One Got Away

by S. A. Lelchuk

  “Why didn’t you think that?” Under the worry blanketing her voice, I could detect a trace of her mother’s sharpness in the questions, but her face was a study in simple curiosity, as though asking me about some abstract subject—calculus or geography—that had no bearing on Susan herself.

  “One, because someone had phoned in a tip. That was you, I realized. Who else would have—that day?” I snowplowed over the protest rising on her face. “Mostly, though, I just doubted they would have been so stupid. Those guys were looking to dodge attention. They’d been in the headlines even before all this, and they hated it. Taking a con man, a criminal, is one thing. Kidnap a wealthy heiress with a famous last name, and you have the FBI involved, all kinds of scary federal statutes kicking in, reporters, the whole state poking around. Bad for business. Could they have been dumb enough, even so? Sure. Except your car was there.”

  Susan looked confused by this. “My car? What does that have to do with anything?”

  “The people I was after dealt with stolen cars. If they had done anything to you, they would never have left your car sitting at a public beach that’s patrolled probably twice an hour. It would have vanished into some scrapyard or chop shop. They wouldn’t have left it to arouse suspicion.”

  She seemed to want to ask something more, but stopped herself and changed direction. “You didn’t answer my first question. How you knew I’d be here. I could have been anywhere in the entire world.”

  “Could you have? I’m guessing you never tried to go missing before,” I said. “Not as easy as it looks, is it? Where do you go? As soon as you have the police looking for you, no more credit cards or banks, no passports or cell phones. Can’t stay at home, of course, that’s the first place they check—same with friends and family—but you have to go somewhere. So where? Hotels won’t take cash without a credit card and ID. Forget airports. Can’t rent a car. Can’t even buy a train ticket without photo ID anymore. Not even a Greyhound. Running, hiding, these are tricky things to pull off.” I thought of Coombs. “Same as anything else. You need practice to get good.”

  She seemed not to notice the strangeness or irony of her asking me the same questions I should have been asking her. “But why would I try to hide? Are you trying to say I did something wrong?”

  I said, “In my experience, if you’ve done something wrong, sometimes you want people to be worried about you. Basic deflection. Act like a victim.”

  I ticked off points on my fingers. “Something I said when we first talked made you nervous. You decided you needed to see me—to find out what I knew. Only after we talked on the phone, the second time, you realized I wasn’t barking up whatever tree you were worried about. But you had made everything sound too urgent when you called me—and you knew it. You couldn’t just not show up without making me wonder why. I would have tried to find you, been suspicious. So you decided to disappear for a bit instead. Lay low until you could learn what was going on.”

  Not to mention pointing the police my way, I could have added. The anonymous tip, probably mentioning my name specifically, surely made to slow me down.

  Susan flinched as though I was holding hot metal to her skin. “You have no idea how frightened I’ve been, Nikki. Living in this—this blur, this fog, of fear, panic. Not knowing who I could trust. I had learned about the terrible things my brother had done. He’s been so cruel to me, my whole life. I didn’t even know if I was safe.”

  “Too late for that,” I told her. “About two days ago, I would have loved to have that conversation. You could have told me everything. You didn’t.”

  After her first sip, Susan’s coffee had remained untouched. She stirred a silver teaspoon in little circles in her mug as she said, “But that was my brother. Nothing to do with me.”

  “Which brother?”

  She paused, as if looking for a trap, and then said, “Ron, of course.”

  “Ron? Really?”

  Uncertainty crept again into her voice. “Of course. Who else would it be? Martin has his flaws, but something like this? Impossible.”

  “You’re very good,” I told Susan.

  “Good?”

  “Good. You. You know what I mean.”

  Her hands, spread on the table, trembled. “Nikki, what are you getting at?”

  “See?” I pointed at one of her hands. Like a pinned butterfly, it quivered more. “All of that. The whole thing. You’re a natural.”

  “Natural what? What are you getting at?”

  I remembered something and took William’s steak knife from my pocket. “Before I forget. For your mother. She’ll want the full set back, I’m sure.” I placed the knife on the table between us, noticing the smallest bit of leather from my jacket, still caught on the blade’s serrations.

  Susan eyed the ivory-handled knife. “You’ve been to see my mother?”

  Rather than answer her question, I said, “I couldn’t figure out why you were so worried, though. You hadn’t done anything. How could something I’d said scare you so much?”

  “And?” she murmured. “What did you conclude?”

  “I realized the answer had to be in our conversations—and we’d only had two, after all. I must have said something. Whatever it was, it was there, in my memory, waiting to be noticed. Which just made it a matter of thinking things through.”

  Susan’s hands still trembled. “I don’t feel very well,” she said in the same soft voice. “I think I should go to bed and rest.”

  “You can rest in a minute. I have a question of my own. For you.”

  She watched me in silence but made no effort to speak.

  “When you hit William with the car, were you trying to kill him? Or just scare him?”

  “What?” Now she was shocked. Her face flushed and she drew herself up in her seat. “Are you mad? How dare you accuse me of—”

  “There was something too neat about it,” I interrupted. There had been the smallest bit of something in her eyes at my question. Like the speck of leather on the knife blade. Almost invisible, but there.

  “I walked up and down that block,” I told her. “He happened to be hit in the one spot without any cameras. Hard to pull off a hit-and-run, these days. Especially in a city. Too many people, too many cameras. Takes careful planning, unless you’re the hope-and-pray type. Which you’re most definitely not.”

  I pushed my empty coffee cup aside. “When I came by the gallery, you didn’t even want to give me five minutes of your time—until I happened to mention William and the accident. Then you had all the time in the world to chat. At first you thought Martin had hired me to look into the hit-and-run, since the police weren’t getting anywhere. That’s what scared you, and that’s why you agreed to talk—to find out how much I knew, and decide if you had to throw me off.”

  “But why… ?”

  “That, Susan, is what I want to know. Why?”

  “How can I tell you something I don’t—”

  I interrupted her a second time. “I can’t make up my mind about you. The good-little-girl-mean-older-brother thing threw me for a bit, but you’re a whole lot less innocent than you let on. You’ve got some dirt under your nails, no doubt. On the other hand, my compass spins a bit different than most. Can’t blame you for not knowing that. I don’t know if running your brother over with a car bothers me as much as it would some people. He sort of deserved it. But I do want to know why.”

  Her face was in her hands and her shoulders shuddered as though she was weeping inaudibly. Her voice was muffled by her hands as she repeated, “How can I tell you something I don’t know the an—”

  “One chance. No sob stories. Or I go to the police with everything. At the very least, that will cause scrutiny you really don’t want.”

  For a moment more she rocked and trembled.

  “I will,” I said. “I mean it.”

  Her shoulders stopped shaking and she moved her hands, wiping her cheeks and looking up at me through fogged lenses and glistening eyes.
“Please. Let me be.”

  “No. Talk.”

  Susan sat for another moment, head bowed as though in prayer.

  Then she said, “Maybe you think you know my family a bit, Nikki, but you don’t really know us—none of us. Sometimes I think we barely know each other.”

  Her voice was different, now. No quaver. Her hands were still. She stood, and I followed her into the dimly lit living room. She walked gracefully, feet silently padding over the hardwood floor.

  “My brothers, you see—each of them, in his own vainglorious way, thinks he is the only one capable of leading our family after Mother passes. They’re so pathetic—the bickering, the squabbling, as though we were all still little children, quarreling over the last bit of Christmas pie. I’ve never been able to stand it.”

  She turned away from the window to face me, the translucent curtained doors behind her, her skin pale as lemon pith. “Put yourself in my shoes, Nikki. To learn that your celebrated eldest brother, the toast of the family, the firstborn, has been engaging in such tawdry and disgusting behavior. Worse—risky behavior. And then he goes and manages to get caught—hooked—in a manner that could destroy all of us. Our entire family. Do you know what that’s like? For me? Being shackled, for life, to such dangerous irresponsibility?”

  Her eyes, now clear and dry, held mine, and in her gaze, I realized that she was truly her mother’s daughter—maybe even a purer form, something more distilled.

  “My mother is the strongest person I know,” Susan said. “The strongest person I’ve ever met. But her weakness has always been her three sons. She knows it, deep down. She’s admitted as much, to me, even though she can never come out and say so. My mother couldn’t—wouldn’t—do what truly had to be done. If a weed is overgrowing a garden, you don’t blame the garden or cut the flowers—you yank it out by the roots. Why would anyone possibly think I’d simply stand by and watch as my brother threw away a centuries-old legacy, all for his weak-willed pursuit of pleasure?”

  Susan stepped closer to me. No trace, now, of the nervous, frightened woman who had cried at her kitchen table. I was seeing someone else now. “My mother was willing to do anything in the world—except the one thing that truly needed to be done.”

  “You don’t care about what he did,” I said. “You care about your family. Your name. That’s all any of you care about. That’s all you’ve ever cared about—all of you.”

  “Martin is weak,” Susan said. “Ron is nothing more than a hedonistic drunk. And William—William is the worst of all. None of them are fit to lead our family.”

  “That’s what you want,” I said. Realizing. “That’s what you’ve always wanted—all you’ve ever wanted.”

  “Not wanted. I never wanted any of this,” she retorted. “Needed. A duty, Nikki, a responsibility. Because there’s no one else. My mother is in her eighties. There’s no one else but me. And I will always do what it takes.”

  She held my eyes as she took a breath. “Go to the police if you want, with whatever story you want to give them. I’ve admitted nothing.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” I told Susan. I wondered if she had known or guessed that William had been faking his mental state. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter—not here. “Whatever you did to your brother,” I continued, “I won’t be talking about it.”

  Despite what I’d told her earlier she seemed taken aback to hear this.

  “Why not?”

  “Like I said. My compass spins a bit differently. North, for most people, isn’t always quite north for me. If you’d gone after anyone innocent it would be different. But here? All this? The best punishment I can imagine is letting you work things out with your family—for the rest of your lives. Goodbye, Susan.”

  * * *

  I let myself out. The seat of the Aprilia soaked my jeans as I started the motorcycle, feeling the engine thrum and rumble against my thighs. The rain was pounding down now, hard, cleansing, streaming down the visor of my helmet, against my jacket, pelting my legs, but I didn’t mind. I rode up Market Street, late-night revelers mixed with clusters of homeless on the sidewalks, merriment and despondency jammed thoughtlessly together, voices, cars, high empty office towers, each with blanketed bodies in their doorways, the bison groan of a street sweeper, carnival bright lights leaping off hotels and bars and marquees. I rode back over the bridge to Berkeley and went to bed.

  SUNDAY

  38

  Sunday afternoon brought a blizzard of news that tore through the city. The scion of one of San Francisco’s most prominent families, stepping forward out of the blue to “come clean” via a popular weekend show. His admissions were met with widespread disgust and condemnation, but there was also some quieter talk of his having “done the right thing” and “taking it on the chin.” The family issued a statement: a foundation was being set up, enormous donations being made, steps being taken, soul-searching being done. All media requests were referred to a crisis management firm with a reputation for being the best in the city. There was talk that the DA’s office was hurriedly preparing its own news conference for Monday morning, a joint statement with several state and national law enforcement agencies to announce a sweeping set of linked investigations that might well carry outside of California. By Sunday night the story had broken into cable news and was being picked up all over the country.

  That was what people told me, anyway. I never watched the news.

  * * *

  Ethan and I had agreed to meet at the bookstore on Sunday evening. I’d come from a heated yoga session and felt good, my muscles warm and relaxed. About a year ago I’d started supplementing the sparring I had done since the age of fourteen with a few hours of yoga each week. Right hooks and crow pose. There were stranger combinations.

  Before going inside, I went next door to the former noodle place. My brother had beaten me there and was conversing with the landlord, who stepped outside to let us talk.

  “So, what do you think?” I asked.

  “Looks okay, I guess.” Brandon was trying to act nonchalant but was too excited. He gave up completely after a few seconds. “It’s perfect, Nik! It’s amazing!” He hugged me and tried to waltz me around the space, pointing out different places where he envisioned this or that going. “And I think my big sister is even cooler than I gave her credit for.”

  “I’m very cool,” I said, laughing as I broke free. “Even if it took a damn restaurant to finally get you to admit that.”

  He was walking around, inspecting everything. “You think this can really work?”

  “That depends on you,” I said. “Can you make it work?”

  Brandon nodded, his green eyes dancing with excitement. “Yes. I’m positive.”

  “Lots of responsibility,” I said. “From one small business owner to another. Different from punching a clock. Different kind of pressure and it’s all on you.”

  He understood what I meant. “I feel great, Nik. I go to meetings, I’m feeling sharp, clean—I got this. Honest.”

  “Then you better get to work,” I told him. “What’s it gonna be? Seafood? Burgers?”

  “So many options. Ethan keeps telling me to open a steakhouse. But I’m leaning more casual.”

  “I’m sure Ethan will forgive you if you crush his dreams of getting on-the-house filet mignon five nights a week.” I glanced at my watch. “You want to join us for dinner?”

  “I would,” Brandon said, “but I have plans.”

  “Not the—”

  “Yup! The hot doctor.” He laughed, seeing my dubious expression. “What can I say? We hit it off.” He gave me a second, longer hug. “Thanks, Nik. Seriously. For everything.”

  “I’ll see you soon, okay? We can sign the lease next week.”

  His voice stopped me at the door. “What do you think Mom and Dad would think?”

  I turned back to my younger brother. “Of what?”

  “Us. This.” His gesture took in the empty noodle shop, the adjac
ent bookstore, the two of us. “Everything. If they could see the whole thing, the whole trail, and see where we ended up.”

  I blinked moisture out of my eyes. Talked over the swelling lump in my throat. “I think they’d be pretty happy with us.”

  “Yeah,” Brandon agreed. “I think they’d be pretty happy, too.”

  I said good night to my brother and walked next door.

  * * *

  The BRIMSTONE MAGPIE was crowded, despite the evening hour. Customers read in armchairs and browsed the shelves. All the tactile delight of holding and touching books. The bookstore was fragrant with the smells of roasted coffee beans and bound pages.

  I greeted Jess and then stepped away to make a quick call.

  He picked up on the second ring. “Hello?”

  “Hey there, sidekick,” I said.

  “Nikki?” Mason sounded excited. “Where are you?”

  “Back in Berkeley. You okay?”

  “Yeah, I am. My aunt talked to my dad. I’m going to stay with her for a while.”

  “I got another adventure for you,” I said. “Not as exciting, but important.”

  His voice quickened. “What is it?”

  “The Athenian School, up here, where I am. It’s a boarding school. If you want, I can send you an application.”

  “Really?” His voice fled from excited to worried. “Do you think my father would allow it?”

  “I’m pretty sure he will. I can ask if they’ll make an exception and let you start midway through the year. If you want.” I had done a substantial favor for one of the deans there, years ago. Given the nature of the favor, I had a feeling she’d be receptive to Mason’s plight.

  “Really? You would? Thank you thank you thank you tha—”

  I cut him off with a laugh. “Don’t thank me. This is totally selfish, I promise. I need a really trusty sidekick up here and don’t have time to train someone new.”