and yanked her inside.

She passed the van and a long black SUV approached from her right. She watched with a strangely detached fascination as the driver’s tinted window slid down and the driver thrust his arm through the opening even before the window had completed its journey down into the door slot. He wore a dark suit with a white shirt cuff peeking out at the wrist. She hadn’t thought to reach into her bag for the gun or at least try to run back behind the van for cover before his arm reached full extension, a cigarette nestled between the index and middle fingers as he exhaled a grateful plume of smoke, his head pressed against the headrest. He shot her a lazy grin as he passed, as if to say, It’s all about the little pleasures, ain’t it?

After he rolled past, she put her hand in her bag, thumbed the safety off the P380, and kept her hand there as she reached the Range Rover. She opened the door with her left hand and climbed inside. Put the bag on the front passenger seat and the gun on the console beside her, finger still on the trigger, safety off. She said, “You still there?”

“Had a few birthdays while you were gone,” he said mildly. “Fucking took you so long?”

“Really?” She removed her finger from the trigger, thumbed the safety back on, and put the gun in the space between her seat and the console. “That’s my greeting?”

“Gosh, hon, you look beautiful. Is that a new something? You look like you dropped a few pounds too. Not that you ever needed to.”

“Fuck you,” she said, surprised to hear a chuckle trail the words.

He laughed. “My bad. How’d everything go? Should probably start the engine, by the way, and do the phone trick if we’re going to keep talking.”

She turned the car on. “Couldn’t they assume I’m going hands-free on the cell?”

“You’re not wearing a headset and you’re driving a car from 1992.”

She put the phone to her ear. “Touché.”

“Was there a plant in the bank?”

She pulled out of the slot, turned toward the exit. “Hard to tell. There was a girl in the waiting area I’m still unsure about.”

“How about the parking lot?”

“One guy in a car in the employee section. Couldn’t tell if he was watching us or not.”

She reached the road.

“Turn right,” Brian said.

They drove up a mild incline and then passed a cluster of clapboard houses — most red, a few blue, the rest faded to the brown-gray of old baseballs. Once they passed the houses, they hit a straightaway between two pastures that unfurled for miles. The sky that rose before her was a blue she’d seen only in dreams and old Technicolor movies. A bank of white clouds formed in the southeast corner but cast no shadow on the fields. She could see why Brian had chosen this road — there were no crossroads for miles. What was left of Johnston’s farming community, it appeared, was right here.

“Well,” Brian said after about two miles.

“Well what?” She laughed for some reason.

“You see anyone in the rearview?”

She glanced up. The road behind her was a gunmetal ribbon with nothing on it. “No.”

“How far back can you see?”

“I’d guess about two miles.”

After another minute, he said, “Now?”

She looked again. “Nothing. Nobody.”

“Rachel.”

“Brian.”

“Rachel,” he said again.

“Brian...”

He sat up in the backseat and the smile that broke across his face was almost too big for the car.

“How do you feel about yourself today?” he asked. “Right now? Pretty fucking bad or pretty fucking good?”

She caught his eyes in the rearview and presumed hers were as adrenalized as his. “I feel...”

“Speak it.”

“Pretty fucking good.”

He clapped his hands together and whooped.

She stepped on the gas and punched the roof and let out a howl.

In another ten minutes, they reached another small strip mall. She’d clocked it on the way in; it contained a post office, a sub shop, a liquor store, a Marshalls, and a Laundromat.

“What’re we doing here?” Brian peered at the low-slung buildings, all gray except for the Marshalls, which was white fading to eggshell.

“I need to run a quick errand.”

“Now?”

She nodded.

“Rachel,” he said, and failed to keep a whiff of condescension out of his voice, “we don’t have time to—”

“Argue?” she said. “I agree. Be right back.”

She left the key in the ignition and the bag she’d carried out of the bank at his feet. It took her ten minutes in Marshalls to change out of her Nicole Rosovich outfit and into a pair of jeans, cranberry V-neck tee, and black cashmere cardigan. She handed the tags to the cashier, transferred her previous outfit to a plastic store bag, paid up, and left.

Brian watched her exit and started to sit up, but then his face darkened as she gave him a quick four-finger wave and entered the post office.

She came back out five minutes later. Brian looked a lot paler when she got behind the wheel. Smaller, too, and a little sickly. Her bag still sat at his feet, but he’d clearly gone through it — a stack of bills peeked through the opening.

“You went through my bag,” she said. “So much for trust.”

“Trust?” It came out sharp and high like a hiccup. “My passport isn’t in there. Neither is yours.”

“No.”

“So where are they?”

“I have mine,” she assured him.

“That’s wonderful.”

“I think so.”

“Rachel.”

“Brian.”

His voice was nearly a whisper. “Where’s my fucking passport?”

She reached into the Marshalls bag and retrieved a shipping label, handed it to him.

He smoothed it on his thigh and stared at it for some time. “What’s this?”

“It’s a shipping label. Global Express. Guaranteed from the United States Postal Service. That’s your tracking number right there in the upper right corner.”

“I can see that,” he said. “I can also see you addressed it to yourself as a guest of the Intercontinental Hotel in Amsterdam.”

She nodded. “Is that a good hotel? Have you ever stayed there? It looked good on the website, so I went with it.”

He looked at her like he was thinking about hitting something. Her, perhaps. Or himself. The dashboard possibly.

Probably her, though.

“What did you mail to the Intercontinental Hotel in Amsterdam, Rachel?”

“Your passport.” She started the Range Rover and pulled out of the parking lot.

“What do you mean, my passport?” His voice was, if possible, even quieter. It was how he got in an argument just before he exploded.

“I mean,” she said with the slowness one reserved for very young children, “I mailed your passport to Amsterdam. Which is where I plan to be by tomorrow night. You, on the other hand, will still be here in the States.”

“You can’t do this,” he said.

She looked over at him. “I kinda already did.”

“You can’t do this!” he repeated, but this time he shouted it. And then he punched the ceiling.

She waited to see if he’d hit anything else. After a mile or so, she said, “Brian, you lied to me through our entire marriage and for the year leading up to it. Did you actually think I was going to overlook that? Say, ‘Gosh, you big lug, ya, thanks for looking out for me?’” She turned left at a sign for 95, still ten miles away from the on-ramp.

“Turn the fucking car around,” he said.

“To do what?”

“Get the passport back.”

“You can’t get mail back once you’ve handed it over. Something to do with interfering with a civil servant on his appointed rounds or something.”

“Turn the car around.”

“What’re you going to do?” She was surprised to hear a chuckle trail the words. “Go back and stick up a post office? I’m going to guess they have cameras, Brian. You may get the passport, but by then you’ll have Cotter-McCann, the local police, the state police, and — since this would surely be a federal crime — the FB fucking I on your ass. Is that really the option you most want to explore right now?”

He glowered at her from the other side of the Range Rover.

“You hate me right now,” she said.

He continued to glower.

“Well,” she said, “we always hate the things that wake us up.”

He punched the ceiling again. “Fuck you.”

“Aw, sweetness,” she said, “would you like me to elucidate your remaining options?”

He popped the glove compartment with the side of his fist and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He lit the cigarette and cracked the window.

“You smoke?” she said.

“You mentioned options.”

She held out her hand. “Give me one.”

He handed her his and lit another one and they drove the empty road and smoked and she felt a hundred feet tall for a moment.

“You can kill me,” she said.

“I’m not a killer,” he said with a weary indignation that fell somewhere between charming and offensive.

“But if you do, you’ll never get your passport. With all the heat on you, even if you could get someone to make you another one, they’d probably charge you a king’s ransom and sell you out to Cotter-McCann anyway.”

She looked in his eyes and saw that she’d scored a direct hit.

“You’ve got no one left to trust, do you?”

He flicked his ash out the crack in the window. “That’s what you’re offering? Trust?”

She shook her head. “That’s what I’m demanding.”

After a while, he asked, “And what’s that look like?”

“It looks like you scurrying around for a few days like a rat with everyone chasing you while me, Haya, and AB wander the canals of Amsterdam.”

“You like that image,” he said.

“And at the appointed time and place, you retrieve the passport I’ll have sent back stateside.”

He sucked so hard on the cigarette the tobacco crackled as it burned. “You can’t do this to me.”

She flicked her own cigarette out the window. “But I already have, dear.”

“I rescued you,” he said.

“You what?”

“From a prison you built for yourself. I spent fucking years getting you ready for this. If that’s not love, then what—”

“You want me to believe you love me?” She pulled to the side of the road and slammed the shift into park. “Then get me out of this country, give me access to the money, and trust I’ll send you the passport.” She stabbed the air between them with her finger, surprised at the swift appearance and infinite depth of her rage. “Because, Brian? There is no other fucking deal on the table.”

He dropped his gaze and looked out at the gray road and blue sky and the fields yellow with the promise of summer.

Now, she thought, comes the moment when he threatens you.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay, what?”

“I’ll give you what you want.”

“And what’s that?”

“Apparently,” he said, “everything.”

“No,” she said, “just faith.”

He gave his own reflection a rueful smile. “Like I said...”

Brian texted Haya from the interstate. For the second time in twenty-four hours, he didn’t like her response.

As agreed upon, he wrote,

If everything was all right, she was supposed to write back,

If anything had gone wrong, she was supposed to respond,

After fifteen minutes, she sent a text back:

In Woonsocket, he directed her up the main hill and then south several blocks. They turned onto a dusty scar of a street that dead-ended at a mound of landfill, crumbled Sheetrock, and bent rebar. From there they had a perfect view of the river and the mill and the night watchman’s house. He pulled a pair of binoculars from the glove box and adjusted the focus as he looked down at the house.

“The pantry shade is still up,” he said.

The sparrow flapped twice in her chest.

He handed the binoculars to her and she saw for herself. “Maybe she forgot.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“But you were pretty clear with your instructions.”

“But I was pretty clear with my instructions,” he agreed.

They sat and watched the house for a while, passing the binoculars back and forth, looking for movement of any kind. Once Rachel thought she saw the shade of the far left window on the second floor move, but she couldn’t swear to it.

Still, they knew.

They knew.

Her stomach eddied and for a moment the Earth’s atmosphere felt too thin.

After a little more watching, Brian took the wheel and they drove back down through the neighborhood and he drove a bit beyond where he had last night and approached the mill from a few blocks farther north. They entered the grounds from an old trucking route that ran parallel to the railroad tracks, and in daylight the skeleton of the mill was both more pathetic and more resplendent, like the sun-bleached bones of a slaughtered god king and his once-majestic retinue.

They found the pickup truck parked a few yards into the shell of the building closest to the river. There was no northern wall left and most of the second floor was gone. The truck was a beast of a machine, a black full-size Sierra, all hard form and function, its wheels and sides splattered with dried mud.

Brian put his hand on the hood. “It’s not hot but it’s a little warm. They haven’t been here too long.”

“How many?”

He looked in the cab. “Hard to tell. Seats five. But I doubt they’d bring five.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Manpower’s expensive.”

“So’s losing seventy million,” she said.

He looked around the mill for a bit and she knew him well enough to know this was how he processed, his eyes clocking his surroundings without actually seeing them.

“You want to confront them?” she said.

“I don’t want to.” He widened his eyes. “But I don’t see a choice.”

“We could skip returning to the house and just run from here.”

He nodded. “You’re willing to leave Haya and the baby behind?”

“We could call the police. Haya doesn’t know anything. She can easily claim ignorance.”

“If the police show up, what’s to stop the guys inside from shooting Haya and the baby? Or shooting the cops? Or entering into a standoff with hostages?”

“Nothing,” she admitted.

“So do you still want to hit the road? Leave them behind?”

“Do you?”

“Asked you first.” He shot her the tiniest of smiles. “What’s it that asshole said to you in Haiti?”

“‘Would you like to be good? Or would you like to live?’”

Brian nodded.

“Can you get us out of here?” she asked.

“I can get you out of here. Can’t get myself out of here the way you’ve fixed it, but I can get you out, honey bunch.”

She ignored the dig. “Right this second?”

He nodded. “Right this second.”

“What’re our chances?”

“Our chances?”

“My chances,” she said.

“About fifty-fifty. Every hour, they drop five percent in Cotter-McCann’s favor. We add a terrified woman and a baby — that’s if we can extricate them from guys who know how to use firearms a lot better than we do — your odds of success drop even further.”

“So right now the odds are about even. But if we go up to that house” — she pointed at the other end of the mill — “it’s more likely we die.”

His eyes widened a little more and he nodded repeatedly. “Way more likely, yeah.”

“And if I say I want to run, you’ll just take me out of here now?”

“I didn’t say that. I said it was an option.”

She looked up through the blackened rafters and the shredded roof at the blue sky. “There’s no option.”

He waited.

“All four of us go.” She took several quick breaths and it made her light-headed. “Or none of us do.”

“Okay,” he whispered and she could see he was as terrified as she was. “Okay.”

She dropped the hammer. “Haya speaks perfect English.”

He squinted at her.

“She grew up in California. She was gaming Caleb.”

He let loose a high chuckle of disbelief. “Why?”

“So he’d rescue her from a shitty life, it sounds like.”

Brian shook his head so many times he resembled a dog after a bath. Then he smiled. The old Brian smile — surprised to be surprised by the turns of the world and somehow tickled at the same time.

“Well, shit,” he said, “I finally like her.” He nodded once. “She told you?”

Rachel nodded.

“Why?”

“So we’d know not to abandon her.”

“I’m not above leaving her behind,” he said simply. “Never was. But I wouldn’t leave Caleb’s kid up there to die. Not even for seventy million.”

He lifted the cover over the tire jack compartment in the Rover and came back with a short ugly shotgun with a pistol grip.

“How many guns do you need?” she asked.

He looked off in the direction of the house as he loaded shells into the gun. “You’ve seen me shoot — I suck. A shotgun levels the playing field a bit.” He shut the hatchback.

Whatever he’d just claimed about being unable to leave Caleb’s daughter behind, it didn’t alter the fact that he could kill her right now with that ugly weapon. It wouldn’t be the rational choice necessarily, but at this point rational choice was a luxury in the rearview mirror.

It didn’t seem to be the first thing on his mind, though, so she opened the driver’s door of the truck. The floor mat was caked with dried mud. She craned her head over the seat and saw the floor mat on the passenger seat was crusted with the same. Wherever they’d been searching for her or Brian lately, they’d walked through some dirt to do it. She opened the rear driver’s-side door — the mats back there were pristine. She could still smell the showroom in the rubber.

She showed it to Brian. “There are only two of them.”

“Unless the other car’s parked somewhere else.”

She hadn’t considered that. “I thought you were Mr. Positive Thinking.”

“We’ll call this an off fucking day then.”

“I mean—” She started but couldn’t finish the thought. Her hand dropped back to her side. She felt closer to vomiting than she had in a while. She mentioned this to Brian.

“Where’s a Scientologist when you need one, uh?” He pointed the shotgun down the end of the building, past mounds of dirt and trash and all the pieces of wall that had been torn out when the scavengers came for the copper wire. “Right at the end there’s a set of stairs. You go down them and you find a really small tunnel.”

“A tunnel?”

He nodded. “Caleb and me dug it over the last couple months. When you thought I was out of the country.”

“Lovely.”

“Figured if we were ever in that house and we had time to see the opposition coming for us, we’d scoot out, get over here, and make a run for it pretty much from where we’re standing now. You can go down—”

“I can?”

“We can, yeah. We’ll crawl over there and—”

“How tight is this tunnel?”

“Oh, it’s bad,” he said. “It’s more like a trough. If I ate a pizza right now, I’d probably get stuck in there.”

“I’m not doing that,” she said.

“You’d rather die?” He waved the shotgun like it was an extension of his arm.

“I’d rather die above ground than below it, yes.”

“You got a better idea?” It came out sharply.

“I haven’t even heard yours. All I’ve heard is the word ‘tunnel.’ And point that fucking thing at the ground, would you?”

He considered the shotgun. He shrugged an apology and pointed it at the ground.

“My plan,” he said calmly, “is that we take the tunnel under the house. We come up in the back bedroom on the first floor. We come out into the house, while they’re peeking out the windows for us.”

“And what’s to stop them from shooting us then?”

“We’ll have the drop on them?”

“The drop?” she said.

“Yes.”

“They’re professionals. A good man with a gun can’t defeat a bad man with a gun if the bad man is at ease in violent confrontation and the good man is not.”

“Fine,” he said, “your turn.”

“What?”

“Your turn,” he repeated. “Give me a better idea.”

She took a minute. It was hard to think over the terror. Hard for any word to find space in her brain besides Run.

She told him her idea.

When she finished, he chewed his lower lip and then the inside of his mouth and then his upper lip. “It’s good.”

“You think?”

He stared at her, as if judging how honest he could afford to be. “No,” he eventually admitted, “it’s not. But it’s better than mine.”

She stepped up close to him. “There’s one big problem with it.”

“Which is?”

“If you don’t do your part, I’m dead within a minute.”

He said, “Maybe even less.”

She took a step back and flipped him the bird. “So how do I know you’ll hold up your end?”

He pulled the pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and offered her one. She waved it off. He put one between his lips, lit it, and returned the pack to his pocket.

“Be seeing you, Rachel.” He gave her a small shrug and walked off through the mill toward the night watchman’s house and never looked back.

35 Family Photo

She drove the Range Rover along the train tracks that ran between the mills and the river. She left the tracks just past the last redbrick building and bounced over cinder block and boulders, and hoped that none of the things scraping the underside of the vehicle was strong enough or angled in such a way that it could puncture the gas tank. She bounced along until she found the little road Brian had described and then she was clinging to the backside of the hill that led up to the night watchman’s house.

Near the top, she stood on the gas and lurched up and over the ridge, the Rover tilting hard to the left, so hard she feared she’d tip over, so she went against her natural instincts and pressed down even harder on the gas, and the vehicle slammed back down on all four wheels and shot up into the clearing behind the house.

Both Ned and Lars came out on the back porch. They were armed. Ned cocked his head at her in surprise but also triumph, a look in his small eyes that she’d seen plenty of times in her life, a look that never failed to make her feel tiny and yet outraged at the same time:

Stupid girl.

She put the Rover in park and stepped out of it, keeping it between her and the porch.

“Don’t run,” Ned said. “We’ll just have to chase you. And the story will end the same way but with us just a bit more fucking perturbed.”

Ned had the Glock he’d killed Caleb with in his hand, the silencer already attached. The soundtrack of her death, she feared, would be a soft pffft. Then again, Lars cradled a large hunting rifle, the kind she imagined could take down a bear, so maybe her death would come with a bang.

They both walked off the porch at the same time.

She pointed her pistol across the hood at them and said, “Stay there.”

Ned held up his hands, looked over at Lars. “I think she’s got us.”

Was Brian somewhere safe, watching the scene play out with a smile on his face?

Lars kept walking toward the Rover. But he did so on a diagonal line. And so did Ned. But in the opposite direction. So that each step they took brought them closer to her yet farther from each other.

“Fucking stop.”

Lars sauntered a few more steps before he did.

It was quite possible Brian kept a backup passport. He could just let her die and go spend all the money.

“What’s this?” Ned said. “Red Light, Green Light?”

He took two steps toward her.

Brian, she wanted to scream. Brian!

She extended her arm across the hood. “I said stop.”

“You didn’t say red light.” He took another step.

“Stop!” Her voice bounced off the house and echoed down the hill.

Ned’s voice stayed level and smooth. “Rachel, you’ve seen some movies, I’m sure, where little girls with guns hold off big bad guys with guns. But, honey, it doesn’t work that way in real life. You let us come off that porch. And then you let us get meaningful separation from each other. Which means that now, in this real life of ours, you can’t shoot both of us before one of us shoots you. Instead, I’ll shoot you or he will and it’s not gonna be real hard to pull off.”

Brian, Jesus. Where the fuck are you? Did you abandon me?

Her hand shook enough that she placed her elbow to the hood of the Rover to steady it. She pointed the gun at Ned, but that left her unable to cover Lars.

Ned cocked an eyebrow at her elbow vibrating off the hood. “See what I’m talking about?”

Oh shit. Shit. Shit. Did you forsake me?

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lars take two more steps.

“Please,” she said. “Just don’t move.”

Ned smiled at that. Checkmate.

From upstairs, the baby cried.

Lars looked up at the sound. Ned kept his eyes on Rachel.

And Brian stepped out on the porch, leveled the shotgun, and pulled the trigger.

The blast entered Lars’s back. It exited his front while the rifle was still in his arms. Pieces of buckshot and pieces of Lars hit the passenger side of the Rover and the rifle left his arms and landed on the hood. Lars went to his knees, and she shot Ned.

She couldn’t actually remember squeezing the trigger but she must have because he shouted as if he were shouting at a ref making a bad call at a sporting event, a dismayed and disgusted “Ahhhhhhhh,” and then he toppled back against the porch steps and she could see the gun was no longer in his hand.

She came around the Rover, kept the gun pointed at him. He watched her come, watched Brian come too, pointing that shotgun at him. Brian’s arm shook — hers, to her surprise, did not anymore — but it didn’t much matter when you were talking about a shotgun.

Lars made a soft thud when his face planted in the dirt.

She picked up Ned’s gun. She held on to it and put her own in the waistband of her jeans. Then they were both standing in front of him, wondering what they were going to do.

The hole she’d put in Ned was in his shoulder. His left arm drooped, as if there were nothing to hold it up anymore, so she presumed her bullet had shattered his collarbone.

He looked at her, breathing shallowly through his mouth. He looked forlorn and lost, a salesman at the end of a bad week. The blood spread down his off-white shirt and soaked the left side of his jacket, one of those plaid, fleece-lined shirt-jackets a lot of construction workers wear.

“Where’s your cell phone?” Brian said.

Ned grimaced as he reached into the right pocket of his corduroy pants. He handed Brian a flip phone.

Brian opened it, scrolled through the call log and then the texts.

“When did you arrive?” he asked.

“’Bout nine,” Ned said.

Brian opened one of his texts. “You told someone ‘We got C.’ What’s that mean?”

“Perloff’s wife was Objective C. You’re Objective A.” He gave Rachel a weary flick of the head. “She’s B.”

The baby wailed again, muffled by glass and distance.

“Where’s Haya?” Rachel said.

“Tied up upstairs,” Ned said. “Same room as the baby. Baby’s in the crib, and she’s not climbing-out age yet. They’re not going anywhere.”

Brian rechecked the call log and then the texts again. He pocketed the phone. “No texts or calls since nine-thirty. Why?”

“Nothing to report. We were waiting on you, Brian. Didn’t think you’d show.”

“What’s your name?” Rachel asked.

“What difference does it make?” Ned said.

Rachel couldn’t argue the point one way or the other.

Brian said, “How’d you find this place?”

Ned blinked a few times, hissed at the pain as he adjusted his position on the steps. “Dummy corp’s docs on your partner’s laptop. Same company that rented the mining probes out of Jakarta two years ago bought this place.”

“Where else are you looking?”

“Sorry,” Ned said. “Even if I could help you — and I’d probably serve up everything I know for a bottle of water right now — I’m only looped in on what applies to my project and my department, no one else’s.”

Rachel retrieved a bottle of water from the Rover, went to hand it to Ned, but he was struggling one-handed with his wallet, thumbing out a photograph. He dropped the wallet to the porch. Now, if she really wanted to know, she could pick it up and look at his license to learn his name. She left it there.

He handed her the photograph as he took the bottle of water.

It was of a blond girl, maybe eleven or twelve, with a wide chin, big eyes, and an uncertain smile, her arm slung around a brown-haired boy, a couple years younger, with Ned’s small lips and wide nose, the boy’s smile bigger and more confident than his sister’s.

“Those are my kids.”

Brian looked over. “Put that fucking thing away.”

Ned held Rachel’s eyes, went on like Brian hadn’t spoken. “Caylee, that’s my girl, she’s real smart, you know? She’s founded the Big Buddies program in her school. That’s where—”

“Stop,” Rachel said.

“—where the older kids, like her, they mentor the first and second graders, you know, buddy up with them so they’re not scared. It was Caylee’s idea. She’s got a huge heart.”

“Stop,” Rachel said again.

Ned gulped some water. “And, uh, Jacob, that’s my boy, he—”

Brian pointed the shotgun at Ned. “Shut the fuck up!”

“Okay!” Ned spilled a bunch of water on his lap. He’d thought Brian was going to pull the trigger. “Okay, okay.”

She watched him tremble as he drank more water and she tried willing her heart to calcify and shrivel but she failed.

Ned drank a bit more water and licked his lips several times. “Thank you, Rachel.”

Suddenly she didn’t want to meet his eyes.

“My name,” he said to her, “is—”

“Don’t you do it,” she whispered. “Don’t.”

Now she met his eyes and he met hers and he looked at her a long time, long enough for her to see both the little boy and the terrible man inside him. Then he flicked his eyelids in acquiescence.

Brian walked to the edge of the hill, cocked his arm, and threw Ned’s cell phone in a high arc that ended when it splashed into the river. He spoke with his back to them. “What’re we going to do with you, man?”

“I’ve been thinking about that.”

Brian turned. “I bet you have.”

“You’re not killers.”

Brian tilted his head toward Lars. “Your road dog there might debate that point.”

“He had a gun on your wife. He was an immediate threat. You did what you had to do. That’s different than executing someone. So, so different.”

“What would you do if you were us?” Rachel asked.

“Oh, you’d already be dead,” Ned said. “But I forked over my soul a long time ago, Rachel. You still have yours.” Ned adjusted himself on the stairs again. “Whether you kill me or you tie me up, it’ll add up to the same thing. The company’s going to send a second team, if they haven’t already. They don’t give a shit about me. I’m just a fucking coolie. If they find me alive or they find me dead, the story is still the same — they continue to hunt you. They might get me to a doctor or not, but they will continue pursuit of you. My point is, you leave me alive, the end result is the same as it would be if you kill me. Except if you kill me in cold blood, you’ve got to look in the mirror every night.”

Brian and Rachel considered that, considered each other.

Ned stood slowly, using the column to the right of the broken railing to do so.

“Hey,” Brian said.

“If I’m going to die, I’d rather be standing.”

Brian looked wildly at Rachel and she looked wildly back. Ned was right — shooting him and Lars had been easy when there’d been no time to think about it. But now...

Upstairs the baby howled. It was shriller this time, more frenzied.

Brian said, “That doesn’t sound right. You want to check on her?”

Rachel didn’t know shit about checking on a baby. She’d never even babysat. And the thought of being up there, trapped, if something went wrong down here was more terrifying than standing guard.

“I’ll stay with him.”

Brian nodded. “He moves, you fucking shoot him.”

Easy for you to say.

“You bet,” she said.

Brian went up the steps and put the shotgun barrel under Ned’s chin. “Don’t fuck with her.”

Ned said nothing, just kept his eyes on something in the general vicinity of the blown-out mills.

Brian entered the house.

The moment he was gone she felt half as strong and twice as weak.

Ned wavered in place against the post. He dropped the water bottle and looked about to keel over but kept his balance by slapping his wrist into it at the last second.

“You’re losing too much blood,” Rachel said.

“I’m losing too much blood,” Ned agreed. “Could I ask you for the water?”

She went to pick up the water but stopped. She caught him watching her, and for the briefest of seconds, he looked far less helpless. He looked hungry and ready to pounce.

“The water,” he said.

“Get it yourself.”

He let out a groan and reached for the bottle, his fingers pawing at the wood riser just above it.

A window opened above them, and several things happened in the same two- or three-second span:

Brian called, “They killed Haya!”

Ned surged off the porch and rammed the top of his head into her chest.

Ned reached for her gun.

Rachel jerked her gun hand free.

Ned drove his good shoulder into Rachel’s chin.

Brian called, “Shoot him!”

Rachel pulled the trigger and fell to the ground.

Ned came off her body and she heard him grunt and she fired the pistol again. The first time she fired at nothing — it was purely defense. The next shot, as she rolled, she aimed in the direction of Ned’s legs as they scrabbled away from her. She fired the final shot as she came to her knees, fired in the direction of his ass as he reached the top of the incline.

He dove over the hill and she may or may not have heard him make a sound when she’d fired that third shot, a yelp possibly. Or she’d imagined it.

She got to her feet and ran to the edge of the hill and she saw him down at the bottom on his knees. She jumped into the brush and the high grass and the weeds and the bottles and old burger wrappers and came down the hill with the gun held high by her right ear.

Ned was on his feet now, staggering toward the first brick building. By the time she reached the bottom of the hill he was holding a hand to his belly and lurching as he walked and he made it to an old office chair with rusted legs and a rusted metal frame. Someone had slashed a horizontal line across the seat and the foam that spilled out was brown. Ned sat in it and watched her come.

Her phone vibrated. She put it to her ear.

“You okay?” Brian asked.

“Yeah.”

She looked back up the hill at him standing on the back porch, the baby to his shoulder, the shotgun in his other hand.

“You need me?”

“No,” she said. “I got this.”

“They shot her in the head.” Brian’s voice was thick. “In the room with the baby.”

“Okay,” she said. “It’ll be okay, Brian. I’ll be right back.”

“Hurry,” he said.

“Why’d you have to kill her?” she asked Ned when she reached him.

He pressed a hand to the exit wound. One of her bullets — she had no idea which one — had entered his body somewhere in the back and come out by his right hip.

“Performance bonus,” he said.

What came out of her mouth sounded like a laugh. “What did you say?”

He nodded. “Our hourly rate is for shit. We’re incentive-based.” His head lolled as he looked around at the husk of the mill. “My old man worked in a place like this up in Lowell.”

“Cotter-McCann could turn this into an apartment complex or a mall,” she said. “A casino, for Christ’s sake. Make their seventy million back in a year.”

He gave that a weary raise of the eyebrows. “Land is probably poisoned.”

“What do they care?” She was hoping if she kept talking he would just fucking bleed out in front of her. “By the time people start getting sick they’ll have pulled their money back out and be long gone.”

He gave that some thought and half nodded, half shrugged.

“She didn’t know anything. She barely spoke English.”

“Police have translators,” he said. “And she spoke English just fine in her last few minutes. Believe it.” He was turning gray, but the hand he pressed to the wound still looked firm and strong. He gave her puppy-dog eyes full of apology. “I don’t make the rules, Rachel. I don’t control anything. I just do a job to put food on my family’s table and I sit up some nights just like every other parent hoping my kids’ lives will be better than mine was. That they’ll have more options than I did.”

She followed his gaze around the mill. “You think they will?”

“No.” He shook his head. He looked down at the blood soaking into his lap and his voice cracked. “I think those days are over.”

“Funny,” Rachel said. “I’m starting to wonder if they ever existed at all.”

Ned heard something in her voice that made him look up. The last thing he said was “Hold on.”

She aimed at his chest from three feet away, but her arm was shaking so badly when she pulled the trigger that the bullet entered his neck. He went rigid against the back of the chair for a moment and panted like a parched dog and blinked at the sky. His lips moved but no sound came out; the blood pooled in the hollow of his throat and dripped into the crevices between the chair frame and the cushions.

He stopped blinking. His lips stopped moving.

Rachel walked back up the hill.

Brian stood with Annabelle to his shoulder. Her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted. She was sleeping.

“You want to have kids?” she asked him.

“What?”

“Simple question.”

“Yes,” Brian said to her, “I want to have kids.”

“Beyond this one?” she said. “Because I think she’s ours now, Brian.”

“Ours?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t have a passport.”

“No, you don’t. But you have our kid. Do you want another?”

“If I live?”

“If you live,” she conceded.

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you want to have kids with me?” Rachel asked.

“Well, who else?” Brian said.

“Say the words.”

“I want to have kids with you,” Brian said. “No one else.”

“Why no one else?”

“Because I don’t love anyone else, Rachel. Never have.”

“Oh.”

“I want a few actually.” Brian nodded. “Kids.”

“A few?”

“A few.”

“You going to birth them?”

“Already playing the violin for herself,” he said to the child on his shoulder. “Get a load of her.”

She looked at the house. “I’m going to say good-bye to Haya.”

“You don’t have to go in there.”

“Yes, I do. I have to pay my respects.”

“They blew her head off, Rachel.”

She winced. Haya had pursued a desire to be anyone but what the world had fated her to be with such fierce resolve that Rachel, having only met the “real” Haya a few hours before, didn’t want see her with half her face turned to pulp, lying in a gout of black blood. But if she didn’t look, then Haya was just another of the disappeared in Rachel’s rearview. Soon it would grow too easy to pretend she’d never been real.

If it’s ever within your power to do so, she considered saying aloud to Brian (but didn’t), you have to bear witness to your dead. You simply have to. You have to step into the energy field of whatever remains of their spirit, their soul, their essence and let it pass through your body. And in the passing, maybe a wisp of it adheres to you, grafts itself to your cells. And in this communion, the dead continue to live. Or strive to.

Instead, what she said to Brian was “Just because it’s unpleasant doesn’t mean I get to avoid it.”

He didn’t like it but all he said was “And then we gotta go.”

“How?”

He gestured toward the river. “I got a boat down there.”

“A boat?”

“Big boat. Get us to Halifax. You two will be out of the country in two days.”

“What’ll you do?”

“Hide in plain sight.” He placed his palm to the crown of the baby’s head and kissed the top of her ear. “You might have noticed I’ve got a knack for it.”

She nodded. “Maybe too much of one.”

He gave that a sad tilt of his head and said nothing.

“If we don’t make good time on the water?” she asked. “Or if one of us gets injured, breaks an ankle or something?”

“There’s a backup plan for that.”

“How many backup plans do you have?”

He thought about it. “Quite a few.”

“What about me?”

“Hmm?”

“You got a backup plan for me?”

He stood across from her with the baby asleep on his shoulder and he let the shotgun fall to the ground and he touched a strand of her hair with his thumb and index finger. “There’s no backup plan for you.”

Eventually she looked at the house behind him. “I’m gonna go pay my respects.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

She left him and walked into the house. With all but one shade drawn, it was cool and dark in there. She paused at the base of the stairs. She pictured Haya’s corpse and her resolve wavered. She almost turned back. But then she pictured the Haya she’d seen in the bedroom this morning, the true person staring back at her for the first time through eyes as rich and black as the first night or the last. She marveled at her will — the resolve, the balls it took to become someone else so completely that the battle for dominance between the captive self and the captor self couldn’t become anything but unwinnable. Each would surely subsume the other in a forever war. And, no matter how it ended up, neither could ever return home.

So it had been with Brian Alden, she realized, since the moment he’d donned the purloined coat of Brian Delacroix. And so it had been with Elizabeth Childs and Jeremy James and even Lee Grayson. At times in their lives they’d been one version and then they’d been other versions and some of those versions had brushed up against Rachel and altered Rachel’s life or even given life to her. But then they’d gone on to be still other versions. And other people beyond that. Then Elizabeth and Lee had gone even further, into the place where Haya now found herself. Transformed yet again.

And what of Rachel herself? What was she, if not forever in transit? Forever en route. As adaptable as any of them to a journey, but never to an end.

She climbed the stairs. As she did, she could feel his passport tucked behind her own in the front pocket of her jeans. And she felt the dark deepen around her.

I don’t know how this ends, she told the dark. I don’t know my true place in it.

Yet the only response she got from the dark was a deepening of it as she climbed the stairs.

But there might be some light upstairs and there would certainly be light when she went back outside.

And if by some twist of fate there wasn’t, if all that remained of the world was night and no way to climb out of it?

Then she’d make a friend of the night.