The Switch

44

The house was in a wealthy part of Boston called Chestnut Hill, an area of leafy streets and large houses and private schools. It was a redbrick Georgian mansion with ten bedrooms (or so Sarah had said; he wasn’t going to double-check).

Looped around the front door handle was a device that looked like an oversized padlock. Tanner entered the four-digit code on the lockbox’s keypad, and it unlocked. He pulled it open and removed the front door key.

Inside, it smelled like apple cider and fresh paint. He’d heard that mulling apple cider in the kitchen produced a smell that most people found welcoming; maybe that was a trick Sarah had employed.

Because the owners of the house didn’t live here anymore, but you couldn’t tell that at first glance. Potential buyers would see the Persian carpets and the elegant furniture and admire the spare but perfect décor. They wouldn’t know that all the furnishings were on loan, put there by someone who specialized in staging houses for sale. In the entry hall there were fresh flowers in a glass vase on a demilune card table in a nook by the landing of a swooping staircase. The flowers were probably changed daily by the stager. In the front sitting room, on a coffee table, was a neat stack of oversized art and photography books, expertly askew, probably borrowed from the stager’s warehouse. In the kitchen, besides the pot of apple cider that he’d smelled, there were a few, mostly very expensive, appliances on the counters. A bowl of perfect fresh fruit, fresh flowers on the marble-topped island, and nothing in the Sub-Zero. The dining room table was set for a dinner party, with blue hydrangeas in low vases at the center of the table. No family photos anywhere, but that was deliberate too. They wanted buyers to imagine the house as their own.

Tanner turned on lights as he entered. He went to the kitchen, looked for a drinking glass for some water, which was when he discovered the cabinets were empty. He drank from the tap in the soapstone sink. Then he went upstairs to the master bedroom and saw, at the center of the room, a king-size-plus bed with a magnificent silk duvet cover. Not a bad place to crash.

He set the alarm on his phone to two A.M., figuring he could at least get a couple of hours of sleep.

As he tried to fall asleep, he found himself thinking about the Box again.

A few years after Tanner’s father died, he was sitting with his mother at the old kitchen table, drinking coffee from beans he’d bought in Guatemala and his company had roasted. She complimented him on the coffee and then said, “You did it, didn’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“This.” She held up her coffee mug. “Your dream.”

“Tanner Roast?”

“Yes. Tanner Roast. You’ve wanted to start your own company since you were a boy.”

“I guess.”

“I’m so proud of you. Your dad would have been proud of you.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Tanner said dismissively, pleased but embarrassed.

“Do you know how old I was when I had you?”

“Twenty-one, twenty-two, right? Young.”

“Daddy was twenty-six. We—” She hesitated a moment, then proceeded. “We weren’t planning on having kids just yet.”

“I was an accident?”

“Pretty much, yeah. A blessed accident.”

“You’re kidding! Is that why you guys got married then?”

“We were going to get married anyway. But that sort of sped things up. In our world, in our families, that was what you did. So Daddy knew he had to get serious. Make a living. And you know something, we wouldn’t have it otherwise for the world.”

“So the barbecue place, Tanner Q—”

“He was really thinking about a chain of barbecue restaurants, like the places he used to go when he was a kid in Kansas City.”

“So he gave up on the barbecue place and got a job in insurance because he was having a baby.”

“He had to make sacrifices. That’s what you do when you have kids. You do what you have to do. You make a choice. And you do it out of love.”

“And you put it away in the attic,” Tanner said, moved. His father had talked about throwing “that crap” away, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He’d kept the Box.

The Box was where you put your dreams.

The iPhone’s alarm pierced a disturbing dream. He bolted upright.

Ten minutes later he was driving in Sarah’s little green Fiat 500, which he’d parked a few blocks away. His Lexus remained parked on Huron Avenue, no doubt collecting parking tickets.

The streets were empty, and he got to Brighton in fifteen minutes. Spotting a residential-looking street, he pulled over and parked. The street was dim, lit by a distant streetlamp, the asphalt pitted and broken. A few lights were on in windows, probably night owls, but all was still.

He waited ten minutes, the radio playing quietly, and constantly checked his rearview and side mirrors. When he was sure no car was following him — as sure as he could be, anyway — he made a U-turn and drove over to Mayfield Street, three blocks from Tanner Roast, and pulled over again and waited.

After five minutes he was satisfied, again, that no one was lurking nearby.

He parked and walked, instead of directly to the office, around three sides of the block, looking for loiterers, or people sitting in dark cars, until he came to the seldom-used side door. He inserted his key card, which buzzed it open. The inner door was locked with a funky-looking narrow key. An Abloy lock, made by a Swedish company, supposedly unpickable. After a rash of break-ins in the neighborhood, Tanner had had the warehouse and office rekeyed. Only he and Lucy and Sal had keys to the exterior doors.

Of course, that didn’t mean that government agents couldn’t break in. Surely they had ways.

Once inside, he heard the constant low tone from the burglar alarm and he flipped on a light, found the keypad, and immediately punched in the code to shut it off. Then he turned off the light. There were a few high windows, visible from the street, and he didn’t want to give away so easily that someone was here. The truth was, he didn’t know what to look for. He sold coffee, for God’s sake. He wasn’t a spy. Apparently they weren’t staking out the office, or at least not in the middle of the night. That told him something. They were expecting him to keep traditional hours.

Or maybe they weren’t looking for him, not in that way. The guys from Homeland Security who came by the office earlier in the day: maybe that’s all they were, agents from Homeland Security. Glorified cops. Not from some deep-secret agency of the government. Maybe he was overreacting to Lanny’s death. He refused to believe it was a suicide, no matter what the evidence said.

Problem was, he couldn’t be certain.

He decided he would act as if they were looking for him; he’d take measures, be careful.

He had an urgent, simple task now.

Faint blue-gray light filtered in through the windows, barely enough for him to navigate his way to his own office, his desk. There he stood, thinking, for a beat, his finger on the switch to his desk lamp. His office (smaller than his sales director’s) wasn’t near a window, but the light would still be visible through the windows that faced Mayfield Street. Better not to put it on.

He sat in his desk chair, closed his eyes briefly, then opened them, his eyes slowly acclimating to the dark. There was enough available light to see the keyboard on his computer. He logged in, moved some files onto his Dropbox, then sat still for a minute, wondering if it was safe.

At the far end of the warehouse there was a rustle.

He waited, still, listening. Nothing for fifteen seconds or so and then, again, an unmistakable rustling sound. Like paper rustling. Maybe it was nothing.

Or maybe it was someone, or something, moving at the far end of the warehouse.

That was also possible.

He got up noiselessly from his desk chair, walked slowly and quietly out of his office, and began advancing along the carpet. Underneath, the old floorboards squeaked intermittently, but not loudly. He stopped, listened for twenty seconds or so, heard nothing. Still, he advanced farther along the carpet to the entrance to the adjoining warehouse.

He stood in the entrance, at one end of the warehouse, and listened again. He felt his heart rate accelerate.

This time he heard it again, that furtive rustle. He looked around the warehouse, the shadows, the hulking shapes, the rows of shelving that held bags of green coffee, the big old roaster, the worktables. He could probably traverse the floor blindfolded.

The floors in here were poured concrete. They were quieter. They didn’t squeak when he walked. But now he realized he was a moving shadow in this vast space, immediately identifiable as a person to anyone whose eyes had adjusted to the light the way his had.

Was it paranoid to wonder, or maybe half wonder, whether someone was waiting in the warehouse with a handgun? Maybe so; maybe he was being crazy. They came to get Lanny because he was about to report a story they didn’t want made public. But why go after Tanner? Maybe to grab him and somehow compel him to turn over the laptop. That wasn’t beyond the realm of plausibility. Not at all.

He walked farther along the floor, heard the rustling, stopped. Turned his head and cocked his ear. Heard it again. Turned his head toward the sound.

A rat scurried along the packing table.

He made a mental note to have that table cleaned first thing tomorrow and bring in the exterminator again.

He went to the kitchen and opened the cabinet drawer, then dialed the combination of the safe.

The laptop was there. He slipped it into his gym bag.

Returning to his office, he put his iPhone in the top drawer of his desk. Then he spent another ten minutes or so gathering things and then slipped carefully out the building’s side door.