Six Years

Chapter 33

The life of a college professor, especially one who lives on a small campus, is pretty contained. You stay in the surreal world of so-called higher learning. You are comfortable there. You have very little reason to leave it. I owned a car, but probably drove it no more than once a week. I walked to all my classes. I walked into the town of Lanford to visit my favorite shops, haunts, cinema, restaurants, what have you. I worked out at the school’s state-of-the-art weight room. It was an isolated world, not just for the students but also for those who have made such places our livelihood.

You tend to live in a snow globe of liberal-arts academia.

It alters your mind frame, of course, but on a purely physical level, I had probably done more traveling in the week-plus since seeing Todd Sanderson’s obituary than I had done in the previous six years combined. That may be an exaggeration, but not much of one. The violent altercations, combined with the stiffness of sitting for hours in these car and plane rides, were sapping my energy. I’d been flying high on adrenaline, of course, but as I had learned the hard way, that resource was not unlimited.

As I turned off Route 202 and started climbing toward the rural area along the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border, my back started to seize up. I stopped at Lee’s Hot Dog Stand to stretch a bit. A sign in the front promoted their fried haddock sandwich. I went instead with a hot dog, cheese fries, and a Coke. It all tasted wonderful, and for a second, heading up to this remote cabin, I thought about the notion of a last meal. That couldn’t be a healthy mind frame. I ate ravenously, bought and downed another hot dog, and got back in the car. I felt strangely renewed.

I drove past Otter River State Forest. I was only about ten minutes from Malcolm Hume’s house. I didn’t have his cell phone number-I don’t even know if he had one-but I wouldn’t have called it anyway. I wanted to just show up and see what was what. I didn’t want to give Professor Hume time to prepare. I wanted answers, and I suspected my old mentor had them.

I didn’t really need to know it all. I knew enough. I only needed to be sure that Natalie was safe, that she understood some very bad people were back on her trail, and if possible, I wanted to see if I could run away and be with her. Yes, I had heard about Fresh Start’s rules and oaths and all that, but the heart doesn’t know from rules and oaths.

There had to be a way.

I almost missed the small sign for Attal Drive. I made a left onto the dirt road and started up the mountain. When I reached the top, Lake Canet was laid out below me, still as a mirror. People toss around the word pristine, but that word was taken to a new level of purity when I saw the water. I stopped the car and got out. The air had that kind of freshness that lets you know even one breath could nourish the lungs. The silence and stillness were almost devastating. I knew that if I called out, my shout would echo, would keep echoing, would never fully dissipate. The shout would live in these woods, growing dimmer and dimmer but never dying, joining the other past sounds that somehow still echoed into that low hum of the great outdoors.

I looked for a house on the lake. There was none. I could see two docks. There were canoes tied to both of them. Nothing else. I got back in my car and drove to the left. The dirt road was not as well paved here. The car bounced on the rough terrain, testing the shocks and finding them wanting. I was glad I took the insurance out on the rental, which was a bizarre thing to think about at a time like this, but the mind goes where it goes. I remembered Professor Hume had owned a four-by-four pickup truck, not exactly standard liberal-arts driving fare. Now I knew why.

Up ahead I saw two pickup trucks parked side by side. I pulled my car behind them and got out. I couldn’t help but notice that there were several sets of tire tracks in the dirt. Either Malcolm had gone back and forth repeatedly or he had company.

I wasn’t sure what to make of that.

When I looked up the hill and saw the small cottage with the dark windows, I could feel my eyes start to well up.

There was no soft morning glow this time. There was no pinkness from the start of a new day. The sun was setting behind it, casting long shadows, turning what had appeared empty and abandoned into something more black and menacing.

It was the cottage from Natalie’s painting.

I started up the hill toward the front door. There was something dream-like about this trek, something almost Alice in Wonderlandish, as though I were leaving the real world and entering Natalie’s painting. I reached the door. There was no bell to press. When I knocked, the sound ripped through the stillness like a gunshot.

I waited, but I heard no returning sound.

I knocked again. Still nothing. I debated my next move. I could walk down to the lake and see if Malcolm was on it, but that stillness I had witnessed earlier seemed to indicate that no one was down there. There was also the matter of all those tire tracks.

I put my hand on the knob. It turned. Not only was the door left unlocked, there was, I could see now, no actual lock on it-no hole in either the knob or the door to place a key. I pushed the door open and stepped inside. The room was dark. I flicked on the lights.

No one.

“Professor Hume?”

Once I’d graduated, he had insisted that I call him Malcolm. I never could.

I checked the kitchen. It was empty. There was only one bedroom. I headed toward it, tiptoeing for some odd reason across the floor.

When I stepped into the bedroom, my heart dropped like a stone.

Oh no…

Malcolm Hume was on the bed, lying on his back, dried foam on his face. His mouth was half open, his face twisted in a final, frozen scream of agony.

My knees buckled. I used the wall to support me. Memories rushed at me, nearly knocking me over: the first class I took with him freshman year (Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau), the first time I met with him in that office I now called my own (we discussed depictions of law and violence in literature), the hours working on my thesis (subject: The Rule of Law), the way he bear-hugged me the day I graduated, with tears in his eyes.

A voice behind me said, “You couldn’t leave it alone.”

I spun around to see Jed pointing a gun at me.

“I didn’t do this,” I said.

“I know. He did it to himself.” Jed stared at me. “Cyanide.”

I remembered Benedict’s pillbox now. All the members of Fresh Start, he said, carried one.

“We told you to leave it alone.”

I shook my head, trying to keep it together, trying to tell the side of me that just wanted to collapse and grieve that there’d be time for that later. “This whole thing started before I got involved. I didn’t know a damn thing about any of this until I saw Todd Sanderson’s obituary.”

Jed suddenly looked exhausted. “It doesn’t matter. We asked you to stop in a million different ways. You wouldn’t. It doesn’t make a difference if you’re guilty or innocent. You know about us. We took an oath.”

“To kill me.”

“In this case, yes.” Jed looked again toward the bed. “If Malcolm was committed enough to do this to himself, shouldn’t I be committed enough to kill you?”

But he didn’t fire. Jed no longer relished shooting me. I could see that now. He had when he thought I’d been the one to kill Todd, but the idea of killing me just to keep me quiet was weighing on him. He looked back down at the body in the end.

“Malcolm loved you,” Jed said. “He loved you like a son. He wouldn’t want…” His voice just drifted off. The gun dropped to his side.

I took a tentative step toward him. “Jed?”

He turned to me.

“I think I know how Maxwell Minor’s men found Todd in the first place.”

“How?”

“I need to ask you something first,” I said. “Did Fresh Start begin with Todd Sanderson or Malcolm Hume or, well, you?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Just… trust me for a second, okay?”

“Fresh Start began with Todd,” Jed said. “His father was accused of a heinous crime.”

“Pedophilia,” I said.

“Yes.”

“His father ended up killing himself over it,” I said.

“You can’t imagine what that did to Todd. I was his college roommate and best friend. I watched him fall apart. He railed against the unfairness of it all. If only his father could have moved away, we wondered. But of course, even if he had, that kind of accusation follows you. You can never escape it.”

“Except,” I said, “with a fresh start.”

“Exactly. We realized that there were people who needed to be rescued-and the only way to rescue them was to give them a new life. Professor Hume understood too. He had a person in his life that could have used a fresh start.”

I thought about that. I wondered whether that “person” could very well have been Professor Aaron Kleiner.

“So we joined up,” Jed continued. “We formed this group under the guise of a legitimate charity. My father was a federal marshal. He hid people in witness protection. I knew all the rules. I inherited that family farm from my grandfather. We made it into a retreat. We trained people how to act when they change identities. If you love gambling, for example, you don’t go to Vegas or the track. We worked with them psychologically so they realized that disappearing was a form of suicide and renewal-you kill one being to create another. We created flawless new identities. We used misinformation to lead their stalkers down the wrong path. We added distracting tattoos and disguises. In certain instances, Todd performed cosmetic surgery to change a subject’s appearance.”

“So then what?” I asked. “Where did you relocate the people you rescued?”

Jed smiled. “That’s the beauty. We didn’t.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You keep searching for Natalie, but you don’t listen. None of us knows where she is. That’s how it works. We couldn’t tell you even if we wanted to. We give them all the tools and at some point, we drop them off at a train station and have no idea where they end up. That’s part of how we keep it safe.”

I tried to push through what he was saying, the notion that there was absolutely no way I could find her, no way that we could ever be together. It was simply too crushing to think that all of this had been futile from the start.

“At some point,” I said, “Natalie came to you guys for help.”

Again Jed looked down at the bed. “She came to Malcolm.”

“How did she know him?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

But I did. Natalie’s mother had told her daughter about Archer Minor’s cheating scandal and how her father had been forced to vanish. She would have tried to track her father down, so naturally Malcolm Hume would be one of the first people she would visit. Malcolm would have befriended her, the daughter of the beloved colleague who had been forced to disappear. Had Malcolm helped her father run from Archer Minor’s family? I don’t know. I suspected that he probably did. Either way, Aaron Kleiner was Malcolm’s impetus for joining Fresh Start. His daughter would be someone he’d immediately care about and take under his wing.

“Natalie came to you guys because she witnessed a murder,” I said.

“Not just any murder. The murder of Archer Minor.”

I nodded. “So she witnesses the murder. She goes to Malcolm. Malcolm brings her to your retreat.”

“First he brought her here.”

Of course, I thought. The painting. This place inspired it.

Jed was smiling.

“What?”

“You don’t get it, do you?”

“Get what?”

“You were so close to Malcolm,” he said. “Like I said. He loved you like a son.”

“I’m not following.”

“Six years ago, when you needed help writing your dissertation, Malcolm Hume was the one who suggested the Vermont retreat to you, didn’t he?”

I felt a small coldness seep into my bones. “Yeah, so?”

“Fresh Start isn’t just the three of us, of course. We have a committed staff. You met Cookie and some of the others. There aren’t many, for obvious reasons. We have to trust each other completely. At one point, Malcolm thought that you’d be an asset to the organization.”

“Me?”

“That was why he suggested that you attend that retreat. He hoped to show you what Fresh Start was doing so that you’d join us.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I went with the obvious: “Why didn’t he?”

“He realized that you wouldn’t be a good fit.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We work in a murky world, Jake. Some of the things we do are illegal. We make our own rules. We decide who is deserving and who is not. The line between innocence and guilt isn’t so clear with us.”

I nodded, seeing it now. The black-and-white-and the grays. “Professor Eban Trainor.”

“He broke a rule. You wanted him punished. You couldn’t see the extenuating circumstances.”

I thought about how Malcolm had defended Eban Trainor after the party where two students had been rushed to the hospital for alcohol poisoning. Now I saw the truth. Professor Hume’s defense of Trainor had been, in part, a test-one that in Malcolm’s mind I had failed. He was right though. I believe in the rule of law. If you start down that slippery slope, you take all of what makes us civilized with you.

At least, that was how I felt before this week.

“Jake?”

“Yes?”

“Do you really know how the Minors found Todd Sanderson?”

“I think so,” I said. “You keep some paperwork on Fresh Start, right?”

“Only on a web cloud. And you needed two of the three of us-Todd, Malcolm, or me-to access it.” He blinked, looked away, blinked some more. “I just realized. I’m the only one left. The paperwork is gone forever.”

“But there must be something physical you store, no?”

“Like what?” he asked.

“Like their last will and testament?”

“Well, yes, those, but they’re kept someplace where no one can find them.”

“You mean like a safety-deposit box on Canal Street?”

Jed’s mouth dropped open. “How can you know that?”

“It was broken into. Someone got into the safety-deposit boxes. I can’t say what happened for sure, but Natalie was still a huge priority for the Minor family. If you found her, it could mean big bucks. So my guess is, someone-the thieves, a cop on the take, whatever-recognized her name. They reported it to the Minors. The Minors saw that the box was taken out by a guy named Todd Sanderson who lived in Palmetto Bluff, South Carolina.”

“My God,” Jed said. “So they paid him a visit.”

“Yes.”

“Todd was tortured,” Jed said.

“I know.”

“They made him talk. A man can only stand so much pain. But Todd didn’t know where Natalie or anyone else was. See? He could only tell them what he knew.”

“Like about you and the retreat in Vermont,” I said.

Jed nodded. “That’s why we had to close it down. That’s why we had to run away and pretend that there was nothing there but a farm. Do you understand?”

“I do,” I said.

He looked back down at Malcolm’s body. “We need to bury him, Jake. You and me. Out here in this place he loved.”

And then I realized something else that chilled me to the bone. Jed could see it on my face.

“What?”

“Todd never got the chance to take the cyanide pill.”

“They probably surprised him.”

“Right, and if they tortured him and he gave up your name, it stands to reason that he gave up Malcolm’s name too. They probably sent men to Vero Beach. But Malcolm was already gone. He came up here to this cabin. The house would have been empty. But these guys don’t quit easily. They’d just found their first clue in six years-they weren’t about to just let it go. They would have asked questions and pored through personal records. Even if this land was still in his late wife’s name, they may have found this place.”

I thought about all those tire tracks outside.

“He’s dead,” I said, looking down at the bed. “He chose to kill himself, and judging by the lack of decay, he did it very recently. Why?”

“Oh God.” Jed saw it now too. “Because Minor’s guys found him.”

As he said those words, I heard cars pull up. It was so clear now. Minor’s men had been here already. Malcolm Hume had seen them coming and taken matters into his own hands.

So what would they do about that?

They’d have set a trap. They’d leave someone behind to stake out the house in case someone else showed up.

Jed and I both rushed to the window as the two black cars came to a stop. The doors opened. Five men with guns came out.

One of them was Danny Zuker.