The Last Flight

by Julie Clark

  A knock on the door startles me, and I worry that Rory might have bumped his trip up, slipped out of New York without Danielle knowing, and somehow located me here. That by the time the CNN car arrives, there will be nothing but an empty room.

  I peek through the curtains and see a man, his arms folded across his chest, revealing a brief glimpse of a gun holster under his coat.

  I call through the door. “Can I help you?”

  He smiles and flashes a badge. “My name is Agent Castro,” he says. “And I’d like to talk to you about Eva James.”

  Eva

  New Jersey

  February

  One Day before the Crash

  The plane bumped down at two o’clock in Newark, after flying all night and an interminable layover in Chicago. After taxiing to the gate, Eva hurried up the Jetway, stopping only to buy a new prepaid phone at a kiosk, tossing the packaging in the trash, and dialing the number Liz had written at the bottom of her letter. “It’s Eva,” she said, relieved to find Liz at home. “I’m actually in New Jersey. Is it possible I can stop by?”

  “You’re here? How? Why?” Liz’s surprised voice floated through the line.

  “It’s a long story,” Eva said, passing through baggage claim and out into the frigid February air. “Can I tell you in person?”

  * * *

  Just a little over fifty miles from Manhattan, Liz’s New Jersey street looked like it belonged in the Midwest, with small, well-cared-for houses, a mix of brick and painted stucco. When Liz opened her door, she pulled Eva into a tight hug. “This is such a surprise,” she said. “Come in.”

  She followed Liz through the house to a large room off the kitchen that overlooked a snowy backyard. An afternoon talk show was on the TV in the corner, and Liz switched it off, gesturing for Eva to sit on the couch. Liz perched next to her and said, “I’ve missed you. Tell me everything.”

  Eva froze. The whole flight, she’d rehearsed in the dark while people slept around her. Tried to find the right place to begin unraveling it all. But now that she was looking into Liz’s questioning eyes, waiting for Eva to say something, she couldn’t make her mouth work at all.

  Her gaze traveled around the room, to the bookshelves crammed with books, a messy desk covered in papers, and a couple half-emptied packing boxes in the corner.

  She took a deep breath and gave Liz a wobbly smile. “I don’t know where to start,” she told her.

  Liz took Eva’s hands, warm and dry against Eva’s sweaty ones, and she felt a little calmer, Liz’s energy passing through her, making her heart rate slow. “Just pick a place and begin.”

  “I’m in trouble,” Eva said, her voice low and tentative. And then she began. She told Liz about Wade. How he made her feel special. Eva looked into her lap and shrugged. “It was the first time anyone had made me feel that way. Interesting. Attractive. Like a normal person living a normal life.”

  She described the meeting in the dean’s office, how no one showed up for her, and how she’d felt she had to accept their terms. “They had all the power. All the leverage. I was just a kid. It was easy for them to kick me out and pretend none of it happened.”

  “Didn’t the university appoint an advocate for you?”

  Eva had never even considered such a thing. She shook her head, and Liz looked disgusted. “You could have appealed. There are procedures that should have been followed.” But then Liz seemed to catch herself, because she said, “You couldn’t have known, and that doesn’t help you now. Go on.”

  Eva thought about what came next, a decision so significant, her entire life cleaved in two. She let out a slow breath, dragging out the moment, knowing she’d have to step forward and tell the rest, but not wanting to. Terrified Liz wouldn’t understand. That what she’d said in her letter, about accepting Eva as she was, wouldn’t apply to what she was about to confess.

  Eva was tempted to end the story there. Tell Liz she was on her way to Europe, had a layover, and wanted to stop by and say hi. But she knew Liz wouldn’t buy it. And eventually, Castro would show up at Liz’s door and tell her the truth. Eva needed to be the one to tell Liz. To make sure Liz understood why she’d done what she did. She prayed some of Liz’s forgiveness would come her way.

  “That guy you saw me arguing with is named Dex. Or at least, that’s the name I know him by. Apparently, he has others.” Eva told her about Dex’s offer, about how she had no money. Nowhere to go, and how it seemed like a lifeline at the time.

  As she spoke, Liz’s eyes grew wider, her expression more and more shocked. Eva knew what Liz expected to hear. Typical problems such as a lost job. An unwanted pregnancy. Maybe stolen money or property. But Eva could tell Liz didn’t expect this. She couldn’t bear the weight of Liz’s eyes, and she leaned forward, resting her head in her hands, covering her face, elbows on her knees.

  Next to her, she felt Liz rise from the couch and move away from her. Eva held her breath, waiting for the sound of Liz opening her front door, a quiet voice asking Eva to leave. Or the sound of her picking up the phone to call the police. But instead she heard Liz move into the kitchen and open the refrigerator, the sound of ice, and she returned with a bottle of vodka and two glasses. She poured generously and took a drink. “Continue,” she said.

  Eva sipped her vodka and told her the rest. Brittany. Agent Castro. The evidence she’d assembled, Castro’s news that she didn’t qualify for witness protection. And finally, that Dex was Fish. “I’m sure he knows by now that something is up. I was supposed to meet him yesterday, but I never showed.”

  “You have to cooperate,” Liz said when Eva had finished telling her everything. “It’s the only thing you can do.” She finished her vodka and poured another glass, topping off Eva’s as well. “My God, Eva.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You have to,” Liz insisted. “This is how you get your life back.”

  Eva tried not to lose her temper. “It doesn’t work like it does on TV. Even if Dex goes to jail, I’m still at risk. No matter where I go, his people will find me. I tried to make Agent Castro understand this, but he said his hands were tied.” Eva began to cry, great hiccupping sobs, and Liz wrapped her arms around her, holding her tight.

  “You have to stop running,” she said into the top of Eva’s head. “Stop covering up lies with more lies.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Eva said, pulling back and wiping her eyes. “Castro thinks I can testify and then somehow go back to my regular life. As if Dex would ever let me get that far. The only thing I can do is leave. Disappear and let Castro figure it out without me.”

  She waited for Liz to argue with her, to threaten to turn her in. But Liz just said, “Okay. Let’s follow this line of thinking. Where will you go?”

  Eva shrugged. “I’ll stay in New York for a while. Find a way to get a fake passport. I have money.”

  Liz nodded. “A fake passport. And then you’ll leave the country?”

  Eva knew what Liz was doing. She’d had a professor at Berkeley use this kind of Socratic method to help students reason out an argument. But she went along with it. “Yes.”

  Liz rolled her glass between her hands, the ice settling toward the bottom. “You’ll be someone new. Someone without a past. What will you do with your time? Will you work? Buy some property? Rent? How will you explain yourself to others?”

  “I’ll figure it out. Make something up.”

  “And constantly be afraid, looking over your shoulder, waiting for someone to discover the truth.” Liz’s quiet voice landed hard in Eva’s ears. “You need to make a deal, and you need to do it now.” Liz set her glass down and put her finger under Eva’s chin, forcing Eva to look at her. “What happened to you was shitty and unfair. But you have to go back and own your part of it. Either Dex is going to jail for a long time, or you are. Who’s it going to be?”

  “And wh
at if Dex’s people get to me first? He has to know by now.” Panic began to swirl around inside of Eva, and she started to cry again.

  Liz handed her a tissue and said, “You have to fly back before Castro knows you’ve left. Call him the minute you land, and wait for him at the airport. Do not leave until he comes in to get you. Understand?”

  “Why can’t I just disappear?” Eva whispered. “Pretend I’ve never been here?”

  Liz’s eyes softened. “You know they’ll come here eventually and ask me questions. I can’t lie for you.”

  Maybe this was why Eva came. To be forced to do the right thing. To be held accountable by someone who loved her enough to not let her make any more mistakes. For Liz to be the mother she’d never had.

  Relief melted through her, to be able to set everything down and let someone else—someone who cared about her—tell her what to do. “Okay,” she said.

  They sat together, with only the faint ticking of a clock somewhere deep inside the house, the silence between them heavy with all that Eva still wanted to say.

  All her life, she’d craved connection. Family. Friendship. Then Liz came along and gave it to her, without asking for anything in return. Eva wanted to ask Why me? But she wouldn’t, because there could never be enough words to fill the hole Eva had inside of her, the deepest part of the heart, where the most precious love and the truest friendships are stored.

  She knew that walking out the door tomorrow would require an act of courage Eva wasn’t sure she possessed. To turn her back and leave this life, with all its sharp edges and hard knots, and trust that there would be something on the other side for her.

  “Do you remember the day we met?” Liz’s voice was the same low tenor Eva remembered from their first meeting, and it passed through her like warm honey. “I was crumpled in a heap on the ground, and you walked over and lifted me up.” Eva started to speak, but Liz silenced her with an upheld hand. “Do not ever forget who you are and what you mean to me. In a world crowded with noise and selfishness, you are a brilliant flash of kindness.” Liz turned Eva so she was facing her and held her by the shoulders. “No matter where you go, no matter what happens, know I will be out here, loving you.”

  Eva let her tears fall, the last of her walls crumbling beneath Liz’s words. Every regret, every disappointment, every heartache that Eva had ever endured seeped out of her, a slow leak of sadness, until she was empty.

  * * *

  After she’d booked her flight back to Oakland, they sat together on the couch, Eva trying to soak up every last moment with Liz, knowing it would never be enough. From the front of the house came the sound of a key in the lock, then the door opening and closing. “Mom?” a voice called. “Are you home?”

  “Back here, honey.”

  A young woman came through the kitchen, tossing her keys on the counter and dropping her heavy bag on the floor. She stopped suddenly when she saw Eva and Liz on the couch. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know you had company.”

  “Eva, this is my daughter, Ellie.”

  Ellie rolled her eyes and stepped forward to shake Eva’s hand. “I go by Danielle now. It’s nice to finally meet you.”

  Claire

  Monday, February 28

  I stare at Agent Castro, feeling as if the careful stitches holding my secrets together have been pulled apart. “I don’t know who that is.”

  He flips his sunglasses on top of his head and says, “I think you do. You just finished a call on her phone.” My eyes dart toward Eva’s cell phone, sitting on the dresser, wondering how he’d know that. He continues. “So let’s try this a different way. Good afternoon, Mrs. Cook. It’s wonderful to see you looking so well. My name is Agent Castro, and I’m a federal DEA officer. I have some questions I’d like to ask you.” Beyond him in the parking lot is an anonymous sedan with government plates. “Maybe we should go inside and chat,” he suggests. His tone is friendly but firm, and I nod, opening the door wider to let him enter.

  We sit at the small table by the window, two chairs facing each other. He pulls the curtains open, flooding the tiny room with light. “I’d like you to tell me how you know Eva James.”

  “I don’t, really.”

  “And yet, up until yesterday, you were staying in her house.” He gestures toward Eva’s green coat, tossed over a chair. “And wearing her clothes.” Then he holds up his own phone. “Mrs. Cook, we’ve had Ms. James under surveillance for several months. That includes having her phone cloned.”

  “Cloned?” I ask. “What does that mean?”

  He leans back and studies me, the weight of his gaze making me uncomfortable. Finally, he says, “It means that anything you do with that phone, we know about it. We get copies of all texts and emails. When that phone rings, we know it. Whatever is said on it, we hear it.”

  My mind jumps back to the conversation I just had with Kate Lane. To Danielle’s messages and the voice recording. And I know now why Eva left the phone behind. “Did she know?”

  He shakes his head. “She was working with us on an active investigation, and we couldn’t risk her changing her patterns with the people she worked with. But we began to worry when Eva failed to show up at a prearranged meeting last week. And then you arrived.”

  I look down at my hands, resting in my lap. I think about the car Kate Lane is sending for me, and whether Agent Castro will let me get in it, or whether I’m going to be stuck here, answering his questions until the moment Rory arrives.

  “Why don’t we start with how you met Eva,” he repeats.

  “If you’ve been listening in on my phone conversations, then you already know.”

  “Fair enough. Then tell me more about what happened at the airport. Whose idea was it to switch places?”

  I’m unsure how to describe my role. Am I a victim? A co-conspirator? I was neither, just a woman desperate for a solution. Any solution. “Eva approached me,” I finally say.

  Castro nods. “How did she seem to you?”

  “That’s an impossible question to answer, since nothing she told me was true.” I think of the way she stared into her drink, as if the weight of the world rested on her shoulders, and know that beneath her lies, the fear was real. “She was scared,” I finally say.

  “She had a good reason to be. Did anyone come to the house looking for her?”

  I tell him about the man who showed up on the porch, about what he said and what he didn’t say.

  “Describe him,” Agent Castro says.

  “About my age. Maybe a little bit older. Dark hair. Olive skin. Long coat, and these crazy gray eyes. Not quite blue.”

  “While you were staying at Eva’s house, did you see any drugs?”

  “No.” I think about that basement lab. Of the hours Eva must have spent working underground, and what it had cost her up above. And I think about the notarized letter and recordings, carefully gathered and documented, and weigh the benefits of handing them over now. If I do, Castro will have what he needs, or as much as Eva is able to give him, which might be enough to fulfill whatever promises she made.

  I retrieve the envelope and voice recorder and slide them across the table to him. “I found these yesterday when I discovered her basement.”

  He sets the recorder aside and flips through the pages of Eva’s statement, then jots the notary information into a small notebook.

  “I had no idea what she was running from. She told me she had just lost her husband to cancer. That she’d helped him die and that she might be in trouble because of it.” As I recount the story, it sounds even crazier than it did at the time. “You have to understand, I was desperate enough to want to believe pretty much anything. And I think she knew that.”

  “Eva has had years of practice deceiving people. She’s very good at what she does. She had to be, to have done it for so long.” He leans forward, resting his elbows on t
he table. “I need you to understand that my job is to investigate drug crimes,” he says. “Not fraud. Not identity theft. And you are not under investigation by me.” His voice softens, now that his questions have been answered and I get a peek at the man beneath the surface, someone who genuinely wants to help me. “I understand you’re hiding from your husband?”

  “I am.”

  “I’m not here to get you into trouble, Mrs. Cook. But Eva was helping me, and I need to know what happened to her. What she told you.”

  “Nothing true,” I say. “None of it was real.”

  He looks out the window as a black town car glides into the spot next to his sedan. “I think your ride is here.”

  We stand and I open the door.

  “Claire Cook?” the driver asks. He’s large, in his midtwenties, squeezed into a dark suit with sleeves that just barely cover a tattoo circling up his right wrist. In his ears are those giant circles, stretching enormous holes in his earlobes.

  Berkeley. Where everyone is just a little bit weirder than you are.

  As he loads my bag into the trunk, I notice his gaze land on Agent Castro’s gun beneath his coat. He looks away and slams the trunk closed, stepping away from the rest of our conversation.

  Agent Castro turns to me. “Good luck,” he says, shaking my hand. “If possible, I’d like to touch base again before you leave town. Assuming you go back to New York.”

  “Sure,” I say, looking toward the busy street, cars and buses blowing past the motel. “Though what happens next depends on the next few hours. How much trouble I’ll be in for what I did, and whether anyone will believe what I have to say.”

  “If your husband was involved in what happened to Maggie Moretti, it won’t matter if they believe you or not. The evidence will back you up.”

  I tear my eyes away from the street and look at him. “You don’t know the Cook family very well if you think they won’t fight. The rules are different for people like them.”